Yes this is brie talking about force the vote.
But the real message is that the dsa and M4a activist and organizers have no real idea or plan what they are doing other than talking. I don't really know how you get more grifting than all these Ngo political orgs.
Disregard DSA national. Treat local DSA chapters as a nexus to find recruits for whatever local project or campaign you have. National keeps talking about how "we need formal structures or else we'll get crushed like occupy" and basically just recreated an NGO. The best national can do right now is promote active membership, and facilitate communication between chapters.
planning in DSA:
- do thing
- ????
- socialism
if you have a step 2, the plan is too complicated
This is an excellent point and I’m never going to try to do anything anymore.
The immediate plan, rightly, seems to be to grow membership and win more seats. They've had success on both fronts, too.
Having broad membership and/or having representatives in positions of power is a prerequisite to accomplishing anything.
Part of an effective plan to increase DSA membership and participation might be to force the M4A vote, campaign hard, make a few scenes, convince people that they have power, they are willing and able to use power, and are therefore worth supporting-joining-participating in.
convince people that they have power
This is where the "force the vote" idea loses me. How will getting clobbered in a vote and not getting M4A convince people that they have power? I don't see much to gain here, if anything. It's certainly not worth condemning anyone over either way.
The DSA keeps growing and winning more seats. While they aren't always going to be right, I think they've earned a presumption that their decisions are good ones.
How can they have power to enact socialist policies through a bourgeois capitalist apparatus designed to block them?
Exactly so why are they ramming their head against a wall with all their might?
In this instance they're not? The DSA spokesperson (who I would say is broadly right on the overall chapter attitude) is tacitly saying that putting resources into forcing the vote is dumb, there's better stuff chapters are already doing. A relatively small amount of DSA time and money goes into electoral stuff overall tbh and the majority of what is done is focused on local races. That stuff is more important than the congress seats (which are still important though so they get some resources, and are also one of the best recruitment strategies for bringing in new members, and other logistical benefits like constructing new power networks, but these cannot be done on the timeframe of a push for force the vote that would be disruptive to ongoing campaigns).
You know Michael Lighty literally has no power in DSA lol for steering the direction of the org. No one in national does, no reason to to blame them for anything good or bad other except the necessary legal stuff for DSA to function, which they do a decent job at. At best they have soft power in that chapter leadership and membership will sometimes listen to their input. For DSA to support force the vote, even getting force the vote to be on the national political committee agenda that all chapters agree to would take weeks, and many in DSA think the whole thing is pointless and would rather if engaging with congressional politics at all, try and build momentum for the ACA fix fight and have everyone vote against Pelosi no matter what. Also for what its worth, imo Lighty is right on why DSA as an org has not done anything official and force the vote does not serve any strategic purpose for growing DSA right now. Force the vote has very little value to put resources into in the opinion of many DSA chapters compared to the ongoing campaigns. Disrupting the ongoing local campaigns and national ones for a new national one with a very short timescale on something as contentious as force the vote would likely not even pass onto the national political committee.
Ok but what do you actually expect DSA to do? Develop a mind control gun to use on senators? Working to get more people to understand what M4A is and why they should support candidates who are for it is about all they can do.
Just keeping M4A in the political mainstream is valuable, because it's such a perfect leftist entrypoint. It's simultaneously a litmus test for whether a person will buy into the idea that a government can act to improve the material conditions of its citizens, whether a person really gives a shit about their fellow human beings, and whether someone will criticize the Democratic Party as too conservative.
I feel like if the people running a campaign called "force" the vote don't have any idea "how to get that done" then they need to look up the definition of the word "force"
Maybe you can't find orgs willing to organise on #forcethevote because it doesn't achieve anything.