It is 2023 and DSA can't get its act together about apartheid being bad.
Christ.
Idk if this will be an unpopular opinion here, probably not, but my hot take on the DSA is that if you want to understand why the Trotskyist and left-com purges in the 1930's happened, just watch a DSA convention or meeting, and imagine if you were expecting an imminent German fascist invasion and you needed a way to get rid of these people who are bringing up banal, pointless, or decades out of date decision points up in meetings, or stalling with obvious parliamentary tactics.
I'm not going to argue that it was the 'best' decision to make, particularly the killing that was involved, but I am going to say that I think I understand their frustration.
particularly the killing that was involved
the one place they needed an obstructionist bureaucracy was standing between the removal of members from the party and their executions. bunch of folks would've been exonerated like they were posthumously, and people guilty of less serious offenses could've kept contributing to society in a more limited capacity instead of pushing up daisies. this shit is why we need our pacifists and rehabilitative justice folks, to balance the exigencies of revolutionary violence and restrain it when necessary
Hard agree on this. While the ratio of simple removal-to-execution was pretty high (I believe it was something like twenty-to-one), the fact that it was able to spiral out of control like that was a real sign of the lack of a real ideological stop-gap. There was a real sense that incompetence and obstinance, particularly the unexplainable, was traitorous.
I think it's perfectly fine to purge people who engage in obstructive behaviors like that, and it's a simple affair to make sure there is fairness in the process, an appeals system, a review board, a random peer-jury selection process, all of this happening out of the way of official business
If "leftists" want to create the socialist equivalent of red tape, then they should have to deal with red tape, tit for tat
it's a simple affair to make sure there is fairness in the process, an appeals system, a review board, a random peer-jury selection process, all of this happening out of the way of official business
That's actually a hell of a lot of work; you're describing a mini-court system.
The best approach may be a process in which the standard for "convicting" someone is lower (say, "clear and convincing evidence") and the procedure is very informal, but the penalties are light enough (maybe you just don't get to speak at meetings for a while) that it's not a huge issue if you get it wrong.
Yes I agree, while I do believe the system I described is necessary for any organization that wants to tangle with capital on a national scale, it should only be used for severe cases that affect large segments of a party, while the majority of offenders can be dealt with by the structured informal system you described
Redundancies and dual systems that are tied to different scaled tiers are always a sign of decent organizational capacity and responsiveness
I kinda get what you mean, but those purges happened in the context of there being a communist party with state power under siege from the whole capitalist world. This is not the current situation.
Moreover, despite the parliamentary bullshit, the convention voted to hand power to the NPC to make decisions on all items that didn't make the convention floor. An NPC composed mostly of caucuses that advised voting for the pro-BDS resolution.
I'm not saying they haven't mostly fixed the issues (especially compared to the 2020 convention, now that one was an actual shit-show), but it basically demonstrates why you need a central committee.
Edit: but that is part of the problem and my point, now they have fixed these things, they have lost the moment and momentum.
How the fuck is that controversial, even
's America passed the Anti-Apartheid ActElements of DSA delegates delayed the vote on the BDS resolution so it was never brought to the convention floor.
However, DSA delegates also voted to defer any unresolved resolutions to the newly elected National Political Committee to decide on. The new NPC is significantly to the left of the last one. Moreover, a member of the anti-zionist slate won a seat on the NPC.
They tabled a BDS thing so the NPC could fuck around with it
