Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Marxist Unity Group: Navigating DSA's Political Landscape
What does it mean to build a socialist party in America today? The Marxist Unity Group, a left caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America, offers their perspective on this critical question while unpacking the complexities of DSA's internal dynamics, electoral strategy, and revolutionary vision.
Fresh from DSA's national convention, MUG members celebrate significant victories including the passage of their "Principles of Party Building" resolution and the election of three caucus members to national leadership. They explore how the convention demonstrated both DSA's growing maturity and the ongoing tensions between different political tendencies within the organization.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when examining DSA's relationship with electoral campaigns, particularly Zoran Mamdani's potentially historic mayoral run in New York City. As Mamdani's messaging shifts toward the mainstream, the panelists wrestle with fundamental questions: How should socialists approach executive office? Can reforms be won without compromising revolutionary principles? What happens when elected officials begin to distance themselves from the very organization that helped elect them?
What emerges is a thoughtful analysis of the challenges facing socialist politics in America today. The MUG members articulate how winning reforms must be connected to a broader revolutionary program and party-building strategy. They highlight how declining trust in institutions creates openings for socialist politics, but only if socialists can offer genuine alternatives rather than simply better management of the existing system.
Whether you're a DSA member, a curious observer of left politics, or someone trying to understand how socialists navigate America's difficult political terrain, this conversation offers valuable insights into building working class power in challenging times. Listen now to explore these crucial strategic questions with some of DSA's most thoughtful organizers.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to VARM blog, and today we are talking to the Marxist Unity Group panel that consists of Amy, ben Juno, jean and Aaliyah, and we will be talking about all kinds of things in this pending economic political climate. I think polycrisis doesn't even cover all the crises plural that we're seeing right now.
Speaker 3:It's gone viral.
Speaker 1:A zoomer crisis in general. So we'll be talking about that and where the dsa is right now, at least according to marxist unity group's viewpoint on things. And um, I will remind people that my standing offer for anybody representing any dsa caucus who wants to come on, you can't come on. You don't get the complaint about me only having the marxist unity group on when you guys don't come on, um, so, uh, that said, um, we are a little under a month past the last dsa convention. Um, we've had a major change in the National Political Committee.
Speaker 1:It seems like the DSA's orientation is kind of shoring up. At the same time, zoram Mandani is doing very well in the polls in New York, but it also seems like we're seeing pivoting from Mondani that we would expect of progressive candidates, and maybe that tells you what I think right there. So I wanted to get you a general feeling of where we're at and we're going to start with the convention, because that's the first thing, and just so you guys know we're going to start there. But who knows where we're going to go tonight, because there's about 80,000 things happening at once, so much so that I actually increasingly try to not cover current events, because by the time I post on them they're usually out of date. So we'll start with Amy and go clock rise from Amy to Ben, to Aaliyah, to John to Juno. All right, so what do you think was achieved from Marxist Unity Group's objectives at the last DSA convention? Go, amy.
Speaker 4:I think the biggest thing that we can see, obviously. Well, we got three NDC members selected, which was our target, that's myself, sid and Cliff I don't know if Sid, I think, was on. We did this previously. And then also we've got Principles of Party Building Past, which I'm very proud about, and that kind of sets out what it means to be a party, because that's something I think it's something really important, just because both it's our mission of what it means to be a party, a socialist party, and because we don't have anything like that in the United States. You know, I can't say what the history looks like exactly because I admit I haven't really studied it, but for at least my lifetime, which is not that long, but for at least my lifetime like we haven't had anything that meaningfully looks like a political party as in somewhere that somewhere people can get involved and you know, practice I would practice democracy together, essentially in determining what it will be and what it will be, what it will fight for, and then you know, put those politics into practice. So I think that really is like the most important thing for a party to be and that is a big part of kind of what we laid out.
Speaker 4:I'll also say, I think that, although we didn't get the program that we wanted, I think the fact that we did see, I think that adopting the Workers Serve More program is a step forward in terms of having DSA have a fairly concise program that describes the things we're fighting for, not just an immediate term and not like a laundry list of, you know, um, the 20 colon platform, which was fine, um, but you know, if you guys print it out, it'd be, oh, it was a few 60 pages, um, you know, the fact that now we have adopted a program, that is, the fact that now we have adopted a program that is more concise, that is still fairly thorough, I think is a big step forward, even if it isn't the one that we wanted, and ultimately we had a pretty good showing on the revolutionary program for DSA is what it ended up being called.
Speaker 2:All right, ben, amy hit on the top. The two things that I think are the biggest. We really showed up on the NBC remarks. It was perfect. On the principles of party building, that's definitely the one I'm like most excited about. Um more generically, uh, I was, I was, I was very confident it was gonna be a left conventional.
Speaker 2:Okay, let me take a step back for a second um the you were saying before that this is like a big change, like one of the arguments I've made for a long time, I continue to make here, is that we have not really seen the change in the makeup of convention of any real significance since 2017 at least.
Speaker 2:It has always been about 35% to 40% right, 15% to 20% center, 40% to 45% left, and that's just been consistent. You can just look at 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025. Numbers are the same. There are changes. It's been changes in what those things mean in the present political context, uh, and within dsa um. So, bringing that to like the question here, one thing like so, though I was very confident it's going to be like a leftist because it usually is um, I was not confident about one member, one vote which would have was never going to pass because it required two thirds, but if it gets 50% it creates like a political context where the right can go. The same way a lot of folks did with the anti-Zionist resolutes, chapter by chapter, and like fight that out With a 40 margin.
Speaker 5:That's a much harder, uh, so I'm really excited about that number two. Okay, well, I actually um, yeah, I mean on what's been said, I I hate to harp on the point. I will say a big takeaway for me with our program proposal was that you know running the numbers ahead of time and you know gauging where we were at and I don't know, kind of, what our margins were going to be. I think I think our proposal did better than we expected by quite a bit, and because we, I think, went into it, there was a general sense that it just wasn't going to pass at all. And so I think that, not to say we weren't whipping for it, we were writing articles, we were talking about it, we were doing all that stuff, but it definitely, I think, took a backseat.
Speaker 5:And I think that what I learned was that we can maybe be a little more optimistic, maybe a little more bold. Sometimes our stuff just honestly does better than we expect it to. I think our ideas are popular and I think that you know ahead of time, you know, and it's actually just not even mug. I think what it shows is just the value of deliberative democracy you get everybody together, you're answering questions. You're asking questions and there are shifts, so you can't always, you know, go into it thinking you know exactly what we're going to get. And so I think that a lot of the feedback we got was, well, we kind of like where you're going with this, but we didn't feel like we got to be a part of it. You know, maybe we wanted our own kind of proposal to match up with it.
Speaker 5:So I'm thinking that next convention the program battle excuse me is going to be happening again and I'm hoping that it's, yeah, kind of more org wide and that we get to have a deeper, richer discussion about what a program's for, what it's supposed to do, and just kind of expand that conversation. So, excuse me. So I'm happy about that, I'm optimistic. But enough on that.
Speaker 5:I will say and Juno will say more about this we got three bulletins out. We got a fresh bulletin out each day for the second convention in a row, fresh articles. I think they're well written, I think they're exciting. I think this one's even more beautiful than the one we got out last time. And, again, I think this really just shows the value of long form polemic, of even when you are in a room with people speaking with your voice. There is still a real value to writing and proliferating writing and getting people to engage with each other that way. So that was really exciting to be part of, really exciting to see. Yeah, those are the things that I think are really awesome and that I'm feeling really good about.
Speaker 1:All right, John.
Speaker 3:Since I know Comrade Juno is going to talk about the bulletin, I'm going to talk about a broader shift. On the one hand, it's tough to read too much into convention because of so many specifics about when I don't know. There are a lot of specifics about when people got elected, when convention is held. If the convention was held after Mamdani's win, it could have been a different convention. If all these things were different, then we could have Oceans made out of lemonade. But given that, something that I am excited about is that when I started doing editing for Marxist Unity Group, it was out of years of like being someone who's like written in the context of DSA, and in DSA, a lot of the thinking, a lot of the writing is about specifics to running your chapter or it's about like the lead up to convention and kind of using words and ideas as like weapons to bludgeon people about very, very specific and like small ultimately not to make convention unimportant but very, very narrow disagreements.
Speaker 3:Right, and we've also seen during convention in 2019 and in 2021 specifically, that the easy shortcut around having well-thought-out positions is just total interpersonal warfare about shit that is very hard to parse out, even a couple of years outside of that context major on like okay, so many other DSA caucuses are. We're in this context where, like pretty much everything is about like establishing your bona fides, establishing like that you're a great organizer, which is kind of a black box, and if you're writing anything further than that, it's a cute, cute little hobby thing. And I don't know. I feel like a couple of years ago, mug was a left caucus that was overly like oh, there's like what's the there? There, as opposed to looking at us like we're a bunch of like overdeveloped weirdos and if that thoughtfulness like holds, that is a really, really tremendous of the us left, because there are a lot of amazing talents in this organization but we are do not have an intellectual environment that like encourages a helpful exchange of ideas do you know?
Speaker 6:it's to me, yes, juno. It's to me. Yes, hi, juno, say them pronouns I live in Brooklyn. The question is like what did Mug accomplish, right? Mm-hmm?
Speaker 6:Okay, I appreciate my comrades saving the content of the bulletin for me.
Speaker 6:I feel like that's my main contribution to the caucus initiative, this convention and last convention, this convention and last convention. I'm so proud of all of my comrades that are able to write like really informative and nuanced and also like reactive articles. Like we have a daily newspaper so we're like able to publish analysis and reaction to the things that happened in the convention the day before. I feel like that really plays into um what comrade jean is saying about like raising the level of discourse, and it also sort of reinforces our theory of democracy where, like we, our political tendency constitutes a minority, according to ben, like the left might be the majority but like what we think is still like a minority tendency, and so we're like exercising our right to say what we think about issues and try to have forms of debate that we believe are constructive and can like develop the politics of our um other caucuses. So, from my perspective, like keeping the mug brand, like nerds that like think things through. Is is one of the main accomplishments.
