Join and make it less lib. It’s that easy.
The only way you’d make it more lib is if you think you’re more lib than DSA 😳 👀
To those of you requesting I move my posts proselytizing people about joining an organization over to /strugglesession I have but one thing to say:
Join an organization
To those who repeat the line “I believe in democratic centralism so I won’t join” I say: so do I. If that’s such a sticking point for you to not join DSA, which organization practicing democratic centralism are you currently a part of?
Do you think Lenin or Mao woke up one day with a perfectly structured organization laying at their feet comprised of only those who held similar beliefs to them? Of course they didn’t. They crafted and cultivated these organizations and revolutionary mindsets for decades before seeing the fruits of their labor. If you aren’t organizing you are not only not a revolutionary, you are a counterrevolutionary. Are you waiting for a perfect movement to be waiting at the foot of your bed one morning instead of putting in the labor to craft one you see as suitably revolutionary? Not to even scold you, but factually your absence from organization based on personal ideology favors only the capitalist and harms only your comrades.
People also literally forget that DSA formed out of two groups merging. One kinda reformist Marxist/ some social democrats in DSOC, and the other NAM (New American Movement), which was a couple thousand communists who left CPUSA for how shit it was. The reason the demcent clause in the constitution is actually a legacy from the ex-CPUSA communists who joined, due to both their experiences of the absolute wrecking that occurred in New Communist Movement orgs and SDS, and the atrocious way democratic centralism was practiced by CPUSA in the 60s and 70s. The other founder of DSA that is always overshadowed is Dorothy Healey, who was one of the most prominent American communists in California in the 40s to 60s.
And every year the DSA changes its rules regarding organization and membership, with the changes coming from the people who make up DSA. The beauty of it being a flawed horizontal organization is that it is a flawed horizontal organization. A few loud and convincing voices are all it takes for major change in almost no time
GOOD POST
Just join the cops and make them less bad :thumb-cop:
echoing @notthenameiwant - this is so toxic that the feds ought to be paying you to spread it. The DSA has been victorious in minimum wage hikes, rent control measures, and strong environmental legislation, on the level of entire states, in the last 6 months alone. You won’t catch me saying they’re not at least a little lib, but “a little lib and saving the proletariat from abuse by landlords and employers on a scale of hundreds of thousands of people” is a lot better than whatever you want to call “not lib” that presumably comprises nothing but turning leftist infighting to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you think you’re too good for the DSA and that the folks in it are literally no better than standard libs, IMO you’re about 2 steps away from being a leftcom.
It seems to me like there are many advantages to joining a big tent org like the DSA with some level of mainstream acceptance. Having a constant influx of people you can radicalize is one advantage. Another is that having some mainstream acceptance seems like it would make it more difficult for the feds to effectively infiltrate and/or dismantle it, as they did to so many radical groups in the 60s and 70s. A group that is explicitly revolutionary seems much more likely to be a target, and I suppose this is why front groups exist.
