Interesting and thoughtful as usual- Freddie have you written up something on your experiences (and takeaways) from your time in the anti-Iraq war protest movement? I would love to read that.
I would also be curious to hear more about protests--my experiences in the Iraq war protests and OWS have led me to believe that protesting is often ineffectual and inferior to other methods, such as getting onto local boards to wield actual political power. My experience with BLM has led me to believe that protesting can lead to catastrophic policy failures. I am quite soured on protesting overall, but I am curious what Freddie's takeaways are, as he is far more involved in such things.
He has, a bit. In this essay here he mentions being kicked out of an anti-war group so they can implement decision-making by consensus, and I remember reading that story in another essay. I have no idea where you'd find it now, though, since so much of his old work has been deleted.
I'm on the organizing committee for one of the working groups of NYC DSA and I'm thrilled to have your praise. I doubt that anyone I know in DSA would not want the praise of someone involved in housing activism in New York.
You're correct that a lot of members probably couldn't give you a coherent definition of Democratic Socialism and I don't think I did know that DSA was explicitly founded as anti communist. I only really know the history back to the Barbara Ehrenreich era. I also suspect I don't share the all of the views of our chapter or national leadership, in fact I don't particularly like some of the city wide leadership.
But here's the thing: I don't give a shit about all that right now. Our Working Group is fanatically devoted to one project right now that I believe in entirely. It will be an unambiguously good thing for the people of the City and it will be a blow against some of the most powerful corporations in the world. DSA at this point just gives an organizational structure to operate within and institutional power.
I would also note that AOC criticism is alive and thriving in the DSA discussion forums. It feels sometimes like people assume that DSA members don't criticize the people we helped get elected (because DSA is just The Democrats...something), but that's just not the case. We read twitter, the same disappointment you see on Twitter is present in the DSA forums, and there's plenty of good discussion about what it means for the left.
I think its less relevant whether a handful of people are criticizing AOC on an obscure message board somewhere, and more relevant than no one thought ahead of time, "How are we going to exercise organizational discipline against this person we are endorsing if they get into office and turn out to be yet another milquetoast centerist Dem?"
you're belittling the internal conversations on DSA forums that are addressing the exact thing that you wish would be addressed. They didn't happen "ahead of time" because AOC was the first of her kind, there was no one with that level of institutional power that even theoretically could be accountable to DSA before. I personally knocked on doors for AOC, but I didn't think she was going to win. I just did it out of spite at Joe Crowley and the Democrats (and even if I am sometimes disappointed in AOC, I have no regrets).
Now there are like a half dozen congresspeople, hundreds of state legislators, and city council members all over the country with DSA endorsement. The people who were put there with the backing of DSA know the consequences of losing that organizational support or even worse having to oppose it in an election. Particularly for the smaller elections like a State Legislature - the backing of a local DSA Chapter can give you dozens of volunteers for your campaign which is hard to come by in any other milquetoast State Leg election that nobody pays attention to.
and like I don't mean intend to be defensive about DSA discussion boards, of course they are obscure to the average person. But that's where internal conversations take place, and lots of people there are aware of it when AOC bends to centrism.
I hear you and I am glad those conversations are starting to happen now. I guess the difference I was trying to highlight is the difference between individual moralism and building institutional power.
The individual moralism is perfectly content to just condemn AOC's bad takes on Palestine (and I agree that even given that, she's still a net improvement to Crowley). Building institutional power is going to take a lot of organizing work from outside the political system to give us enough muscle to scare our politicians into compliance. There are a *ton* of influences once someone has been elected to office that are all arrayed to pull the to the right.
And I want to make this clear, I am a dues paying and active DSA member that does my damnest to show up for everything that I can. I've knocked doors in a few races that I wasn't necessarily totally in agreement with because that's what the chapter was doing.
I do have to admit that I kind of loath the DSA discussion boards. I've been there a few times and found they are almost completely overrun with people that need to log off the damn computer and go talk to people in the real world.
ah ok I think I misunderstood your critique a bit. And yeah I don't really participate in the DSA discussion boards either. I'm fairly involved in ground level things that I care about, so I mostly look at them for an occasional temperature check on what is going for the broader org.
You're right that there is no formal accountability structure. I think it just hasn't come up because we are so new to having any power at all - again, I didn't even expect AOC to win. I think it's all still fairly informal right now.
"I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known from activism in the past 20 years who have started out as Dem critics, gotten some sort of pro activist gig or started some sort of respectable organization, sworn to me that they would never become part of the toothless left wing of the party, and then gone on to do that in short order."
And those were almost certainly the people who accomplished the most actual good. They were the people who got themselves elected to the boards and councils that you protest to, and cast the actual votes that actually did something.
