https://twitter.com/DSANorthStar/status/1602758852851531776
Also take a look at their logo
https://twitter.com/jonnysocialism/status/1603024109558206464
All but 1 of the squad have across their voting records consistently voted with the democratic party. They just rotate who the 1 is to maintain the facade of being tepidly in favor of not feeding the workers to the face eating leopards
we need a separate rashida emote that is like that one of stalin doing the disappearing act :aoc-rashida:
They just rotate who the 1 is to maintain the facade of being tepidly in favor of not feeding the workers to the face eating leopards
Isn't Rachida Tlaib the one who mostly votes right?
I don't think anyone here needs to hear this, but in case I'm wrong, it's time to let the DSA go. They're literally just Democrats.
Counterpoint: you can manipulate them to do stuff for you. Also I there's value in pipelining cool ones into commie orgs, basically the opposite of entryism.
Yeah, there's really no better pipeline left than a fairly large organization that has actual people in power who at least stake out positions to the left of Democrats.
Leftists are upset with the DSA because they aren't a revolutionary vanguard party, but they don't need to be that to be useful.
DSA is extremely lib and does embarrassing things, so I'm sympathetic to dunking on it (I love to do it too lol) and pointing out its risks and failures.
I just think it still has utility for commies if approached strategically. Set your sights realistically and you can be (a little) less frustrated when your local DSA chapter goes slava ukraini or something.
This is the right wing caucus, right?
That sentence alone is...
IIRC, North Star was formed when almost half of DSA members rejected partnering with Our Rev. They're electoralist. Everyone good left the org after 2020 anyway
The US presidential election. There was a big schism in the DSA over throwing resources behind Bernie's campaign.
North Star is like the furthest right wing of the organization and it's basically a bunch of boomer Harringtonites with an email chain. I am unironically surprised that they are on Twitter.
The organization has a lot of right wing factions but this is both the least radical and the least relevant.
It was annoying at the time, but I feel like I can take pride in having been purged from my local DSA chapter lol. The leadership is very lib, so when a group of people tried to challenge them from their left, they kicked the candidates and everyone associated with them out of the chapter
If you live in a place with DSA chapters, chances are that other parties are present in your area for you to look into!
This is so wildly not true. DSA will have small chapters in hollowed out deindustrialized towns, which will be a hodge-podge of whatever progressives, socialists, anarchists and communists in the town.
The national DSA is kind of shit but it has a lot of local chapters doing good organizing work. Join whatever org is doing good organizing in your area that you can plug yourself into. Maybe that's an org with an overall better structure and political line, maybe it isn't. To characterize the whole of DSA "literally just democrats" based on a north star tweet is silly if I am being charitable and fed shit if I am not.
Logging on to hexbear to intimate another user is a fed because I feel like a dope for being in a useless org.
I don't think you are actually a fed, I think comrades should be more wary of the fact that they are in a forum filled with people who might get involved in an org who aren't currently, and shitting on an org that does good work vindicates people doing nothing and discourages those who might do something. That's counter-productive.
As someone else pointed out, most areas that are large enough to have a DSA chapter probably have something else. At this point, DSA is just MoveOn with vaguely left wing aesthetics.
It blows my mind that people are on here defending AOC, et al voting to enforce the rail contract. If the excuse is they would have lost their seats at the table, then they're already compromised. This is why so many of us left the org in 2020 when NDSA put Bernie's campaign on par or ahead of local work. We all knew electoralism and Democratic entryism were ultimately losing strategies because of exactly this possibility.
If there are people here that are considering getting involved with an org for the first time I think it is important to steer them away from DSA. If someone's first taste of left wing organizing ends in useless Democratic entryism, what are the chances they'll walk away frustrated that socialism turned out to be no different than the system they were trying to escape?
