As we near the end of 2022, nobody really wants to talk about 2015. But one 2015 topic has piqued my interest as of late: the decision of the Old Guard of the DSA to ride the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign to membership growth. As the Old Guard reflects back on it – if it reflects back on it – I suspect it has mixed feelings about how it all went down.
Category: DSA (Page 4 of 7)
So, you’ve joined DSA. You attended your first meeting the other day. And like any right-thinking socialist at their first DSA meeting, you identified your politics as ‘to the left of the DSA.’ Now you’re sitting around thinking, ‘why doesn’t DSA have a real socialist caucus?’
Good think you clicked this blog post, my friend, because you’re in luck. I’m going to explain the 5 steps to start a DSA caucus. Read on and enjoy!
Readers know I don’t talk much about the sectarian left. You know, the kinds of smaller leftist groups based on certain ideologies, e.g., Marxist-Leninist groups, Maoist groups, and so on. I spend a lot of time – both as a blogger and a local DSA chapter leader – discussing strategy on the left. I’ve even posted a couple of times on the DSA caucuses. But I mostly ignore the sectarian left during all this.
Why?
So, the DSA released a statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And boy did liberals hate it! Liberals hated it a lot! You can read it at the link in the first sentence.
However, I’m not going to bother linking to any of the liberal critiques. You can read those at your own leisure. Or you can not read them at all. Whatever. Most of those critiques are so awful they don’t merit a response. All I really wanted to do here is provide a short summary of the statement and the context of it, as far as I can tell.
Within the Democratic Socialists of America – especially the very online parts of DSA – there’s been a hot debate lately over whether to expel Jamaal Bowman from the org. Bowman recently won an election to Congress, joined The Squad, and formed a big part of the DSA’s strategy of building membership through electoral engagement.
I won’t recap all the details. Readers can check out coverage from the DSA Observer. But the basic story: Bowman voted for Iron Dome funding for Israel. He took a lobbyist-paid trip to Israel and posed with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, among other things. In response to a rebuff from Bowman and his supporters, the DSA’s Palestine Solidarity Working Group called on him to fix these issues or face expulsion. Some on the online left sided with the WG, while other parts sided against expulsion.
But I think the whole expulsion question arrives far too late. The DSA should look into how it got into this mess in the first place.
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