Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, friends. Dick Flack here with another episode of Talking Strategy, Making History, along of course, with Daraka Larimore Hall. And we're together today when something's happened that really, I think, interests us and involves our history, which is that dsa, the Democratic Socialists of America, have gone viral over the last few days.
And that's not accidental nor surprising in a way, because the success of DSA backed candidates in the recent primary elections is what has triggered that degree of attention.
And both of us have very long connections with dsa. I joined esoc, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, at the behest of Michael Harrington, who personally called me when he was founding it. I was one of the SDS generation that had been very antagonistic to Harrington when he was at the stage of really thinking we were going over to support of Fidel Castro and he had to stop us. He changed a lot of his political views in the 60s around the New Left, realized that he made some misjudgments about who we really were.
And in the early 70s was calling people like me and saying, I'm forming this new entity and I've split from the Socialist Party. We need a new socialist organization and I'd love to have you join it.
And I did. I never was very active in dsa. Went to maybe one or two national gatherings of DSA in early days.
And I liked being a member because they didn't ask me to do anything. I liked it as an organization. I could support and therefore claim a socialist connection, but didn't feel that it was getting very far organizationally. But the big time that we really had connecting with Mike and with DSA was at the Democratic convention in 1980, and that's relevant to our story today.
Mickey was encouraged by DSA people to run as a delegate to the convention, as a Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy delegate. And she got a lot of votes in Santa Barbara to send her to New York, to Madison Square Garden. And they formed the Socialist Caucus. There were like 40 or 50 delegates out of 2000 who identified with DSA then.
And we formed a Socialist Caucus which was covered heavily by the European press at that convention, but not by any American press.
And just to say that Mike Harrington, the one big thing that happened in, under his leadership at that convention was to convene a big meeting in New York's town hall of what he called the Democratic Agenda. And it was a.
It was an array of movement leaders who were connected to the Democratic Party as well as to move them. So you had people like Gloria Steinem, you had Several labor leaders on the platform, civil rights folks.
And that was the framework that he thought would help build a left wing in the Democratic Party, the Democrat. It wasn't DSA that would build it, but DSA helping build this coalition of social movement grassroots leadership, especially strong labor membership. That was of course that was very much his strategic idea to have labor lead the change of the Democratic Party. Not much of that was happening was forthcoming at that time, but in a certain way it helps lay the groundwork for what is happening now.
And you Durock? I have much more connection with DSA after the period that I'm talking about. Why don't you say what that was?
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Well, yeah, but before I jump into that, which in my experience, you know, and DSA was mostly the. In the 90s.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: But I think one of the things about your story that's important to emphasize and, and clarify is that the. Or the organization that was active at the Democratic convention in 1980 and 82, because at that time the Democratic Party nationally had conventions every two years with the off the non presidential year being for policy discussion.
Which is a really important thing to, to think about in terms of how much the party apparatus that was built by activists in the Democratic Party starting in the 60s that was really trying to make it function like a normal political party, including having national conventions that highlighted policy discussion and what the party was for and what its values were. And that was very brief time period because these were eliminated in the mid mid 80s. But anyway, the, the organization that was active in that sphere and you know, spearheaded that Democratic agenda coalition which was very successful actually in platform fights in 82.
The, you know, that was, that was DSOC, that was the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: And that was the organization on who. Whose behalf Harrington reached out to at like the first generation of the New Left that you were so, so much a big part of to try to repair things.
And, and that in between your. That time period that you just described and me getting involved, D Sock merged with the New American movement to become DSA in the mid-80s.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: I would argue a sort of second rapprochement, a sort of second union of different left forces. Because NAM had come out of the later student movement, the later New Left. That was more. That was communist, you know. And that was like if, if the old anti communist Social Democrats of DESOC make them a caricature, were like afraid of the first generation of SDS leaders for being too soft on communism. The second wave was actually communist. Like it actually was sort of what they were worried about. And so, so that was a kind of even more significant, in a way, political reunion or, or, or union or reckoning or something.
