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Goast posted:sorry cant do it not enough political capital in the tank rn do the work and check again in 2022 well, yes, as they literally have spent their leverage ("political capital", whatever you like to call it) on a different set of parliamentarian maneuvers. they obviously didn't have the numbers or the clout to exempt m4a from paygo AND exempt climate legislation from paygo AND get put on whatever committee that was, i forget, AND force a public vote on m4a, so they picked and chose. you might as well ask why they didn't just use their political capital to pass m4a immediately personally i think it was a good move because any information or changes in public perception stemming from a floor vote would be redundant with what we've already seen re: $2,000 dollar relief checks and, hell, the democratic primary and general election, which had not been resolved at the time that asking for a floor vote was written into dsa m4a campaign strategy. but even THESE concerns are distractions from the real problem, which is that the antics of those clowns in congress are downstream, not upstream, from the development and consolidation of proletarian power Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 03:05 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 03:00
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i can only speak on my experiences for how this has played out in other what I would consider similar instances. when kshama sawant won in 2013 in seattle she did it by running on a platform of $15 an hour. when she was elected, she immediately worked to bring a vote on $15 an hour once she was elected. majority of dems on the council opposed it, they did not have the votes. but because of the popularity and the fact that she was then willing to call them out at every step for their betrayal of what they claimed were their principles, it helped mobilize even more people which eventually put enough pressure on some to flip their votes. they then worked to delay and add in as many loopholes for business as possible, which again meant calling them out and expanding the struggle. 15 won but it was because of using the office as a point for mobilization for as many people as possible on the issue. for that reason i think DSA should have their elected representatives absolutely work to force a vote on medicare for all, not with the outlook that doing so will cause dems or reps to vote for it, but with the knowledge that the vote would show just how many in both parties are opposed to one of the most popular policy ideas out there right now. it would help build support and give a concrete demand that people could mobilize around right now to win it. if it failed, it would be clarifying for millions of people in the middle of the pandemic and if DSA took the lead they could grow by leaps and bounds. the role of elected socialists is to wage a constant fight in legislatures and parliaments against other capitalist parties and their represntatives. theyre basically the tip of a spear where the real power they wield isnt the office but the movement behind them, and so their role is to use their office in whatever way possible to help build that movement. basically to paraphrase lenin - fight and see what happens
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Jan 7, 2021 03:53
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I've been watching C-SPAN for the last few hours. Some of the call-ins have been loving magical. Big shout out to Brandon from Florida. Joining us is Brandon from Florida: "I think what is happening is super justified. Say I'm a monkey and you're a banana" - "Thank you Brandon, next caller"
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Jan 7, 2021 04:06
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apropos to nothing posted:... the vote would show just how many in both parties are opposed to one of the most popular policy ideas out there right now. ... if it failed, it would be clarifying for millions of people ... i've isolated the elements in your post specific to causing a floor vote on medicare for all to be publically held i don't actually agree that it would be particularly clarifying. maybe it would have been in 2019 but we're not at the tail end of a democratic primary in which medicare for all was a hot button issue and in which the one guy brave enough NOT to lie and say he's for it but instead tell us to go gently caress ourselves every time we mentioned it won decisively. i don't think this is a matter of the masses being stupid, some kind of tragic "alas, if only they knew..." situation. i think they correctly perceived it was not really on the table, such that they were largely for it for the same reason and with the same force that they were largely for world peace or against racism. in a vacuum, i think holding a floor vote and thus adding a bit extra evidence of who's for and who's against would be better than doing nothing. but it's not better than every other option. like i said, i watched the FTV town hall and in the first place found it incredibly disingenuous, basically using the same strategy over and over again. oh, rashida tlaib says she's for m4a... but doesn't want to force the vote! (tearfully) were you lying to me that time, rashida??? that DOES sound like a hideous betrayal... if you assume that holding a floor vote is the best if not the only way to get m4a passed. if not, you're just blowing smoke up my rear end. so sure, aoc et al should fight whole heartedly for the issues they were elected on and in a way that mobilizes the maximum number of people behind those issues. but the people who specifically claim that FTV is the way to do that are a bunch of liberal podcasters, so why would i take their direction?
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Jan 7, 2021 05:50
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Goast posted:sorry cant do it not enough political capital in the tank rn do the work and check again in 2022
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Jan 7, 2021 05:54
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Ferrinus, in theory if aoc et al were committed vanguards of the revolution or w/e, what should they be doing in parliament
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Jan 7, 2021 07:40
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comedyblissoption posted:Ferrinus, in theory if aoc et al were committed vanguards of the revolution or w/e, what should they be doing in parliament this basically. causing a big ol stink about it is pretty much what you can and should do and this would do it. i dont know a lot about jimmy dore, seems like a jerk and whatnot but like the fact that hes a jerk and some of the other proponents are "liberals" doesnt really affect whether its a good idea or not. thats prolly the biggest frustration i have with the whole thing, what way forward is a valuable debate and having it actually is clarifying. i get a lot of the reason why people would be opposed to trying to force a vote too, problem is most of the discussion around it is being had around whether you like this person or that person, whether theyre a liberal or a careerist or a traitor, etc. on both sides so the actual strategy and tactics of which way the socialist movement should go forward isnt actually discussed, which is of course way more valuiable
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Jan 7, 2021 14:39
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comedyblissoption posted:Ferrinus, in theory if aoc et al were committed vanguards of the revolution or w/e, what should they be doing in parliament well i'd like to see more strident opposition to police brutality and foreign intervention but they're mostly too cowed or ideologically ensnared to even say that eg israel is bad
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Jan 7, 2021 16:26
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when do primary candidates for 2022 need to be registered? I’ve heard that the deadline is past which is worrying since DSA doesn’t seem to have put up too many people. might as well see if we can get some people in during the bloodbath
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Jan 9, 2021 02:03
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Congressional? People will probably start announcing this summer. Some states have municipal elections off cycle so some people might lose those then move on to state legislatures or congress.
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Jan 9, 2021 02:11
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I'm already getting a headache when people will be like "Why doesn't Pittsburgh DSA endorse John Fetterman?" to which I can refer to the video footage of his lt gov endorsement hearing that was a total shitshow. Guy is all style no substance and only gets by because he has a decent social media presence and no one gives a poo poo about how he actually ran things as Mayor of Braddock. Mostly there will be judges running in Pittsburgh which should be interesting if we can get some in. Mayor of Pittsburgh is a fools game though' In other news our first Anti-capitalists Classics went well! 26 people discussing an excerpt from "Social Reform or Revolution" which honestly was pretty good timing with the FTV stuff Anyway next reading is an excerpt from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos's "The World: Seven Thoughts in May of 2003" (17 pages) To sign up go to bit.ly/anticapitalist
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Jan 9, 2021 06:02
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my friends in red star are also running a public zoom reading group: "Red Start" i think this week's reading is On Practice and On Contradiction
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Jan 9, 2021 06:39
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achillesforever6 posted:I'm already getting a headache when people will be like "Why doesn't Pittsburgh DSA endorse John Fetterman?" to which I can refer to the video footage of his lt gov endorsement hearing that was a total shitshow. Guy is all style no substance and only gets by because he has a decent social media presence and no one gives a poo poo about how he actually ran things as Mayor of Braddock. Have you posted about this in the John Fetterman thread? I feel like more people should know about what you're saying
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Jan 9, 2021 08:06
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Doc Hawkins posted:my friends in red star are also running a public zoom reading group: "Red Start" lmao, reading mao? the one prominent communist that was quoted in the west wing? smdh.
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Jan 9, 2021 09:56
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https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1347701622726676480?s=21 God I hate how much Jacobin is treated like a DSA publication because of how much Bhaskar is friends with B&R people
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Jan 9, 2021 15:39
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this is the mirror image of Harris thinking that banning Trump from Twitter was hugely politically important
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Jan 9, 2021 17:28
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achillesforever6 posted:https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1347701622726676480?s=21 i disagree with bhaskar on a lot but agree here. like yeah its funny and good ultimately that trump was banned but the point is like most social media this day should be treated as a form of public communication with democratic oversight. instead its private companies that can censor and ban even the most influential and powerful political leader in the world with no accountability or oversight to anyone. im not gonna go on a crusade to get trumps twitter reinstated but its still not a good pattern and its something that has been done primarily to left wing folks on twitter and likely if the practice escalates from this which it prolly will, its gonna be used against folks on the left even more
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Jan 9, 2021 17:35
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there is no pattern. it already has been used against leftists, and its usage against Trump will neither hasten nor strengthen that inevitable escalation. it's a non-event.
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Jan 9, 2021 18:21
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it’s definitely not a non event whatever you think of it
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Jan 9, 2021 18:22
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Kind of an event, really.
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Jan 9, 2021 18:24
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A whole thing, if you would.
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Jan 9, 2021 19:19
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*tech monopolies collude to successfully censor literally the president of the united states, press briefings look obviously edited, entire media whips up a frenzy for domestic terrorism laws and increased surveillance* ah a nothingburger
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Jan 10, 2021 01:10
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it's all been on the way for years. whenever you first noticed social and political activity passing over platforms architected for mass commercial surveillance, you were seeing structures of the society which is being prepared for us. these platforms are intended to enable a closer management of communication and thereby of people.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:45
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lol speaking of which https://www.twitter.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1348094356893310978
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Jan 10, 2021 04:39
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Doc Hawkins posted:lol speaking of which MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE COUNTRY 
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Jan 10, 2021 05:59
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Signed up for the DSA. Thanks to the Cool Zone and Trump threads, I'm officially a "card-carrying socialist." Thanks, C-SPAM!
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Jan 11, 2021 23:42
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Ferrinus posted:in a vacuum, i think holding a floor vote and thus adding a bit extra evidence of who's for and who's against would be better than doing nothing. but it's not better than every other option.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:53
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I mean my beef is voting for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker in the first place, not that they did it "for free." She is not a popular politician, and withholding that vote would get the attention of people who are otherwise not engaged in politics to a large degree and (perhaps correctly) perceive that a lot of the "left" at least among the electeds, are full of poo poo. And those electeds would accomplish this by not being full of poo poo, for a change. It could also act as a wedge to peel off people who currently like both AOC and Nancy Pelosi (these people are dumb as poo poo but also involved in Democratic politics more than people who dislike both). pictured below: all the people who are not engaged with politics to a large degree but know who nancy pelosi is and care deeply whether the squad voted to confirm her speakership and would be activated/mobilized had they gone the other way.
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Jan 12, 2021 00:08
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Quetzadilla posted:pictured below: all the people who are not engaged with politics to a large degree but know who nancy pelosi is and care deeply whether the squad voted to confirm her speakership and would be activated/mobilized had they gone the other way. because if your reaction to anything other than toeing the democratic party line is "nobody cares" then you should either make peace with what the democrats plan to do - whatever that is (nothing, to a first approximation) - or you should check out from politics yourself. because you are not even trying to have any tangible effect on the party which iirc is the whole point of electoralism? and if you're posting in C-SPAM then you have not checked out of politics completely, fwiw at any rate it seems to me that infighting within the democratic party as they implement a plan of austerity coupled with mass surveillance, is preferable to doing that and not having any infighting along the way, assuming we're getting the austerity and expanded surveillance either way which is a pretty safe bet. and if nobody cares about renegade democrats then probably nobody cares about austerity and surveillance either, and in fact nobody cares about anything right up to the point that their own material conditions are substantially impacted, which is going to happen regardless of whether you gently caress around with electoralism and regardless of whether your favs get the committee assignments you wanted them to get I mean forgive me but it seems like you're saying electoralism is a waste of time, right? I agree also you ignored the part about people who like both
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Jan 12, 2021 00:30
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Drunk Nerds posted:Signed up for the DSA. Thanks to the Cool Zone and Trump threads, I'm officially a "card-carrying socialist." Thanks, C-SPAM! welceom comrade!
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Jan 12, 2021 00:32
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I mean my beef is voting for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker in the first place, not that they did it "for free." She is not a popular politician, and withholding that vote would get the attention of people who are otherwise not engaged in politics to a large degree and (perhaps correctly) perceive that a lot of the "left" at least among the electeds, are full of poo poo. And those electeds would accomplish this by not being full of poo poo, for a change. It could also act as a wedge to peel off people who currently like both AOC and Nancy Pelosi (these people are dumb as poo poo but also involved in Democratic politics more than people who dislike both). i don't really know much about the fine details of the legislature, but my loose understanding is that if the squad withheld their votes entirely either pelosi might have lost (but some republican might have won) or pelosi might have just gone and twisted some other arms and won anyway, but won in a way that gave some other non-squad politicians favors and leverage to trade down the line. obviously this is why the gaggle of dsa-friendly politicians chose to vote for her in exchange for small concessions somewhere rather than make a principled refusal to legitimize her - it just wouldn't work out for them, those politicians, in the short or maybe even medium run in the long run, i do want to see the democratic party fail and for there to be clear, public breaks between socialist and liberal candidates. in order for our candidates to be able to basically go scorched earth on the rest of the legislature, though, we need to be giving them serious backing, in the sense that their electoral victories are so much our doing that they'll be able to retain their positions even if the establishment completely encircles and abandons them and, conversely, that they can't possibly hope to win without us. we don't have the power that allows us to support but also control them right now, so we can't make them kamikaze themselves into the dem establishment for the point of public spectacle, and also there'd be no point in us asking them to do that or tricking them into doing that because we don't have the power to back them up or make any hay out of their clash with establishment dems (make any MORE hay, anyway; there've clearly been multiple recent incidents in which The Squad has broken with the rest of the party, like by endorsing sanders or fighting for 2,000 checks, and we've done what we can with our messaging but it's come to little) in short i don't think having the squad draw swords on the rest of the dems here and now would draw attention we don't already have or meaningfully build our power. when they CAN do that, and profit by doing that, it'll because we've built up so much power that it'd be stupid for them not to. putting the focus on micromanaging the actions of politicians in the legislature rather than building the movement in the streets and neighborhoods is not materialist, and the fact that the FTV people in particular are focusing the bulk of their ire on the DSA and DSA electeds and speaking purely in terms of comms, consciouisness-raising, "revealing themselves", etc shows they are not seriously thinking about what it takes to win
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Jan 12, 2021 00:53
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:well then you may as well just throw in the towel honestly - stop sending dues to the dsa and caring what they do ferrinus put it better than i could but look I agree with you that nancy pelosi sucks rear end as do the rest of the establishment dems and that alone is grounds to never ever confirm her speakership. i just disagree with your conclusions that 1.) DSA could even meaningfully affect the squad's decision to confirm and 2.) if the squad DID vote against it would crack-ping this mythical subset of the American people who i don't think actually exist. if your politics are so incoherent that you have warm fuzzy feelings about pelosi and the squad then politics is all aesthetic to you anyway and when push comes to shove you'd just side with pelosi. if you want to commit to electoralism as a strategy then you're gonna be bound by what it takes to actually do electoralism. like sure you could go full lenin and just be obstructionist for the sake of demolishing the bourgeois state but i don't think that's actually DSA's or the squad's goal in doing electoralism.
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Jan 12, 2021 01:14
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always go full lenin
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Jan 12, 2021 02:17
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going full lenin means making a sober assessment of your practical circumstances and responding appropriately. there's no one size fits all option which you can guarantee is the right move regardless of context because it's The Most Revolutionary
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Jan 12, 2021 02:19
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Regardless of how one feels about FTV I would like to note a Republican couldn't become Speaker in this Congress. The bar for being Speaker isn't getting the most votes but getting a majority of the reps to support you. If repubs vote lockstep for McCarthy at 211 and dems vote Pelosi 208 and the squad votes maybe Barbara Lee 10 that doesn't mean McCarthy gets it. Instead another round of voting is held until Pelosi gives enough concessions to make it to 216 votes.
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Jan 12, 2021 02:31
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is access to healthcare a sober assessment of practical circumstances
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Jan 12, 2021 02:42
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comedyblissoption posted:is access to healthcare a sober assessment of practical circumstances you're pulling the same switcheroo that FTV's leading lights did repeatedly in their town hall and on their other media, which is pretending that their specific idea is the same thing as access to healthcare. but, since we know it'll fail, and since we've already seen the issue of general healthcare AND the issue of short-term pandemic aid brought up, debated, and voted on in the public sphere with disappointing results, it's actually not the same as healthcare and not even likely to get us any closer to healthcare so what are you doing? did you think i wouldn't notice?
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Jan 12, 2021 02:46
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also please remember the idea behind FTV, caucusing to obstruct legislation to try to extract a demand, is not a unique tactic to just the vote for speaker but basically any major legislation
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Jan 12, 2021 02:46
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Ferrinus posted:you're pulling the same switcheroo that FTV's leading lights did repeatedly in their town hall and on their other media, which is pretending that their specific idea is the same thing as access to healthcare. but, since we know it'll fail, and since we've already seen the issue of general healthcare AND the issue of short-term pandemic aid brought up, debated, and voted on in the public sphere with disappointing results, it's actually not the same as healthcare and not even likely to get us any closer to healthcare it is dismaying if they continue down this rhetorical path and abandon 'healthcare is a right' and 'm4a' and so on
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Jan 12, 2021 02:49
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comedyblissoption posted:'access to healthcare' is a rhetorical shift in recent remarks by aoc and sanders, dsa backed candidates, which is relevant since you were commenting on the parliamentary tactics of politicians i don't know offhand of sanders surrogates who have stopped saying that healthcare is a right and started saying instead that access to healthcare is a right, but i don't follow electoral politics that closely. if people ARE doing it though, it's not because of their personal evil or because of our failure to execute the One Weird Trick of yelling at politicians loudly and meanly enough
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Jan 12, 2021 02:53
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