I am honestly not sure how true the first part is. As far as I know, DSA is the largest socialist org and it's not close. Anecdotally, where I live I know a few other orgs exist, but genuinely I have never seen any more than one member from those orgs at a time, and it's not very common. If I left DSA for another org, it seems quite likely the scope of activity where I could get involved would be greatly diminished. Joining a DSA chapter ran by harringtonites would suck, but joining a glorified book club would also suck. I agree with you that we should encourage people to join orgs doing useful work (and steer people away from bad orgs). That org near someone might be a DSA chapter, it might not be. It's not all democratic entryism lmao.
Like if someone not familiar with the DSA read your comment they would get the idea that it's all electoralists and they all are fans of AOC and they all put all their effort on electing democrats and that's simply not true. A significant portion of DSA's work is non-electoral. I don't want to sound like I'm doing a fucking commercial for the DSA but literally if the chapter near you is good, you can join and ignore electoral stuff. If you want (and you are near a chapter that actually does this), you can join and just focus on labor for example. If the chapter is like yours, then yeah find another org if one exists.
If you've found a better org in which you can do better organizing then that's fantastic, genuinely. You won't hear any defense from me of the DSA spending resources electing socdems in congress, not expelling bowman, dissolving the palestine working group, etc. etc.
They're accidentally right that Socialist Alternative is somewhat ultra, lol. They're Trots with unfortunately stereotypical takes on AES. North Star just doesn't understand the term, as is typical for liberals.
Can someone sum up what the fuck Trotskyism is for me? Why are they always so weird and why does it attract weird people?
in theory, the main idea is "permanent revolution"
in practice, the main idea is being party-splitting feds and selling newspapers
The latter is maybe a side effect of being the dominant strain of Marxism in countries where no Marxist party ever held power. Focusing on scoring wins against intraparty opponents because of being too weak to affect the bigger political picture.
The way I picture it, there's kind of a tendency decision tree as you move further left. If you go down the Marxism tree, you eventually get to the point where you have to wrestle with Stalin's legacy. If you move on from that point (rather than stopping or going back a step), you can go forward in the decision tree with or without Stalin. If you choose Stalin, you go down the Marxism-Leninism tree, and without Stalin the main tree is Trotskyism. (This is just my mental picture of it, not the way I think it actually is, just in case it needs to be said lol)
Back when I was a baby leftist, it was mostly just a matter of "I like the Soviet Union, and I like Lenin, but not Stalin, since I've been told all my life that he's basically Hitler" and at that point the natural choice is "well after Lenin it was either going to be Trotsky or Stalin, and I've already ruled Stalin out, so let's go with Trotsky". Thankfully that was just a stage I went through along the way, but I figure some people get stuck there and become Trots
If you choose Stalin, you go down the Marxism-Leninism tree, and without Stalin the main tree is Trotskyism. (This is just my mental picture of it, not the way I think it actually is, just in case it needs to be said lol)
I generally agree and I think you explained the concept well, except that this is a pretty binary way of looking at things on the whole.
Oh yeah there's for sure plenty of nuance, I just didn't want to go too deep into the analogy in case it didn't make sense to anyone else lol. I'm sure there are plenty of Luxembourgists, or what have you, out there who don't uphold either one, and I'm pretty sure I've even seen Maoists who don't support Stalin, however that works
Remind me to come back to this later with a link to a book that I've been reading that contextualizes criticisms of Stalin in the historical reality of the time. The book is primarily oriented toward the criticisms levelled by Kruschev, but Trotsky comes up pretty often as well (being a prominent detractor of Stalin).
It doesn't really define "Trotskyism" in an explicit way, but it does illustrate many differences that Trotsky and Stalin had which you may find helpful.
It's just what happens when you go all-in on Trotsky's writings, often to the exclusion of all else (even Lenin, lol!), and pick up some of the culture of Western Trots.
If you go down the rabbit hole of just believing basically everything Trotsky said, it starts looking reasonable to criticize every AES because they all start to look, "Stalinist". Where are the workers' council's? Where is the vanguard party with rotating leadership? Why are there still capitalists and exploitation? Why are there secret police? Etc etc etc. The answer to every one of these questions, to such a person, is: they are opportunists and have betrayed the revolution.