Speaker 1:All right. So I guess we should kind of break down what are the various factions on the left and the right in the DSA from your perspective again, and the center. These percentages you throw out are actually to me somewhat misleading, in so much that, as I commented during the convention, that looking over the caucuses that were considered left and the caucuses that were considered right and I guess the caucuses that are considered center, considered right and I guess the caucuses that are considered center, it was unclear to me that there is a lot of unity on the left and apparently there was over key specific questions. But you know when I'm talking about. When you mentioned the left, the DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus, winter Caucus, red Star are all listed together and they don't really share that much ideologically.
Speaker 1:So I want to talk about what we mean by the DSA left and the DSA right. And what is this mysterious DSA center that's been Sandra Day O'Connor-ing things for I don't know half a decade and how did they? You know, it seems like if anything that's where there was a decline is in the DSA center when I look at the NPCs. But I don't think the people outside of the DSA they would know what this means. So anyone can answer. We went in order. But if you want to go in order again, that's fine.
Speaker 2:But I've just thrown that out to the floor as the yeah, as the caucus spreadsheet guy, let me try to do the baseball numbers and then we can go through the politics a little more. So, yeah, that's absolutely right, the DSA left is not a particularly clear information, neither is the right Just to break down very, very quick baseball cards, very quick baseball cards. So the general tendencies on the left, like I tend to think about it as, like the Palestine left, which is like SOR, red Star, ic, that's all sort of IC is International Committee which has sort of been merged into Springs of Rebel and tend to be unified like, uh, on almost entirely international issues. Uh and like, look, I think it's fair to say some more or less campest analysis, um, but even within that like sort of vague block, um, red stars, red stars politics look very different than sORs. The Red Star is localist but they're both kind of localist but in very different ways. Sor is just a bunch of it's like it's people who do Palestine organizing and sort of has the politics of that Very movement-driven and very like.
Speaker 2:I've talked to plenty of sor people who are this against for the revolution, um, who uh, like are in the communist party and like really care but like they tend to don't really care about, like electoral politics as a general thing, this one very much as a general thing. They have like specific issues that they think are key to the movement and they care a lot about those. Otherwise, they kind of think like politics comes from the ground up. Red star has a similar analysis like so red star has like some similar beliefs, but a very different analysis of that like much more at this point, like I, I think. I think they've done a pretty good job of cohering something that looks like a reasonable set of Marxist-Leninist politics, which I think is a newish development. But it seems there to me now that's the sort of internationalist part of the left, that's the sort of internationalist peer part of the left. So the LSC, as you were saying, who has some of those traits again, as you were saying, on their issues, is always going to vote for that's one thing most of us are unified on, just on the grounds of Palestine, because Palestine has been this very central issue going all the way back to 2021.
Speaker 2:And then, but that's a smaller part, a bigger part of the left, I guess, once you move those two aside, is, I would say, us. That's the other part of the left. If you're thinking about it in context, which is much more partious, they very consciously not look at it. We're not movementists, we're not. We're very much like. We believe in the party, we think the party does base building, we think the party does electoral work, we think the party does a lot of things, but for us the party comes first and that ends up looking really, really different, because in New York, where I am, we have all of these tendencies. So we end up coalitioning with people in the center on some of these party questions a lot more than we tend to with the folks on the left on them. And so, like, figuring out how to work, like those sort of like figure out political collections we can work on in a chapter that is very, very right or those very, very right.
Speaker 2:So, getting on to the center, I guess the first, like the first, the furthest left caucus of the center would be Reform and Revolution, which was not always considered a center caucus, but like these days it's pretty everyone can be. I think. And I guess you what defines them as center? I guess you what, what defines them as center, I guess. I guess I would say that the left is sort of defined by like accommodation of internationalist politics and a revolutionary politics. The center is sort of constituted by like an opposition to insider politics, but not always a super revolutionary politics, in V&R's case. Well, in V&R's case they're just reformists, they're like middle-of-band reformists, so it's complicated, but like they're reformists, reformists um, they're. They're like middle band reformists, it's complicated, but like they're reformists, um. And then r and r are like salt style, like very transitional, so like there is a revolutionary politics, oh yeah, uh.
Speaker 2:And then they're the last few are groundwork, which is the sort of partyist right caucus, um, and that's come out of like just a sort of collection of a bunch of different chapters coming together oh, bnr, uh, I think that's red roses, it's a uh caucus used to be like very much of labor organizers has sort of been polarized, left as fights, uh, over the years. But it's not. It's, it's very much a caucus of the left. It just isn't like theory insider politics and the right has sort of moved away in some ways, or at least SMC has.
Speaker 2:And then there's groundwork which is like, basically I tend to think of it as like the sort of organic politics of the post-Murdy moment. It's it as the sort of organic politics of the post-Burney moment. It's just like the sort of vaguely right leaders of every large chapter that weren't in social socialist majority sort of got together and were just like we should get together and conquer DSA. And they've over time developed more and more like party politics, like they'll talk about programmatic unity, like they they still want, like they have a very performance vision of what that means. They really like this guy, a hunt, a Gustav Anderson, but yeah, like they they have the idea of the party. And then there's social majority which is more or less I mean, I would say less so it's the continuation of the Harrington politics. It's like a continuation, but by the end it's like a continuation of that new left post-Maoist politics In the liberation road. Yeah, I guess that's the.
Speaker 2:Those are the? I guess that's the. Those are the, because that's my son, all right.
Speaker 1:So just to break down what I heard and then let other people break that, we have, on the left, libertarian Socialist Caucus with Winter Caucus, red Star Communist Caucus, red Star Communist Caucus, marxist Unity Group and the divisions there are and whatever became of the International Committee which became its own caucus, and so you have split between kind of left-partiest, left-movementist and left-internationalistist and left internationalist, aka mostly about palestine at the moment. Um, then you have the center, which is uh, uh I'm gonna say this even though you didn't um both kind of post trotskyist one. Coming from, I associate bread and roses with the jacobin school. I just kind of associate them with like mixture of uh, of uh, sankara ites for lack of a better boss card, not the other one and uh and um non-revolutionary trotskyists, and then reform revolution with transitionalists who are salt, a little bit of leftovers of the cliff fight tendencies as well, and I associate them with transitional revolutionary politics, but they still tend to be. They won't like me saying this, but I find them to be reformist in the way they orient. They won't like me saying this, but I find them to be reformist in the way they orient.
Speaker 1:And then there are a right partyist and right advocates, and all of them have shifted leftward for a variety of reasons, compared to where they were in, say, 2016, before the big boom. And I'll also say none of these caucuses, except for libertarian, socialist caucus, are that old, although brett and roses is also pretty old far as the new set of caucuses go but the caucus names have changed every time I've looked um, uh and um. You know, like groundworkwork, groundwork is exist and oh yeah, I forgot socialist majority. I guess that's like the most old school Harringtonite caucus and they're also pretty old. But old here, I mean, the caucus system is a is a DSA expansion were there caucuses before?
Speaker 2:2017 2016 like there were, but they weren't. But like the current caucus system doesn't arise from those the like, the current caucus system arises that spring, as the majority at vnr came from from.
Speaker 1:That happens like around 2018, 2018, okay now I'm going to throw out something that that I often throw out to VEX DSA members, and you've been warned. How did the caucus system not recapitulate the sex system outside of the DSA?
Speaker 3:yeah, you vexed us. Oh, we're vexed. Um, I mean, here is my take on that every single sect would be improved if it was a dsa caucus and had to interact with other people as equals. Um, and they're made worse by that. They can just be like, shut the fuck up. Your, your tendency, was responsible for this or that atrocity, and now I'm not going to interact or think about this anymore.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I'll say, ultimately, I think, like it kind of is like, if we really want to generalize, it kind of is more or less like to what degree we are attaining to like an actually existing, you know, democratic centralism. If it didn't exist at all in DSA, you know, maybe it would kind of just be the same thing, except sometimes we're in a room together, but it isn't because we, for you know, like it or not, we are constrained by each other. We co-determine, ultimately, our own potentialities through each other, um, through each other, um. So I just think that you know, some of the worst elements of you know the sectarianism are just kind of avoided. Um, and this is also one of the reasons people think dsa is so annoying and why people are always like oh my god, well, I don't want to join dsa because I have to see you guys complain to each other online, which is like whatever, okay, like there's a reason. You know you don't see psl, um folks arguing online, um they don't allow it.
Speaker 6:No, they don't allow it.
Speaker 5:So everything that's like sort of annoying about dsa to the, to the super ultra left libs who talk to us about it Like that's what's good about DSA also, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah so.
Speaker 6:I'll give you. Can I jump in? Go ahead, juno, before I say anything. I think like the spirit of your question is like that there is sectarianism amongst like caucuses, but like these are just literally different things. Caucuses are organizations within organizations and as a member of BSA I'm comrades with the other people that are not in my caucus. That's very dissimilar to the structure of the sect. So on the one hand we do have infighting and like petty disagreements in a sectarian nature, but like we do have also like this common sense of unity that is not characteristic of sects at all, like yeah, yeah, I think, regardless of your caucus, most DSA members who are caucused understand themselves as a dsa member before being a caucus member, you know yeah, and I I think that, like that's the important thing is is, um, there isn't that kind of thing that binds sects together.
Speaker 4:Um, the fact that we have to, we have to interact and convince each other to do things, you know, that alone is a big kind of moderating factor towards the kind of sectarian impulse that I think is difficult to avoid for all of us, I think at times. But yeah, at the end of the day, the fact that we're all in DSA, we all believe in DSA and we have to interact, and, at the end of the day, like, yeah, we're in DSA because we believe that DSA, whatever it is, can be the vehicle for socialism here, the vehicle for socialism here. And that puts us together in a context where sex just aren't Like. They may see each other as part of a broader socialist movement. They may see each other only as fellow travelers, if that. They may see each other as bourgeois shills, but that is something that, you know, we don't have, the. It's not really the right word, but it's not something we have the luxury of doing as DSM Bruce.
Speaker 1:So my response to that, since I set you up on this one, is that I both do think there are sec like ideological tendencies within the caucuses. I do not think they are sex and I do think most of the sex would be would benefit from what I would like to call an organization that is, a clearinghouse of the sex, which is actually something I've been advocating for since 2012, is that the sex join up to each other. You might go with them. Why aren't you in the DSA barn? You guys know why because until you clarify your relationship to the Democratic Party, that's not happening.
Speaker 5:Didn't you tell us the last time we were here, though, that you would join once we got rid of the Demsen?
Speaker 1:ban? No, I did not.
Speaker 5:Which, by the way, we didn't mention it.
Speaker 1:You did get rid of it we did do that. We got rid of it.
Speaker 3:Editor guy checked the tape and we can talk more about that.
Speaker 5:There was one other thing I forgot to mention, which is the other big thing I was really proud of that I totally forgot about in the moment. The other big thing I was really proud of that I totally forgot about in the moment we held a party to raise funds to benefit Gaza and we raised over $5,000. That's great.
Speaker 1:Pretty good for a bunch of nerds, I think, so to speak, to this a little bit, though. One of the things that I would like to see from the DSA is I do like that it's a multi-tendency thing, and what we should really say what sex become when they join a party is a tendency uh. Organizations have had and is certain interpretations of democratic centralism, um, which I think are bad interpretations of democratic centralism. Not uh that block um factions or tendencies from existing um. You see this in the cp usa, you see this in the PSL, you see this in Salt had such a ban when they existed. The ISO had such a ban, and that tends to be a real limit to growth, because ideological battles become all or nothing, and it's not that you don't have a faction, it's that you only have one faction and all the other factions try to eliminate each other.
Speaker 5:Um uh so one of the big mcnerrite kind of elements that we really are kind of uh locked in on, even though you know, I think, that you often interpret events uh quite differently than us and, um, you depart from us on a lot. I think we are in lockstep on this.
Speaker 1:I do depart from you guys on a lot. But I will also say your caucus is the caucus that tends to be closest to my thinking because I'm very influenced by Mike McNair and the Communist Party Great Britain Provisional Committee. And I make sure I add the Provisional Committee because there's like five Communist Parties of Great Britain or something. So I bring that up because it is of vital importance on understanding what I've been advocating for myself for the last couple of years and why the DSA is moving closer to that. And I'm happy about your developments On the DIMCET ban.
Speaker 1:I just think that was stupid anti-communist bullshit. Well, like, I'm not for a faction ban anywhere, but like I've always been. Like, well, what do you like? How are you in an organization if you don't agree to go by the majority vote? Why? I just don't know what else you mean by like. Yes, there are interpretations of democratic centralisms are more censorious, but like, at least very early on, even in the bolshevik context, it was just you agreed to go with the vote of the party period.
Speaker 1:In the discussion there were sometimes, uh, there were things that have been interpreted as democratic centralism that I think have not served various groups well, like, for example, um, the Central Committee of the SPD always looking to be unanimous in its votes. So it was actually very hard for many, many years to figure out who voted for what when the SPD made a decision which often misrepresented certain key figures. For example, kotsky did not actually vote for war credits, being a key historical example. He was neutral on the topic, but we didn't really know that until the minutes were released way after the fact, because they didn't want it. No, um, so stuff like that really really matters, but that's nerd shit.
Speaker 1:Um, let's get into some some other, some other key stuff. I just wanted to get into this. One thing, though, I have criticized the DSA for and I want your response to this because it hasn't been in my mind fixed consistently is the fact that there are not, outside of the various caucuses, which I think should really be called tendencies, there have not been a lot of trans-regional or regional coordination groups that you go from local to national with nothing in between, and I do think as the DSA grows, as it ever gets back over 100K again, that kind of organization is going to be important. Is there anyone advocating for that in the DSA right now?
Speaker 6:Doing trans-regional organizing and taking the wisdom that's developed in New York and spreading it to New Jersey specifically. Also, I'll say that if you care about that, then you should do that. I don't feel like it's super. Why are you telling?
Speaker 3:Why don't you just do it?
Speaker 6:if you care so much about it.
Speaker 1:Because I'm not going to join an organization that doesn't handle those things seriously. Just flat out. I'm a union person. I deal with organizations way larger than yours and I'm very serious about the structural organizations before I enter them. When you go, why don't you join? Any cult can do that shit, I don't care. I'm not saying DSA is a cult, by the way. But if you want to get my actual opinion for why I feel that way, the answer is why don't you go and do it for me? Why would I join an organization as one person when I don't know if people have thought that through within that organization?
Speaker 6:I'll say this Because national organizing is, in my view, you could be a force for change all by yourself and have an individual impact on the transnationality of our organization, if it's something that you really value organize if it's something that you really value, like yeah, um the.
Speaker 3:I will say, with regards to just the experience of being in new york, I think that a similar problem I I will not speak on california, california does have a regional formation set up new york has had a consistent problem. Um, that, I think, has plagued a lot of other attempts at regional organizing, which is like towards what end? Right, and the question of towards what end is such a controversial question, and so what happens instead is that people argue about proportionality versus like. Oh, new York should be like you know the classic like it should be proportional because New York has more members, there are more people in New York, they should be represented. Versus like the reality, which is that if New York asks if New York is just overwhelming a state body and then says we're going to do a thing, then you've just replicated the same dynamic that exists already in New York state politics.
Speaker 3:I've seen three different attempts at regional organizing not work because of this dynamic. The staffer came to me to ask about this and I don't know the degree to which this is going to occur. I think it will, because it seems like there's a lot of interest in it. There's just going to be coordination on like member orientation stuff and you just need to have that like a degree of trust before the desire to just be like we need to have a statewide body so we can have a Senate campaign. But I'm not going to tell you that it's so we can have a Senate campaign. It's like that's been problematic.
Speaker 4:Yeah, also one of the difficult things too.
Speaker 4:There was a proposal I don't I don't recall what his position was, may have just failed, but there was a proposal to the convention that basically said okay, we're going to set up statewide things, we're going to prioritize setting up state-by-chapters. If there's one chapter in the state then it'll become the state chapter. I don't think that's probably very good for chapters, to be honest, but kind of towards this idea of we don't want to just leave at-large members out in the cold. I think was part of it, but I think a lot of people have seen from experience in California is one of them, there are some. California is one of them, there are some. There can be a desire to make statewide permission and regional is a different thing and I'll talk about this in a sec. But I think statewide is for an organization as well, with oral work, but that is kind of a kind of a um in some regard logical. Next step, in terms of regional organizing, um, there is a lot to worry about, like, okay, well, you know, is the big chapter gonna just kind of run over everybody? And what's the purpose of the statewide chapter, um, the statewide organization, um, isn't it going to be an intermediate body politically? Is it going to endorse Newsom's redistricting plan, because I guess we love gerrymandering now that Republicans are doing it? Anyway, is it going to just be something where, yeah, this is a body that, like, helps out smaller chapters, helps members who are not in chapters to get in chapters different visions of what that statewide organization would be? As far as, like, lifting up work that's being done in chapters to bring to other chapters, that's something that I think is really important. Um and uh, finding ways to do that that aren't, um, exclusive to our organizing staff, who are pretty thin right now, um, but we're working on that. Um, you know, finding ways to do that where we can have members involved in that process, I think is really important.
Speaker 4:As far as regional things, yeah, I think, like so I'm in Washington. We had recently we set up this kind of statewide SIO thing, which is interesting. Socialist in Office Committee is what SIO stands for? Because we have a representative in the Seattle, has a representative in the State House. Yeah, um, yeah, um, and that's sort of things we talked about. Like what if we set up a statewide pack because, um, washington has weird rules about campaign finance that kind of screwed us um last year. Um so like, yeah, that question of what are we trying to do? Um.
Speaker 4:Another thing as far as regional, like, uh, some of our members in washington are in the portland chapter. Um, because portland chapter, because of geography um has members in vancouver, washington. Um, some of our members in our Palouse DSA chapter, which is kind of mostly in Washington, are in Idaho Because that region straddles Washington and Idaho. You have, well, lewiston is down there, but you have mostly Pullman and Moscow which are big college cities and that's where I think most of the members in blue's dsa are. Um. So statewide formations also are a little challenging that way, like what happens with those. Um, we have a lot of chapters travel, state lines, regional, um, like a northwest regional thing, cool, what's it for? Um.
Speaker 4:One thing that you know we do want to talk about, we've talked about doing again I think we do want to do is regional organizing retreats. Now, that's not really like organization I'm not going to say that it is but serves as a way for members from different chapters in the region and that'll be, you know, fairly large region like the Northwest or New England or some sections of the South or, you know kind of central states. I'm not very good at geography, can you tell, or I don't know. California is pretty much a big enough region to have its own. The idea is, you have memory, you bring them together, you can run some trainings but also exchange ideas and form some of those connections.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so you're right, um, there are efforts to kind of come up with an idea of regional organizing. Um, you're right that that is a layer that's missing. Um, but there's a lot of disagreement about what those regional formations would be, how they would function, what they would do, um, and I think that, um, in some regard it's going to have to come out of those, those organizing relationships and hopefully, you know, um, building some, building some connective tissue at first. That isn't just um kind of national, uh being that connective tissue at first, that isn't just kind of national being that connective tissue which is a big part of what we do.
Speaker 6:Anybody else want to respond?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just one one. Yeah, just very briefly. We, we also we haven't mentioned. They're actually like a bunch of successful statewide chapters. Delaware seems to be going okay, maine is going well, connecticut is going well. It's really just like it's the organizing question in all these cases. And in New Jersey we thought it was going to show well, but it had some issues and, and where it's been successful and where it hasn't, I think more or less comes down to like can you define the organizing? Like is? Is that a coherent basis of organizing? Yeah, and, and we want it to be, but it doesn't necessarily mean we know how to do it yet.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think, having the conversation just in general about what's needed, what's desired, what have people's experiences been. I think there is, you know, more or less a good degree of this transnational organizing. That happens already to be fair. Obviously, you know there are the caucuses, but I don't know that that's. You know quite what we're talking about here. You know there are regional organizing calls. I'm sure they're more productive and cooperative in some places and a little bit, I know in my area it takes on just kind of a tone of reporting. But I think at a variety of levels there is already kind of an informal coalescence that happens regionally. But it's like people said, it's typically around projects. It's like I don't want to say interest groups, but it's basically interest groups, that kind of form out of you know what they want, where they want it and who can help.
Speaker 5:I think formalizing it is totally something we can do. I just think that because we have so much freedom kind of to do it already, and because of you know the the issues that comrades have pointed out, I think that, um, I don't see like a huge, huge push for it, like this doesn't seem. You know what I mean. I think um like for me.
Speaker 5:You know I had I'm not sure if you heard you know I I definitely would like to see more of it, but I think that especially just kind of connecting younger or smaller chapters, you know, and doing more orientation and stuff, kind of like Amy said, is maybe something we could definitely work on. It's something that's been a bit of a struggle here, but yeah, I don't know, I think there's a lot of reasons it hasn't quite happened. It has to do with capacity, it has to do with our actual like how much drive we have to make this happen. I don't think there's anything preventing it really, other than just that I don't know that we've had enough conversations about it or really formalized maybe enough of it.
Speaker 1:The reason why I bring it up is not just because it's my own hobby horse, but because what I think Amy is quite perceptive to note that I wasn't talking about state organizing. I think state organizing tends to be a disaster. Why would we replicate a failed federated system in the very thing? I mean, particularly from Mug's perspective, right Like it doesn't make any sense for you guys to advocate the problems of federation in the Constitution in your org. Nor would I not want it to be a centralist organization. I think the reason why I think about this in terms of regions is that regions really do understand their coordination and local projects better, and having former institutions to handle that beyond the convention would make convention what you focus on in convention that much sharper and that much more important. And the reason why it's really mattered to me is one of the and no one here has done this. I want to be very clear. I've never heard this from anyone in mug, but uh, when I hear that the greatest thing about the dsa is the locals can kind of do whatever they want and ignore the national, and I'm like well, why the hell are you in the organization if you want to ignore its national, like that doesn't make any sense to me. If you don't like the national, you should either fight the reframing or you should leave, and I do think a lot of people do leave.
Speaker 1:Frankly, one of the things that I have argued and one of the interesting things about right now is that the DSA seems to be back in a period of growth, and that's good. Hopefully, it's more responsibly sustained than it was last time, where you had a period of rapid growth between 2019 and 2020, and then a period of pretty significant decline of, depending on which numbers you look at, a fourth to a third of the membership becoming either inactive or leaving, and the reason why I put it that high is the recruiting numbers were also rep. We're also replacing some of those people. At the same time, you no longer seem to be in that crisis, which is good, but it does lead me to like wonder about stuff like dsa financial structure. A year ago, the dsa was on the rocks financially. It seems like it's that you weathered that as well, and that's a good thing, but people will throw at me and I don't know if they're throwing it at you um, like, why does the dsa have problems with money when organizations that have literally an order of magnitude less people, the PSL, for example. We don't know how many people are in the PSL, but almost nobody estimates it more than 6,000. It's historically more likely to be about three, but we don't know because they don't make that public. But the PSL has seemingly a larger war chest than the DSA by a lot. One of that is they can put candidates on the national scale level, which, even if you short ball that, that's millions of dollars per candidate, that they do that.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the reasons why I actually will praise the dsa is we do know where the dsa's money goes. Even if you're not a member, I can look it up. Like I know what you guys spend money on, um, you know it. You're not like putting on your front page, but if you go to a report you can find it, and those reports are not hidden. And so I want to give the DSA a lot of credit for that level of transparency, because most parties will use like, oh, we're doing whatever and the feds are. I'm like the feds are already in your business. You should know that there's always feds in your organization. Like that excuse doesn't really fly. So you know, I want to give the DSA credit for that, because I can tell you, even as a non-member, roughly what the DSA spends, where the money goes, the, the, what is it? I think it's the 85-15 split, the uh, um, local dues spent locally, that sort of thing. Um, uh, these things are very useful for organization to have. Frankly, you're more transparent than my union, so I want to give you guys credit for that.
Speaker 1:And if people were looking to join a socialist organization, knowing both where and how they get their money is really important. But one of the things you ask is like, if you become a separate party, and now that you have the charter for or what, the clarification of what you mean by a party, um, if you become a separate party with a clearer program, um, manifesting those things regionally, even in a centralist thing, is going to be important. And that's like stuff that you had to do. And you don't really want to adopt the Bolshevik cell structure, probably because even they only adopted it during wartime and during severe repression. Also, when they adopted it, they weren't under people confuse things, they weren't under democratic centralist organization, because why would you be under democratic centralist organization when you can't be openly democratic? Um, and these are things most people don't understand when they come to these questions.
Speaker 1:Uh, so you might go, okay, var, and you've been lecturing us on how you think our organization should work.
Speaker 1:Well, what should we do with it? The question that I have is like um, right now there's a lot of people hinging on mandami and mandami does feel different than the last set of dsa endorsed mayors which, frankly, have not gone that well, um, for a variety of reasons. Um, but it also seems like like a lot of people are disappointed that mandani is acting, like a lot of people are disappointed that Mondani is acting like a progressive the closer we get to the election and I wanted to get how people who are not in New York because really, if we're honest, only the New York contingency in New York City can directly intervene how are they responding to that and how to use this moment and how to feel about it, because it does feel like a lot of people put a lot of weight on this can I come in with two direct responses and then I'll let my other comrades take on the more substantive issues of like Sauron and like the finances of the DSA.
Speaker 6:But okay, first I think that this is sort of like charged with political importance, like it's mom Donnie. Okay, m-a-m-d-n-i. That's the first thing. The second thing I wanted to sort of like register my disagreement with one of the first points that you made about structure in the dsa. Um, a disclaimer like these are two of those opinions. They're like not the opinions of marxist unity group, but like I'm hegelian and like I care about like what structure should do and like in my opinion it should like reflect the political reality on principle and it's just like that. Like people in new jersey should like work together to change new jersey laws and like people in bro, people in Brooklyn, should influence the borough president, I feel like the most rational structure that we can have just mimics whatever contingent historical structure is already given to us. Those are my two points.
Speaker 3:I'll just say about the finances is that the reason that our finances are transparent are the same reason that PSL seems to have so much money when you have membership, or I mean, and not to say all membership organizations are transparent, because we all know that that's not true, but it's dues. It's it's almost entirely membership dues. And then, like some I don't know what the term is bequeathments or stuff like you know, people, people passing away and stuff like that, um, inheritances, uh, but it's almost entirely membership dues. And during a period of time when DSA had a prolonged ideological crisis, that led to a lot, led to the creation of this gigantic ecosystem of post DSA organizations, which I think PSL almost qualifies as, even though that's not where they started at it. You know, during that period of time, we had a financial crisis and the outburst of that Also, apologies about Stack, and DSA doesn't have billionaires to lean back on, and that's the. You know, that's the long and short of it. And some organizations do I'm not going to say which ones.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that is a partial answer to why we don't necessarily have so much money and why some organizations do. One of those two is I don't know to what extent this is true, but generally it's said, SECs tend to have the high dues requirements and DSA really doesn't. We strongly encourage members to get on monthly dues. It helps so much with our financial planning dues. It helps so much with our financial planning and we strongly encourage members. We've been doing our solidarity dues drives kind of constantly for a couple, well, on and off for two plus years now and the idea is to try and get everybody to. We ask for, you know, 1%, for the 99% is the marketing thing, our marketing for it, and we asked everybody to give 1% of their annual income, which is a fairly small amount and for a lot of members it may be less than the $20 or $30 a month they're already paying.
Speaker 4:I have talked to on those calls. I've talked to members who are like it's actually less than I'm already paying, so I'll just keep paying what I am. That is probably, you know, not a huge amount, but it's what we encourage. We don't want to like be huge. You know, members, we don't want to be members we don't want to be, yeah, and then we do have some members who don't pay dues. We have a dues waiver that members can apply for good for one year and we kind of discourage using it as a trial membership thing. But, yeah, we have members who can't forthpay even annual dues and we don't want to leave them out in the cold.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Part of what's changed too is we are in a period of upswing which we are trying to find ways to sustain better, I think. If one thing I'll say, I think the chapters have gotten better over the last couple of years. Not something that um I you know as someone in on pc or I even think necessarily national as dsa um can take credit for um, but a lot of chapters have gotten better retention over the last couple of years. Also, we're hopefully not facing a pandemic breaking out which I think just puts a huge damper on organizing when you can't organize in person. The other thing too is like we have basically got completely new financial staff over the course of 2024.
Speaker 4:And we're doing things now like forecasting. We're getting budgets passed before the fiscal year. I don't mind saying these things because these are all public record. We're doing finance better now. So that's one thing that, like, we're keeping an eye on things. We're not counting money before we have it and we're trying to make sure we have a good grasp on, like, where are we going in terms of our, in terms of our budget? Those are really important things that we are doing now that weren't previously.
Speaker 4:As far as I'm done, yeah, as someone outside of New York, as someone in national leadership, I'm watching with excited trepidation, trepidation. You know I have my concerns about what the messaging means, the kind of shifts in messaging that we're seeing. I mean, you say progressive. That's, I think, fair in some ways again in terms of the messaging, and I think that I would say in terms of messaging just Democrat, because some of it seems to be, in some regard, to make the Democratic establishment happy. The New York Times published something today talking about, I don't know, some crank centrist Democrat who's been a thorn in our side in the state house, I think, in New York and, just you know, throw a line in the article says a Mamdani aide says that you know he will make his own decisions on endorsements and not listen to the DSA, which is very concerning to me as someone who cares about DSA, because one of the things that we always ask of indoor Cs is will you do this?
Speaker 4:So the thing, though, is that I also think, frankly, that one could look at the Dinkins mayoralty in the early 90s and take the wrong lessons. Like, he was very serious about police reform and tops rioted about it, and you could look at that and take the lesson that well, if you're nice to them and don't play up that you're going to get the cops under control, you'll have an easier time working with them to get things up. I don't think that's true. I don't know if that's part of the thought or not. The thing is that any thought process about the campaign is not transparent. Any thought process, any communication happening between there's basically no communication happening between DSA as DSA and the campaign. Whatever communication is happening between NYC DSA and the campaign is opaque. I'll let Ben speak to how much members of New York can actually know about that or influence it. I think the answer is not very much, but that's one of those tough things.
