Social Activism in the Age of Trump: What To Do and What We Are Doing

someone with a better grounding than me in theory might want to tackle this but our mode of production is capitalism. as long as capitalism is the organizing principal of society, "doing" socialism in the sense that I think that you mean is more or less impossible on any noticeable scale. this is why socialist organizations ask for money and not pictures of Lenin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production

what can one do day to day that is a socialist action?

working in/for a worker-owned coop comes to mind, for example Bi-Mart (which is a large NW member-based chain supermarket type thing)

I do see why "America is not/will never be ready for socialism" is an easy conclusion to draw. but I think the single payer thing, if it gets legs, could be a springboard for more.

The biggest supporter of unions that I respect goes to a conservative synagogue. He has hired only reputable members of his local for his entire career. He passionately believes in what unions do even though he's been management most of his life (he owned the company). Talking about a rank-and-file labor approach and then dropping "oh btw sanctions for Israel" is, to me, about as smart as saying "but no lesbos!" In the middle of a Planned Parenthood mission statement

I just realized: self-destructive non sequiturs are how you know Hillary was a true progressive, actually

III. A GLOBAL APPROACH TO FIGHTING STENTORIAN TOPIC HEADINGS

The basket of deplorables can bake their own damn cookies. More wine!

Talking about a rank-and-file labor approach and then dropping "oh btw sanctions for Israel" is, to me, about as smart as saying "but no lesbos!" In the middle of a Planned Parenthood mission statement

This is a terrible analogy.

I know

so i can be a capitalist because i can buy stock but i can't be a socialist because i can't control the means of production? that definition doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

It's still dumb to toss perpendicular, barely relevant issue positions in a platform UNLESS the whole thing is just supposed to be a Free Palestine loyalty test and has nothing to do with labor at all

it's almost like, in political terms, different people have different issues that are critical to them, and the dsa's platform is a random hodgepodge of positions designed to appeal to the wide range of priorities held by their base membership.

so i can be a capitalist because i can buy stock but i can't be a socialist because i can't control the means of production? that definition doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

You can do the former because the mode of production determines the terms of commerce and exchange. You can't do the latter because capitalism prevents it as a rule. (Though sleeve gave a good example of a local based endeavor that manages to be in line with certain tenets.)

It's still dumb to toss perpendicular, barely relevant issue positions in a platform UNLESS the whole thing is just supposed to be a Free Palestine loyalty test and has nothing to do with labor at all

only if you consider DSA strictly a labor org (it's not) and Socialists unconcerned with the welfare of people in other nations (again, nah, generally it's agreed upon that any worthwhile socialist tendency is inherently international). you might reasonably criticize them for being insufficiently comprehensive in their international concerns but again this is a set of planks presented by a half-dozen people for an org that seems to be very much in flux given the huge injection of new blood.

thanks rushomancy, if there's one thing I always come back to ILX for, it's being condescended to as if I've never made sausage in my entire fucking career

if I have to restate position again, I like some of these planks, but I think it would be wiser and more coherent if they left out the absolutist demand for a foreign policy unicorn

So one thing you could do, if your state is trying to find ways to weaken Medicaid, is to post a public comment right here:

https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/section-1115-demo/demonstration-and-waiver-list/waivers_faceted.html

If that whets your appetite, you can look at the whole spectrum of proposed federal regulations (or deregulations) which are open for public comment here:

https://www.regulations.gov/

If there's a domain where you have some direct personal experience, expertise, or knowledge (and there probably is!) take a minute and write a comment.

is the "dsmomentum" label a flare sent up to signify affinity with the uk momentum group (that supports corbyn and a left agenda)? is it more than that, is there a material partnership?

great post eephus

READING the comments is also good for the soul. It reminds you that all over this country there are doctors and caseworkers and teachers and small-city mayors and nurses and etc. etc. who wake up every day and go help people, and who understand exactly how every one of these changes developed by focus group or think tank actually materially affects specific people they work with every day. And I guess when I read these it really makes me feel like our society has a certain tensile strength to it and it's not going to be as easy to break us as the masters of the GOP think.

thanks rushomancy, if there's one thing I always come back to ILX for, it's being condescended to as if I've never made sausage in my entire fucking career

― El Tomboto

sorry to be a jackass, but something about your position just strikes me as blue-sky "gee wouldn't it be nice if this political party wasn't stuck with all this stupid political power-game bullshit". it's a dumb position for them to take, and maybe they would be better served to throw out the leadership hardliners who insist on it so that they can go off and form the Socialist Democrats of America or whatever. yeah i'm in the same boat, i'd like to be a member but the party has construed its boundaries in a manner so as to exclude me out. i hate to say it but the last six months have instilled in me a certain morbsian fatalism about "the future of the left", particularly a "left" which defines itself a priori.

is the "dsmomentum" label a flare sent up to signify affinity with the uk momentum group (that supports corbyn and a left agenda)? is it more than that, is there a material partnership?

