Please tell me that when/if he founds this party, he will lean into the meme and have his official title be "Chairman Daou".
it has been said a billion times by now but i can't get over how radically cooler Daou is. I was skeptical early on but the dude goes hard sometimes and genuinely love to see that type of growth. i'm usually a person who doesn't forgive very easily but in situations like Daou where he even goes after his old cohorts, it's very hard not to respect it.
If Daou explicitly came out and endorsed any (at least decently left) third party literally right now they would explode in membership overnight.
Leader: I am going to help build up an organization
Millions of Leftist voices crying out "You're Doing It Wrong!" before being silenced.
The structure of an organization matters far more than if there's an organization or not. Organizing people together in ineffective ways can often just ultimately end up being worse than useless.
What I'm talking about is actually learning from existing and past failures. Most mass protest movements fail because they don't have clear organized leadership with enough fully organized and trained members to manage a protest movement when it does errupt.
A conundrum indeed, mass protest movements could use leadership to steer the ship at a certain point but leadership needs to get experience by being a part of leaderless mass movements to practice taking leadership of them.
Well I, for one, am completely shocked!
I'm sure they got some real concessions in those 30 mins they were abstaining!
They got the PAYGO rule scrapped, and getting something really meaty was never on the table in the first place. They don't have a magic wand.
Arguably, sure. But we shouldn't entertain the idea that progressives just folded immediately with nothing to show for it. They got something, and within the range of what was possible it was at least decent.
Dude, they're opportunists. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but they will always fold to the ruling class.
They didn't fold here. They got something. What they got is modest, but they only have a modest amount of power.
It's a mistake to write off high-profile politicians who do unquestionably good stuff like make the case for M4A and destigmatize the term "socialism." Anything less than critical support is unjustifiable.
Holy shit they did?? That removes one of the most obnoxious excuses Pelosi might have had for refusing to pass spending bills to help working class people.They didn't get PAYGO scrapped. They got some limited exceptions to PAYGO for bills related to covid or climate change. I guarantee Pelosi doesn't consider M4A related to covid.
Of fucking course. There's always some bullshit qualifier or caveat.
Scrapping it for bills related to Covid is big, as you said in your above comment.
Not to be a downer, but him and what army? Does he have the support of other groups, does he have candidates to run in a new party? Otherwise hes just created a 17th 3rd party, no better than the Greens or the PSL or anyone else
I feel like all their recent controversies are ruining their chances for that honestly. I know so many people who have exitted the party because of it in the past two months. They really fumbled a lot recently.
PSL has not been able to keep up with DSAs growth for the past 16 years. It was super sectarian and had huge leadership problems when it started and remains with those problems today. I highly doubt it will ever hit the growth DSA has.
They have a long history at this point with protecting sexual assault (posting the most recent one, whole thing is super messy) within the group, and being extremely invasive to party members private lives in the event they do something that goes against the parties (read criticize leadership) line. They also just literally have a prominent member that does a show with an ex-CIA guy. Here's a list of stuff a member who was in PSL for years put together. I'd be very wary considering joining a group where this stuff comes up over and over again over the years. They also as I understand really keep stuff some their veteran members did in Iraq and Afghanistan hushed up. Really ruined my opinion of Mike Prysner after I found out. Financially I'm also sketched out by how much in dues they demand.
The amount of toxic drama and legit issues that come up year after year is wild.
From an ex-member on the chapo discord:
i mean their candidacy process is literally designed to alienate you from your friends and loved ones so the party replaces that in your life, they not only make you pay dues which is normal but they hand out a collection basket at every meeting like a church, the becker family controls the whole thing, they control what you can and can’t post about on social media, they view themselves as the only hope for revolutionary salvation in the US, they cover up sexual assault and honestly just exist as a fundraising machine, they attach themselves to meaningless marches and take credit for them and then try to raise money, they suck so much ass tbh [9:33 PM] i’m saying this as ex-PSL btw [9:34 PM] ben becker told me to miss my first HRT appointment so i could go to their march in washington against trump lol
Yeah now you know the problem with all the small centralized party orgs in the US (and UK, and Germany, etc, really this sort of stuff is in a bunch of rump organizations).
The other commentor said a lot of what I'd say. Also read this if you're curious about more.
Yeah one of DSAs reasons for not running as a third party is because it wouldn't grow and would lose. The big debate over party in DSA right now is still whether and if so when to do a dirty break and run candidates off the democratic ticket. Personally I would not consider supporting it until the org at least doubles in size again, the electeds more than double. Either that or if the dems somehow got shit together on state legislatures and changed election laws banning socialists from running as democrats (which will likely never happen).