Speaker 4:This seems like the trepidation comes from trying to be like oh, I'll take back that I said cops were racist in 2020. That kind of thing. When you're talking about things like, yeah, we're going to take you know some areas out of the purview of the police, we're going to shift that to social workers, we're going to disband the strategic response group. They're like, you know, protest squad, basically. Um, I don't think making friends with them is going to help that happen. I think it's going to demobilize, uh, supporters who want that to happen, and, and I think it's a recipe for a failed mayor, frankly, and I'm like, okay, is this really reflective of the approach or is it politicking? I don't know, I can't know. That's the trepidation, but that's, as a member outside NYC who has, you know, really very much a sort of class war view of the state, you might say, but classically Marxist view of the state, I would say that's what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1:Ben Leah, anybody want to speak? Or anyone in New York want to speak to the New York situation specifically?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so for a little context, I've been a GSA or NYC field organizer like for five years now, so sort of in there. Uh, I'm field leading for mondani currently, um, and uh, yeah, I like helped out a little bit on some stuff with it. Um, the the thing, the thing I guess I would um. So the points I would make are um, in terms of like the. The really important context here is like the strategy of nyc dsa, um, which is like a very conscious and different thing and that strategy is very much. It is like mostly the strategy of SMC, I would say, with round work, kind of annoyed about it and doing random pushbacks on it very periodically. There was a reso where they were giving a weird pseudo-ultimatum. I swear it was a reso where they were giving a weird pseudo-ultimatum. I swear it was a cool reso. It's a little weird To our CLC, which is our internal parliament, as it were, for the chapter, and that was an ultimatum requiring that all of our electeds support Mamdani by such and such a date or whatever. Didn't really get super. So stuff like that tends to get, stuff like that tends to happen. But for the most part the strategy is.
Speaker 2:The analysis starts from the first sentence of the NYC electoral strategy document, which I would encourage everybody to read and have encouraged, which sort of lays out NYC's strategy for electoral work. Her sentence is the point of socialist electoral work is to pass policies or is to pass socialists? Uh, to push social, uh past socialist policies. Yeah, it's working. Something like that, um, and that kind of and like that immediately implies a majority. Like, like, logically, if you're, like, if you're, if you're, if your analysis of the socialist movement is the reason why people don't vote for socialists is because they can't prove they can get a good. The next thought is okay, how do I get a majority? And they're not wrong to say that, like, if you want a majority, you probably are going to get a majority for socialism.
Speaker 2:And that's like, when I've had these arguments with folks here, that tends to be how they go. When I've had these arguments with folks here, that tends to be how they go. They're just like well, this is the most, this is the farthest realistically he can go on Palestine and get this far. Now, I say all that not to say that I either want. Like it's important.
Speaker 2:Two things are true. One that is true of the chapter strategy. Mamdani is committed to that strategy and the consequences of that strategy is that the general vibe I get is that, like a lot of the, even the right of the chapter is not real happy about how far we've gone, which is not to say we're not like very much in contact. It's just like that's the nature when you have this very passive, policy oriented strategy of like, uh, then these are things that come up, um, I, I last thing I'd say, um, I would just like really, really echo people who are like mumdani is different than AOC. Mamdani was the co-chair of the Queen's Ritual Working Group back in 2018 or whatever. There's a lot of events in between that makes clear Mamdani is very committed to the movement and the organization but, as he understands it, funneled through that experience of the NYC DSA's sort of understanding of DSA.
Speaker 1:Okay, I hope that makes sense. It makes sense. Okay, I hope that makes it makes it. No, that makes sense. Um, I mean, I'm always torn when I respond to, like what's happening with mandani um is that it's very clear to me that he's going to have to hedge his bets, even if he had a more radical position. It is unclear to me how we always online, this is always referred to as disciplining your electeds, which I think is important, but the switch side of that though that is also important is protecting your electeds who actually do try at least try to deliver the goods, and in many cases I have said that like well, I don't you know, if you want to talk about disciplining your electeds, you're going to have to tell me how you're going to protect them too, if they actually keep their end of the bargain, or even if they don't but try to keep their end of the bargain. Or even if they don't but try to keep their end of the bargain, Like when Mamdani's signaling, it's going to be quite hard for us to know what is sincere and what is him placating larger national interest, who? I don't think he can win over anyway, but he might have to pay some lip service too, and I mean the two models that you often see proposed as models for DSA mayors.
Speaker 1:I mean, we don't talk about Chicago very much because that hasn't gone very well. We will mention Jackson Mississippi, but honestly, because that hasn't gone very well, we, we, we will mention Jackson Mississippi, but honestly, that didn't go very well either. That's not the fault of the mayor in that case in that latter case at all, that's the fault of the legislature, the city council and a bunch of other things. But it's the problem of having a mayor sitting alone, and that's always concerned me when we get focused on the executive first. I also, however, know that the way US politics works is that, frankly, people don't pay attention to anything but the executive, and increasingly we live in a Bonaparte estate anyway, or a Caesar estate pick your poison on what you want to call it where the legislative is increasingly less and less powerful. But, for example, if I was to poll people in the DSA right now about whether or not they want to support Newsom and everybody else unleashing the gerrymandering counter to protect democratic seats for clear, obvious but kind of short-term political gain, I don't know where the DSA would stand, but I know where most Democrats would, and I don't think, from what I've seen online, that outside of some very principled people in the various left caucuses, that it would be that different and it's hard to know.
Speaker 1:Then how do you? How do you, how do you even build a legislative based campaign which is like the classical marxist strategy? You go up through the legislative, you don't fuck with the executive until you can seize governmental power and have a majority. How you do that in these sorts of scenarios in our current context? I mean, this is a real question because I don't know the answer. I do know what the classical Marxist proposition would be, but I also know the classical Marxist proposition was really designed for European parliamentary systems. So it's very difficult to go and build from there.
Speaker 1:So the Chicago DSA didn't endorse Brandon. Okay, that's good to know. But I'm going to let you guys answer that and talk about how would this work? How could you protect Mandani if you tried to do so? And for those of you who are wondering, I realize there are political vanities in the pronunciation of his names. I have trouble saying M and N's in the middle of a sentence, our middle of a word period. So let's turn this out and talk and talk about like how you could even do that. Let's think about you. Know you speculate within the limits of what your organization will allow.
Speaker 2:So, oh, let me, before I do that, let me just like say what the cause. This is not a new problem and there is an old American socialist movement and we've there's been a solution. It's the dev solution, which is you run on a platform of getting more left, you run for the executive with the intention of disempowering the executive and like my. So the piece that I like because I can't write anything, it hasn't been written, but the piece I've shouted at like half of the Mondami campaign and most of Mug and like a lot of other people at TSA, is like, yeah, why don't we just do that? Like, look, no, you can't abolish the police overnight, but you can say, no, I can't abolish police overnight, overnight, but you can say, no, I can't abolish police overnight.
Speaker 2:But here are the things I can do, maybe one of the most important of which is to shift power away from the, like the potapartist mayor of new york city to the city council, who really doesn't like having the power, because when they have the power, they can't settle their constituents.
Speaker 2:No, I can't do this. Like it's a very powerful dynamic in ny, uh, in nyc, like I, I, I and like the answer, I've gotten back, I got back, I remember I was talking to like some of the founders of the electoral program back in um march about this and like um, they were basic. Like when we were talking to the campaign people about it, they were like that's july, um, which is like what do you? What do you do later? Um, we're now in july. But I think I think their answer, and like their consistent answer, is like people don't, people don't give a shit about like, like residential powers and like legislative powers, and I I have two thoughts on that. One, I don't think you should run a campaign exclusively on that like I do think the affordability measure has been effective, and I think any new messaging has to like figure out how to integrate that.
Speaker 2:The second thing I would say is yeah, maybe we don't really know how to pitch the legislative stuff at the moment. But also, man, if we can't figure out a way to make democracy politically saleable, we have much bigger problems. I don't know. I don't know how to do it overnight. We've got to start trying. If we're not, what are we doing here?
Speaker 1:Any other takers, we're open.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I'll say I'm not in NYC, so I am not on the inside of their political machine. And I think that our members who are closer to NYC DSA not to say they don't still have their critiques, but I think they tend to be they have their own way of dealing with NYC DSAs, kind of how they like to position themselves and how they like to do their work. You know, I think that's, I think that's one of the reasons Sid was successful in this NPC campaign. I think he was able to articulate a critique that still recognized the strengths and that was, you know, invested in this. I think that I can speak for, you know, a certain you know section of DSA member in general who's, you know, very excited about Mamdani, kind of, as a citizen, I want to see Nanyahu get arrested, like we all want this stuff to happen. But then, of course, yeah, I think that when we talk about I mean, you know, we obviously have a lot of material kind of out there about how we think, you know, we want our candidates to represent their relationship with the party, how they want to actually manage their relationship to the party, how those intermediary, like negotiations are supposed to work out, you, those intermediary, like negotiations are supposed to work out. You know, these kind of dependency structures, and I mean obviously, yeah, I think there does leave a certain amount to be desired here.
Speaker 5:I think that obviously, zoran is a lot more cooperative with NYC DSA than like the PR kind of suggests, right, but also at the same time, you know, is it a purely as agitational campaign? Like, no, like, like we are, you know, I don't know we are trying to win and we are already seeing, like just a lot of concessions being made that I think are unfortunate, because the reality is that Zoran, I think you know, um, especially after actually clinching the nomination, really, really, really has been not talking about this relationship to DSA really at all anymore. Like this is no longer part of the campaign. Um, and this was one of the really strong things about the campaign is, people were all excited about this, and then they, you know, look at a speech and they say, oh, this is a very active DSA member. Like you know, this was awesome for us, you know, because bringing people into the party is a big part of why we want to be running candidates in the first place, and so that is worrisome to me, and maybe it is, you know, a strategic thing, but I I'm very I don't know. I don't really know what it's supposed to necessarily achieve, because I don't think it protects Zoran and his reputation, like people already associated with DSA.