Ditto AOC. I read that article you linked to that supposed tells us what's so bad about her, and yet all it says is that she met with a Jewish group. Yeah, ya gots to meet with the people whose votes ya need. Geez.
Local activism is great and important, but getting to be one of the decision makers is far more effective. And that requires allies. And those potential allies are mostly Democrats.
Freddie, you often write about the need for political action to be effective, and then turn around and counsel people to, for example, not work to elect HRC in 2016, thus leading to the appointment of hundreds of right-wing judges by Trump, in front of whom you and the DSA will now uselessly protest.
Your basic premise is simply incorrect: more establishment organizations fail to accomplish anything as a matter of habit. Your assumption that a more Democrat-friendly and institutional group must be effecting change is just... not how many of these groups operate. I'm in New York City; you can't walk down the street without bumping into some mid-level manager at a nonprofit that does nothing, again and again, and yet never stops receiving donations from wealthy Manhattan liberals looking for a tax dodge. It's a tale as old as time.
And AOC's rhetoric has changed on Palestine when much of her rhetoric about other things has not. And that sucks.
You are assuming that the good comes directly from the groups. It does not. It comes from getting their allies into governmental positions of power. And this is very much a Democrat-Republican battle, with everything else a tiny sideshow. See, again, the number of judges appointed by Trump (vs who Hilary would have appointed) and the VAST amount of power they will now wield for decades to come. Everything DSA has done or will do for the next thirty years is a flyspeck compared to that. This is what you do not seem to understand.
"On Thursday, a group of leading progressive members of Congress offered a rare break from party unity, giving fiery speeches on the House floor that accused Mr. Biden of ignoring the plight of Palestinians and “taking the side of the occupation.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York directly challenged the president, who had asserted that Israel had a right to defend itself. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” she asked in an impassioned address. “Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”" NYT, May 15.
But yeah, keep throwing AOC under the bus. She'll get primaried in 2022 by some dickwad centrist white guy (like the one she beat in a big upset) and the left will stand on the sidelines, AGAIN, because PURITY!!!
Are you serious? Because in a genuine collapse situation leftists don’t have nearly enough firearms relative to the other side to be anything other than roadkill.
Well the *current* leftists. But new ones would presumably be made in the aftermath. Greece has a pretty vigorous left (ok, by US standards) despite the fact they killed off their communists in a civil war.
This is, as usual, an incredibly well written article. The DSA thing is such a mystery to me. I was very active in left wing (primarily Marxist but there were so few of us you had to expand out) from about 1998-2004. Then I spent about a decade involved in Democratic politics, then became completely apolitical for a few years.
I cannot express the shock of coming back to politics and seeing a bunch of people proclaiming themselves as socialists. This was bizzaroland. To have been there in those brutal post-9/11 years and then Rip Van Winkle style wake up to socialism being trendy and cool was - and still is - surprising beyond words.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that DSA elects candidates who (at least the ones I know of on a national level) campaign as champions of the working class and then in office immediately become the standard bearers for [whatever is the nice way of saying woke politics]. Plus, I left the Democratic Party when I realized they were committed to not just rehabilitating the criminals behind the Iraq War but actively returning control of the party to them. DSA still wants you to vote for those people, which makes it difficult for me to view them with much charity. Of course, I doubt anyone there is losing sleep over the opinions of the five of us left in America who still remembers the illegal and immoral murder we unleashed on that country.
Weirdly, despite all that, I still feel some affinity for them.
I'm not in this space at all, but it's related to a long-standing question I have about the effectiveness of protests. It seems like you're praising DSA for showing up and that seems important for recruiting and solidarity, but this seems secondary to whether the protest actually works, which is something curious outsiders have questions about. Are the tenants being helped? Maybe it's too soon to say.
Of course in general, the answer is going to be that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's going to depend on what you mean by "works." But I think something a writer with connections in this space could do is find and share success stories? Not necessarily flashy, just examples of getting things done.
I named one. In a political space like New York, local activism actually matters for a great number of reasons, especially issue specific activism. There are so many structures in place that relate the legislative representatives to the groups that are made up of the people. The Housing Safety and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 is an immensely consequential law for how people actually live their lives in New York City, and it absolutely would not exist in anything like its current form without years and years of dedicated activist work.
Yes, that seems like a great example. Who is writing about this story - how the battle was won and how the tenants are benefiting? Does anyone have links to share?
Interesting and thoughtful as usual- Freddie have you written up something on your experiences (and takeaways) from your time in the anti-Iraq war protest movement? I would love to read that.
