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R. Guyovich posted:you seem to think aoc is a secret socialist when an honest reading of her public statements reveals tepid social democracy at best. have you decoded something? would you like to share with the class? be fair - she’s an enthusiastic socdem! which is definitely an improvement
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Jul 9, 2018 14:19
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aoc did help widen the overton window, and if nothing else opens the door to even further-left candidates in the future whether or not we have time to wait for future elections is questionable tho
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Jul 9, 2018 14:21
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Serf posted:aoc did help widen the overton window, and if nothing else opens the door to even further-left candidates in the future Overton window is bullshit hth
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Jul 9, 2018 14:23
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R. Guyovich posted:i love when purported "leftists" deploy the exact same arguments democrats do. "purity testing" lmao They failed because the democratic party was structured, from its founding, to privilege corporate interests, and be captured by them, at every level. A turn that has become more pronounced since the failure of the New Deal coalition. The same story repeats itself with new labor. it's the structural power relations, and how that intersects with class & so on, that determine a what party becomes, it's not simply a matter of a 'lack of faith' among the party officials or whatever.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:24
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Jizz Festival posted:Overton window is bullshit hth its really not
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Jul 9, 2018 14:24
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again, you're mischaracterizing what i want from candidates. explicitly tying material improvements to people's lives with a socialist movement is fine, but that's not what the social democrat "radicals" are doing in dem primaries. as soon as they win, they distance themselves from the socialist label asap by diminishing its importance — which means either the democrats are getting to them, or we're not as close to rehabilitating the "s-word" as everybody on twitter thought. i'm not sure which yet, because winning candidates appear to be cowards when it comes to pride in their dsa membership. a remedy for that would be running under an organization that enforces actual discipline on its members rather than endorsing/not endorsing as a watered down means of exerting influence. this poo poo about me wanting Full Communism Now is a ridiculous strawman, because you can't engage with the things i'm actually saying.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:24
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GunnerJ posted:He was also talking about Russia over 100 years ago, so I've gotta wonder whether the "spirit of the law" applied to different circumstances (like a country where third party ballot lines are curiosities at best under anything but extraordinary conditions) would lead to different conclusions than the "letter of the law." Yeah, I think that the difference in how the Russian Parliament at the time worked and our Congress is significant, but I do think that trying to maintain a distinct working-class characteristic is important to any sort of electoral project AOC emphasis that she was of the working class, not merely for the middle class was important in this regard, and identification of DSA membership as standing in for a politics centered around working class interest I would think would suffice
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Jul 9, 2018 14:25
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so i'll take that as a no then to marxist histories of cold war america
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Jul 9, 2018 14:25
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rudatron posted:you're operating from a fallacious worldview, where democratic party betrayals occured because they lacked sufficient ideological fervor. That's simply historical-idealism. this is all over the place, and again is based on nothing i've said. do you think i'm unaware of the structural forces at play? toss the word salad a bit more next time.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:26
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:its really not Tis
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Jul 9, 2018 14:28
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Jul 9, 2018 14:30
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I refuse to support AOC until she publically states Kautsky was a fraud on live national television. This is what people need to hear
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Jul 9, 2018 14:30
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Raskolnikov38 posted:so i'll take that as a no then to marxist histories of cold war america is there a specific focus you were looking for?