They also have some very funny ideas about where and how the revolution will happen and it amounts to trying to replay semi-fictional attempts at promoting and then co-opting trade unions in the imperial core.
Ah!! Ok you and @GarbageShoot have nailed down a very familiar tendency to me that I think must be the main draw for those kinds of people, something much wider than the group of people who actually identify as trots.
It seems like they're rejecting or just not making this analysis:
- Stalin and the Soviet Union did did a lot of crimes, yes,
- That country was founded in and died in a state of external siege
- It was common knowledge among all Marxists that the forces of capital would do something like WW2
- Much of the human suffering in the 20's and 30's was caused by mechanization, which they did barely enough of not to get fully genocided by the forces of reaction
- Much of the human suffering WAS completely unnecessary, but
- External siege tends to cause power consolidation around the most cutthroat political agents available -For example in the US we had 3 buildings blown up and lost a ton of constitutional rights within like a week, and then the fascist movement exploded during the following decade. Take North Korea - oh maybe if we point more nukes at them they'll consolidate around a sweet ol' teddy bear.
- The early plan for the Soviet Union was "we're just the first domino" and when the rest of the world stayed capitalist, it kind of just had to be a state.
- And if life expectancy is going up, any deaths caused by the system are obviously outweighed by how bad the previous system was
- And Russia was a complete fucking shit country before 1917, where famines were common, just like China before 1949, Vietnam when France had them as fucking slaves, etc.
Instead, western Trots must be basically prioritizing an appeal to liberals, who just see this all as deluded, psychotic denialism. And they're spending a lot of time theorycrafting Real AES or some shit, which could only produce eclectic and weird philosophies.
Basically they need this banger on repeat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uThpIDlfcBQ
Yep, pretty much.
A very similar angle is that such Western Trots, as Western ultras, can construct idealized forms of socialism amongst themselves that do not suffer from decades of mainstream criticism and propaganda, at least not directly. This is because those forms of socialism do not exist and have not existed. They are very close to the "real socialism has never been tried" line of thinking that provides a cop-out avoidance of criticisms towards AES. They explicitly dissociate themselves from all AES and therefore do not have to rationalize its problems as something of their own tendency, nor do they have to defend them against liberals. On the contrary, they pile on, thereby often serving a pro-capitalist function in the imperial core. Sometimes there's an exception (some Trots like Cuba, for example), but they're definitely exceptions.
I would argue that most of their staying power stems from not being much of a threat to capital, which makes it easier to bring in liberals, makes them lesser targets for disruption by the feds (though the feds did/do still mess with them). Also their tendency for splitting and coming across as cultish to others limits their ability to influence.
That said, SA is doing pretty well, mostly due to focusing on local races and funneling a ton of organizing power into a handful of candidates. Also Sawant in particular somewhat stays away from criticizing AES and folks around here claim she's a self-professed ML, though I've seen nothing in her actions that suggest that.
.pdf of that book: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ed33bcd368e221ec227cacd/t/5ee39a1731781f54f197c5f7/1591974443348/Domenico+Losurdo+-+Stalin.pdf
Why are they always so weird and why does it attract weird people
I think because historically, Trot parties weren't just where someone would go if they agreed with Trotsky's theories or w/e (plenty of Trot groups basically disowned Trotsky at some point) or because you disagreed with the Soviet line, etc. They were also where people would go if they got kicked out, or left, the main communist party because they were wreckers, impossible to work with, sex pests, etc. These people basically formed the culture of Trot parties.
So, "democratic socialist" doesn't really MEAN anything, does it? Basically their goal is to keep voting in democrats who occasionally say nice things about universal healthcare until capitalism goes away, right?
This is a caucus within a caucus, composed of some unknown group of people, making very loud noises on social media. Groups like this are like mushrooms. They pop up every time it rains, all wearing different affiliated hats and badges while parroting an identical set of talking points.
Democratic socialist is the American exceptionalist interpretation of social democracy.
"We're just a caucus within a caucus wearing the DSA name tag while shouting 'No Entryism!' and 'Ultra-Left!' at anyone who supports striking workers."