Speaker 5:Regardless, dsa gets mentioned in every you know think piece about this guy. Um, people already see him as this DSA commie guy and there's nothing he can do about it. Um, people, his, his base, likes that about him. Um, and it's it was part of why his campaign, I think, was so successful, Um, and so distancing himself. Now I don't think it's fooling anyone and it doesn't, I don't think, protect us either necessarily, because, again, like the relationship that is there, it's known Um and so it can almost reflect a little bit poorly on us too. I mean, you know we all, we all see the kind of hating from outside the club or whatever, but I think you know we all care about it and want to listen to it and I think that people who were, you know, more excited about a Zoran campaign have lost some faith in the ability for this to be kind of yeah, I don't know a really oppositional win and actually I mean there's going to be gains for the working class. You know what I mean. There's a lot of good stuff about it, so I don't want to say it's a big nothing burger. But, yeah, it seems that there have been concessions made to dilute the politics, to win, and that's not, I don't think, what we want to be doing and I don't think that it reflects well on us.
Speaker 5:And I think that, yeah, there's some nervousness around Zoran and you know whether, because he's bringing a lot of attention to us, he's definitely bringing a lot of attention to us. He's definitely bringing a lot of attention to us. Um, so good or bad? Um, if this I don't know, if the relationship isn't where we want it to be, but then, you know, the heat is kind of being brought down. It makes people nervous.
Speaker 5:Um, whether that's right or wrong, I don't even know if I know enough to say, because I'm not in NYC, I'm not a field lead, and it is kind of opaque, right, and I think that's strategic, but it makes me nervous too. So do I hope he wins, definitely? Do I honestly think he might be a problem for us? I mean, I hope not, but I do. I have heard it. I've heard people saying this and I see where they're coming from and you know it makes me nervous too to I don't know have someone so publicly representing us who, once again, you know, is kind of going to realign with the Dems over us. Like, how many times have we been through this, I don't know. It's disappointing.
Speaker 3:So, first thing, to line out everything else that I'm saying, I'm going to see family this weekend and then this next week I am planning on being in New York City and canvassing for Zora and Momme Because, regardless of everything else I'm going to say after this, we're reaching a tremendous moment in the contradictions heightening because of the success of this campaign. Success of this campaign. I think that all of this is marked in the context of our whole adult lives being defined by false, like politicians who have false claims of authenticity. You know, from Obama to Trump, to Fetterman, to a million way lower scale, uh, politicians, um, you know, it's created a tremendous amount of tension whenever there's like a anything on display and this is not you, but I do think that there's like almost a desire, you know, for him to sell out, because then that would allow us to uh retain on our uh armchair like theory of change, right, and that's like I see that from some ultras who are like this celebrity is better than Zoran Mamdani, and it's like, yes, I believe in a tribunal theory of politics, but politicians are not celebrities. First and foremost. There's a different thing. I think that what is worrying to me?
Speaker 3:Mug put out a bunch of pieces about what should you do with executive office. Should you run in the first place? We've published a lot about that in the last couple of months and the thing that we kind of settled on is like, well, it's going to put you in a new era. You probably shouldn't do it, but I guess we're already doing it and that's not like a satisfying answer and that's not a satisfying answer from us. But also we need to get a whole lot more serious about thinking about like what even like fragments of state power looks like and what like administering some locality is going to look like. Because when I ask people what what they're like why are we running for a majority in city council? Why are we running to have the mayor, you get like jokey answers. And we're so past having like jokey answers about like oh, we'll just rebuild tammany hall and then like give all of our friends like make work jobs.
Speaker 3:You cannot say that we are actually trying to administer parts of the like. We are trying to like figure out some way to like create democracy in this fucking country, and part of that is going to involve some cities having like socialist majority legislatures and at some point in time we have to have an answer to this question and it can't just be jokes and it can't just be like vibes, um, and it is really dangerous because, in the absence of that, what you get is leaning towards the people who have the expert problems, who have the expertise, and I don't think that that's why Material forces are a big part of why someone why Mamdani is choosing to cozy up to the Democratic Party. Donnie is like choosing to cozy up to like the democratic party. This is also, while this is an unfortunate thing to say, like mom.
Speaker 3:Donnie's decision here is not like just a guy going rogue. It is a part of a theory of change, of a threat, of a tendency within DSA, which is a thing that we have to fight out. But all of like, there are material reasons for this, but we have to have clearer alternatives than kind of jokes and a nihilistic desire to be proven right um, yeah, just uh.
Speaker 2:I'm reminded of something that I was talking about, like, because this is not a, this is not just like a cranky dsa left concern either. Like, um, there are like some very basic mechanical problems with this whole pitch here. The whole idea of running for New York City, running for mayoralities, for as long as it's been done, it's been a very, very important part of the American socialist movement for a long time and it's been a mess for a long time. All the money lives in the state. Where's the money coming from? It's going to be an even bigger mess because it's like, in new york city, in order to get that money, you have to get it from the state, and so the plan is, I think, um, to like I've heard people bring this um the uh is to basically make hokal the enemy, like turn, like, look, I can't do this, I can't get these buses because there isn't the money for is to basically make Poco the enemy Look, I can't do this, I can't get these buses because there isn't the money for buses unless the state gives it to us. I can't do the buses because of the governor, which is fine until you think about the fact that you have to get that money for the rest of the state.
Speaker 2:So it's like what's the point here? A lot of for the rest of the state. So it's like what's the point here? And like a lot of there were. The Mondani run was not by the end, it was kind of the fact that we endorsed was kind of a given, but like leading up to it, there were a lot of people in SMC who were pretty skeptical for like these reasons, which is like, if we think about it just in terms of the NYC DSA strategy, which is like passing material reforms, cities are pretty weak in this country, yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyone else. I mean I'll say something and then I'll turn it back over. I think that's a very important point. Point is looking at where funding comes from. States can raise funds, Federal governments can print money, but cities can't do either of those things really. I mean, they're they're either relying on state taxes or municipal bonds, and municipal bonds means you are subject to capitalist. And we can look at Dinkins, we can look at Kucinich back in you know, I think, the eighties or late seventies. We can see the bond market undermine these people, even if the legislatures don't, which usually legislatures do, and I think that's a. That's a good, a good, very important point, and I'm glad that people in the DSA are thinking about it, because the socialist mayor strategy is probably the longest run strategy that electoral socialists have had. I mean that. And city councils if you look at Kassama Sawant I'm unclear if I pronounced that K we can see that it used the resources of an entire organization to maintain that City Council seat. And while Sawant did a lot during her first year, after that first year her city council victories are pretty much just staying on city council, which I even think she herself acknowledged when she stepped down.
Speaker 1:And so these kind of individual campaigns around individual figures always just leaves me in that lurch. And how do you protect them? I guess this brings us to an implicit point in all the discussion here, and maybe some people who haven't talked a lot, like Juno, can speak to this a little bit. You know, can can uh speak to this a little bit. Um, how do you pivot, um, you know uh, around one of the problems with, with, with, with, let's say, left populism and I'm not saying the dsa is running a left populist strategy, I want to like pin that before, before anyone accuses me of accusing you of that but is that popularism always meets people where they are now and we have to acknowledge the material facts of where people are.
Speaker 1:But it's always seemed to me like the purpose of a political program is to move people, not just to like give them what is popular under the current conditions, because you're also wanting to change those conditions. And that seems like a very hard, tight rope to walk, and I mean I can think of one successful you know move for this in US, in US electoral history, and that is Debs. That's, I mean that pretty much is the example of someone trying to do that. But how would you do that today? Because you don't just like.
Speaker 1:On one hand, you have to deliver policies for people, Otherwise they're not going to buy into you. On the other hand and the right has successfully done this and by this I mean the general right, not the DSA right they have changed people's desires by what they put on offer and the way that, like left populist in europe have not been able to do so. You know how do you kind of meet people where they are and simultaneously pull them, and I'm gonna let that be open to anyone. But I want to start with people who haven't been talking as much in this last round.
Speaker 6:Okay, I stacked.
Speaker 6:I'm going to address your last question first. That's fine. You're talking about appealing to people's views the way they are, versus trying to be the force that causes their political development, which we anticipate to have a left-wing shift. I feel like you do that by being really vocal about what you think, and in order to do that, I feel like you have to give up on what you think. And in order to do that, I feel like you have to give up on what you're saying about delivering politics to the people. The way I understand it, it's like you don't want to be part of the governing coalition because then you're responsible for all the bad shit that happens and it's not worth joining that power. And like getting free buses, sometimes like specific lines are all free buses it's like not worth it to do that because you're um, you're making yourself accountable to all of the things that you're, all the evils that you're claiming are caused by capitalism. So the alternative view is that, instead of delivering, you just are really noisy and vocal about what you think your vision for politics is. And you could still do that and fight for reforms based on, not like mutually exclusive things, but like I feel like. That's our, our general views on that.
Speaker 6:The next thing I want to stack about like Zoran and comment about this idea of like electing a socialist mayor. I, for context, like I've been a paid canvasser for multiple New York City electoral campaigns but I didn't participate in the Zoran campaign. But I didn't participate in the Zoran campaign because I didn't. I don't think we should run for mayor. But now that we get a socialist mayor, the question about what he can do is still interesting. So my thoughts here are that he can like I think someone already mentioned this disempower the mayor and empower the city council and then change, maybe, the charter of the city to be like proportional representation and have a more suitable environment for political democracy in our city. I think he has the power or capital to probably do that. He has a bully pulpit. He can be like get on TV and be like immigrants are welcome here, we're going to open the stadiums, we want you here and be a forceful good for immigrant rights.
Speaker 6:I feel like he could also. You know, zoran's campaign is one of the most hopeful mobilizations of volunteer canvassing capacity that we've ever seen. Right, how many was it like 40,000 unique volunteers. That's amazing and, like Comrade Gene's point before about like the person that gets elected sort of like reflects the average view of the canvassers. That like put in the volunteer capacity to make it happen. But it's kind of disappointing because, like we have no mechanisms in place for assessing what those views are of those 40 000 cameras.
Speaker 6:They're not primarily loyal to dsa. Like zonon doesn't really forward that organizational membership really at all in his messaging. Like he's he doesn't deny being a socialist but he's like he's not as vocal as he could be and he doesn't tell his volunteers to join DSA. So it's sort of like a separate loyalty and membership. That's like Zoran's members and in principle what socialist mayor means to me is to promote a democratic process and values. So you should be talking to those members and trying to engage them and ask them what they think, or poll them and then have Zoran's policies reflect those some kind of democratic process where the policies of the elected person are informed by the membership. I feel like that's some of my vision for like if we're gonna have a mayor, what can we do with it? Uh, that's. I think that's what it's okay I'm just gonna be short.
