CarlMarks

Those 90 million people are more correct about the nature of US electoral politics than any Dem voter.

You cannot take over the Democratic Party. It will just change its own rules before you get the chance. The people running it are all feeding from the same donor trough, either as politicians or consultants. You think they will let you just take the trough away? Friend they make the party rules! They will just change them! They already did this against Bernie, an imperialist socdem, someone who isn't even a real threat to capital (just the insurance industry) and they thwarted that even when it had momentum and kids allowed themselves hope for healthcare without poverty. This is the basic nature of capitalist parties: they are beholden to capital, not the people, and certainly not you or I.

By the time the Democratic Partu is "taken over" by anything, it will be because it has found a way to make capital happy by adopting a policy that costs them nothing. Which means we win nothing of serious value and the spiral of capitalist degrading conditions continues.

In the meantime, what role do these reformers actually serve? If they can't change what needs yo change, what other effects do they have?

Well, they mostly just convince people to have false hope for the party, delaying its need to crash and burn and be replaced, ideally with something more effective than a bourgeois electoral party.

Blocking movement to the left is why you're left with a rightward trend. Not just because the right itself "moves right" but because Dems' political nature breeds false consciousness and confused disillusionment. Dems promise basic things like a student debt jubilee and then do a little weak attempt at it. So then people leave them behind. Even worse, Dems help create the degrading conditions that provokes an anti-liberal backlash (liberalism being the dominant ideology of capitalism, not just US Dems), and then Dems work their hardest to fight the associated leftward shift. But not the right: their radicals are useful for crushing that new left, as the left is anticapitalist.

Most importantly, the bourgeoisie electoral system provides an illusion of control. You don't actually choose the lesset evil. You just throw in a vote for candidates preselected for you by capital and the party (a party in which you have no say) who will never actually be able to fight the right or adopt anticapitalist positions, and will therefore never be left. You, and the people, are not in control in this scenario. This scenario just provides consent for what capital wanted anyways, just with two different flavors: genocidal fascism with a good PR team for the theoretically empathetic and genocidal fascism with an okay PR team for braying hogs.

Capitalists will never let you vote them out of power. The field in which politicians can operate electorally is already heavily restricted and biased by donors and a donor-focused campaign machine that is further entrenched by ever-changing thresholds for candidacy and redistricting. I encourage you to run as a principled person as a third party and see how it goes. I would encourage you to run as a Dem but the time when a politician learns they are also enemies is after they've already helped entrench the party. If you ran as a Dem with principles they would not help your campaign and might fight it. Once in office they'll stymy most of what you attempt.

Voting for every general election is just picking which of two capitalist parties will dictate policy. And the "good guys" are actually detrimental enough that they make their potential voters apathetic or opposed to thrm, as they cannot resonate with their experiences or needs. You know what folks actually need? Rent cut by 90%. Real estate is a financial legalized crime to create "passive income" for the wealthy. That would be incredibly popular. It would also be impossible for a capitalist party in the US, it is their antithesis.

So the serious, adult question is to state what the existential problems are and then ask what solutions could be sufficient to solve them. And there is at least one thing we know well in US electoralism: just voting for Dems will never be close to enough, abd even believing it is particularly important will just keep you ans others from spending the time to work together and do enough.

Case in point: the consequences of Dems co-opting the George Floyd protests was tp increase cops at the expense of public services ans to then spend even more on cops because Biden gave them federal funding. They did the "tough on crime" right wing thing and this was forced into the mainstream position.

Bernie and AOC are sheepdogs for the Dems. They are all-in on the party. When people become disillusioned with Dems, they pop in to spread false hope and convince people to come back and believe in the Dems.

It is true that the welfare state is popular and thar is basically what they are selling. The public wants healthcare, not the cruelty and expense of the capitalist extraction insurance industry. So Medicare for All sounds great in comparison. It's very popular when actually explained to people.

But it will never become policy without turmoil. The health insurance industry is a huge leech excreting profits for the owner class. Dems want to dangle it in front of voters but will never suppory it when in power, they will enginerr a Lieberman or parliamentarian because the party is completely beholden to capital, including insurance capital.

I'm sure you agree with a lot of what I have said. I just want to emphasize that Bernie and AOC are not really outsiders, they are ineffectual refornists whose only current function - one that they embrace - is to keep people that hate the crimes of the Democratic Party, up to and including genocide, to keep voting for them.

"Both sides bad" is why we have Trump.

You have Trump because you have capitalism and the reactionary political class serves a purpose in it. Liberalism tells you to only think of politics in a vacuum: whatever the last election was and what the next election is. In this vacuum they limit the world of politics down to what the two capitalist parties promise for capital, which varies and triangulates over time. The GOP was originally a party of free states and slavery abolition and the Democrats slavers and Southern white racists. Look at how they shift over time, both parties existing now for over 120 years. If you only ever look at the previous and next 4 years of what the capitalist political duopoly gives you, you will never understand the currents or why your "good guys" are increasingly xenophobic and transphobic or how political choices are actually made, because it is not just every four years at a ballot box proxied through some weirdos in the electoral college.

Anyways, both sides are bad. Have you already forgotten Biden's genocide in Gaza? Dems' "tough on the border" pivot? Breaking the rail strike? Being competent stewards of imperialism? I think liberals like to forget Blue Crimes, they are basically told to do so by mass media and it doesn't comport with parasocially liking the sunglasses ice cream guy if you acknowledge he's a genocidal racist. It isn't really your fault to be in that bubble, but it is on you if you don't seriously listen to others taking the time to explain its problems.

Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.

Absolutely wrong. Gay rights were popularized by left struggle, not struggle from Dems. Dems were dragged there by younger people that were radicalized by the people actually fighting for gay rights. Pride was a riot. The liberal assent and cooption was lagging, not leading. And in the US, gay marriage at the federal level was created by fiat of unelected lords (the Supreme Court) and not Democratic policy, despite Dems having full control of Congress and the Presidency in the neighboring period. Finally, gay rights are not full. I don't understand why you think they would be. Gay people still face all kinds of oppressions in the US and the law only rarely protects them.

Environmental laws have been all Democrats.

This is simply factually incorrect. Early "environmental" laws were largely implemented by Republicans, including Teddy Roosevelt, also a racist genocidal war criminal. This was in many ways responding to muckrakers and organized labor who saw the environment, living conditions, and working conditions as inextricable.

Nixon signed the EPA into existence.

If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn't have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.

Democrats don't do nothing, they just avoid doing the vast majority of things good for humanity in general and even just the US citizen working class. Even when they promise to do so, they have an excuse and whipping boy ready to go. Oh, Ovama and the national platform said single-payer? Sorry there's Lieberman and we can't kill the filibuster and oh man no discipline at all. Cancel student debt? Oh sorry there's a parliamentarian that we can just override and fire and okay we will issue a conspicuously legally weak executive order and then fold at the earliest opportunity.

But Democrats do implement policies, they just do so in the interest of capital. Their platform represents certain formations of capital, the GOP's some others, and they share many donors. The different formations undo each others' work when in power. Or at least they don't flex their muscles until something is intolerable to them.

This instance has a challenging inconsistency in that it wants to hold lines like an org without adopting the (necessary) culture of patience, consensus-building, and mutual education required to do so. Most of the work in functional organizations is emotional, it is hearing some bullshit and finding a way to move the group to the correct positions rather than reaching straight for vilification, uncharitable assumptions, and callouts. And it requires planning and coherency for projects that take months to complete. By the time people are pissed about ignorance, the (education heavy) project that would actually address the issue should have been going for months. Just dropping a reference and saying "educate yourself" is not an example of this. The reference must be adopted as a priority and focus with an accompanying schedule, rationale, contextualization, and implicitly some kind of buy-in like having all committees promoting participation and working it into their own projects. And it should become part of an adopted set of fleshed out positions and a "required reading" bibliography so that new members must adopt this education as part of an onboarding period. To be clear, I amnot criticizing the feeling of being pissed at someone saying something wrong or harmful, that is often entirely righteous. But the knee-jerk reaction is often the wrong one to take, it can tear down rather thsn build.

Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is "in charge" at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people "in charge" keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.

This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently. For example, I know that one of those that is throwing around accusations and being generally aggro has also been repeatedly explained of how something they are saying is anti-X (being vague because I'm not doing a callout), but rather than acknowledge this and do the work to build to a consensus understanding, they are lashing out. Others have been banned for less than their behavior, but they seem to be unscathed. It is quite clear that this user is both burned out and a member of a clique, and nobody with any power is either interested in or has the capacity to actually deescalate and, instead, are just supporting their in-group.

It should also be noted that this is a standalone website and not an organization. I'm going on and on about (dys)functional organizations, but a website of anonymous users has its own challenges and limits. But the social core I'm describing seems to be there.

I see a lot of tokenizing logic on this instance, which I see as internalized liberalism coming from a good place - seeking liberation - but then combining with petty toxicity to act more like a weapon for mutual alienation. "Someone with an X identity told you it bothers them so you need to stop", that kind of thinking. To those of us with a liberatory mindset struggling against reaction, this can be appealing, as we see ourselves as co-struggling for liberation with or as "X" and in opposition to any anti-"X" action. This makes it easy to adopt this tokenization, maybe even not notice that this is what is happening, never stopping to wonder what it means when an "X" person has the polar opposite view of another "X" person and how the logic then falls apart, therefore requiring a different justification for the initial position. Tokenization, aside ftom being itself [racist, sexist, ableist, etc] makes our theory fragile and organizations weak, at risk of takeover by liberal positions that attach themselves to sn identity. And, to me, not recognizing and rejecting tokenization in a left space belies a naivete, it means they have not had to combat it in irl organizing where it is ubiquitous and can straight-up destroy entire projects and organizations.

For one example, I have seen more than one allegedly socialist / clasd conscious organization fail to maintain an anti-cop position in the US because, and I kid you not, "most black people want more police". And this is often coming from white people, who are only understanding black people through tokenizing logic: they have decided that "the" black person position is actually a pro-cop sentiment (more to unpack there, of course) and are not engaging in the correct analysis of why we must understand cops as part of the racialized capitalist prison industrial complex. Though to be clear, I have also heard this same logic from other black people, namely those in proximity to bourgeois interests, those in leadetship of NGOs (funded by bourgeoisie) or business owners, all of whom understood (black) community improvement in terms of capital investment (shops, black owned businesses etc), of capital investment only coming from private investment (because this is their actual lived experience), and cops as the business-protecting alternative to street gangs. If you try to adopt tokenizing logic to justify one's position on racialized policing, let alone forming a political program by which to organize against it, then you are vulnerable to its same weaknesses when it is weaponized for a liberal position. And the liberal position will benefit from being amplified by capital.

So, to me, it seems like those who aren't hyper-aware of tokenization just plain don't have much experience doing irl organizing. They are underdeveloped in terms of praxis and will make various (near?-)fatal mistakes for the groups they are in.

Anyways apologies for the long post. We should of course oppose misogyny, anti-blackness, transphobia, and fatphobia, all of which are part of this infighting. We also need to be able to communicate patiently with one another, prioritize education, and be willing and ready to accept criticism, as we have all internalized logics of marginalization that need to be purged. Either that or we will need to ban everyone except me, the one true leftist on this site.

To make an unsolicited recommendation, it is to get involved with irl organizing, in any capacity, and to seek out organizations that are socially competent: where there is an emphasis on education and understanding to resolve internal disputes. These orgs will have better humility and better external projects, in my experience. This place ia just a website, it could go poof one day because the domain owner gets alienated enough. But a network of irl comrades has real staying power and will help develop actual impact and inclusion.

Sounds like whatsboutism. What time is it in Moscow?

It seems pretty clear you just don't know what imperialism is full stop.

Capitalism will not abide people not working just because they don't want to. Even in rich countries like the US where imperialism and the undocumented immigrant labor underclass could provide everything truly needed to survive, capitalism requires that the population be exploited to realize even greater profits.

I mention imperialism and the immigrant labor underclass because work is still necessary for production and momentary examples to the contrary (e.g. COVID lockdowns) are an illusion built on the backs of the hyperexploited. However, if we were able to depose capitalism, we could focus our efforts on eliminating the need for work rather than building everything around profit maximization.

Cosmonaut is mostly just the newsletter for the Marxist Unity Group in the DSA. MUG, in my experience, is full of unread chauvinists. Their main thing is to say we need to amend the US Constitution, lmao. "Revolutionary socialists".

I think it is a shame that ML groups don't merge, as it does mean that there is some level of dysfunction, but that is not a good reason to not create or join ML orgs.

Similarly, I don't think the author appreciates the true value of front orgs, which is the protection of the cadre org from both external attack and as a way to pipeline liberals without needing to let them into your organization and fuck it up with their terrible opinions. DSA does the latter and that is why it is garbage despite having so many members (on paper). You literally don't have to read or do anything to join and MUG has similarly low standards.

I do think that there is an overprescription of an aesthetic of democratic centralism, which I view as more of a situational tool than something essential for all communist organizations. The hard work of making it truly function is more about personal relationships and building the organization's capacity through education in theory and practicr and modeling productive behaviors while discouraging toxic ones. How to treat each other well and constructively, to protect each other and through this the organization and not the other way around. Only then can you have productive struggle rather than endless splits and "why I am leaving" essays.

In other words, the person with a correct opinion at the party. What a nice compliment!

Well yeah I need these rubles to pay for my faux fur ushankas

CarlMarks

@ CarlMarks @lemmygrad.ml

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CarlMarks

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What is going on here??? I'm scared.

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