Post-Trump North American left trends

Literally means, by definition: "word for word."

Bill Cosby feigned victimhood, equating his martyrdom to Emmett Till's. He claimed his accusers and the whole judicial establishment were racists. He claimed consent. He preached a Puritanical anti-drug message, while drugging his victims. His defense lawyers tried to excuse his rapes away by alleging that they were "romantic" affairs. What does any of this have to do with what I wrote? Literally or figuratively?

When it came up, I asked about the process of accountability and mentioned restorative justice. How does that have anything to do with Bill Cosby?

This is disingenuous. Don't put words in my (or anyone else's) mouth. From what you've written, perhaps you know this person better than I do. They haven't lived in my region for over a decade, so it's not accurate to call him a friend. In this thread posters bleat on and on about "due process," but I've yet to see anything that goes beyond being a smear. A vicious factional fight has escalated to accusations of abuse, as part of a power struggle.

If not, why is it taking place on libcom? And why on this thread? And how is the intent any different than the accusers in Aufhebengate? The post making the revelation was almost gleeful. Is that the proper tone in addressing allegations of sexual abuse?

FYI, it isn't hearsay or a fabrication when you hear it straight from the perpetrator:

This,on the other hand, is is the definition of hearsay:

On Spencer and Cyan, they left the Seattle IWW and SeaSol in 2012. At that point, as I understand it, they were leftists more interested in abstract theory than workplace organizing. From there Spencer spent a few years on LibCom and in some sort of online leftist theory reading group. If you want to find people with insight into their drift to fascism, you might try talking with someone who's had contact with them sometime in the past 7 years.

I'd bet a pint that active Seattle wobs put all together have had no more interaction with Spencer/Cyan over the last 7 years than you have, Hieronymous.

Anyone been following the stuff around the DSA Convention? My god its like seeing the 1960s SDS play out in 2019. Fights over basic centralization vs decentralization, innumerable caucuses and factions, procedural nightmares, fake controversies, walking the line between liberalism and leftism but leaning towards the latter, etc. If you've read Kilpatrick Sale's book on SDS, you'll see what I mean.

There's a number of accounts on the Convention. It's hard to really parse the different caucuses and factions as an outsider so its hard to really make sense of the proposals and resolutions. But it seems the caucuses that are most pro-Bernie/electoral politics won out easily over those who are more skeptical of electoral work as a main activity.

I've been struggling to parse it too. I found this report from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung helpful in understanding the internal dynamics and factions of the DSA with regards to the caucus. It has some interesting survey data too. Eg, ~70% of DSA chapters are not involved in campaigning for candidates or ballot initiatives, whilst 48% are engaged in 'mutual aid' (pg. 4). Agree that the more centralist people seem to have won out, but I'm still trying to figure out what was at stake. Like I still don't know what the Build group actually believe or want to do.

Most of the (sparse) mainstream media coverage seems to have focused on the clips of the weird procedural disputes, like the person criticising the speaker for using the word 'guys'. Tucker Carlson had a little feature about that and invited Libcom favourite Angela Nagle on to discuss it with him. From what I can tell that sort of thing was really marginal in the context of the conference as a whole but it's pissed off the 'anti-idpol' people to the point where some of them have formed a new caucus to 'right the ship' and wrest control of the organisation back from the "the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials". It's always a bit funny to see social democrats complain that their mostly social democratic organisation is too bureaucratic and 'PMC', it's like saying McDonald's has too many hamburgers.

The thing I'm most interested in is how they're going to approach the labour union issue, they passed a "rank-and-file strategy" (I think this is the Kim Moody thing?) at the conference and some branches in particular are really planning to go hard on it: "We will focus our branch resources on recruiting NYC-DSA members to take jobs in these sectors and on developing a strategy for militant, democratic, classwide struggles based in these sectors". It mainly seems to be about pushing for a more activist union leadership. Will be interesting to see how it plays out, and how radical syndicalists (eg IWW, WSA) respond.

The critique I've seen of the "rank-and-file" resolution has in general been that it focuses only on just unions. Which is seen as not being enough since unions historically represents the "upper strata" of the working-class.

Is there really a "Rosa Luxemburg foundation" that pushes reformist-leftist politics? And I see on wiki they're the think tank of Die Linke party in Germany.