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Jul 9, 2018 14:33
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the dsa did more than 'endorse', they provided labor, in the form of canvassing, to help get her elected. Because of that, she decided to run under the label 'socialist', an incredibly toxic term in the US, and won her primary. Even if aoc were to about face turn, and morph into a clone of clinton, it doesn't matter, because a success has already been achieved. because these facts alone demonstrates a small exertion of power, and of organizational effort, on the part of the left as a whole, and on the part of the DSA in particular. that ability needs to be cultivated, through practice. There will be upsets and failures along the way, but it's a path to power, and it's there, for the taking.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:34
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add in the fact that she's received incredible media attention, and has failed to successfully get smeared (and not for a lack of trying on the part of the right-wing), and the questions about her individual qualities or convictions are irrelevant - if this success can be replicated across the nation, you won't have to worry about candidates being 'cowards' or not, because the context they're working under will have fundamentally shifted, for the better.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:37
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:When Lenin wrote about the need to participate in elections, he wrote about the need to participate as a party that was explicitly centered around the working class, which the Democrats aren't. Even though DSA doesn't have.a ballot line, it could very well serve as a workers party. good post. as long as the DSA pursues a tactic of running candidates through the democratic party its going to present contradictions as they are a capitalist party and so socialists running on their ticket will naturally be viewed with some degree of skepticism by other marxists. I dont think its fair to be overly critical of the DSA and ocasio-cortez as some have done, on the basis of her stated policies specifically, but I do think its fair to criticize them on the basis of how they hold their elected officials accountable to them specifically, and how they are working to eventually break from the democratic party. for years now bhaskar sankara and others in DSA, even before trump, have argued for using the dem ballot line as ameans of building power and raising class consciousness to prepare for an eventual formation of a new mass workers party that would come about through a break with the dems. this is similar to the historical formation of the british labour party which came from workers breaking with the liberals after trying to work within the liberal party first. while I may disagree with it as a strategy, i respect it at least as an earnest attempt to try to develop socialist forces. my concern is that i dont know how much the new blood coming into DSA views that as the goal. the recent influx of membership has included a lot of marxists but also many liberals as well. thats niot a problem necessarily but without a thorough onboarding process for new people and the means of holding new chapters, new members, and especially elected officials to democratic control by the organization, I worry that ultimately it will just be co-opted into the dems like SDS or the rainbow coalition. I know of some chapters of DSA which have a clear commitment to revolutionary politics both inside and outside of electoral work, but I know of others where the chapter is more or less the activist wing of the dems, mainly being made up of democratic party precinct captains and other dem activists who would define socialism as just social democracy or welfare capitalism
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Jul 9, 2018 14:48
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all I wanted to do was to make a cheap joke about the WSWS making unironic getfiscal bits
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Jul 9, 2018 14:56
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Raskolnikov38 posted:so i'll take that as a no then to marxist histories of cold war america Yeah it's pretty slim pickings there, sadly. The cold war era US just isn't talked about much on the left.
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Jul 9, 2018 14:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:all I wanted to do was to make a cheap joke about the WSWS making unironic getfiscal bits https://twitter.com/arishish/status/1016169663116476416
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Jul 9, 2018 15:07
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I think that the S-word isn’t rehabilitated in a majority of Congressional districts, the Dems want to win a majority of Congressional districts (and so does AOC), so there are major structural limits to the electoral strategy. There’s also a lot of organizing on rehabilitating the S-word in those districts, which is a long-term project that has shown both success and setbacks.
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Jul 9, 2018 15:31
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:
*thousands of new people sign up for DSA because of AOC's win* "ugh she's not doing enough for socialism, what a loving traitor baddem"
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Jul 9, 2018 15:33
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imo gently caress elections we need more toothless protests thatll get the socialism ball rolling
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Jul 9, 2018 16:44
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R. Guyovich posted:again, you're mischaracterizing what i want from candidates. explicitly tying material improvements to people's lives with a socialist movement is fine, but that's not what the social democrat "radicals" are doing in dem primaries. as soon as they win, they distance themselves from the socialist label asap by diminishing its importance — which means either the democrats are getting to them, or we're not as close to rehabilitating the "s-word" as everybody on twitter thought. i'm not sure which yet, because winning candidates appear to be cowards when it comes to pride in their dsa membership. this whole discussion got started because of the WSWS article calling her a "reactionary instrument." I was fine with what the article was saying up until that point because it's good to call her out for being uncomfortable with the label "socialist." but her win caused thousands of people to get interested in getting involved with socialist politics. is that really a win for the forces of reaction? it seems unreasonably hostile to me, and that kind of disproportionate hostility is going to be an obstacle towards getting people involved in a nascent political movement.
