Realignment

Realignment

True enough. The reverse is also true: nyc is regularly torn to shreds by national actors in the org and treated with insane levels of bad faith. IMO the dynamic is one outcome of intense factional competition that incentivizes every leadership majority to continuously tweak rules to their advantage

These things don’t happen because capitalism goes too far, but because it *requires* them. A system built to maximize private profit will not be finicky about where that profit comes from or how it is got. This isn’t a unique moment of capitalist degradation; it’s just the one we’re living in.

DAWG WE'RE DOING STATE-RUN GAS PRICES AT PRICE CONTROLLED RATES DESPITE INCREASING SHORTAGES TO PACIFY THE PEOPLE AND THEY'RE SCREAMING ABOUT HOW THEIR OPPONENTS WANT COMMUNISM I AM GOING TO LOSE MY ENTIRE GODDAMN MIND

🎯These people do not want to build a big left-wing ecosystem, DSA or not DSA. They want to capture the activist left to accomplish their own goals. Which, fine, but the idea that we're all just going to go along with it no questions asked now that we see what it's like in practice is insulting!

i mean probably doing a voter guide is not a good idea for DSA chapters because there are frankly a lot of dumb people who lack reading comprehension. people are asking ChatGPT how to vote for god's sake. but maybe that's all the more reason to influence the search. who knows.

The framing of this ”party decision” in mass media really betrays the fact that American political coverage is so completely individualist it denies the existence of ideology

“the crisis of American democracy and the crisis of American empire are one crisis… one way forward is to reclaim the legacy of earlier suppressed traditions that knew freedom would have to be made against the grain of both constitutional idolatry and imperial power” lpeproject.org/blog/revisit...

Gavin Newsom and Trump: both using the power of their governments to prop up sclerotic economic sectors at everyone else‘s expense in literally every way.

Seems like an ideal time to set off 800,000 fireworks

also this makes american local politics completely illegible because every large city council is either 90% democrat or officially nonpartisan and you just kinda have to know who's part of which informal faction between whom the actual political competition actually happens

It's always a coalition to build a governing majority, that's just politics. What we have is a system that doesn't make the factions legible in a way that has a rational way to sort out, and make clear to everyone, who represents what chunk of the coalition. It all gets flattened into one 'party.'

Appalled, yes. Stunned, no. Everyone voted their political preferences sincerely once they knew there were 5 votes. That is exactly how things work in partisan legislative politics. It’s a total mask-off indictment of the idea that SCOTUS is remotely a <legal> institution.

In 2029 tee up a 600-900 member House of Representatives with multiparty proportional representation for the '30 midterms so we can have these fights like a normal democracy last month in @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/proportional...

lot of this line of thinking is cope/wishcasting but I do think one major reason the left has started running more caustic/less conciliatory candidates this cycle is because we tried the "leftist who is also a loyal soldier" approach and the party has spent 8 years spitting in the Squad's face.

One thing about Pelosi as an establishment leader: she wouldn’t be whining with this “how dare you run for our seats” stuff. She’d be trying to convert and make the new electeds work for the establishment.

Also, If I'm Ritchie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries or even like, Josh Gottheimer, I am asking myself what exactly I need to do to make sure there is not a Mamdani-backed candidate in the primary against me in 2028

you cant be a former Bush speech writer and talk like this 😭

It goes a long way towards explaining how many people view politics. When you lack (and are intentionally discouraged from developing or even acknowledging) a material analysis, the world is mystified. Everything seems to happen at random with no cause, just effect. No one does anything on purpose

This is why I’m all-in on large scale party realignment within 10 years. There will be a void on the right for the centrist dems to slide right into.

“…they processed me & put me in a cell with some dearly beloved friends of mine. One of them […] turned to me & asked if I could help him remember all the verses to Solidarity Forever. Within minutes, all the cells up & down the hall were singing the full original IWW version with increasing gusto.”

Ah. I see. apple.news/A7Vqr8sWySkq...

A key point is that the threat is not to profitability as such. Decarbonization can be as profitable as the alternative. The threat is that collective decisions about decarbonization reduce private control over production. (I think this is felt more acutely by the tech owning class than by finance.)

If you think that a serious push to decarbonize the economy is going to unacceptably impinge on the prerogative of private power, then you need to cut back the ability to collectively regulate the economy in general, and exclude science and professional expertise from big swathes of government.

Rest in Power Bea Lumpkin. May her memory be a blessing and a revolution.

Surviving the Trump era is not enough. @stephenlerner.bsky.social and @josephamccartin.bsky.social argue that unions must rebuild their capacity for collective action, challenge the corporations profiting from authoritarianism and organize for a different future.

Mamdani really is the anti-Trump. If DSA does nothing else, we will always have that

New Yorkers need affordable homes. New Yorkers need great public libraries. So we're building both. Today, we took the next step toward creating a brand-new library and more than 200 affordable homes at the New Utrecht Library site in Brooklyn. Because public land should serve the public.

Reminder as always, Los Angeles late ballots are left ballots – the sealed ballots turned in at drop boxes in the last three days of the election. Younger and more progressive voters overwhelmingly turn in their ballots this way (myself included).

“.. The U.S. is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure, according to new Census Bureau figures out today.” @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

the fact is these democratic governors do not have actual control over their own state police forces, and that’s a seriously scary problem that no elected wants to talk about or deal with

So the second a massive wave of democrats gets elected the AI bubble is going to burst huh? And that’s going to go about as well as you might expect.

The goal now is just to discipline labor and crush any popular anticapitalist movement. They’ve achieved a level of wealth that makes profit and loss pure abstraction, now they’re just focused on social control. Fighting taxes isn’t about wealth, it’s about starving the state of resources

Man, a decade and a half ago, five fucking guys said to the worst, richest people in the world “you can spend as much money as you want to influence politics.” Now we are ruled over by the worst, richest people in the world. Imagine that!

Realignment continues

I’m a broken record, but it’s facially insane that the SCOTUS’s position is that the interest of a political party—an entity with no special constitutional protection—in gerrymandering is more important than black people’s right to vote, which we have several constitutional amendments addressing

I see no evidence to contradict my belief that the non socialist wing of the Democratic Party is simply becoming the new conservative party

This is self-evidently true and virtually nobody of consequence in American politics believes it.

Megan y Ashik siempre en mi equipo. Es la izquierda la que tiene ahora la emoción y la capacidad para construir un movimiento amplio y disputar en el 2028 la presidencia. Sindicatos, movimientos sociales e izquierda, en el 2028, huelga general y candidatura socialista en USA.

The most embarrassing thing about the USA having a second civil war is that it isn't even for a new reason

Capitalism didn't replace slavery; it was fueled by it. The 'capitalists need consumers' argument ignores that in a chattel system, the Black body *is* the capital. Vizio & Burger King are only possible because of the massive accumulation of wealth that started with cotton, sugar, and human bodies

The overriding goal of America's right wing is to restore chattel slavery so they can own Black people. That's it. Whether they will admit it or not, whether they'll even admit it to themselves, their goal is legal domination and subjugation through violence of Black people. Everything leads there.

The U.S. Senate is far and away the least representative legislative body in the democratic world. It’s an aristocratic relic of a bygone era and has essentially no purpose in the modern world.

New working paper on the California Fast-Food minimum wage (will come out as NBER WP soon but posting now). Big increase in wages. Big drop in separations. Little change in jobs. (Bonus: sheds light on QWI vs QCEW measurement of jobs.)

In celebration of May Day and the radical history of the working class, we've put together this Class War Reading List. See you in the streets tomorrow!

“…It belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.“ www.marxists.org/archive/trot...

"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-y...