Speaker 3:Um, there's like a tension and, um, the way that, uh, the way that people talk about uh, mom Donnie's witness, that it's like this like culmination of like DSA strategy. But the reality is that New York city DSA, which has an amazing electoral program and started off out of the gate with like a desire to win which you got to give them credit for, but that means that they went by a very norm, like by the book Democrat strategy, of you reach out to your triple prime voters who have voted in the last three primaries, and a lot of SMC's argument is based on this idea that, like socialists are kind of basically progressives and our base is in people who are, uh, partisan democrats and that's why we can't break from the democrats. But while while uh mamdani's campaign is like a reflection of so many smc strategies, its victory doesn't look like that at all. It looked like the thing that we thought was the goal with Bernie and that didn't apparate with Bernie, which was that people who were not politically engaged were going to show up, and we thought that that was going to happen and they did. They did in the streets, but they didn't necessarily show up for a social democratic candidate because their politics weren't there yet and that is maybe the case now.
Speaker 3:I don't again because of what I said about like people almost like wanting to be disappointed, like I don't know. That's not a satisfying answer, but I worry about the resiliency of, like the vast amorphous volunteer base if they don't join DSA. I worry about that, but it's a tension and it's a tension that we're going to actually have to figure out, because in a lot of other DSA chapters that is just the doctrine is you're going for triple prime voters. We're basically, you know, we're doing like pretty typical democratic canvassing. Maybe we're talking a lot more, we're talking about different issues, but structurally it's the same strategy and we're going to have to start rethinking that same strategy, um, and we're gonna have to start rethinking that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, um, I think something like, like you know, and then we're both talking about, I think ben says in a much more eloquent way but, um, I think for a bit has been, you know, I think a socialist executive needs to be, um, needs to be a wrecker.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, uh, social executive needs to be a wrecker. Well, a socialist executive needs to be a wrecker. And if you're going to run for executive, you'd be ready to be a wrecker or a martyr or both. And when I say wrecker, wrecking the state, right, or I mean hell, at least wrecking the executive power, right. Because I think something that is true with many municipalities and certainly true at the federal level the executive has too damn much power, especially in the American system, where the executive is elected separately from the legislature. You know, can essentially override you have a split mandate to essentially override the only like modicum of democracy that exists. So, yeah, I think that would be great, like, try and do that and then that really runs into. Okay, well, what are you promising? How are you going to eat the blood where they're at? That's a good question, um, and it's not one I, I think I necessarily have good answers for, but I think, yeah, you can fight for reforms. While you do that, you can fight for um. I think that you can credibly and you know you were talking about I think she was a pretty good example of this you can pretty credibly um fight for reforms within the system while you indict the system.
Speaker 4:Um, and I think what spelled the interest to want um and you know I I like the point to her vote to confirm the police she's in I want to say 2018, 2019, 2019, as kind of the death knell of her council membership, because their justification for that was well, we think Black voters might not like it if we vote against a Black police chief. They had no idea. They're incapable of having any idea. Um, in some regards, the want modeled a kind of a cartoon. Well, like, she got stuff passed. Um, when the council scruder got stuff passed by initiative, that happened. Um managed to mobilize people for that, but couldn't actually once. Um, the yeah, we're going to have a tax on big employers to help fund, you know, campaigns to or to help fund projects to help, you know, deal with homelessness can pan out anyway, but like once, that was down out anyway. But, um, like, once that was down, what does she have? Um, what do people want to hear from a socialist um in office? They didn't know um, and that's like a problem of the second model, ultimately, is that they can guess um, they can say, hey, here's this thing, you're like um, well, maybe people were like that, maybe not.
Speaker 4:So part of being a people where they're at, I think, is speaking to issues that they have. But then you have to have a good solution, and the solution can't just be a struggle for reforms. You're going to have to, at the same time as you fight for things, be ready to point the finger where it belongs. You know, be ready to point the finger where it belongs when, inevitably, the Democrats screw Mamdani in office. Is he going to be ready, with movement behind him that's ready to go? Yeah, fuck, kathy Hochul, hochul, hochul, I don't know. Anyway, you know, fuck the governor. Is he going to have people, have DSA. But you know, what about the other 40,000? Are they going to be ready to show up in Albany, bust up to Albany, hell, to demonstrate? Um, like, let's get, let's get this happening? Um, probably not. Um.
Speaker 4:So the big question is the big thing is yeah, I mean people where they're at, speak to the things that people need, use that to explain why they're not giving them to.
Speaker 4:And I think that is a thing that is lost in the opportunistic kind of mode of campaigning of well, we're going to win and we're going to do these things, so vote for me because I'll do these things. Good, yeah, but like it doesn't, it doesn't. You have to do that while preparing people for the fact that, like, you're going to be blocked in doing these things. Um, I don't pretend to know exactly how to do that. Um, I believe it can be done. Um, I, I believe I've seen it done, um, but it's just not really something that uh is being experimented with. Um and uh, yeah, with the kind of idea of, like, well, you get an office and you pass good policy, um, how, like um and the the answer um is is not going to be convincing either party's billionaires to have a publicly owned, you know, alternative to I mean New York's, different, I'm sure, but, like you know, you're not going to be. You're not going to convince the Democratic Party to go head to head with Kroger and Allerson's.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, I, I'm, I don't think I'm going to say anything all that different than what other people have said, but I'll just kind of like put it in kind of more, like, kind of simple in general terms, which is just that if we are talking about reforms, we ought to be talking about reforms in the context of a minimum program, you know, as opposed to a maximum program. Without that, okay, if you can pass, you know, reforms, that's awesome. And without tying that into, you know, a genuine party building exercise, bringing people into a party, talking about you know why that's important, you know. And then you know the demand of revolution, of, like, you know, control of society, yada, yada, yada. Without that, okay, a reform passes and it gets seen as, yay, a victory for the strategy of reformism. And you know, people are kind of just going to get channeled into this of like, okay, let's keep fighting for these single issues forever, even though you know they're totally revocable.
Speaker 5:And you know, when there is a failure, I think it also does end up then reflecting on socialism in general in a way that the reforms winning, doesn't? People don't say, oh, wow, socialist politics, it works. I just don't see this happening the same way as when we don't get what we need and what we want. And so you know. And so, okay, you know the reforms, they're political and economic demands, they're meant to be the political and economic demands of the working class. But how can the working class express that? Is it through the party? You know what does that look like? You know, is the democracy there? You know, this is why, you know, we talk a lot about the merger formula and I think, like you know, that's really relevant here. But you know, yeah, it does this actually represent, you know, the working class? And then, yeah, like, how, how do they go about asserting that? There's a lot of little questions that go into it.
Speaker 5:But I think, ultimately, yeah, we want to win reforms, but we don't want to win reforms without talking about why we don't want to just be winning reforms, why, you know why we can't maintain the reforms that we win, why we continue to lose them 50, 60 years later, without a critique of democracy or like the lack thereof in the country, without a greater systemic critique, without talking about the class, without a greater systemic critique, without talking about the class, without talking about party organization and without having really like clear, you know, consistent communications and programming on this stuff.
Speaker 5:You know we put all this work and all this effort and all this time and all this money and we can do that forever.
Speaker 5:And if it doesn't even actually bring people into a party building movement, if it doesn't actually even commit people to the necessity for, you know, revolutionary socialism, like the battle for democracy, you know, however you want to call it it's not that it's worthless like we can maybe improve the organizing conditions for the working class.
Speaker 5:But if we're not even talking about why that's the goal and you know why that's kind of what we're doing, what we're doing, we are really, really wasting all of the energy we're putting in in the first place just to probably pass something we're not going to be able to keep and we don't want to be doing that. Yeah, it is important to, you know, try to win majorities. It is important to kind of talk to people about their class interests in a way they might not be thinking about them otherwise. But if we're not also talking about why they can't like meaningfully assert this will already in the first place and what it would require for them to be able to do it, we're I don't know, we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1:I actually want to reiterate I think two points have been made here and I think they're really good points. One I'd like to reiterate, Juno, where they said that we really should be focusing on the legislature, because that is the more democratic organ of government, in so much that the executive is a democratic organ it is, I mean, only in the most Hobbesian sense and that you elected your sovereign and then let it go. I think Juna made a really good point there. And then I would like to I'd like to think that Aaliyah did summarize Ben John and Amy's points, but with adding the fact that the program a minimum program and for those of you who don't get that language a minimum program is reforms that a socialist party would endorse to get to a socialist conclusion. I mean, it is not just what is popular, it is what is popular within the means of what we're trying to do. And I think it's really important that that be a heuristic or like a rubric for what you would endorse, because if you're just doing populism, I don't know what man like I can make anything popular. If I try like because because people project on to what you're saying to fix it for you. I mean, it's one of those weird things about politics that on one hand everybody's super cynical, On the other hand people fix what is said to them in their head so that when they go to vote for what they think they agree with, they'll just make it what they think, even though it's not that at all. And these tensions are actually somewhat ameliorated by a very clear political program that is relatively simple but does have kind of a reformist plank, and then a goal or a maximum program or whatever. I mean there's lots of ways you can structure this If you want to get socialists arguing argue about what the programs mean, because 50 different Trotskyists will tell me what the transitional program is and I'll get like 40 answers, Same with min-max.
Speaker 1:But the point that I'm making is you do have to have a heuristic to go by, and there's a lot of counter incentives, particularly in our congressional system, to be honest about that and to to state what your actual um goals are, or you'll let some demagogic figure do it. I mean, on the right that's what they tend to have Like unity often on the right wing is not? It's actually ideological civil war all the time, but with some demagogue coming in and representing the chaos of that ideological civil war on the conservative end and I liberals will mistake that as some kind of like clear unity that the right has. That they're just wrong. But I guess you summing up what you guys said here. I'm actually I'm heartened by a lot of this, because this is things that I would also hit on. I'm going to ask you guys to kind of end on a positive note, because we can be super critical here, but I'm actually actually, for the first time in a while, kind of hopeful for the dsa, so I'm going to give you guys a pen about.
