Everyone's always talking about PSL, SRA, DSA, RR, CPUSA, and I'm just over here like "I just wanna grill for god sake!"
There's a million little random leftist organizations with slightly different goals and ideologies, but which one should someone looking to, in the words of Father Matt, 'log the fuck off' go to? Which ones are crank warehouses? Which are honeypots? Which are full of libs?
Bitch and complain about your least favorite orgs and shill for your favorites here. Reply to others telling them that their org is full of libs and FBI agents. Etc.
EDIT: also anyone with a specific recommendation in the Quad Cities area in Iowa/Illinois definitely drop me a line
DSA is hot shit in most of the country, especially in the big cities. the politics runs liberal but even more than that, the org is captured by the worst sort of people, more obsessed with their personal power in the org than with what they might accomplish. I spent about two years trying to make the org less useless but the last convention convinced me it wasn't a worthwhile use of time. but that and my time in a chapter's leadership means I have a lot of stories about the org. AMA, I guess.
Could a cadre of well-read leftists feasibly hijack a DSA local and use it to do, like, actual leftism? I'm curious if the structure of DSA lends itself to reformation by informed actors.
it's been tried a bunch and the org invariably tends back towards its rather liberal center. generally the smaller locals are more radical but they lack the resources that should come with being part of the larger organization - the national org has repeatedly voted to deny them those resources. so yeah, you can capture one of the smaller chapters but you generally don't need to because those chapters are already where you'd want them to be but then you have to fight the national org to get resources to do anything bigger than your limited resources allow.
and I guess that's the core issue - if you have to fight the national org in trying to do anything useful, you have to justify that cost against the benefits and I could never make that math work out.
It sounds like the most utility that can be drawn from DSA is to join, form smaller blocs of leftist voters, and then peel off when that organization outgrows what DSA can provide for it
Very enlightening answer, I appreciate the feedback
yea, that's ultimately what we ended up doing.
In my experience, the most utility that came out my local DSA chapter was providing a forum for various smaller independent groups to come together and talk about the actions they are planning, report on updates, and share news. The chapter itself helped organize a handful of immigration justice demonstrations, but a large portion of the local action is being pioneered by other groups and using DSA meetings as a place to plug their orgs and upcoming actions. There's a fair amount of Cosecha and IWW people in there, as well as people with labor union roots.
What mistakes do you think the DSA has made that have led it to being so captured? What do you think another organization might do to avoid such an outcome?
this question is kind of backwards because it presumes the DSA isn't exactly where it always intended itself to be. it's history is - from the start - deeply socdem and it's always seen as its highest calling the capture or defeat of the democratic party. that means it's core purpose is and pretty much always will be to recuperate a leftist movement and shephard it back towards the realm of bourgeois politics.
but if we assume that the org might have been something else, political education would be critical. the org today is rife with people using social justice or communist rhetoric in reactionary ways and people generally don't know how to discern those kinds of bad faith arguments which leads to a lot of abusive people being given political power on the basis of their confidence.
but generally, the thing you're fighting is the iron law of institutions: as an organization grows, people with power in that institution will work towards the accumulation of their own power, even at the expense of the organization itself.
Just stopping by to bolster your point with this article on the history of the DSA: https://struggle-sessions.com/2020/04/20/dsa-are-capitalist-pigs/
What's your favourite thing about the DSA?
I met a lot of good people through the organization, mostly with those similarly frustrated with the org. but lots of people meaning in and through means a number of decent folks.