And so the organization that I joined was one that had both a tradition of we should work inside the Democratic Party. We're part of the left coalition of the Democratic Party, along with the actually existing trade unions, which were not always super progressive, but we would work with the ones that exist and that are like that. So there was like that heritage and then there was one that was much more movement based, student activist based, radical, influenced by revolutionary and radical movements abroad, interested in American foreign policy from a critical lens. And you could see both of those things reflected. So I got active in DSA through the youth organization in the early 90s at the University of Chicago. And it was a very small organization, only a few chapters, I think maybe, you know, maybe eight to ten at the top. At the, at a sort of high point of my tenure, it had been a bit bigger than that. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was a period of resurgence of student activism after a period of time of sort of abeyance. But that student activism was ideologically much more influenced by anarchism than socialism.
And so the DSA youth section, which then became YDS and then after my time has become ydsa, Young Democratic Socialists of America. You know, we, we're just sort of one of the few national student organizations, even though we were really small. So a lot of our activism was in coalition with other larger national student organizations, trying to add some coherence to things. And it was a time period where issues around globalization and the globalization of the economy were front and center manifested in this anti sweatshop movement on campus and then also, you know, anti prison divestment movements.
You know, these were the sorts of day to day activist projects that we'd be involved in. And then, and the, the national organization was sort of similar on a non campus, in a non campus way, like getting involved in different coalitional efforts, holding seminars and workshops and speeches and so forth, education programs about socialism.
And it was at the time, this is really crazy to think about, it was at the time, at 8 to 10,000 people, the largest socialist organization in the United States.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: And that wasn't saying very much, obviously.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: No, no.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Well, I mean in terms of actual size, it was. Yeah, it's tiny.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: That's minuscule. That's minuscule. And, but, but just to put our conversation about the present, the DSA today in context for folks. So is that in the 90s and into the 2000s, DSA was the largest socialist organization in the U.S. and in fact, at least by some calculations, like if you, if you really added all of the other ones up, was still smaller than dsa, right? That's how small the entire socialist milieu, socialist environment was. So very strange time period. But the last thing I just want to say in order to situate, you know, the DSA and the Doldrums era, the old dsa, is that even though it was this coalition of people who had, you know, come through various radical movements of the 60s and 70s and people more tied to a, an older social Democratic aligned model, I'd say the majority of folks were interested in like what was happening inside the Democratic Party, saw that as like the relevant space for political activism.
But after the DSOC era and the Democratic Party getting rid of midterm conventions, the, and the triumph of Clintonite third way centrist forces in the Democratic Party, its corporatization, the further erosion of its grassroots organizational base, all of those things led Harrington and everyone else, really, even on that de Soc tradition, to kind of give up on actually doing anything around that analysis, that the Democratic Party should be transformed and should be our political home and all of that.
So during my tenure it was a very strange kind of stasis of our arguments, our analysis, our ideology. Like what you'd say to people and talking to them about joining was like, yeah, we think we should work inside the Democratic Party, but we really weren't. We weren't working inside the Democratic Party, not really very much at all. And absolutely crucially, we were not in any kind of organized or systematic way doing electoral work around or within the Democratic Party. We just thought that that's what people should do. And to the extent other progressives were doing it, we supported them and you know, we're all about it. DSA was active or is like part of the mix that created the Working Families Party in New York, things like that. But it's not until now, it is not until right now that the ideas of the Harringtonite old DSA of inherited from DSOC that there should be a big left in the Democratic Party, that it should be, as much as possible, should be aligned with socialism and socialists should be like active and front and center and a big part of it.
It's not until today that that's happening.
And as we've discussed, the irony is within DSA as an organization, there's a ton of confusion, argument, theoretical debate going on about whether they should actually embrace the strategy that they are doing and creating a lot of ripples.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Well, the thing I want to think, I want to focus on is something I've been thinking about and written about really for a number of years about the contradictions inherent in an organization, the way DSA has operated. And it's not just dsa, it's the whole history of the American left have been these what I would call party type organizations.
And I'll try to spell out what I mean by that in a minute because I think that the, this is what I'm at the moment quite a bit worried about in terms of this, I think, quite terrific way that the DSA people who have been active in the electoral effort, they, they've done this terrific job in New York and in other places, much more than I would have ever expected and I didn't really know about in building on the grassroots level, an electorally oriented base and creating and encouraging candidacies of people who are really talented politicians. This is pretty unusual, you know, in the recent history of certainly socialist electoral interests in the United States.
