This is from the wikipedia article about Michael Harrington, generally considered to be the DSA’s founder. The libs were right: socialism is (apparently) when you commit genocide.
Edit: lol I did not think I would be starting a thread with a million replies but here we go I guess.
Harrington died in 1989. What’s relevant is what the DSA is doing today.
More zionism 🥴
no investigation, no right to speak
I’m not super plugged in to them, but it doesn’t look like it:
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/dsa-commemorates-the-78th-anniversary-of-the-nakba/
Mamdani let Smotrich (wanted for war crimes) march in NYC.
Ok, so post about that instead of some dude that died 40 years ago.
The dude who founded the party.
You’re not really trying here.
Tons of “socialists” were elected during trump’s first term. How have they turned out since then?
Yeah because the NYPD would totally have arrested him on Zohran’s orders, then they’ll peacefully disarm and apologize for all their crimes against the people of New York
It’s almost like we need a revolution in order to have socialism.
ok then go do that instead
Ideological struggle is just as important as struggle in the real world. Socialists have tried electoralism many times all over the world during the last century. Are you really going to argue that it’s been more effective for the international working class than revolution?
Not making any statement about the DSA, but if you use this yardstick, you’re going to have to dunk on Stalin and the USSR too
The USSR turned against isn’treal pretty quickly, which elected dsa officials have done the same?
rashida tlaib ahaik
She is seriously the only one.
if DSA read theory and held an ideological line this might be a problem
but you’re in luck on that grain lol
Edit: lol I did not think I would be starting a thread with a million replies but here we go I guess.
Posting this edit when you’re at 15 makes me think you are wanting to start something lol. Either way, have your fun I guess.
I seriously didn’t think it would be controversial to post this.
The Harrington tendency is dead in DSA, we literally passed an anti-zionist resolution at convention last year, members can be expelled for supporting Zionism.
Apparently not if these members are elected officials.
This is an active debate in DSA. DSA does not have any way of enforcing party discipline on our electeds. The nature of the NYC chapter, itself composed of many qualitatively differing large branches, is the largest, most active and electorally successful branch in the country, and differs qualitatively from the national org.
But it also has to be acknowledged that winning an executive office brings an immense amount of baggage and contradictions. Mamdani did not run as a pure propaganda candidate, and wants to actually govern. Which means he inherited a governance apparatus that has, for years, been ground zero for an immense amount of corruption and personal enrichment. DSA does not have control of the office of NYC mayor, and Mamdani’s win has attracted tens of thousands of new members. He has vocally and practically opposed Zionism in many ways, and if the people who he appoints to this or that position do not, then unless they are members of DSA, we can’t really do much about it, at this juncture.
The anti-zionism resolution passed but was still very controversial, I had to have many difficult conversations with members after convention explaining why we voted for it. I think you are correct to be critical, and there are parts of DSA that are working to improve our ability to enforce discipline on electeds. National DSA refused to endorse AOC, for example, and are vocal in opposition to her pragmatism toward support for Israel. The National leadership criticizes Mamdani when he makes critical mistakes like you are pointing out. But because you can only think about things abstractly, you can’t understand what’s actually going on, what forces are at work, and what is being done within the org, as well as Mamdani’s own circle, to resolve the concrete contradictions.
This baby simple formula of Mamdani bad = DSA bad is pure ultraleft idealism. You’re arm-chairing during the most dynamic moment in the socialist movement in 80+ years. You need to understand that to love DSA is an act of trying to understand it in order to change it; rather than putting it in a box and slapping a label on it like some idealist.
But because you can only think about things abstractly
“Abstractly” is when the mayor keeps on a zionist police chief, actively enables the dispossession of Palestinian land, and supports a candidate who invested hundreds of millions of dollars of public pension money in genocide. Who forced Mamdani to do these things? What pushback has come from the DSA? Yes, clearly I am the one thinking abstractly here. Pragmatism is when you keep the death machine well oiled with the blood of innocent people.