I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the cards

re: the Israel boycott plank, the group I currently organize with has a ton of positions on international situations and politicians, I'm not well-informed enough as yet to know how I feel about every single one, but I like their core stances and am happy to organize with them to support left-leaning leadership (they have endorsed Niki Ashton in the NDP leadership race, for example). Maybe it's true the BDS plank would be a dealbreaker for a would-be insurgent American Jewish left to join in but I'm having trouble imagining that.

(personally I think sanctions are dumb and bad)

sanctions are a blunt instrument, like most of the tools in the diplomatic box that are recognizable to the layperson.

I am glad for the back-and-forth here though because it's making me think about what kinds of foreign policy stances would fit in my version of a proper left platform which is always in the dusty attic portion of my head

I guess to frame it another way, for myself, it's unconscionable not to try to do more to bring about a more just society, and personally I think that's best done with a socialist aim and with an organization. That desire is a lot bigger for me than the need for said organization to validate or reflect all or most of my beliefs, and it may even contradict a few. Personally, I don't anticipate losing any sleep over that given the much more monstrous forces at work currently in power.

a lot of times when i think about power i think about it through the lens of caro, who argues in his books that power _reveals_. and frequently, as we see in the current administration, what it reveals is a deep inhumanity. it's easy enough to say that one thinks the opposition forces will not possess the deep inhumanity our current leadership possesses, but if, indeed, power reveals, it's impossible to say such things with certainty. and all of the internecine fights inside political movements, in the end, come down at some point to the fear that a person, or people, inside the movement may be a secret hitler.

i have to remind myself that's not true. hitler wasn't a secret hitler. the current us administration is doing nothing that ought to be truly surprising to anyone who's been paying attention. but the principle, i think, that those who cannot be trusted in small things ought not to be trusted in large things... it's not an unsound one. and the "left" is packed with people who cannot be trusted in small things. dogmatically insist on one stupid policy, and how many more will follow in its wake?

the right is packed with just as many! just bad at small things in different ways. Your post just made me think of this

http://bigthink.com/the-moral-sciences-club/country-music-openness-to-experience-and-the-psychology-of-culture-war

see also: Doris Lessing's book Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, a favorite of mine

(mostly about her negative experiences with the 50s-era Communist Party)

but yes I think the clear cut-and-paste dogmatic nature of the BDS plank is perhaps the most bothersome aspect to me, regardless of my anecdotal evidence of one really savvy, passionate dude (who votes! in Ohio!). It evidences a degree of rolling over and just accepting the new sausage ingredient because it means getting some really vocal advocates to shut up and let the work proceed. Whenever you do this you're ceding power - it's better to integrate the planks under a cohesive vision; make that plank about workers and livelihoods and security, not just "Israel is committing apartheid, BDS motherfuckers, because of course"

oh, yeah, the right has _more_ people like that. a lot of what's going on right now is, you know, left reaction. all my lifetime the democratic party has been saying "look, we may not agree, but we can work with these people", and that ideology has been a clear and decisive failure. so after 20+ years of the american right pushing apocalyptic tribal warfare, after the events of 2016 there's a much higher level of basic acceptance of this dialectic on the left.

a condition of warfare, cultural or literal, suppresses open and frank discourse. suddenly the Enemy becomes a consideration. you can't disagree with anybody on Your Side because They will see it as weakness. if you meet to discuss issues at all, it is behind closed doors. presenting a united front is more important than implementing humane and effective policy.

where does it all go? nowhere good. the left makes exorbitant false promises about single-payer, just like they did about the aca, because that's the only way to get anything passed in america today. when it doesn't work out like they said it would, the disgruntled electorate elects rand paul president, who proposes a bill outlawing all forms of insurance as "socialist" and requiring everyone to pay for healthcare in cash up front. and it goes on from there until you have literal mass death, which is the thing everybody is really waiting for anyhow. all other forms of "disruption" are but pale shadows.