I'd also say Daou's point about running third party because they voted for Pelosi doesn't make any sense here. If they were third party reps but still thought the conservative who would get the house majority leadership position was worse than having Pelosi, and that they'd be punished with having no committee seats (which is one of the ways to propagandize as a house member) then they would vote for her anyway. At that point does the third party pull support from them, if so goodbye those house seats because now you have to primary the person you just ran a grassroots campaign to put in office.
i remember reading that the reason the DSA doesnt form a party is bc they do a lot of local organizing & direct action and running against the DNC in national elections would hurt their ability to do direct action. No need to destroy food bank programs so they can lose a symbolic run
could aoc run for reelection as dsa member and beat her challengers? she has to be insanely popular and well known in her district, or as an independent
the point im making here isnt about whether AOC could win her seat as DSA, its that she shouldn't. beating a DNC member for a seat as DSA hurts the DSA's ability to do direct action. They run a lot of food banks & free light car repair tents (to help prevent ppl from getting pulled over for like, having a busted tail light or a license plate that fell off) that get a lot of funding & support from local democratic politicians and if the DSA threw in behind AOC and she went and whipped the ass of a democratic federal senator the DSA-run food banks & stuff would see a decrease in the amount of funding & support they receive as a consequence of it. This is what is meant by parallel power structures. It can't all be done by 1 super-party of leftists bc there are things you need to get done that is made harder by doing other stuff you need to get done. You need 1 party whose job is to ally with anyone they can to get resources to help normal people with direct action, and a 2nd party whose job is to go to war with the DNC & GOP and whip ass, and they can't be the same group.
TLDR; dont ever expect the DSA to do federal politics. They shouldn't
does the dnc actually fund her campaigns? surely she brings in more money for them than they do for her ? idk im genuinely asking
edit: and its not like the DSA is a revolutionary party ?? whats the demsoc end game?
im not saying the DNC funds AOC's campaigns (p sure they dont & fund anyone who runs against her), Im talking the DNC funding DSA direct action on a local level like food banks. Like a DNC mayor giving some tax money to a food bank that the DSA started. If the DSA starts backing politicians who un-seat a DNC senator, that DNC mayor might stop funding the DSA-run food bank bc they are now The Enemy Of The Party & he doesn't want the party to cut his funding for his next campaign over funding a political opponent's tiny little local charity
right but the opportunity cost of waaaaay more money going from AOC's fundraising efforts to the DNC that she coukd instead direct into dsa is pretty clearly more than whatever crumbs the DNC throws at DSA projects, besides heightening the contradictions and weakening the dnc as an institution and going for those paper members and actual members that more fame would bring the party
why do electoralism for someone else? milk that national spotlight for all its worth and dont let the dnc take credit for actual organizing
AOC will not generate for the DSA more money than its alliance with the local DNC governments lol
i literally have no idea what either of those numbers are tbh im genuinely asking,
well its not just a matter of money, its also a matter of like, the mayor letting them use land or not sending cops to beat the volunteers for feeding poor people, which no reasonable amount of money could replace
Low-key makes sense. Political terms mean nothing in America anyway. I feel like America needs a satire party that relentlessly mocks both parties and then use the clout to shoehorn in a real workers party
Sounds like Vermin Supreme needs to found a party, especially because you used the word "shoehorn".
A third party only matters in the context of an organized and sustained socialist movement, which cant be build through failed third party tactics that have made so many parties and projects irrelevant over the decades. Online personalities just want to make everything about some cool trick, but the truth is you gotta do the organizing work thats the only way we grow this.
These people aren't talking about a "party" in the sense of an organization of socialists working together to build a real working class movement, but rather specifically a ballot line organizing around electing non democrats. Thats why MPP is deeming DSA traitors and saying they're standing in the way of "the movement", because they want to get disenfranchised people to join their party and just run a ballot line thats specifically not democrats, and to what end? They're going to run a bunch of failed campaigns and get disillusioned with the whole process and waste time and resources. People organizing in DSA are advocating actual strategies to continue building the movement, and a separate political party is one of those things thats being advocated and discussed and if thats what interests you join the org and actually work on strategizing around that tactic. But thats not glamorous of course, so people want to just shout that we just need a third party. Well theres already dozens of them and have been and they havent worked to do anything. And who's we? Why dont they say a socialist party? Why dont they talk of real organizing work? I dont buy this kind of shit that just turns into a circus like MPP.
