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

What is the story with the IDC? Why are NY state Dems so cozy with Republicans?

Asking as someone who is very unfamiliar with NY politics. That whole situation is pretty baffling to me.

Does it just boil down to whole-scale corruption? Or is it part of long-term political/cultural trends in NY?

The IDC did disband a while back I think, but another Dem called Simcha Felder caucused with Republicans as well. He cleared his primary challenge. So Dems need to flip a seat.

Reading up on it on Wikipedia, and it's kinda incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Senate#Recent_history It's been a ten-year debacle.

The IDC "disbanding" was meaningless imo, it was a late game maneuver to try to save their seats.

I don't feel any simcha about felder winning

What is the story with the IDC? Why are NY state Dems so cozy with Republicans?

Asking as someone who is very unfamiliar with NY politics. That whole situation is pretty baffling to me.

Does it just boil down to whole-scale corruption? Or is it part of long-term political/cultural trends in NY?

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Friday, September 14, 2018 11:22 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's complicated. Even people familiar with NY Politics have trouble fully explaining it, but Cuomo very much enabled the situation and yes there is definitely corruption involved.

Simcha Felder's district is gerrymandered such that no one could beat him except probably another orthodox jew (BTW, that gerrymandering is ALSO enabled by Cuomo!)

BTW, not all the IDC members were conservative dems. Alcantara (who rightfully lost last night) was a left-wing activist and organizer who backed Bernie. But, according to her, the mainstream dems wouldn't meet with her when she wanted to run for state senate. In swooped Jeff Klein, who offered her money for her campaign (some of which comes from pretty sketchy sources). She basically sold out without fully realizing that she was selling out, imo. In her mind, this was a way to give progressive latinx groups a seat at the table, but the larger effect was to make sure republicans controlled the state senate and most of the progressive agenda couldn't get passed. Nonetheless, she had to be pushed out as a result of making this alliance. Who you take money from and who you align with matters, not just what's in your heart.

I mean, if I had to sum it up, I'd say the IDC was a creation of moneyed-interests with the support of Cuomo who wanted a bulwark against the naturally left-leaning tendencies of the state's polity. It was a clever way to reduce the otherwise natural power of progressive dems in the state legislature. I'm sure it won't be the last device of its kind.

Simon, just thinking out loud here, but there might be another reason why people who think the opposite of you are rarely proven wrong...

― Frederik B, Thursday, September 13, 2018 3:29 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god fuck off

maybe if we duct tape you to a ceiling your blithe condescension will actually have a reason to sound like it's from on high

lol

I'll help

Haha

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/ubkngrbgbh8phpsy3rtf.jpg

See? Look, you can post!

(Also, it’s freaky that that image is now _16_ years old.

https://compete.kotaku.com/15-years-later-heres-why-a-gamer-was-duct-taped-to-a-c-1796679499)

Meanwhile, a couple local libertarian types decided to roll up on the DSA happy hour earlier this evening

(I think this is a first as the social events tend not to get trolled)

In an uncharacteristic show of strength, both libertarians in Portland showed up to crash our happy hour 😂😂😂. 2 of them showed up to support free markets; over 50 of us showed up to support free people. pic.twitter.com/V0FuFZtX2M

— DSA Portland Oregon (@PortlandDSA) September 15, 2018

Email in from DC DSA steering committee that O'Keefe is likely to release another Project Veritas vid soon targeting DSA DC members that are fed bureaucrats

Fun!

hooooo boy

how is that dude not in jail

I’m guessing that means they’re going after Allison then

DSA strikes me as a much lower value target than Planned Parenthood or Acorn. Maybe he’s a little desperate.

hyup xp

The new Tribune looks interesting:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/relaunch-preview

Some excellent contributors.

ah look its my twitter TL in the culture section #proud

https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2018/09/18/22990739/burgerville-employees-go-on-strike-on-national-cheeseburger-day

Interesting tactics

Good comments from Spain's Borrell

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/19/donald-trump-urged-spain-to-build-the-wall-across-the-sahara

into this piece

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/9/18/17876024/mcdonalds-strikes-walkout-me-too

I’m guessing that means they’re going after Allison then

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish), Tuesday, September 18, 2018 6:16 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Allison of DC DSA was fired this week

https://www.gofundme.com/activist-fired-for-protesting-trump

Yup, was just about to link that:

And if you don't know why you shouldn't lose any sleep over someone yelling at Secretary Neilsen this should clear that up. https://t.co/Lzl7tmcwdK https://t.co/YD6tWNi6zs

— Charles, Star of MicDicta (@Ugarles) September 25, 2018

If you can, please donate to my friend @allisongeroi, she was one of the super brave protestors who shamed DHS Secretary Nielsen in public, and got fired from her job for it months later https://t.co/r3SB51Z3Wr

— hell woods (@floozyesq) September 25, 2018

Pretty into these two short articles, one presenting a taxonomy of the current US left, and a second that responds to the first.

https://theleftwind.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/the-us-left-has-only-four-tendencies/

https://theleftwind.wordpress.com/2018/09/26/how-many-tendencies/

From the second, which of the two I prefer:

regardless of all protestations to the contrary, the US left owes more to the period between Occupy Wall Street and Blacklivesmatter than it does to the Russian or Chinese revolutions. While we may ideologically claim adherence to any historical movement we wish, practically a movement is limited by the organizational makeup and strategies of the movements that came before it. We may do what we want with this body we have, but sadly we have inherited our skeleton.

What we must understand about this skeleton the left has built on is that, as opposed to the 50s, the 30s, or the 1910s, the current era of radicalism is coming from an incredibly narrow range of organizations. Activist orgs and intellectuals were the two forms of activism which predominated on the left, with some interplay between these two groups and electoral advocacy. In terms of what union work there was, it was scant and often guided one directly into the nexus of liberal organizations, and as for mutual aid, it was often focused on supplying the milieu with half-molded bread.

This came to a peak at Occupy, and after that the slow collapse of the left of the Oughties became a far more rapid process. In its place we began to see a series of different tendencies, marked by their shared oppositions to what they viewed as the failures of the last decade. But these new tendencies did not spring up completely new; they were built on the organizations that existed before them. This led to a strange interregnum: the left was increasingly disgusted with itself after Occupy but its reactions could only manifest through the same kinds of organizations as the ones who produced Occupy. A kind of magical thinking arose, where replacing the seemingly mundane forms of organizing associated with the anarchist left with some other form would lead to immediate success.

Here’s Sophia on RevLeft Radio talking about the one of those she wrote: http://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/marxist-center

man, fuck Bhaskar Sunkara

??

http://paydayreport.com/jacobin-publisher-accused-of-reneging-on-wage-deal-in-takeover-of-british-magazine-the-tribune/

their statement in response:

https://tribunemag.tumblr.com/post/178442272996/tribune-statement

Fuck the Jacobin. They have all that money to be benevolent buyers, but can't pay their writers?

pic.twitter.com/3eAcdwNhwj

— shut up (@itsbedtimebitcj) September 27, 2018

i'm not sure the name is worth that much, i'd have started a new magazine

http://paydayreport.com/jacobin-publisher-accused-of-reneging-on-wage-deal-in-takeover-of-british-magazine-the-tribune/

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:26 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the guy that wrote this is an acquaintance and honestly i don't trust his reporting as truthful anymore

he's had a years long vendetta against sunkara over this issue because of a pay dispute

good podcast episode here on the elections/movements dialectic from a gang that imo knows what they're doing

https://radiopublic.com/healing-justice-podcast-WznLEJ/ep/s1!fd2df?fbclid=IwAR3rV8WrJnbyNJs9ZNFNPTmZ_telcU-N3ftA73ikV4RXMZkG2nKj6-wjZkY

Nice ep here from Ryan Cooper et al about eco-socialism, criticisms of “degrowth,” and then sequel into discussing Jonathan Chait’s recent column

https://leftanchor.podbean.com/e/episode-9-champagne-ecosocialism-jon-chait-join-dsa-feat-jeffspross/

Tim Faust has a new newsletter out.

Work is being done all around us. In Idaho, a woman in a van built the popular movement which will win Medicaid expansion at the ballot box this fall. In Maine, the Maine People’s Alliance won Medicaid expansion off the back of a minimum-wage-increase campaign. In San Francisco, people won right to guaranteed counsel in case of eviction at the ballot box. In Cincinnati, the DSA won a needle exchange--the first in the region. And in Texas, beautiful Texas, we have the paid sick leave campaigns. The paid sick movement in San Antonio organized San Antonio residents (instead of well-meaning liberals from California and New York) who spoke to other San Antonio residents about paid sick leave. It turned out 140,000 signatures -- 40% higher than the number of people who voted for mayor in 2017. This is the largest popular movement in San Antonio in years, if not decades.

What do all these campaigns have in common?

One, they offer material and redistributive relief to people who are suffering now. Two, they’re all fundamentally movements toward health justice. Three, they organize with the people who most need to be heard and respected in the development of a radical single-payer program.

This is the work that excites me: the work of highlighting the specific manifestations of health disparity in our communities, working to alleviate it, and through this work building the local grassroots movement which, in coalition with hundreds of local movements nationwide, can demand, win, and enforce federal, universal single-payer--one which forces the state to bear the costs of providing care--AND the risks and costs of what happens when care is not provided.

Only by forcing the state to reckon with the financial consequences of unsafe housing, of inadequate food, of abandoning the rural population, of the carceral state, can we force it realize that housing is healthcare; that food is healthcare, etc. But the state alone is insufficient and untrustworthy: only through the mass popular movement, this big quilt organized from below, which demands health justice can we develop the mechanisms to hold it accountable.

forgot the link: https://tinyletter.com/error/letters/some-thoughts-on-health-justice-and-the-way-forward

Backgrounder on Citizen Strong - a group that's crowdsourcing opposition research on GOP candidates:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/a-former-obama-operative-built-a-new-anti-republican-attack-machine

(I'm proud to be one of the 16000 researchers for them!)

couple good pieces i liked this week:

http://newsocialist.org/karl-marx-revolutionary-heretic/?fbclid=IwAR2YSsWt38KQj3WKAPYHNDu1r1UsoOyhCJoknblbkknslNslOAL4hgaenes

There is no “playbook” from Marx, Lenin or anyone else waiting to be applied to our age. To realize the thought and struggles of the past is to actualize in new conditions, in conditions that are in some respects more appropriate to the struggles of the past. This requires attending to the changed circumstances in which we operate, while nourishing past dreams of liberation.

https://communemag.com/the-shield-of-utopia/?fbclid=IwAR3kpPmkvDWHLqiPRV71fsN8X7bS0VQiUWHtGQ8Hg5XNWwxgqn5eTM50bl0

Development is not only at the heart of the novel form, but is the basis for Karl Marx’s conception of communism. While many revolutionaries of Marx’s time and ours emphasized equality in their depictions of the world to come, Marx himself insisted on the centrality of freedom and, in particular, what he called free development. He is, in this sense, much closer to anarchism than the contemporaries who insisted on the right to work or a fair wage. In Marx’s view, proletarian revolution would produce “a community of freely associated individuals” in which “the free development of each is the precondition of the free development of all.” Equality, he argues in many places, cannot be the goal in any sort of simplistic way, since people have different needs and capacities: equal treatment produces, paradoxically, inequality. We do not have similar expectations for children and adults, for example. Instead of asking everyone to consume or work an equal amount, or in the same way, the equality that matters would be one that gave everyone the same opportunities to freely participate in any activity, to freely take, but most importantly, to freely change and grow. In The Dispossessed, what we see through Shevek’s dissatisfaction is a society in which there is freedom but not quite free development, in which there is equality without the fullness of free access and opportunity that is possible.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

In maintaining this principle, the greatest difficulty to be encountered does not lie in the appreciation of means towards an acknowledged end, but in the indifference of persons in general to the end itself. If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated[Pg 106] by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be under-valued, and the adjustment of the boundaries between it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty. But the evil is, that individual spontaneity is hardly recognised by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its own account. The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind. Few persons, out of Germany, even comprehend the meaning of the doctrine which Wilhelm von Humboldt, so eminent both as a savant and as a politician, made the text of a treatise—that "the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient[Pg 107] desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole;" that, therefore, the object "towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow-men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development;" that for this there are two requisites, "freedom, and a variety of situations;" and that from the union of these arise "individual vigour and manifold diversity," which combine themselves in "originality."

this is good

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-color-of-economic-anxiety

hell yeah

great piece