Is it? Isn't concerning themselves with the Dems at all a huge L? None of the congresspeople who were ever members (maybe Rashida) even care about the org. DSA would probably gain more by not wasting any further time on anything associated with Dems, and any electoral candidates they do put up should just be beholden to DSA and the masses.

I just wrote a short story for a (foreign language) course about finding and adopting a platypus. I used these pics for it. I loved learning more about monotremes, truly so cute!

I'm practically sold. Hope the SF PSL is as lit as your branch.

Never fails

I have a question: are Trotskyists and ultras distinct?

[Incoming rant]

I have a friend in the UC grad student union (I'm currently not in the country but will be returning relatively soon to a UC myself). We used to live together and he's pretty far left and all, but definitely always been a tad ultra. I was messaging him about orgs to join when I'm back when the craziest encampment action was happening. He said PSL has some members but seem "Stalinist" . He even said several members in his union are from PSL (super cool honestly), but that they were refusing to push the union to actively vote a statement of solidarity with palestine or something. He was critical of them being too bureaucratic about stuff like that.

Then he told me about the Revolutionary Communists of America and said they seem pretty cool . I thought hmmm okay I'll check them out. They were recently founded (insert existential comic joke about leftist parties). They had a podcast and one episode was like "Why we are Leninists" and I was like .

I'm listening and hear a lot of Lenin, Marx, no Stalin though. They say "we get criticism for handing out flyers at protests but that's because we want to build the party to solve all the protests!!1!" . At this point I'm like no pls, next they bring up directly "a lot of people ask if we're 'Trotskyists', haha the internet has such funny slang doesn't it. Well, let's just read what Trotsky said about..." blah blah basically yeah that Stalin re-established class society in USSR etc etc.

So yeah I was pretty burned because it seems the trots get their marketing down pretty well these days. There were a few signs that slipped right past me.

Yes, my experience at the (I think recently opened) 1916 Uprising Museum was that they are much more open about all the radical contributors to the struggle for independence.

This is something that I keep coming back to again and again too. Just like FDR, Bernie was the compromise candidate to let off just enough steam so that we all begrudgingly except that enough overtures have been made to the working class, move away from truly radical politics, and allow the whole cycle to start over again. And even that was too far for the capitalists this time (not that they really ever accepted FDR), but the difference is that the media control is much more entrenched, making average liberals themselves too uncompromising to make the smart choice for their preferred political system.

In a way it is relieving to have such a clear delineation between paths of justice/evil. We will never again be tricked into wasting any energy on progressive candidates within a bourgeois party. The choice always was between socialism and barbarism, and no one who is paying attention can trick themselves into thinking otherwise ever again.

My friends and I went to a surprisingly based public high school that taught about the coup against Allende and US imperialism in the Phillippines post-WWII. Also our Spanish teacher was an out-and-out PSL connected Communist, you could basically write "Che cool, US bad" on your tests to get extra credit.

We used to make fun of the Spanish teacher and also argued a few times with one of the humanities teachers about how "biased against the US" our curriculum was and how it was a little over the top. He just said "appreciate it while you have it, because once you graduate you're never going to see this perspective again". Right he was, and now thankfully my core group are all some flavor of communist/anarchist.

But a lot of peripheral friends from those days have gone on to be weird execs at places like UBER or even cops. Really even that curriculum wasn't able to inoculate any but a few of us in the end.

this'll be the last comment I make complaining about him.

I don't understand how or why he keeps hating on MLs so much. There was a point where he was saying how the argument liberals make for why they can never do any better is blah blah blah all the fallacious tactics libs use and we know is wrong (this point he's correct on). Then he said "doesn't that sound a bit like Marxist Leninists..." and I almost got whiplash, why would you use a very large historical/international tendency as the benchmark to describe how bad liberals are??

Also he almost seems to acknowledge that bad tankies hiding under the bed are something real (though maybe this was sarcasm that I didn't get).

His point about radical third spaces was certainly correct though, as well as that small groups that do something specific and material are probably better for their immediate community than another overly ambitious workers party with aspirations beyond their ability.

I know not to mind online personalities and certainly this is just another In a long list of reasons to realize that the internet is not a place of any real change.

I see. It's something I'll definitely look into and I think I'll give it a shot in the case that I can actually make it past the onboarding phase. I'll always have family and friends outside the org so that is probably a good boundary to keep myself from getting swept up in any organizational drama.

Do you think it's worth any of our time to try to steer DSA into a better direction? I feel like if they could sever their ties with the Democrats it could become a vehicle for some real agitation and organizing. Again it just takes involvement. It's funny how "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" actually applies to socialist organizing because we are trying to change the world for the better but not to voting for genocidal capital-simp freaks because they are, you know, actually trying to do bad.

Could you elaborate? I had a friend who stanned Makhno and said that them not getting crushed by the USSR would have been "the good timeline for socialism". I was wondering what the controversy was between Makhno and the USSR.