That's trash, I haven't followed MPP but I didn't realize they did that. MPP is a seriously Washington-brained idea. Like just vote PSL if anything lmao
Fuck #forceTheVote, let's get #SquadEndorsePSL trending
Revolutionary unions. Revolutionary militias. That's what's missing. Economic power and military power. Forming a party is the easy part. Unions and militias dont need parties, they form spontaneously, with some pushing by radicals. Personally I'm in favour of direct democracy, so I'm suspicious of parties. But in the context of liberal democracy, parties are still useful.
We can't active third party wins without ranked choice, also we could just disregard parliamentarian.
If we're going to wait for the political system to embrace ranked choice, we might as well wait for the Sun to become a red dwarf and swallow the Earth. If ranked choice is what's necessary for a third party to get off the ground, that is exactly the reason why we'll never live to see the day.
Getting politicians elected to bourgeois parliamentary bodies is not the only purpose of a political party. Only in the US with our utterly bankrupt political imagination do we think like this. If we determine a third party is necessary (it is) but we limit ourselves to thinking only in terms of electoral strategy, we will never escape this stalemate. This is the thinking which leads to the situation the Green Party finds itself in today. The Green Party mistakes the tactic of running in elections for a fully fledged strategy.
But a party serves other important functions. Functions that will prove essential whether or not electoral victory is ever achieved. As a membership organization, the party is capable of gauging the size of its support base. It is capable of synthesizing the needs and desires of its constituents into a coherent party line, turning around, and using that party line as the basis of further political education. It is capable of reliably disseminating news about the bleeding edge of the struggle - news that would otherwise be buried by the bourgeois institutions. It is capable of rapid mobilization. It is capable of reacting to unfolding events with a level of agility not found among disorganized masses of alienated people. It is capable of dialing the temperature up or down strategically, instead of being caught helplessly in the tides of spontaneous discontent. The party is the backbone of the workers movement. Call it a party like the MLs, call it a union like the IWW, call it an organization like the DSA, call it a federation like the Syndicalists. The labels don't matter. What matters is the strategic refinement of the worker's struggle into the sharpened tip of a spear. To focus the glowing rage of the proletariat like a magnifying glass focuses the Sun's rays into a scorching pinpoint.
Running elections is a tactic, not a strategy. We should view running elections the same way we view smashing the windows of gentrified boulevards. It is a means of growing the cracks which already exist within society, nothing more, nothing less.
This is all true, but on the tactic of running campaigns to get socialists in office, that tactic itself can be a detrimental failure if those campaigns are always doomed to fail from the start. Putting resources and time and effort into only running failed campaigns doesnt win you anything, plenty of political parties have proven that over the past decades and have faded into obscurity. Also people mean different things when they say third party, most just mean it in the sense of a third party ballot line, because people think that "whats wrong" is that we "dont have the right politicians in charge", so they elevate the tactic of elections to that of a strategy and it becomes the goal of what they think it will take for us to win.
The main org that has shown a real strategic undertaking in the matter of building the socialist movement has been DSA, theyve been the only ones to grow substantially and undertake multiple tactics all while balancing the need to grow with the need to push for a socialist movement. People can shout all they want but these tactics work and theres of course a ton more to do, but theres a reason DSA doesnt run its own candidates as everyone is often demanding. I dont think we're anywhere near that level, it would only eat up time and resources which we could instead be spending now to grow by focusing on work that matters much more like labor and housing organizing.
The current moment needs people to come together and work collectively on strategies that build up the socialist movement, definitely not focus on third party ballot lines as some sort of neat trick to prove some point.
Good ass take. But what do you mean by "growing the cracks which already exist"?
Probably referring to exploiting the ever growing symptoms of capitalist contradictions (hellworld getting more hellworldish)
Throughout US history third parties have come up and killed off dying parties there's nothing (other than the obstacle of the interest of capital, which isn't insignificant) saying that couldn't happen again.
I used to think the same thing but ranked choice did fuck all for third parties in Maine in the last election.
If it did nothing - they wouldn't fight it so much in Maine and Massachusetts (where they beat it in November). But if it was a magic wand Australia wouldn't suck as much as it does right now.
australia would suck a lot more if we didn’t have preferential voting.
Cool crystal ball. Guess what ranked choice won't be a thing without a third party.
"Why yes, I do uphold marxist-leninist-maoist-daouist thought. How could you tell ?!"
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/026/152/gigachad.jpg
"Pelosi has protected us from more liberal policy." - Tim Ryan
Oooo this is a fun game. Which country makes a new party first? The US or the UK?
IMO we should focus on radical unionizing and forming armed militias.