Look, you are rightly upset about the horrors that exist in the world. You are rightly upset about your criticisms of Mamdani. You are rightly skeptical of DSA. But none of that transforms the org into something that it just isn’t. You’ve moved the goal posts from a criticism of DSA on the basis of our founder, whose influence has been rendered irrelevant and wrong; to a criticism of Mamdani. In order to be coherent you should try to be consistent.
What I mean by you’re thinking too abstractly and idealistically, is the actual work that the members engage in, and what those members have brought back to their chapters, committees, and in some cases leadership positions, is what defines the nature of DSA. And the reality of what that work is and how it has developed, does not align with your criticisms of it.
If you joined DSA, you would fit in with a large and growing body of members. Like clearly we weren’t always anti Zionist, clearly we still have a ways to go, but it has changed and is continuing to change. What is your theory of change? It seems like you don’t have one, you have a sectarian idea of political absolutism and I’m sure you could find some left opportunist sect that would tell you everything you want to hear as long as your dues meet the expectation.
DSA isn’t one thing, it hasn’t been for a long time. We have ultra sectarians in DSA! We also have reformists, and moderate tendencies, and how those dynamics develop never ceases to yield frustration, or inspire awe. But your criticisms do not make DSA something that it isn’t. You don’t understand the org, you don’t want to understand the org, and that’s your prerogative. But if you don’t understand how these horrors divide us, if you’re not willing to make any compromises with reality, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Having a theory of change is not pragmatism, and DSA’s theory of change is a site of struggle. So its different than pragmatism. Its always breathtaking how outsiders act like their single criticism is stating some final checkmate; when usually their criticism is alive and playing out inside the org, from a dozen different directions. Meanwhile you just sound like a crank. You aren’t wrong! But your attitude and approach is out of sync with the practical process of change.
This country isn’t going to change without a revolution, and that isn’t going to happen without a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries to guide the proletariat to victory. Bourgeois elections are little more than theatrics, and little different from student council elections. You can pick this up just from reading the first few pages of What Is To Be Done. I honestly like when leftwingers beat the Democrats because I despise the Democrats and love when anyone who isn’t a Republican defeats them, but the result is still liberal zionists sending money and weapons to israel so they can keep murdering people in Palestine and plenty of other places every single day. If you were in Gaza right now, would you be celebrating the DSA’s recent victories? How has any of that changed the situation on the ground for those people? I am not looking for platitudes. I am looking for results, i.e., a single day in Gaza when israel doesn’t incinerate children.
This country isn’t going to change without a revolution, and that isn’t going to happen without a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries to guide the proletariat to victory.
Yes but also the revolution must be a revolution of the masses, which is why the question of leadership does not resolve itself before the questions of the organizing the mass party, and the problem of consciousness of the working class. Like it isn’t some little sect that leads the revolution! That’s been tried and tried, and the effect is sectarian alienation from the workers movement. You say we need a revolution, reference Lenin and Marxism, but then dispense with every single principle of dialectical materialism, which is the Marxist theory of change. You’re just proving my point.
The mass party struggles internally and externally to develop the vanguard and the party in preparation for revolution. Even then, the vanguard is not able to choose the time of revolution, objective historical circumstances determine it, and whether or not the workers seize power or the bourgeois, or petty bourgeois or whatever, is based on the former, pre revolutionary period. Did the party work within the class to empower the workers, to instill revolutionary consciousness, to learn to collectivize our efforts and prepare us for revolution? Did the party organize authentic centers of worker power such as the unions, and organize worker councils to reform them and unseat bureaucrats and bring them under democratic worker control? Has the party won legitimacy among the institutions that hold sway in the consciousness of working class? The vanguard is necessary to organize the mass party, the vanguard is not the party itself. The vanguard is composed of elected delegates, not self-appointed revolutionaries who never participate in revolution.