In a way, it echoes the beginnings of the Socialist party in the 20th century when they did run candidates all across the political spectrum, all across the country. How many congresspeople were elected? At its peak, this is before World War I, I think it was four.
And when they refused to vote for the war, they were expelled by Congress from their ranks.
In Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, the Socialist, for some reason the Socialist Party was strong enough in the city of Milwaukee for decades elect the city government there. And that's interesting because tomorrow the Wisconsin primary looks like the governor Democratic candidate's going to be a DSA member, which is unexpected and in a way very remarkable. She, like several of the people we're seeing, they've come from not from the normal ranks of politicians and overtaken and surpassed their popularity by far in some of these elections.
So that's all fascinating and terrific, I think, but as you kind of were alluding to, DSA is not really united around this electoral direction.
That's point one. But the thing I really want to focus on is a contradiction in the very nature of the Democratic socialists of America in being this kind of force. The contradiction is rooted in the fact that it wants to have its own platform that covers the waterfront, so to speak, covers all kinds of issues and takes positions on issues that, that from the point of view of the members of the organization are deliberately advanced ideas about a number of things, but ones that are not necessarily going to be popular or well received initially by lots of People one role of a socialist organization is not to be a majoritarian force so much as an advantage scarred in the thinking of society at large.
And you know, the socialist program of 1910 became the new part of the New Deal 20, 25 years later.
Very influential on a lot of the social programs and perspectives of the New Deal, not under the name of socialism, but under the New Deal label.
And you know, by the way, just as a footnote, a lot of the conversation right now is are these democratic socialists really socialists? Aren't they just New Dealers? I would like to turn that around and I think Mike Harrington did. The New Deal was socialism without the name of socialism. To some extent it didn't wasn't that different from European social democratic parties that didn't adopt a sort of socialist label. And I think even in the 30s that was not a secret.
It was part of what was going on that socialist ideas were influential in this country, not necessarily calling them socialists, but recognizing they had some of those roots.
And so anyway, the thing I want to emphasize though really was triggered just yesterday by watching what's her name Now I'm blocking on her name. The, the co chair of the, of the dsa.
She was interviewed first on Fox and then by David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour.
And what she was on Fox, this went viral.
She said that Fox said well we want to give you a true false quiz. And she agreed to do this.
And they said so is it true that DSA wants to abolish the Senate? She said yes.
And what about the Supreme Court? She said, yep, that's true too. And so they went down this litany of ideas that 99% of Americans had never heard about abolishing, you know, established institutions. And I think the Fox News person was pretty excited about having all of this confirmed by, by the DSA co chair as characterizing DSA and that then David Remnick, I think to his credit, the New Yorker's credit, brought her on for a more extended conversation. So she was able to explain herself a bit more fully. But I think this is part of the contradiction is that there's a platform, I'm not even sure how, or a policy almost manifesto that the DSA has issued that contains many ideas about many things.
But candidates running in mainstream elections, you can't run on a lot of those principles. Those are principles that have to be debated in the larger society because before candidates hoping to get majority votes can win. And the candidates, like Mamdani is a great example, ran on a very Popular agenda of ideas and policies that are needed by people in their daily lives.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: But he also talks about Eugene Debs.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Well, sure, he talks. Yes. And he doesn't deny broader political context. Exactly. But he doesn't say, well, our aim is to abolish the Supreme Court. I mean, that's an important, maybe a very important debate to be had.
That's maybe. I mean, Harold Meyerson just wrote a piece saying part of the problem with DSA is there's a lot of graduate students who are in it. And as you well know, that that's a different political discourse framework from what most Americans experience. I'm not saying it's a bad political framework. It's a. Can be a very creative one, but it's very different from running in majority, you know, wanting to get a majority of people to vote for you in a. In a. Yeah, of course. Election. Yes. I think structurally there's an inherent problem, and that is to try to build your organization around a set of ideas in which factions debate each other and pass resolutions at conferences and those ideas then become what the organization stands for. All of that is not necessary for an effective socialist organization to exist because DSA will say, we're very diverse organization. There are many different viewpoints within it. Well, if those viewpoints are within it, why have a common platform on all these issues in which people then devote tremendous energy to winning the argument within the organization?
As far as I can tell, SVS was founded.
It didn't stay this way, but it was founded on the idea that we weren't doing resolutionism. That wasn't our goal as an organization. We were.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: It was founded at a conference in which people passed a lengthy, deeply ideological.
[00:22:09] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Bird's Eye View document that still, people still resonate with.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Today.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: That's right. But yeah, I just think that this
[00:22:19] Speaker B: is a couple of very classic tensions that exist in small D democratic politics.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: That people are like, I don't know, overwrought about, freaking out about. Because it's novel in an American context. And I say novel because it's just coming back. And so let me back up the idea that an organization that puts forward candidates can influence those candidates after they're put forward, after they're elected.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: That that basic idea is what makes DSA party like, makes lots of organizations party like and is the core reason for existence of political parties from a progressive democracy building standpoint. Obviously there's other models of political parties, but the point, I mean, is that there being some way that a group of people decide on a set of principles. Those principles shape the platform that the candidates run on so that when voters vote, they're voting essentially on a platform, not just on a personality. That's the main contribution to democracy that political parties, unions that engage in politics, issue organizations and multi issue organizations like DSA all contribute. And there's no, I don't know of another way to do that besides meetings and resolutions and words.
That's how you do that. And so the complaint that there's like more radical or you know, not fully supported by a majority kinds of positions in a platform and that makes it difficult for politicians to answer to or deal with is not unique to DSA by any means. It happens in the Democratic Party all the time. Our elected officials would love there to not be a Democratic Party platform. I should say a lot of them do they wish that at the presidential level, we've gotten into then the Democratic Party, we've gotten into a, a political culture in which the incoming presidential nominee appoints the platform committee, the campaign rights of the platform and it's synonymous with the president's platform. But it hasn't always been that way. As we were just discussing about the early 80s there was because of activism by grassroots Democrats and interest groups. They're like we, there needs to be a space where we come up with a platform independent of the politicians. And if that makes you uncomfortable, that's kind of the point is that Frisian is the point of democracy.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: But the platform is what we want the Democratic Party to have, the socialists. And because that platform is electorally, it's consciously created with an electoral purpose as well as a policy purpose.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Oh, but it isn't in practice. If you have a Democratic Party, if you have an organization with actual members in it and membership input, it is. The platform is not naturally written for electoral purposes. There's always people in the room who want it to be so. And there's a fight and attention. I can tell you that from experience at every level in the Democratic Party there are always people there who just. They're just like DSA members.
They're just, you know, to be sociological, they're not grad students, they're just other kinds of activists.
And they want a position on drone warfare, a position on cutting aid to Israel, a position on a state bank. All the things like it tends to be more policy oriented and less broad ideological analysis. But the same thing where you have members who showed up and are there not just to be agents of electing people but also to shape policy. And they demand a say and they demand that that say is independent of what's good for somebody, particularly somebody running for office in a swing area or a dodgy, you know, like a, an area where moderation might be practical or even beneficial. Like, do you let what is good for somebody running in a purple state or a purple county dictate what's in our platform? That's a tension that comes up all the time. So it's the same thing. So when Megan Romer is, is Megan Romer, sorry.
When she's brought on Fox News to be gotchaed to be, you know, like, used in the way that right wing discourse is, like, that's also not the scenario where we would.
Yeah. And this gets to what you're saying, right? That's a different part of political conversation in America than like somebody knocking on a door saying, vote for so and so for school board.
But like most of the history of small D democratic politics, participatory politics, particularly outside of the United States, it has been totally normal to have political parties whose aspirations, analysis, thoughts about the world include much more radical, bigger visions than what gets debated in parliament year to year or day to day.
You know, it's something I always try to underline to my students when teaching. You know, any of the theory that came out of the early socialist movement is like from Europe is that these people were talking also, they were talking about how do we understand capitalism, but they were also talking about like, how do we, what do we do to win elections? Like, what do we do in power? How do we get work, more workers to vote for us, things like that. And you know, those tensions produced social democracy as a practice, as I think we're watching that in real time happen in the United States.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: The thing that I'm feeling is that DSA is not in itself a party. It is not. It is supporting candidates and cultivating candidacies and cultivating electoral activity within a larger party.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a faction.
[00:28:38] Speaker A: That's point one. But more than a. It is not a faction alone because it is internally split between people who might feel from. I felt from my whole experience that it's good for people who, with left wing perspectives that go beyond immediate, immediate winning reforms and so forth, that have a larger vision for the future and that really believe that we're building toward a much more emancipated world than we now have and want to see that brought into being.
They should not form a separate party type organization where they have to unify around specific policy ideas or vote on them and have.
Because that, that preoccupation, resolutionism leads away from organizing in the wider world. The people who love to fight over resolutions are not necessarily spending most of their time organizing in unions or communities. That's one contradiction. But the other is, I'm a pragmatist. Philosophically, it's better for people to be developing their ideas in the localities where they are and organizing around those things and have the freedom in their organization to do that. I think dsa, whether it wants to or not, is giving that freedom.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very autonomous. The chapters are very autonomous. And nobody gets really compelled.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Well, and that's. That's what they should be.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: She should have.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: She should have started.
So she sort of said that. I wish she had said that very clearly that the candidates who run, they're not bound by the platform that we happen to adopt. I don't think DSA has resolved this question. What do they expect from the people they support?
That's right.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: You're right. That. That's a.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: That's a huge.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: But it's an open question.
It is an open question for every organization that engages in electoral policy.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Well, that's right. And it's an open question because people are actually elected to represent a constituency, not just an idea. Set of ideas. They represent a constituency, not just.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Not in a robotic way. No, they present a position.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Well, I guess what I'm appealing for, you know, I've heard people in DSA say, well, our candidates have to follow the perspective of the organization if they expect to get our support. That's why, absurdly, AOC loses their support because she doesn't have the right to.
Way of talking about Gaza or Israel at a certain point, that kind of thing. It's not necessary dsa.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: No, but it is necessary. Of course it's. It's necessary for dsa, for the Democratic Party, for unions, for everyone to have a set of criteria by which they endorse candidates or not by which they endorse candidates.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: But that doesn't mean the candidate, a candidate, as you know, a candidate for who gets elected especially has to be responsible to the people who elected him, not to some organization hundreds of miles away.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Candidates, real candidates in the real world are pulled by a whole bunch of different, yeah, sure things. Right. What they believe.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: Right. What they believe.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Get money or where. Money's exactly the thing, the thing that people don't talk about enough, which is what money would come in against them based on how they act. And so Forth.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: And so part of, you know, the.
And, and you know, people can have different levels of expectation depending on the district and you know, how close the election is, whether there's lots of conservatives, like all of those things.
And yet, as we know from two people who live in a very, very safe blue district represented by a guy who acts like this is a purple barely one district, like, acts like he absolutely has to appeal to conservatives in every single thing he does and says.
Who votes for resolutions, by the way, that compare you and I to Pol Pot.
He doesn't have to do any of those things. And the only way to keep him from doing those things is to set expectations alongside the endorsements and support that he counts on from the left. And like, I agree with you a hundred percent that DSA has a lot. There's a lot of hubris around DSA activists sometimes because they think of themselves alone in that process. This is where I agree with you completely. Like thinking of a socialist group that is predominantly white, that at its grassroots is. Continues to be fairly male dominated in a lot of ways that whatever is just like a one group in a sea of the movements and the people they can't substitute themselves for like the working class. Right.
This was Trotsky's great insight. I agree with all of those things. They need to be more coalitional. All I'm dis. What I'm disagreeing with though is that it's a categorical problem that there's some energy and work put into coming up with platforms that and resolutions and so forth that we can hold elected officials accountable to, because I think that's a very, very important part of real democracy. We haven't spent enough time going back and forth between Europe and the US in politics, I can tell you in Sweden, they spend way too much time in meetings. In Sweden, it's way too much resolutions, it's way too much bureaucracy. They created a party bureaucracy and social democracy with the expectation that they would always win, that they had to staff a million local councils, that coming up with policy was just a huge part of what the party does and way, way, way too little on organizing, outreach, engagement, all of those things. They have a big problem in shifting that culture in the United States. In politics, we don't have too many meetings, we don't have too many policy discussions, we don't have too many platform fights, not at all. We have way too few in most localities and most state political levels and so forth. There's like no space where this stuff happens. So DSA is creating a space for that, and it's great. My problem is the actual politics that win. And I think we have to be more honest about that being the problem. The problem with censuring AOC about her Israel policy is that her Israel policy is fucking fine.
It was. It was bad to not endorse her because she engages with, like, progressive people who also. Who believe that Israel should exist or whatever. Like, hangs out with J Street. The idea that that's not appropriate is asinine. And the problem is the asinine ness of it. Not that DSA will sometimes not re endorse someone because they go off the rails.
That's a good thing.
We need more of that in American politics.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I guess my feeling is that, and this is rooted in what we were thinking when we formed SDS 60 years ago or more about how we should organize.
And then the fact that SDS didn't follow as it evolved the way we founders thought it should, it had to do with, let's not have factions, let's have discussion, let's reach common ground. But you don't have to spend all our energy. When I say resolutionism, I don't mean having broad ideas and values being expressed in manifesto style. I mean taking a position on this or that issue that we are not, in fact, even in a position.
The influence we used to call it, let's not debate Albania, that that was the kind of thing we would say at our meeting.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: And at this stage of its evolution, I would have preferred DSA to not even adopt these kind of common platforms, to recognize their diversity as they do when they talk about themselves and just make sure that they're creating a framework where people who are activists can meet together, activists who feel that they are socialists and discuss without having to vote on it, on the outcome. And that may sound crazy, but in fact it works on the community level. I meet with a group of people every week. We call it the Housing Brainstorm. We've been meeting for four or five years. These are people who are active in different organizations. And instead of saying we, let's decide on what we actually agree on and make decisions. We just exchanging views, information, and highlighting issues that need to be discussed. And it's more like what people do in their daily lives as political activists is just discuss and see what our common understandings can be. It's more like what happens in a graduate seminar in a strange way than what happens in these kind of party conventions. And that. I know this sounds silly, but I actually think that's how most of the time activists in America actually are affected.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: I don't think that sounds silly and I agree that it's about finding the appropriate place for the graduate seminar or for the informal sit down and so forth and knowing that there is a place that something more formal or deliberative and so forth. I, I don't know exactly how to address the very real problem that you outlined and in what you just said. I mean, I remember in my time in DSA we talked about resolutionary socialism,
[00:38:43] Speaker A: you know, and like thinking that just
[00:38:45] Speaker B: like sitting coming up with the right line was the most important thing.
And that's terrible. Also the idea of being a political organization that wants to be relevant to people in everyday life, spending a lot of time and energy on stuff that isn't directly relevant is. It can be a huge mistake. Right.
And all of those things are true. I don't know exactly how to mitigate against those things because they seem, they feel sort of political, cultural rather than structural.
But you know, because for example, in the Democratic Party there have been several attempts to just shut down any discussion about Israel Palestine, which just like adds more discussion about Israel Palestine on like yet another meta level and whatever is just like part of shutting down any progress toward Palestinian liberation and an end to their suffering. But the justification given for it is always like, hey, why do we spend so much time talking about all these things we can't affect?
Talk about stoplights and wages and blah, blah, blah.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: So well, and actually what I wish as an organization DSA would focus on is, you know, really working on what we mean by socialism, what it, what is the value of having a longer run vision and what is that vision? And it does seem like everyone who thinks that they're socialist or identifies with the classic ideological stances of the American, of the left internationally or in this country. We all have lost some of the capacity to fully, you know, to make sense of that vision, to actually give it substance. And yet there's this vast literature over decades that can help us do that.
And so somehow, and I wish people on the college campuses who think they're political would, instead of debating minutiae of theory, which is how they're caricatured. Often I wish we would have courses on an alternative future for America or on what would a fully emancipated society, how would it be organized and things like that. A future oriented sociology has always been a need and maybe now it would be very helpful to do that and that would be helped by, you know, DSA could interact with that anyway. You know, I still pay my dues, but I'm not in a position to. I just feel like the experience that some of my peers of age, people in their 80s who went through the New Left, I think, have horribly just, you know, they just denounced the essay and they quit as. As if that was helping anything. And in fact, I think that that abandoned a lot of the people in dsa. Maybe they don't care that much, the people who remain in DSA that these oldsters left.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: But, well, I think. I think they. I think some of them care, particularly the ones who did overlap in their activism in DSA with, you know, having the presence of the elder comrades. And so I think they miss them. The other thing is, like, whether they know it or not, what is going on very, very clearly is like the millennial left is starting to discover exactly that literature that you're talking about.
They're really starting to grapple with some of these things. You see discussions of, like, how do you define socialism versus social democracy?
Be way more comp. Like nuanced and interesting and grounded than like 15 years ago or so when this cohort of thinkers, like, really first started to write and publish. Twenty years ago, maybe now. Yikes. Where that was very like, you know, we denounce all the history of this sellout social democracy that didn't work. And like, Michael Harrington is just like, so passe, blah, blah. We've. We've transcended all those contradictions, blah, blah. And it's very different. The new book that's coming out co. Written by Bhaskar Sankara and I don't remember the other author's name. We. We really gotta get better at this podcasting thing, Dick. But. But it's called the Blueprint, and it's like a. A rehashing of market socialist and other kinds of very practical, achievable policy, implementable paths towards a different kind of economy, a more democratic economy that would be worthy of the term socialism.
Like, this was exactly what was sort of handed to me generationally in the 90s as like, the heritage. And we've had this detour, this sort of break. It's starting to come back. They're reading the stuff. At least they're grappling with it. So I would love to see an actual dialogue and like, real repairing of that split that you're talking about, because I do think that people have a lot to say to one another and learn from one another. And there's a ton of experience in the Generation of folks who went, you know, went through the, the, the Cold War, Reagan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of those things, as, you know, in real time and have read a ton of shit that, you know. Now I do want to say I, I don't know where on campus the kids are getting into minutia of theory. I, I'd like to find that group.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: No, I mean, maybe that's, maybe that's an view of what's actually going on. I mean, I have, I, I'm, I'm very happy with what you're saying just now because it's, it is my kind of faith, which is that once people do get involved in serious political engagement, there is a tendency for them to understand reality needs to be taken into account. And because at the beginning of radicalization, you know, the, the practice is often to prove how purely, how, how, how converted I am to this new way of thinking, how revolutionary I can be. People compete for that. And it's all, that's all a sign of the problem with youth leading politics. There's a, you know, that's a feature of that that I think people learn how to overcome if they're given the chance. And so I never want to be in the style of people that I fought when I was younger. Namely, we older people have been through everything. We understand you better listen to us. I have the opposite feeling about my own role. I want to hear what people have to say. And that's maybe part of why I'm worried about this DSA emphasis on, you know, passing on resolutionism. Because instead of listening to people, that leads to combat over the language of the manifesto rather than real discussion.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I do agree with that. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think that's the problem.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Okay, all right.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: From what I'm understanding, but I do think you have reason to be concerned. And I think that the lack of dialogue and like, real sharing of, you know, sort of like real time information between those cohorts is a real problem.
Because from what I hear of, you know, people more active in DSA is, you know, that the pluralism of the organization is still, you know, pretty powerful in that they recognize that it's multi tendency, as they put it, because everything has to be that it's multi tendency. So, you know, it's okay to have different tendencies and different factions and so forth.
[00:46:33] Speaker A: Well, that. Okay, so just to interject, but things are now getting very serious with the tendency of electoral politics. In other words, that's what I mean.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: That's right. On the money. That's exactly right. It's a whole different ball game.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: And you can't just say, oh, well, that's a tendency. This is a really serious thing. People are getting into positions of power. That's fantastic. We haven't had that kind of experience.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: And I do think that is a tension, a contradiction.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: DSA needs to find out where the left part of, you know, wall of the tent is right real fast.