I would also be curious to hear more about protests--my experiences in the Iraq war protests and OWS have led me to believe that protesting is often ineffectual and inferior to other methods, such as getting onto local boards to wield actual political power. My experience with BLM has led me to believe that protesting can lead to catastrophic policy failures. I am quite soured on protesting overall, but I am curious what Freddie's takeaways are, as he is far more involved in such things.
Research has found places with blm protests saw a 15-20 percent decline in police homicides, which saved hundreds of lives https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
They also found that there were 1,000-6,000 more homicides in those cities (https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crime-ferguson-effects-murder), which seems to me to be a questionable trade-off
He has, a bit. In this essay here he mentions being kicked out of an anti-war group so they can implement decision-making by consensus, and I remember reading that story in another essay. I have no idea where you'd find it now, though, since so much of his old work has been deleted.
When I find time. Hopefully soon.
I'm on the organizing committee for one of the working groups of NYC DSA and I'm thrilled to have your praise. I doubt that anyone I know in DSA would not want the praise of someone involved in housing activism in New York.
You're correct that a lot of members probably couldn't give you a coherent definition of Democratic Socialism and I don't think I did know that DSA was explicitly founded as anti communist. I only really know the history back to the Barbara Ehrenreich era. I also suspect I don't share the all of the views of our chapter or national leadership, in fact I don't particularly like some of the city wide leadership.
But here's the thing: I don't give a shit about all that right now. Our Working Group is fanatically devoted to one project right now that I believe in entirely. It will be an unambiguously good thing for the people of the City and it will be a blow against some of the most powerful corporations in the world. DSA at this point just gives an organizational structure to operate within and institutional power.
I would also note that AOC criticism is alive and thriving in the DSA discussion forums. It feels sometimes like people assume that DSA members don't criticize the people we helped get elected (because DSA is just The Democrats...something), but that's just not the case. We read twitter, the same disappointment you see on Twitter is present in the DSA forums, and there's plenty of good discussion about what it means for the left.
I think its less relevant whether a handful of people are criticizing AOC on an obscure message board somewhere, and more relevant than no one thought ahead of time, "How are we going to exercise organizational discipline against this person we are endorsing if they get into office and turn out to be yet another milquetoast centerist Dem?"
you're belittling the internal conversations on DSA forums that are addressing the exact thing that you wish would be addressed. They didn't happen "ahead of time" because AOC was the first of her kind, there was no one with that level of institutional power that even theoretically could be accountable to DSA before. I personally knocked on doors for AOC, but I didn't think she was going to win. I just did it out of spite at Joe Crowley and the Democrats (and even if I am sometimes disappointed in AOC, I have no regrets).
Now there are like a half dozen congresspeople, hundreds of state legislators, and city council members all over the country with DSA endorsement. The people who were put there with the backing of DSA know the consequences of losing that organizational support or even worse having to oppose it in an election. Particularly for the smaller elections like a State Legislature - the backing of a local DSA Chapter can give you dozens of volunteers for your campaign which is hard to come by in any other milquetoast State Leg election that nobody pays attention to.
and like I don't mean intend to be defensive about DSA discussion boards, of course they are obscure to the average person. But that's where internal conversations take place, and lots of people there are aware of it when AOC bends to centrism.
I hear you and I am glad those conversations are starting to happen now. I guess the difference I was trying to highlight is the difference between individual moralism and building institutional power.
The individual moralism is perfectly content to just condemn AOC's bad takes on Palestine (and I agree that even given that, she's still a net improvement to Crowley). Building institutional power is going to take a lot of organizing work from outside the political system to give us enough muscle to scare our politicians into compliance. There are a *ton* of influences once someone has been elected to office that are all arrayed to pull the to the right.
And I want to make this clear, I am a dues paying and active DSA member that does my damnest to show up for everything that I can. I've knocked doors in a few races that I wasn't necessarily totally in agreement with because that's what the chapter was doing.
I do have to admit that I kind of loath the DSA discussion boards. I've been there a few times and found they are almost completely overrun with people that need to log off the damn computer and go talk to people in the real world.
ah ok I think I misunderstood your critique a bit. And yeah I don't really participate in the DSA discussion boards either. I'm fairly involved in ground level things that I care about, so I mostly look at them for an occasional temperature check on what is going for the broader org.
You're right that there is no formal accountability structure. I think it just hasn't come up because we are so new to having any power at all - again, I didn't even expect AOC to win. I think it's all still fairly informal right now.
Great piece. Would love to hear more as well on the 'nuts and bolts' of organizing from your experience
"I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known from activism in the past 20 years who have started out as Dem critics, gotten some sort of pro activist gig or started some sort of respectable organization, sworn to me that they would never become part of the toothless left wing of the party, and then gone on to do that in short order."
And those were almost certainly the people who accomplished the most actual good. They were the people who got themselves elected to the boards and councils that you protest to, and cast the actual votes that actually did something.
