China and Cuba have more grassroots democracy than the average DSA Chapter.
same with “socialism with a human face”. socialism is the most humanitarian system already!
I think that’s more to imply you’re associating a recognizable face to a nebulous political concept. Basically laypeople people saying, “Oh! Socialism is what Lenin/Mao/Castro was doing” as a baseline for their understanding of socialism. Very rudimentary, but then again, few people dig as far into politics as the people here.
My reply to them, “Yes, they were doing socialism. And it was based.”
Imperialist SocialismDSA: Democratic Sellouts of Amerikkka.
Democratic (Party) Socialists of America
They mean bourgeois “democracy”, basically forcing their terrible forms of First past the post or parliamentary systems into a socialist reform.
Yeah it betrays their anti-communist and reactionary nature.
Love seeing lefties attack what should be their allies for not being their particular flavor of left.
Democratic socialists love throwing actual socialists abroad under the bus (e.g. Mamdani on Maduro and Diaz-Canel). They are the ones who reject “leftist unity”.
Just that one incident was more harmful than any amount of internet forum squabbles are.
DSA has consistently criticized their “allies” across the global south. Calling AES states dictatorships isn’t particularly “ally” worthy, in my opinion.
DSA in my city tried to recruit me, and one of their selling points was that they collaborate with the police during protests to ensure it’s safe for everyone.
I’m sure some places have better chapters, but from my experience it’s just libs
one of their selling points was that they collaborate with the police during protests to ensure it’s safe for everyone.
Ayo, what!? 😭
Begone, yakubian leftist. You’re on the wrong server. We don’t cater to western chauvinists here.
yakubian
+1 😂
Look at this. I lay down a tame, no heat, barely even flavored criticism that you know you’re guilty of and your default response is isolationism and petty namecalling.
And you wonder why you have trouble reaching people.
No heat? Your ideology revolves around denouncing revolutionary socialism and calling actual socialists ‘authoritarians’, and then you come here and complain about “leftist Unity”, that too to the people who came up with democratic centralism, the method of unity among socialists.
Is that not a provocation in your eyes, shitlib?
Who said it was my ideology?
Can’t handle the mild sauce OR make a point without projecting. You need to touch grass.
Oh, so you are just an unprincipled chud who came here to stir up some shit.
Go back to your lair, kiddo. The average communist here organizes more in a week than you probably do in a year.
chud
kiddo
You are so far up your own ass it’s kind of noteworthy. The only thing you’re organizing is an echo chamber.
Still here, reactionary? Go do something productive with your life.
I would rather live in an echo chamber of principled communists than in a big tent with bigots and opportunists.
The only people you have reached are social chauvinists who vote for warcriminals with Nazi tattoos and white billionaires who can’t call a genocide a genocide.
To be clear, Marxism-Leninism is rising, even in the west. Some people may be more difficult to reach than others, but that doesn’t mean the process on the whole isn’t positive.
And yet you don’t see the very obvious flaws with trying to reform the imperialist parties into socialism. Many of these people are democratic socialist in name, they think you need a liberal democracy first then to reform it. It’s a lazy way of looking at the transition to socialism, the same way its lazy to call china revisionist because they are still working within a global capitalist system towards transition. None of this to say the democratic socialism of these imperial core leftists is wrong, its more that MLs assert that history shows its likely ineffective.
I don’t know what the makeup of DSA is like these days. There may be chapters that are more marxist-leninist than others.
But the issue with so-called democratic socialism as a label is that it comes with a belief that the capitalist class can be deposed from power by voting them out, essentially. In practice, in the US, it also tends to have problems with not supporting actual socialist projects in the world (such as China).
The reason the “flavor” of it matters is because when we’re talking about people who don’t support existing socialist projects in the world, or don’t take seriously the confrontational nature of taking on an existing entrenched, exploitative, and violent power structure, it’s hard to take them seriously as wanting the same things.
Anyway, that is where the dissing comes from.
If only people realized how often the government ignores the will and well being of the general public, they might actually realize that they can’t vote their way out.
The moat prominent founder of the DSA, Michael Harrington, literally founded it to be the “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party”, while rejecting the actually existing systems of the Soviet Union, China and the Eastern Bloc.
Read this: https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/04/michael-harrington-and-his-afterlives/
This infantilizes critique. The weaknesses of so-called “democratic socialists” are valid to point out, as forming a strong, coherent line with a unified base is the most important task for organization and preparation for revolutionary conditions. We can still work together on projects, of course, but that doesn’t mean ignoring glaring weaknesses. It isn’t simply because they are different, it’s because the matter that is different is structural weakness and usually opposition to existing socialism.
The leftist spectrum that somehow all are allies, want the same thing and are united in the fight against the right - is a social construct.
Can someone from say Palestine that needs the end of the empire to survive ever be allied to someone who doesn’t? That’s incompatibility on a fundamental level.