And honestly, I don't think abolishing the Senate or the Supreme Court is really that problematic, especially because, like, right now people are just saying all kinds of crazy things about the institutions of the United States because they're all like. It's like a circus right now. So I just don't think that's a big deal. There are other things, however sympathetic things for, you know, terrorist ship bags and, you know, just like, apologetics for authoritarianism and authoritarian organizations and all of that calls to violence on. On a very. The very, very, very fringe of dsa, I would say. But I think the bigger, the more practical everyday thing is just that, like, it's like an albatross around the neck of the organization to have major wings of it that think that either independent electoral politics or just pretending to do electoral politics until the revolution are the, like, main tracks of socialist praxis. That's, again, the. The problem is the ideas, the bad ideas of the factions. Not that there are factions or not that there's debate or any of, you know, it's not the. It's not a. It's not a problem of categories going on. It's a problem of the fact that there's a bunch of undemocratic socialists in dsa.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: Well, yes, so that is a good segue from me to give a final little sermon here, which is, to me, the fundamental idea of the American left tradition is the fulfillment of democracy.
And socialism is one important way that that is conceived.
And sometimes the language of DSA understands that, including the.
In interviews that I was referring to earlier, she did say things like that. And I think that that's a very helpful realization because every step that empowers people who are powerless or that changes the relations of power is in itself an advance and can be claimed by socialists as socialistic. In other words, rent control, which we're fighting over right now in Santa Barbara, empowers tenants vis a vis landlords. That's the fundamental value of it. The tenants finally will have avenues by which their interests can be represented and fully supported by the power of the local government.
If. If it all works the way it. The way it looks like it's going to work, because it seems like a very good ordinance is being shaped, that's an end in itself as well as a step toward a fuller democracy that expands that. That's how I think we ought to be thinking about it. So that means that we can look at everything we do in relation to that standard. Are we empowering people who. You know, are we changing the relations of power in a democratic fashion?
And if we could come together around that, that's where points of common ground and unity will be found. Even though people have different strategies and very different ideas about what they want to prioritize and what issues they want to fight over. I hope that makes sense.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Of course it makes sense.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: You were nodding, so I. Really excited about that.
[00:50:34] Speaker B: No, I think that.
I think that talking about socialism as an expansion of democracy is brilliant. I mean, is. Is crucial and both for talking about it in a way that's meaningful and legible to people, and also to protect the project from itself.
Thinking about socialism as something other than the extension of democracy, you know, as like the fulfillment of historical inevitability or as the expansion of government over the economy or the triumph of a class, you know, then you read the fine print and it's the triumph of the party that claims that class.
You know, all of those things are. Are really bad roads to go to if you forget that this is about the liberation of individual human beings and all of their social spheres.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: Right.
All right, well, that's a great way to conclude this episode of talking strategy, making history.
The issue we're talking about today has been, you know, is very fundamental to what you and I, Daraka, have started this podcast about. And as usual, we end up not necessarily solving the problems. If we did, we would be king. Right? We would be so. But. But hopefully got those who are listening given more food for thought. All of our episodes are available on patreon.com tsmh and that's where you can also make a contribution to our efforts, which we would love to have you do. And then if you do that, you will get special bonus opportunities which you only will find out about if you go to that website. But they're there. They're actually bonuses.
So we'll be back soon.
We have a lot to continue to talk about.
Happy to hear that. Your daughter, Ada. I'm her fictional uncle, so I'm always concerned about her. She started preschool today. Is that how we.
[00:52:41] Speaker B: Yeah, big day.
[00:52:42] Speaker A: And so it's a big day for her and I hope everybody will continue to have reasonable enjoyment of life.
Reasonable enjoyment of life? Yes.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Must be 2026.
[00:52:58] Speaker A: Bye. Take care, guys.
[00:53:00] Speaker C: We come from the fire, living in fire Go back to the fire Turn the world around we come from the fire, living in fire Go back to the fire Turn the world around we come from the fire, living in fire Go back to the fire Turn the world around.
We come from the water, living in water Go back to the water Turn the world around we come from the water, living in water Go back to the water Turn the world around we come from the water we begin the water Go back to the water Turn the world around.
We come from the mountain, living on the mountain and go back to the mountain Turn the world around we come from the mountain and living on the mountain Go back to the mountain to turn the world around we come from the mountain and living on the mountain Go back to the mountain Turn the world around oh so is life Ha ha. So is life oh hope so is life so is life do you know who I am? Do I know who you are? See, we are one another clearly do we know who we are? Do you know who I am? Do I know who we are? See one another clearly do we know who we are? See, we know who I am Do I know who you are? See, we want another clearly do we know who we are? O O so is life Abadiwa so is life O so is life Abha so is life.