Speaker 3:I am really hopeful for you I thought that you were going to say hopeful in general and I'm like are you fucking?
Speaker 1:no, no I'm absolutely not hopeful. The world's gonna fucking end. Um, no, we're running out of time. No, um, uh, but I am hopeful for the DSA, mainly because maybe the stakes are clarifying the people's mind. But so, on that note, I'm actually going to do this silly thing that I actually don't normally get to do, but I want you guys to give me two sentences about things that you have not mentioned in depth, that you are hopeful for through your organization and your caucus, and you can focus on the organizational caucus as you see fit, and we'll start with Juno and then go counter-copylize.
Speaker 6:Crap, I don't know I can come back to you, you know I'm really pessimistic well, me too, but I yeah, it seems like people's natural disposition is much more aligned towards, or sympathetic towards, genuine, authentic socialist politics. I feel like people feel the urgency and socialism is meeting the magnitude of the situation. But that's about it.
Speaker 1:Well, that is hope. Jean, Jean or Jean, I've been very hyper-pronounced, jean.
Speaker 3:It's cute. I appreciate all of it. So one proposal that we had that we didn't mention was our Partious Labor Strategy, which is basically a lot of things, but one of the ideas was, you know, starting to lean on industrial sections, which is the idea of just kind of organizing all the DSA members. The example would be organizing all DSA members, like there's a strike that's ongoing. You look at everybody who works at the set, you find everybody who works at the same thing. You put them together, can be supportive, can be involved with the unionization effort or with the union, but it's just a way to actually have one or like organizational intervention into this moment, rather than all of us kind of like taking off our socialism hats and putting on our labor movement hats whenever we uh engage.
Speaker 3:Um, it it didn't it. It failed like 45 55, which we did not expect at all. There was an unfortunate like. Yeah, there was an unfortunate like. We could have pushed that and won this, similar to the program we could have, like it's an opportunity for the future, but, um, I am working on helping set that up at the local level. It's a thing that we can do at the local level. Um, and I'm excited about creating, like, more opportunities for DSA chapters to just like directly involved, like go in in a helpful way, not in like, but like to take like a moment in this, like labor militancy, and just use it to get more and more people actively thinking about the world that they're interacting with. I think that there's a lot of possibility there.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I don't know if I would say this is something I'm super optimistic about and I think it's going to happen and I can't wait to see it, but I will say that I think, over you know, the last couple years, since last convention, you know, as kind of demonstrated by some of the results we saw at this convention way more unity on, like you know, very explicit anti-Zionism, I think. I mean, I think that was already pretty much where we were at before, but I think it's much more explicit now and I think that's meaningful. I also think we have made strides, especially through the Democracy Commission within DSA, to warm DSA up to our constitutional critique as not just a sort of crank thing that we hammer on to like be quirky, but as like a, like a legitimate, um systemic, uh, political critique that is uh, just increasingly relevant and uh and crucial, um and so then, to that point, I think we are in like a cultural moment where you're seeing on the right, on the left, where you're seeing on the right, on the left, every variety of poor psyopt, pseudo schizo, aka every single person who has a cell phone. You see people asking questions, maybe some the right questions. To a certain degree, you know they're asking about. You know the relationship of Zionism as an organized force to the United States. You know, and I think people are getting a little bit more honest about how, like, really deep and entrenched that loyalty is in that relationship. I also think that, in general, you hear all the time we're in a constitutional crisis, we're in a constitutional crisis, we're in a constitutional crisis. You hear this from everyone, all across the board.
Speaker 5:Okay, so there is, like this kind of on all sides of the political spectrum outside of the socialist movement, people asking these questions and they are being fed the wrong answers by interest groups who want to give them the wrong answers. And I think that DSA is positioned to be a voice of reason in both of these items, where we can answer the question and not act like you know what I mean Like we're not afraid to talk about either of these things and and we don't have to be, and and we know exactly why. Um, these, these are not no, no questions and they're important, um, but we, you know, um have answers that are rooted in concrete, material, historical reality. You know the reality of class interaction, yeah, real geopolitics that we can. You know, that we can demonstrate and we can talk about, you know, at a historical level, at a theoretical level.
Speaker 5:And we can demonstrate and we can talk about, you know, at a historical level, at a theoretical level, and we can channel all of that energy into a broader party building movement, even, you know, if we get creative, you know, maybe even kind of extending beyond DSA or at the very least you know sort of redirect some of that energy toward less schizophrenic, reactionary answers and more genuinely revolutionary conclusions, will we do it? Will we sort of take control of the narrative, you know, for the real legitimate interest of the working class and their mental well-being and, just, you know, powers of reason? I don't know. I'd love to see it happen and I'd love to see us be able to do that. I think we're more primed to do it than any other organized force out there. I just don't see anybody really taking these questions seriously. If they're willing to talk about them at all Okay.
Speaker 2:Ben, um, these questions seriously, if they're willing to talk about them at all, okay then um, yeah, uh, I think I think, um, there's like a whole like kind of start starting with like jumping out home. Someone said there's like this uh, I think about all the time which is him talking in the 1890s about how he was able to hold control of the party and he basically said look at every stage, we knew what we wanted to do. They didn't, and so we wanted to advance. Dsa is working on what it wants to do and people talk all the time about how nasty and how confusing and how not connecting the debates are in DSA. It's like one. It's like night and day, I would say if you just compare our internal debates to other publications, I'm very proud of DSA's intellectual law in terms of strategy debates. I will also say it's getting like every year people say this is the worst convention ever, factually untrue. Every everyone you can just like read the quality of the articles and they go precipitously up. It's like not like it gets much more contentful in time. So I think we are like really one. I think like we kind of are the only game in town which is like in terms of like trying to offer a sort of programmatic response to this moment From a left point of view, like I don't really think there's a lot of, not that we're doing it particularly well, we're trying to figure it out as we go, but um, I I'm, I'm pretty hopeful that like we're building that.
Speaker 2:The other thing I'd say is like I've, uh, I've been working on like national stuff for a few years, like in addition to New York stuff, just cause, like I want to see a stronger national electoral presence, and it's hard, it's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 2:But one thing that and Amy has actually done really good work on, one thing that made me really hope this year and has changed the narrative, I think rightly a lot of debates about national work in DSA is that this year our uh socialist cash for takes out capitalist trash, which is like our fundraiser, where we call members like national, calls members uh to donate to our candidates was able to raise like seventy thousand dollars, which, for the races we're talking about, is a big deal, um and represents a way in like which we're really building up. It's a long way to go, but like we are slowly building up a national infrastructure, um and uh, I would and like, without saying, without being specifics, like I'm for those reasons and for others, like I'm excited about potential like congressional stuff in the next couple years okay, good, Amy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, something I'm excited about um is is kind of a bad thing and I'm going to talk about a little bit outside DSA and I think this has impact inside DSA as things come together the decrease in trust in institutions, and there are definitely those in DSA who would say this is an unqualified bad thing. I've heard multiple times from some comrades. Well, you know, one of the tasks of socialists is to build up trust in the state. My opinion is that's completely backwards. The fact is, people are losing trust in the state and I think it's incumbent on us to nurture that, and I honestly think that's good news for socialists, as long as we can capitalize on it Kind of what I think Leah was saying we need to like.
Speaker 4:I think that there is a lot of space for us to put forward real solutions. Like people lose faith in the system and they vote for people because there's no real alternative. You have Democrats saying, well, actually, the system is fine and you're crazy, and you have Republicans saying you're right, the system is broken and it's their fault. There aren't real solutions to be had from either the Democratic or Republican parties. So I think we're going to have this, continue to have. Unless, you know, unless and until we articulate an alternative, we're going to have this ridiculous oscillation between two parties just keeping worse. But that means there's room for real solutions and that's what socialists have to offer.
Speaker 4:I'm not I don't want to come off as saying it's better for us that things are worse, but it's better for us that people are losing trust in institutions. It's better for us that, like, I mean, in a lot of ways, like a lot of institutions are being laid bare, as just you know don't want to get too much into current events again, but like they have to, like okay, okay, the national parks and monuments and things gonna be just scrubbing information about slavery. Um, this isn't a solution to anything. Um, but that's all the right has to offer. Uh, and you know, socialists have that space to say like yeah, no. I mean yeah, no, the system is broken, you can fix it. Like you don't need these ideologues, you don't need these cult leaders. Basically we can fix it together and here's how. And I think there's space for that. So I think that the fact that you know a lot of things show there's just people in general losing faith in the system as it stands means that there's a lot of space for us to put forward a revolutionary message.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, well, I'm going to plug where the people can find more out about Marxist Unity group. You can go to MarxistUnitycom If you want to find more about the DSA. I guess you can just put the DSA in Google. There's like 85,000 webpages at this point, including the national one. You probably should look at what your local chapter's doing, because that's going to be where you're going to get the most interface and where you should probably join, if you're going to join, and if, uh, if you're going to join, um, and uh, if you don't have a local uh chapter, um, I don't know, contact somebody. Um, I got told yesterday that there's one in my hometown, which, uh, surprised the shit out of me. Oh, excuse me, it's not a, it's not a chapter, yet it's like a exploratory committee or whatever it is when you only have 30 people. I guess that's cool.
Speaker 1:For those of you who don't know where I'm from, I'm from Macon, georgia, and apparently there's now a DSA chapter there. That was really weird. I'm a little bit excited because when I was in 2007, when I first explored the DSA back in the bad times, you thought it was hard to be a socialist. Now Try being a socialist. In the aughts, the DSA, there was nothing that had any. I don't think there was nothing that had any. I don't think there was anything that had any formal recognition in the state of Georgia, much less than Macon. So that's interesting and so, yeah, check that out If you were interested.
Speaker 1:I like to thank all of you for your time. This was a longer episode. It's about two hours. For those of you on the East coast it's like the next day, so I want to let everyone go, and this will be out, I believe, the first week of October or the last week in September, so it will be out relatively soon. We are recording it on the 16th of September, just so people wonder if there's any specific dates you're wondering about. All right, and on that, good night.
Speaker 5:Thanks so much for having us Read Light and Air.
Speaker 1:Check it out. It's actually interesting Up to 10.
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