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Jul 9, 2018 16:46
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R. Guyovich posted:is there a specific focus you were looking for? late 1950s to early 1970s. i've been re-reading perlstein's trilogy and trying to sketch out a marxist interpretation of the societal, political, and economic changes of the period
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Jul 9, 2018 16:51
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Good way to dissipate the hostility of crusty commies is to post endlessly about it so everybody knows it's a big problem and "a thing" and not a good look
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Jul 9, 2018 16:54
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Pizza Segregationist posted:this whole discussion got started because of the WSWS article calling her a "reactionary instrument." I was fine with what the article was saying up until that point because it's good to call her out for being uncomfortable with the label "socialist." but her win caused thousands of people to get interested in getting involved with socialist politics. is that really a win for the forces of reaction? it seems unreasonably hostile to me, and that kind of disproportionate hostility is going to be an obstacle towards getting people involved in a nascent political movement. Also it's pretty funny/telling that the WSWS tweet has (at the time of this post) 7 whole likes while all of AOC's tweets now get like 10k minimum
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Jul 9, 2018 16:56
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Can you believe this loving poo poo the commies are posting on reddit again? Makes me never want to organize anything or do anything and dedicate my life to calling out stalinists on twitter who are ruining everything by posting
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Jul 9, 2018 16:57
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they could start by removing Web Site from their organizations name. seems kind of redundant to me. my 2 cents.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:00
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Bernie was the first to explicitly say he was socialist (tho arguably he is not, I know), yet his run put more into the sails of socialism in america than anything in the last, I dunno, 60 years. AOC is a continuation of that - I wouldn't be surprised if she fucks up a bunch, but the big picture is that these are all objectively good things for the movement. now it's up to the chapters to educate the people that join the org, so everyone is on the same page. calling AOC a reactionary is a waste of time, and I'm not really sure who it benefits or who the audience is. maybe PSL etc. (love u guys) should do some self crit and figure out why their tactics over the last 2 decades have failed at building a mass movement. perhaps they have, i haven't seen it tho.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:07
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Pizza Segregationist posted:this whole discussion got started because of the WSWS article calling her a "reactionary instrument." I was fine with what the article was saying up until that point because it's good to call her out for being uncomfortable with the label "socialist." but her win caused thousands of people to get interested in getting involved with socialist politics. is that really a win for the forces of reaction? it seems unreasonably hostile to me, and that kind of disproportionate hostility is going to be an obstacle towards getting people involved in a nascent political movement. i dont see it as unreasonably hostile, the budding socialist movement getting completely co-opted by social democrats would indeed be a win for the forces of reaction. AOC is great and i wish i could vote for her but its clear that the main goal of all her coverage is to make people less informed about socialism.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:22
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Wheeee posted:imo gently caress elections we need more toothless protests thatll get the socialism ball rolling Yes, because this is exactly what anyone who's critical of AOC is saying. I'm just curious as to what people think we're going to accomplish this time differently with AOC. We've already established we can't repeat Lenin and the Bolsheviks Dumas run, though Marx really was right when he said that "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." considering people here are still acting like this is 1917 Tsarist Russia. When are we going to get the fabled mass worker party? Shouldn't the DSA be that? Marx and Engels did advocate participation in electoral politics but there's a big qualifier there, and that's that working class politics and parties can't be a tagtail for bourgeois ones. As far as I can tell, AOC is wanting stuff that's palatable to Democratic party officials, and it doesn't even matter how much right-wing smear she or other socdems get Rudatron, they smear and cry about everyone that's not staunchly on the right lmao. This also isn't the 20th century in terms of widespread unionism, strikes, and new deal Democrats. I think people are nostalgic to build up that same type of working class politics in the present time and that's just not going to happen, that time is long dead and we have to start "thinking dialectically" (  ) instead of trying to retread dead ends and fit them into our current time.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:22
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Karl Barks posted:Bernie was the first to explicitly say he was socialist (tho arguably he is not, I know),
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Jul 9, 2018 17:22
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Infernot posted:Yes, because this is exactly what anyone who's critical of AOC is saying. I'm just curious as to what people think we're going to accomplish this time differently with AOC. We've already established we can't repeat Lenin and the Bolsheviks Dumas run, though Marx really was right when he said that "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." considering people here are still acting like this is 1917 Tsarist Russia. I didn't read this
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Jul 9, 2018 17:28
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I did, it was all right.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:34
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an actual dog posted:I didn't read this lol if youre going to do this at least post the gif
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Jul 9, 2018 17:35
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Jul 9, 2018 17:35
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Infernot posted:When are we going to get the fabled mass worker party? Shouldn't the DSA be that? what does a mass worker party in the USA look like to you?
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Jul 9, 2018 17:56
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A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:i dont see it as unreasonably hostile, the budding socialist movement getting completely co-opted by social democrats would indeed be a win for the forces of reaction. AOC is great and i wish i could vote for her but its clear that the main goal of all her coverage is to make people less informed about socialism. I think it's too early to worry about the movement getting co-opted by social democrats. people are just starting to get interested in socialism and a lot of them are still very liberal in their thinking. people who are getting involved because they found AOC's win inspiring are not going to be receptive to the idea that her win was actually a bad thing. I don't think the American working class will be willing to radicalize until capital hits its next crisis and there is a drastic, sudden drop in their quality of life. until then if people like AOC and Sanders can connect the idea of socialism with an increased standard of living then that's good for class consciousness
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Jul 9, 2018 18:12
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isn't the world socialist web site a trot outfit that also thinks #metoo has #gonetoofar and also thinks jerry sandusky got a raw deal
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Jul 9, 2018 18:27
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like who gives a drat what they think about anything
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Jul 9, 2018 18:27
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