This advert is too good to be true. Unfortunately Sunrise are still very much libs or the useful idiots of libs. https://www.sunrisemovement.org/climate-mandate/

They seem to be orienting towards the same tired old strategy of attempting to drag the Dems left without even threatening to withhold their votes from the Dems, or building an outside independent socialist party to pressure them externally. They choose phrasing like "Joe Biden must do X" and not language like "Biden and the Democratic Party are inevitably going to backstab us again and they must be actively opposed at every step". Theirs is the language of the battered, helpless hostage firmly requesting their new captor to do the right thing...just because they helped him fend off the old captor. It's language that implies that they're willing to double down on their mistaken lesser-evilist approach to the 2020 general election and continue trying to elect "progressive" Democrats.

Look at their recommended cabinet picks. They want Biden to pick that treacherous reformist Elizabeth Warren to be secretary of the Treasury and the sheepdogging Sanders as secretary of labor. The best they can imagine in terms of economic advisors is Stiglitz, who's in the same neighborhood as the likes of Solow policy-wise, about as far left as you can go in bourgeois economics. Sunrise knows to appeal to the working class (especially the Black working class) by invoking Black revolutionaries like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton but if this org's leadership is genuinely trying to improve the world they haven't learned a damn thing.

Statements like "This is Biden's FDR moment" are the height of progressive liberal delusion and demonstrate a complete failure to understand why FDR did the New Deal to begin with: the threat of revolution coming to the US was the greatest it had ever been for the ruling class, and FDR's programs did a great deal to pacify an otherwise increasingly-militant working-class movement, one which spawned the CIO and organized penny auctions to help poor farmers keep their land. In the 1920s and 1930s we had the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the SWP (each corresponding to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th internationals) tying the most advanced elements of the working class to the international working class, with one such party representing the same international that was currently running the Soviet Union. We see no similarly organized and battle-hardened Marxist leadership under current conditions, not even degenerated revisionist leadership like we had in the 1960s-70s. The "FDR moment" only comes at an apex of capitalist crisis and decay, and when the threat of socialist revolution in the US once again becomes credible and imperialist pressure valves are unavailable except fascism.

While this advert shows that there may be potential future revolutionaries within their org, like in DSA the distorters, reformists, and opportunists are clearly still in charge. Sunrise is thus similarly positioned to be co-opted by the bourgeois enemy - if it hasn't been already - and reconfigured to sap the energy of would-be revolutionaries trying to organize for systemic change by distracting them with false hope in simultaneously working with and bullying the Dems "from the inside" without any real leverage.

One's position on the question Dem entryism played a decisive role this past year in determining which organizations even had a shot at building the foundations of a revolutionary party, and Sunrise clearly still falls on the wrong side of that issue, wronger even than all the ultraleft and pessimistic abstentionists who didn't support Hawkins or La Riva. I will not shut up about this.

As someone who is in the movement I can confirm that the national leadership are careerists. For over two weeks they have refused to stand in solidarity with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen despite calls from inside and outside of the movement. https://twitter.com/ChoctawFreedmen

They are afraid that it will hurt Deb Halaand's chances of being selected for Secretary of the Interior. It just doesn't make sense... she isn't getting elected, if Biden wants to choose her he will and if he doesn't he won't. They are basically saying "wait til Biden has his say, then we can stand with you!" #BlackLivesMatter(Conditionally)

Their concept of power is to get progressives elected by phonebanking and performative protests, and I think that TossedAccount is totally spot on that they are in a position to be co-opted by the capitalists, assuming they haven't already. They frequently trot out black revolutionaries like Malcom X and Fred Hampton but the work that they want volunteers to do is pointless. It definitely serves to draw in people who are discontent and have revolutionary energy, and to divert that energy into working for the Democratic party.

I've made a couple of posts about how I am working with a small (but growing fast) group of people who are similarly upset by the direction the movement is going to try and sway it in a left-ward direction. I'm gonna give it like one or two more months before moving on, but we are already causing them some problems and getting the high-level leaders/founders involved. I don't want to give up because I really think that young people are ready to embody revolutionary ideas and they have a pretty large base to build from, but damn they are making it difficult.