From former EPA employees, some suggestions about proposed regulatory changes from the Trump administration on which you can make public comment:

http://www.saveepaalums.info/

this bill is co-sponsored by a Democrat so is not getting concentrated resistance from the party or leadership. It's a shitty bill (check out the renewables section that doesn't even mention wind or solar, or the sub-section that repeals the fossil fuel phase-out for federal buildings), please call your Senators and tell them to vote against it: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/s1460/text

ty

good looking out Οὖτις

this is interesting

https://swingleft.org/fundraise?utm_source=dist_fund_tools&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170727_em_11a&link_id=1&can_id=53c9aca1103164752a73897299ff1df1&email_referrer=how-to-be-a-grassroots-fundraiser-2&email_subject=introducing-the-2018-district-fundraising-leaderboard

After attending some ACLU things earlier this year and doing a few things w my temple I think this is going to be my main focus moving forward, seems like the most impactful thing I can do given where I live/work (ie I don't have to worry too much about local and state politics and policies, since on all fronts my elected officials from the federal down to the local level are all committed to fighting Donnie Two Scoops policies)

No surprise to see so many CA GOP House jerks on the list, and of course Darrell Issa is no. 1.

I hope groups like these maintain pressure on elected Dems to actually do things when the electoral tide inevitably turns

For whoever was asking about DSA/Labour possibly building formal ties, there's going to be an international delegation (Labour, Podemas etc.) at their fall conference and rebuilding international socialism is a stated priority of basically all of their major left organizers

if you like single-payer this might be a good time to call up yr senators and make some noise about it

Harris is on record as being for it. Probably impossible to move Feinstein on it, but she should retire anyway she's a terrible Senator.

I've made 7 calls to 3 of my no-goodnik Senator's offices today, it feels sort of useless while you're doing it but I really believe a mass show of attention counts for something. They're counting on everyone getting bored and going back to playing Candy Crush.

^otm

the sense that thousands upon thousands of their constituents are paying close attention to their shenanigans makes politicians nervous

i asked his answering machine if he thought we were fools and i liked it, i liked it

For the DSA-curious, this was a good recap of their current state and their recent convention

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/08/06/the_dsa_convention_in_chicago_showcases_splinters_among_a_growing_unruly.html

The potential ideological tensions among members might be part of the reason why the convention’s organizers have taken pains to repeatedly encourage civility. In every packet of documents handed out to attendees there is a set of “guidelines for respectful discussion,” which contains advice such as, ”assume good faith in your fellow comrades,” and “please ask yourself ‘why am I talking?’ ” “Many people from different backgrounds have different definitions of what it means to be an ‘activist’ or ‘radical,’ ” it reads. “While we don’t have to agree on everything, we should respect our diversity of opinions. Recognize that everyone has a piece of the truth, everybody can learn, and everybody has the ability to teach and share something.”

The guidelines also include language aimed at encouraging inclusivity, reflecting both the DSA’s commitment to expanding its tent beyond white guys and the movement’s ideological commitments to taking on not only what it sees as class oppression but also what Resistance Rising calls “systems of oppression” based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. The badges handed out to all attendees have spaces for the disclosure of gender pronouns, and a variety of speakers have spoken to the importance of advancing “socialist feminism.” A resolution up for debate this weekend is on the abolition of prisons, one of the planks inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Organizationally, the DSA mandates that half of the slots on its 16-member National Political Committee, which functions as a kind of board of directors, be reserved for women and that at least four spots go to racial minorities.

Endorsing the BDS plank pretty much guarantees that I'm not going to be that curious about the DSA in the future

k

they made the classy choice on voting on it on shabbat

it should be on a weekday so nobody who would ever vote for anything left can make it

— Stephen Miller Band (@lbourgie) August 6, 2017

so I did my first phonebank with Swing Left on Saturday. It was pretty interesting and v well organized, had an online tool all set up and a script and then we just had to click through the contact list. I only got one asshole (he asked me if I was a Democrat, I said yes, then he said "well you can go fuck yourself" and hung up), talked to about a dozen people about events targeting CA District 10's GOP Rep Jeff Dunham whose responses ranged from engaged to very enthusiastic, so that was reassuring. Long way til the next election obviously, but this is a District Hillary won by 4% and Dunham seems like a clueless idiot so fingers crossed.

Houston DSA doing exactly what they should be, funneling resources to local relief efforts - nice to see.

so I did my first phonebank with Swing Left on Saturday. It was pretty interesting and v well organized, had an online tool all set up and a script and then we just had to click through the contact list. I only got one asshole (he asked me if I was a Democrat, I said yes, then he said "well you can go fuck yourself" and hung up), talked to about a dozen people about events targeting CA District 10's GOP Rep Jeff Dunham whose responses ranged from engaged to very enthusiastic, so that was reassuring.

This is interesting and impressive given that every Democratic Party phonebank I've done in the 2014 and 2016 elections yielded almost zero live contacts, and when someone answered it was almost never someone who was interested in hearing from me; how many people did you have to call to get a dozen engaged responses?

Democrats should just form breakdancing teams and tour them through small towns

Breakin' 2018: Democratic Boogaloo