Want to be a better communist in 2022? Here are some tips for building the movements that will bring about a new world. 1a. Join a political organization. Obviously we are partial for joining @DemSocialists (and our caucus!). There are many other orgs to choose from, too. But the most important thing is to not go alone. Without left organizations we can't win.
dsausa.org/join

After Bernie's defeat we see: liberal centrist consolidation in the Democratic Party, and a renewed Republican Party effort at minoritarian rule. Under these conditions, maintaining the dominant strategy of leveraging elections via the Democratic Party is difficult to justify. The situation in the Democratic Party is strategic quagmire. The "progressive" wing continues to function as an easy scapegoat whenever the liberal center runs into trouble. Similarly, any policy successes are used to justify liberal centrist domination of the Dem Party.

The US is a place where a mass left-wing has been largely beaten back by forces of reaction. The US left is, at best, extremely weak and, at worst, practically non-existent. It's for this reason that both right and left-wing opportunisms can come so easily. Though ultra-rightism and ultra-leftism are clearly distinctive and not at all interrelated at the political level, what they do represent is a certain impatience with how things are going and what needs to be done, a direct result of the US left's collective impotence.

The working class needs fundamentally different organizational forms than our class enemies. The destruction of capital and its sources of social power, as well as the reconstruction of a new form of society, give us unique problems that are not shared by the liberals. Liberals can organize around elections without a meaningful relationship to a well-organized constituency. Their monied institutions, control of media, and the like, act as stand-ins for a mass base. A working-class movement will never have equivalent resources.

Santa Cruz DSA's campaign is dissected, along with Campaign for Proposition 10. The conclusion: elections have yet to prove themselves as an engine for socialist organizing.

newpol.org/issue_post/bey… The essay argues on the basis of experience of Santa Cruz DSA. While some DSA caucuses call electoral organizing "class struggle elections," this is merely a rebrand. Looking at outcomes of electoral work, Cavooris and Mason argue that little has been built from the efforts.

In our bi-weekly class in the bay area we're going over Marx' writings on the US civil war and black slavery. One interesting insight is that chapter X of Capital ("The Working Day"), arguably one of 3 most important chapters in the book, was directly informed by black slavery: This chapter is one of marx' most major indictments of capitalism & an articulation of the history of struggle against it. In this history, the freedom of the black slave was central. He called the slave movement "the most momentous thing happening in the world today."

We live in a country where those in power fight tooth and nail against the most modest reforms. They will not let minimum wage rise by a few dollars. Our fight has to be aimed at bringing a new society to life. The US New Deal was a (flawed, racist) concession that must be understood against the backdrop of worldwide, working-class power. Those in power feared a scary working class. They feared internationalism. Their fortunes hung in the balance.