The DSA I know is composed of people like one of my comrades, who is Lebanese, and whenever he goes home to Lebanon he packs 3 bags: one small bag for his clothes and personal belongings, and two massive wardrobe suitcases full of medicine and supplies, which he smuggles into Gaza, he has done this for years. He’s been arrested by Israeli police, and been through hell for it, but keeps doing it. When Oct 7 broke out, DSA had been having debates for years struggling internally against nascent Zionism and reformism. If we hadn’t been having those debates, the left would not have been in a position to win them. New formations emerged, like Springs of Revolution, made up of people who stayed in DSA through the difficult process,many of whom trace their organizing roots to the Arab Spring, and their own experiences as growing up and living in Palestine. It was exceedingly difficult to get there and hang in through all the nasty debates and political maneuvering of the rightist or reformist tendencies, but now they are leaders in the highest bodies and committees in DSA, including our International Committee which orients us toward these struggles. But even now there is a long way to go, as you point out. But it was a process, and the process is working.
Lenin, when discussing participation in bourgeois elections is explicit, that as long as there is some concrete democratic basis for representing the workers and peasants in elections, that the revolutionary party should participate in them. This was not true after 1905, and Lenin advised against elections for the Duma, since Tsar Nick would just disband parliament if it didn’t serve him. but it was true in later periods, like the lead up to 1917 (which Lenin wasn’t even in the country for). His work, Left Wing Communism is primarily a criticism of ultralefts advocating for no participation in labor unions and elections. Granted, that was written after 1917, so those conditions don’t map cleanly onto our own. But my point is that getting there was a decades long process that involved coordination among many different sections of the working class. The proletarian revolution is a mass revolution, and vice versa; not something a small group of intellectuals handles on their own. I hope that isn’t the argument you are making, because if so, you should engage in more practical work and study, which we all should be doing together anyway.
Your description of DSA as an electoral-only organization, is maybe a description of the most right flank of the org. This is what I’m talking about, that you are describing DSA as one thing, when actually it is many tendencies struggling with objective conditions, unevenly distributed over wildly varying cities and regions. In order for you to be correct, DSA has to be this one thing, but what you describe is a minority tendency. Quoting half baked Marxism to justify an objectively incorrect assessments, and then using the horrors in Palestine as a rhetorical flourish, is not Marxism, it isn’t Leninism, it isn’t scientific, and frankly its exploiting the horrors to justify your half baked politics. Every American sectarian org is splintering, while DSA is growing and gaining mass legitimacy. Its a mess, its a tenuous and difficult prospect, but it is the best thing going in the deeply alienated and reactionary USA. We are digesting 100 years of problems of socialism, and the process isn’t pretty. But it is progressing.
DSA IS inherently, if not consistently, democratic and proletarian in nature. Are we annoyingly petty bourgeois in some ways? Yes but those are sites of active struggle within the org, and the reformist and opportunist tendencies are losing ground. The circumstances in NYC DSA are unique and have to be taken together, and apart, from the national org. Frankly I think it is worth celebrating these victories, but these victories are not victories in and of themselves for most of the org, only the right-most sliver, who loses ground nationally and becomes more sectarian as these struggles play out. Its deeply contradictory, but Marxism is in part an analysis of contradiction, and practical activity on the basis of a mass party; not a striving for ideological purity. Insistence on a maximum program is just the other side of social democracy, it isn’t revolutionary Marxism.
I’m sorry comrade, but the more you elaborate, the more it is clear that you don’t have a Marxist theory of change, you have an idealist theory of revolution.
This country isn’t going to change without a revolution, and that isn’t going to happen without a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries to guide the proletariat to victory.
Okay I’m down, we’ve both been posting on this site for years. PM me the general numbers of people you’ve got and what your step-by-step plan is for adapting revolutionary theory to the specifics of present American conditions, connecting Point A (the USA as it is today) to Point B (active widespread proletarian revolt/upheaval), that cadres can plug into to make quantifiable progress. I assume you do have something like this and aren’t just one individual whining about why we aren’t pushing the Revolution button.
If you prefer private video chat I can show you my face and 10 years of personal records to prove I’m a bona fide activist.
Is it Maoist standard English to call them the DZA or the DSSA? Or even the D$$A? Discuss.
CBT… Willy Brand-t… there’s something there