Ditto AOC. I read that article you linked to that supposed tells us what's so bad about her, and yet all it says is that she met with a Jewish group. Yeah, ya gots to meet with the people whose votes ya need. Geez.
Local activism is great and important, but getting to be one of the decision makers is far more effective. And that requires allies. And those potential allies are mostly Democrats.
Freddie, you often write about the need for political action to be effective, and then turn around and counsel people to, for example, not work to elect HRC in 2016, thus leading to the appointment of hundreds of right-wing judges by Trump, in front of whom you and the DSA will now uselessly protest.
Your basic premise is simply incorrect: more establishment organizations fail to accomplish anything as a matter of habit. Your assumption that a more Democrat-friendly and institutional group must be effecting change is just... not how many of these groups operate. I'm in New York City; you can't walk down the street without bumping into some mid-level manager at a nonprofit that does nothing, again and again, and yet never stops receiving donations from wealthy Manhattan liberals looking for a tax dodge. It's a tale as old as time.
And AOC's rhetoric has changed on Palestine when much of her rhetoric about other things has not. And that sucks.
You are assuming that the good comes directly from the groups. It does not. It comes from getting their allies into governmental positions of power. And this is very much a Democrat-Republican battle, with everything else a tiny sideshow. See, again, the number of judges appointed by Trump (vs who Hilary would have appointed) and the VAST amount of power they will now wield for decades to come. Everything DSA has done or will do for the next thirty years is a flyspeck compared to that. This is what you do not seem to understand.
"On Thursday, a group of leading progressive members of Congress offered a rare break from party unity, giving fiery speeches on the House floor that accused Mr. Biden of ignoring the plight of Palestinians and “taking the side of the occupation.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York directly challenged the president, who had asserted that Israel had a right to defend itself. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” she asked in an impassioned address. “Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”" NYT, May 15.
But yeah, keep throwing AOC under the bus. She'll get primaried in 2022 by some dickwad centrist white guy (like the one she beat in a big upset) and the left will stand on the sidelines, AGAIN, because PURITY!!!
> DSA is not my ideal vehicle, or even the most likely path to socialist resurgence.
What do you think is the most likely path to socialist resurgence?
collapse
Are you serious? Because in a genuine collapse situation leftists don’t have nearly enough firearms relative to the other side to be anything other than roadkill.
No, not really serious.
Ok good. 😆
Well the *current* leftists. But new ones would presumably be made in the aftermath. Greece has a pretty vigorous left (ok, by US standards) despite the fact they killed off their communists in a civil war.
This is, as usual, an incredibly well written article. The DSA thing is such a mystery to me. I was very active in left wing (primarily Marxist but there were so few of us you had to expand out) from about 1998-2004. Then I spent about a decade involved in Democratic politics, then became completely apolitical for a few years.
I cannot express the shock of coming back to politics and seeing a bunch of people proclaiming themselves as socialists. This was bizzaroland. To have been there in those brutal post-9/11 years and then Rip Van Winkle style wake up to socialism being trendy and cool was - and still is - surprising beyond words.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that DSA elects candidates who (at least the ones I know of on a national level) campaign as champions of the working class and then in office immediately become the standard bearers for [whatever is the nice way of saying woke politics]. Plus, I left the Democratic Party when I realized they were committed to not just rehabilitating the criminals behind the Iraq War but actively returning control of the party to them. DSA still wants you to vote for those people, which makes it difficult for me to view them with much charity. Of course, I doubt anyone there is losing sleep over the opinions of the five of us left in America who still remembers the illegal and immoral murder we unleashed on that country.
Weirdly, despite all that, I still feel some affinity for them.
I'm not in this space at all, but it's related to a long-standing question I have about the effectiveness of protests. It seems like you're praising DSA for showing up and that seems important for recruiting and solidarity, but this seems secondary to whether the protest actually works, which is something curious outsiders have questions about. Are the tenants being helped? Maybe it's too soon to say.
Of course in general, the answer is going to be that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's going to depend on what you mean by "works." But I think something a writer with connections in this space could do is find and share success stories? Not necessarily flashy, just examples of getting things done.
I named one. In a political space like New York, local activism actually matters for a great number of reasons, especially issue specific activism. There are so many structures in place that relate the legislative representatives to the groups that are made up of the people. The Housing Safety and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 is an immensely consequential law for how people actually live their lives in New York City, and it absolutely would not exist in anything like its current form without years and years of dedicated activist work.
Yes, that seems like a great example. Who is writing about this story - how the battle was won and how the tenants are benefiting? Does anyone have links to share?
I've posted this link thousands of times over the years to attack NIMBYs.
"I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes."
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes