Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

I was listening to Flux of Pink Indians yesterday and Rudimentary Peni today. I suppose it makes sense to listen to Crass next

socialist economic darling/enfant terrible Matt Bruenig made an appearance (his first, I assume?) in the NYT today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/opinion/inequality-social-wealth-fund.html

RE: DSA/Garcia/Rosa, I don’t think a DSA endorsement of Rosa would matter very much. Gutierrez has endorsed Garcia and that counts a lot. Gutierrez is overwhelmingly popular in IL-4 and hasn’t gotten less that 74% of the vote in the last two primaries. I can’t imagine his constituents going against anyone he anoints as a successor.

I gotta say, while I agree (mostly) with their platform, I don't understand what the DSA is trying to do strategically.

The tea party template would seem to be the best approach—obtaining guarantees of support for single-payer, education debt reform and "no" votes on Near Eastern wars from center-left candidates under credible threat of a primary.

But this looks like typical progressive infighting.

AFAICT they haven't run any candidates that have served to prevent Dem-identifying candidates from getting elected

Any chance they can take to run someone and promote socialist ideals and proposals without getting republicans elected is fine by me

Well, that's the thing—they don't actually run anyone. They just endorse them. So they should use *that* as a bargaining chip—in safe districts, obviously—to pull the libs further left.

It worked for the right.

That was their old model, more or less, as I understand it. With the influx of new blood less interested in trying to "reform" or influence the Democratic party, that's changed somewhat. One of the major national slates discussed the difference between electoral strategy vs "electoralism" here https://www.dsamomentum.org/platform/

More broadly, the electoral plank is (again, this is based only on what I've read) just one thing they're interested in and not the principal focus.

From that link:

Rather, we propose an approach that could be called building a “party beyond the party,” one that formulates a clear political program and develops, runs, and disciplines candidates in select campaigns.

Sounds like a Tea Party model to me. I also notice that Medicare For All is explicitly endorsed, not only as a policy (duh), but as a rallying cry:

Medicare for All has become a key working class demand and enjoys strong majority support across the country.

I would note it's a key middle class demand as well. So why go after Garcia, an automatic "yes" vote on Medicare for All? It would seem to make more sense to target the center-left, making it politically unacceptable for any Democrat to hold any other position.

I agree that it's questionable, but a) I'm not sure it's indicative of a larger problem and b) it doesn't seem like it'll make much of a difference - Garcia seems like more or less a sure thing

LanaDelRaytheon outed as harasser?

🤭

https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/lana-del-raytheon?page=20

matt breunig on sovereign wealth funds in the nyt today https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/opinion/inequality-social-wealth-fund.html?_r=0

I re-read the Harper’s Magazine excerpts of the jury selection from the Shkreli trial today.

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/09/public-enemy/

If we can’t convert this elemental anger into concrete political action, we don’t deserve to be called “the Left.”

the wild part is of course that everything they're so angry about was perfectly legal

Imagine passionately wanting to convict this guy of something and then, when handed the opportunity, so nonchalantly disqualifying yrself from doing so in the name of saying some snarky bullshit

I've never been called for a jury before. are potential jurors under oath?

In the US I believe I was under oath for voir dire

In any event you are instructed not to lie during voir dire and in fact encouraged to volunteer the truth unprompted

Interview with Lee Carter

awesome conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta-Taylor about her new book

The Dig - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Recovering Identity Politics from Neoliberalism

<p>Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book<span> </span><i>How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective</i>. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics” in the Combahee River Collective Statement. For them, it was a way to identify the various ways that capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia created a set of interlocking oppressions. And the point of identifying how those systems operated together was not to create an itemized politics of particularity, as is too often the case today, but rather to create a framework for solidarity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out<span> </span><i>Futures of Black Radicalism</i><span> </span>and support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dammit, oh well

this is great, thanks

The Portland DSA chapter got a guest op-ed into the local paper.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/12/a_class_war_brewing_guest_opin.html

Over 850+ comments so far!

Nice!

How do we connect white socialism in Oregon with black self-preservation in Alabama?

whatever "white socialism" is, DSA has been pretty good in its direct-action and rhetoric about not being that

anyway the answer to most questions is to provide more compelling options so that people don't disengage from politics entirely as they seem likely to down the road in Alabama

https://rewire.news/article/2017/12/20/long-take-southern-white-democrat-elected-black-voters-shift-right-less-week/

Doug Jones will never ever get to do anything, he will lose in 2020 and Dems won't have any power until then. The sooner he - and others, I guess, but mostly he - accepts that, the better.

Fred, shut the fuck up for once

How do we connect white socialism in Oregon with black self-preservation in Alabama?

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, December 26, 2017 3:24 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Check out Robin Kelley's Hammer & Hoe--Alabama in particular has a strong black socialist history. The Communist Party in the American South was a remarkable institution rooted in the black working class that had more to say and do with poor sharecroppers than any black American org til SNCC.

I think Fred misunderstands the import of the fact that Doug Jones was until recently a middle-aged white U.S. Attorney in Alabama. He is not and never will be a fervent supporter of the broad progressive agenda that would appeal to urban northerners.

Jones will carve out his own personal agenda, try to get re-elected, and seek to remake the USA in whatever mold he imagines to be the best and most like his own values and those of a majority of Alabama voters. The consensus platform among Senate democrats, such as it is, is very limited compared to the highly disparate ideas and ambitions of democratic senators. We have a very weird system that is hard for foreigners to grasp and confuses most Americans, too.

Nothing good comes from him trying for re-election :( I read this interview with a staffer of his, and it's just all so so wrong: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/26/16810116/doug-jones-alabama-polls-roy-moore The worst thing I've read was that he isn't hiring black staffers. If there's one thing he could do for the future, it's giving activists from the base experience in Washington, but instead he seems scared.

I still thing he did everything correct in the campaign, though, and the handwringing over him was misplaced. But his campaigning is over now.

Feel free to handwring all you wish, but the amount of 'good' you seem to expect out of an Alabama senator is poorly calculated.

I'm pretty sure you're misreading what I'm writing.

Garcia and Ramirez-Rosa are going to vote the same on practically every issue of consequence. What's the point of replacing a guy who's 95% left with a guy who's 100% left?

Rosa has dropped out and endorsed Garcia.

I lost track of which thread the Cooper piece on the history of neoliberalism was posted on, but here's a follow-up, an overview of what American socialism might look like

http://theweek.com/articles/733970/dawn-american-socialism

Has anyone read Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams from a couple of years ago? I meant to read it when it came out but had passed - I revisited after finding it second hand a few weeks ago. It's a fairly provocative - in places - polemic against much of how the left conceives of its own efforts and strategies (both on a small and large scale).

While it's a bit out of date - it must have been mostly written in 2012 or 2013 - and failed to anticipate the successes of Corbyn or Bernie's mobilizations of so many people on the left, it nonetheless raises some very valid points and interesting criticisms about the current moment.

I'm only halfway through so have yet to get to the substance of their more prescriptive/alternative vision, so will withhold any judgment on that for now, but would be interested in anyone's thoughts on the book/its claims/critiques/etc.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2315-inventing-the-future

Yeah, I just finished it a bit ago. I like it. They’re authors I wish would find out about my old philo prof Frithjof Bergmann’s “NewWork/NewCulture” Project.

i've been mostly avoiding it because yknow something something cookshops of the future but if it's good i might try it

I read it and liked it.

Half of the book is more focused on criticizing ineffective ways of organizing similar to what _Hegemony How-To_ did than actually being about the future.

https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2018/01/09/19594215/prominent-tenant-activist-margot-black-is-stepping-down-as-allegations-of-racism-roil-her-organization

that's how you connect "white socialism" in oregon with "black self-preservation" in some kind of theoretical alabama.

at this point i've decided learning how to pound nails into my nose is a more positive and healthy use of my time than trying to align myself with "progressive" causes.

As a counterpoint, we had our local BLM chapter write a long article calling out our local Jobs with Justice chapter over concerns about the way their work was done: slights were cited, deeper questions were raised about whether black activists were being tokenized by JWJ's work, it was suggested they were being used instrumentally without meaningful reciprocity or investment in their priorities. Similar in some respects to what you've linked.

JWJ took the concerns seriously and invited the writers of the piece into a dialogue & a difficult process that ultimately took a year. In the end both orgs issued vulnerable & powerful public follow up statements that indicated a shared sense of progress with difficult ground yet to be covered. It struck me as a powerful positive model of what it can look like when people meet one another in good faith to resolve these kinds of difficult questions.

So don't pound nails up your nose. There's good to go around.

thanks for that

that's really great to hear, hoos! i'm glad they managed to work things out and come to a respectful and conscientious understanding. hopefully they don't wind up running into bob dylan. he might wind up singing a woody guthrie song and they'd have to take a couple more years to work out the inherent problems in that before they could do anything else.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that bottom line is, i'm not a decent enough human being to be meaningfully involved in that kind of work and i don't really believe i ever will be. apologies for the sarcasm in my last post. i do really have a lot of respect for anybody who can do this kind of work, but i can't.

I hear you--some of the cyclical dynamics involved in this work can be challenging. Never count yourself out forever though, man. We need every hand on the plow, now more than ever.

Check it out, efforts in Arizona are getting noticed by douchebag state legislators:

Arizona Legislator Bob Thorpe's New Bill Attacks Socialists, People Under 40
ANTONIA NOORI FARZAN | JANUARY 12, 2018 | 7:30AM

State Representative Bob Thorpe, a Flagstaff Republican best known for trying to keep college students from voting and making racist remarks on Twitter, is at it again.

Thorpe's latest bill, HB 2277, seeks to designate "American free-market capitalism" as the state's official political-economic system.

As Thorpe explains in the legislative intent section of the bill, he's concerned that The Youths are all converting to socialism because they don't know better...

Jacobin magazine has a union now.

http://www.nyguild.org/post/jacobin-newsguild-members-ratify-first-union-contract-for-the-publication

Good for them.