CarlMarks

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.

Ha sorry I can write long things if I don't go through a few rounds of editing. When hitting the lemmy instance comment length limit is the cue to wrap it up you know you have a problem.

Yes, I agree, this is the fundamental dynamic of being "defensively" aggressive. Even when the defensiveness is justified! This is the difficult work of org leadership, how to carefully let certain things slide or receive a soft correction and then out-organize around them, particularly through education.

An important aspect of this negative dynamic is that it is cyclical and self-escalating. When people are frustrated with aggro leadership, they may not recognize that leadership perceives aggro membership and builds their own resentment and alienation, and so on. Opting into an aggressive approach without education or patience is basically a decision to alienate yourself from the group and to be pretty unhappy in general with the state of the organization. Even when your fundamental point is correct!

I'm trying to think of examples where I've seen it really work out. All I can think of is this instance being kneejerk pro-trans (still could've gone better) and an irl instance where a hard line was taken against the sex industry, though that org split in a very toxic way because of the underlying dynamic and basically no longer exists. I tried really hard to think of examples and had to sift through like 9 irl counterexamples that came to mind instead. So many toxic events.

I thought your post was good! This one too. Sorry it had so many people saying fatphobic things or derailing. Not really what should have gone down, imo. Fatphobic doctors suck and you deserve better.

Developing a line on fatphobia is a good idea. I do think it would improve outcomes to take a look at how previous attempts to establish lines unfolded and to compare this critically with how irl organizations succeed at doing this. Of course it can't be perfectly emulated because it's a website and not a party, but I do think there are recognizable negative patterns.

I agree that political education is valuable and something a site like this can contribute to. I would respectfully suggest that those interested in developing a line recruit and develop openly, for example establishing a committee where folks know who is on it, why they are on it, how work will be done, and how to get on it. And that you bring people along by announcing the intent, declaring when the process begins, and focusing on how the line (which sounds like it might be bylaws more than a work of theory?) will be shared, updated, and balance education (bringing people along) vs. removal (when people go too far and aren't in a position to be educated). This is not because I am dogmatically committed to bourgeois notions of democratic participation or transparency, but because they are ways to create buy-in, avoid alienation, and improve the theoretical correctness of the line as well as the concrete skill of community management.

Anyways, this is meant to be a constructive suggestion based on irl experience and having founded a (still running) left forum, so I hope it is not taken as venting or unhelpful criticism. Running a site is often thankless.

lol I just noticed the removal plus its inventive and mischaracterizing justification. It's an appropriate demonstration of the breakdown in basic abilities to communicate between higher ups and users that I described. To be constructive and not just critical, that would've been an opportunity for whoever removed the comment to instead participate and, if needed, develop a line for others to adopt and build into sitewide culture. And, as a first step, double check one's understanding of the stated position(s) first, since this time it is their misunderstanding.

Yeah, the lack of onboarding is a primary symptom of a lack of organizing. Thinking like an organizer is all about building and expanding capacity, usually through struggle, and adopting various practices by which to loop people in and "level them up" both theoretically and in practice. Not everything has to be Serious Communist Work, of course, but there is an inconsistency in how seriously some take themselves and how at odds their actions are with basic practice. This inconsistency describes the situation fairly well. I can think of some amazing contrasts from the last few weeks but listing them out would probably be toxic behavior on my part.

Re: commandism, I agree with the sentiment, but I think the term may exaggerate how serious of an entity this site is in the first place. It's not a party, there are no lines, and there is nobody to command (not really). Who even knows the dogmas? I wouldn't be surprised if someone making a good faith attempt to list them would catch a ban for not listing them with the right (otherwise completely unstated) framing. In that sense, there is an opposite dynamic that depends on ambiguity and whichever mod saw your comment that day. Ad hoc inconsistent application of correct-sounding logic that may or may not apply. I also perceive a "defensive attack" dynamic in interactions, which tends to mean people alienated to near their last nerve and without anything to ground them, deescalate, or shield others from the fallout. I have seen orgs fall apart or split from not nipping that in the bud. By the time that's happening regularly, resentments that should have been addressed constructivelyages ago tend to prevent self-crit and functional behavior. Finally, commandism presupposes that leadership are more theoretically advanced than cadre (or a similar above/below split) and I really don't think that applies here. To be sure, many in leadership have plenty of good to share with others theoretically, but I would not say the last few weeks represent a mature grounding in socialist or liberationist theory. There are glaring forms of reactionary and liberal thought in various rationales and the main characteristic is alienation and escalatory aggression.

With the example of those in Gaza trying to survive genocide, the contrast can sometimes be disturbing, especially with conflict driven incompetently from the top. There's a wider point to make about chauvinism, perspective, and irony there but I'm struggling to frame it constructively. I'm glad to have seen many of the same crowdfunding pleas on other sites and that it does not just depend on one volatile lemmy instance.

The tokenizing logic of some of the aforementioned black NGO workers was also not disconnected from their own identities nor was it free of theory. One person I have in mind was a former panther and pretty on top of things. Employing the false logic of tokenization does not mean a person is wrong or invalid or "other" in all the various ways a person can be in that situation.

Tokenization is rampant on this instance and is a key example of internalized liberalism and part of why the Western left is anemic. It prioritizes splitting and escalating grievances over mutual education and humility, and one of the main weapons for doing this is blurring the lines wrt tokenization. I'm certainly familiar with this, it's the main thing I focus on in new organizing spaces, as it determines how much humility I can safely show. Toxic environments do not allow for productive self-crit, they reward those most willing to insult and fight and you cannot show weakness. Normally, this just means not reacting and not offering very much engagement in this first place: put one's energy elsewhere.

I have another irl example. I helped a coalition group organize in solidarity with Palestine. They adopted an anti-tokenization stance, but had weak and undemocratic structure, non-existent political education outside of what my org introduced (it was well-received, people usually like these things when they are organized), and later invited an Arab org to participate (Arab group as in, definitely proclaimed itself Arab and excluded non-Arabs). That group ultimately took over the unstructured group using self-tokenizing logic. They included other ideas and arguments, of course, but those were ultimately rejected. When emotions were high and people afraid of state reprisal, that group expressed frustration and began condescendingly telling others how only their group should be the voice anyone listens to and they had decided to disband the coalition. This worked on enough people that the project fell apart. There were more Arab people (from other orgs) there who disagreed with them, but this didn't matter as the white people were already cowed and had their excuse for not taking any risks. Oh, and they exploited doing this in an ad hoc meeting when other orgs were resting. The tokenization here did not happen free of context or theory and those who ran with it seemed authentic to me. They were actually frustrated and not feeling listened to. They really seemed to believe they could boil the situation down to white people not listening to those who knew better because of their connections to the region and upbringings. They simply ignored the other Arabs in the coalition, placing all focus on the white people with identical positions. They were also incorrect in their analysis and were frustrated, in part, because they had no real response to correct feedback. Tokenization emerged as an effective weapon for resolving a situation in favor of their preferred course of action, following a series of other ideas about what should be done and why.

Tokenizing logic is always invalid and is harmful to organizing.