Doesn't look like anything to me. :-|
This is a caucus not the org etc etc rank and file does not feel this way etc ☠️☠️☠️I am losing my mind
Given that this is coming from the social fascist caucus, this is to be expected, but have any other chapters/caucuses commented on this?
Edit: Found one, so it’s not like all DSA chapters are ran by radlibs. Still, the NPC not even so much as wagging their fingers is not a good sign.
Our chapter signed onto a letter condemning the strike stoppage as did many others. Here’s the national statement as well: https://www.dsausa.org/statements/stand-with-railworkers-build-workers-power/
DSA is a net good because it’s a pipeline to the actual left. Even if it’s a captured org with incoherent views, once that frustration inevitably hits like being a dem did they’ll branch out.
I 100% agree with you but they absolutely have to be viciously cyber-bullied.
smh y'all couldn't be contented with teaching libs the word tankie, you had to teach them ultraleft too?
Actually yeah. It goes back to the French Revolution. The liberals, including Robespierre called people like Hebert and Roux "ultras", it was used by the Jacobin Club to condemn the more radical section of the mountain.
"a democratic socialist institution"
lol the "democratic socialist" nomer is so fucking apologetic it's basically cringe
This is a caucus in the org. They do not represent the org or common opinions within it.
So frustrating to spend a ton of time and effort doing decent work and trying to bring people in only for this site to elevate the absolute worst parts of DSA instead of anything half decent.
Yes I just made this account I’ve lurked here since day one and I normally have a strict no posting rule but I am bleeding out my eyes reading some of these comments.
My personal take? If you want to organize in politics you are going to be surrounded by some of the most absolutely horrible people you will ever meet. Like north star caucus. It’s the reality of trying to build something out of absolutely putrid conditions.
This caucus is clearly entryist, they aren't socialists that's for sure. They appear to be neoliberals accusing others of doing exactly what they are doing.
We have exactly we have exactly 1 North Star member in our chapter. They are an older boomer with some sort of personality quirk that makes them feel compelled to preach to us. They’re honestly a joke in The chapter.
in this case, as someone who spent 2018-2020 trying to push the org to hold electeds accountable at the local and national levels, the North Star position is actually the org policy. the org has decided that it will not and cannot threaten removal from the org if an elected deviates from the ostensible politics of the org. in our local context, the member in question took money from the Fraternal Order of Police and the chapter refused to even issue a reprimand. what do you know, once he won the election, he busted unions and shoveled money at law enforcement. shocking, really.
the reasons I heard for this basically cited the brand victory of an elected member of DSA. pragmatics demanded that electeds hew to the right so we just needed to accept that they were going to occasionally do things we didn't like - shifting "the Overton window" was enough reason to endorse bad candidates anyway. I hope I don't need to explain here why this position is so self-defeating.
I left the org once I was fully convinced that this was the majority position of the membership. it just can't accomplish much beyond winning a few seats so long as it insists on endorsing candidates without a care for how they behave once the endorsement is given. I'm not even saying they must go full democratic centralism - just set boundaries on how far right candidates are allowed to drift before they face sanction and expulsion. otherwise, the right is twisting their arms and the left is telling them "do what you have to".
Our chapter focuses almost entirely on local politics and it is such a W I can’t even describe it. Every year we have people try to tell us to run candidates for positions and we just say no and focus on local organizing. I’m sorry your experience was negative though.
DSANorthStar speaks only truth here. The DSA Bylaws Article I, Section 3 clearly states:
Members can be expelled… if they are under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.
This explicitly bars entryism by Leninist parties. The language is somewhat coded, but democratic centralism is a core tenant of any communist party. No commies!
The funny thing is that there actually is a DSA Communist Caucus, with a reading list that includes Lenin. So, yes commies, so long as they don’t actually do Commie stuff like organize in a vanguard party.
Yeah, the DSA is an explicitly anti-communist organization, founded by people who supported the US in the Vietnam war. Org is a clownshow, always has been.