I'm pretty sure Luxemburg wrote against this type of stuff, if Die Linke's wiki page is anything to go by, in Reform or Revolution (though I guess Richard Wolff's, who has amassed a following with these worker coop ideas, appearance in their Rosa Remix compilation makes more sense now):

All the major German parties have think tanks attached to them oddly enough. The Greens have the Heinrich Böll foundation, SPD Friedrich Ebert, CDU Konrad Adenauer, etc. They're quite well funded too by looks of things, the Green one has a bunch of international offices, while the Rosa Luxemburg one has international offices and also has funded DSA stuff.

I think it depends on where you draw the line for what is "reformist" politics. From the things I've read it doesn't seem to be pushing a specific line. I think the political groups and unions part of the labor movement in a lot of countries have publications tied to them that is largely independent of their own line. The TUC my union is part of is very close to the Social-democratic party and has a paper called Arbetet, where they have published everything from articles on NUMSA forming their new party Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, articles by active syndicalists that argued against the social-democrat's proposal on restricting the right to strike, and so on.

WSA has always rejected a strategy of "boring from within".

W.S.A. believes, in part:

"The type of unionism that we advocate is self-managed by the members, works to spread solidarity and link up with workers in other countries, encourages mass participation, fights against all forms of inequality and discrimination, and rejects any idea of “partnership” or “common interests” with the bosses.

To transform the American labor movement, we support efforts to build new self-managed unions independent of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions in situations where this makes strategic sense. At the same time, we cannot hope to play a role in many workers struggles, to put forth our ideas and our program, if we remain aloof and abstain from them simply because many of them take place within the AFL-CIO or Change to Win unions. So long as workers struggles are organized through these unions, we participate in those unions and their struggles.

We also support the building of autonomous rank-and-file movements in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions, independent of the bureaucracy. The sort of rank-and-file opposition movements that we support should not aim at merely electing a different leadership, but should aim at changing the union into a social movement based on mass participation and member control.

For unions to be self-managing, this starts with the importance of the general meetings of the members to make decisions. To prevent the organization becoming dependent on a small number of people, executive committee posts should have term limits. This needs to be combined with a systematic approach to training members in all the tasks needed in running a union.

Full-time paid officials no longer suffer the daily indignities of subordination to the bosses. The often high salaries of union bureaucrats in the USA separate union officials from the conditions of life of union members and encourages officials to look at the union as their personal ticket out of the working class. We believe that the number of paid officials in the labor movement should be kept to a minimum. Local unions should avoid paid officers as much as possible. If workers feel that a paid officer is needed in a particular case, their pay should be limited to the average wage level of the workers. Half-time paid officers are better than full-time because at least the person still works under the bosses part of the time.

Genuine self-management of a union goes beyond the formal structure and also depends on active participation and education of members." ("Unionism", https://workersolidarity.org/about-wsa/where-we-stand/ )

I was going to say that I was sure German Wildcat had written about the Rosa Luxemburg foundation, but I might just be thinking of about one line in this article.
Agree it'd be a bit disappointing, although hardly unprecendented, if DSA adopt an industrial strategy that's solely focused on already-unionised sectors and has little or nothing to say about non-unionised ones.

Well, a question is: what sort of unionism for the unorganized sectors? I think this is key. And also why boring from within a social democratic formation is not a strategy for libertarian workers

Has anyone else noticed a significant increase in the amount of American leftists being very pro-gun and anti-gun control? I noticed the Industrial Worker posting "armed minorities are harder to oppress" sorta stuff on their Instagram page, and thought it was odd. There's also the growth of the Socialist Rifle Association.

Have you been paying attention to the stuff that went on in Virginia last month? To me, it [the general trend, not Virginia specifically] seems like a mixture of totally legit, supportable anti-statist stuff, pointing out that there's no legal/police solutions to social problems, and any new gun control legislation will be enforced by the cops and the courts, and so used as one more way to brutally oppress minorities while letting the rich off the hook, etc, combined with other stuff that, from a distance, comes across as "Americans being weird", like posting pictures of their assault rifles on social media as if they were particularly instagram-worthy cupcakes or whatever. And generally speaking, where there's divisive "culture war" issues that split the working class along lines that aren't clearly pro- or anti-oppression, I can see the logic of refusing to line up neatly with either camp but instead trying to split both apart, in practice I imagine it must be quite difficult to relate to both gun owners who want to defend their gun rights and to school kids who don't want to get shot though.
Anyway, I can appreciate a lot of the thinking behind things like last month's intervention into the pro-gun rallies in Virginia, there is some stuff I found troubling though - I think it was in a Final Straw interview with the Red Strings & Maroons guy where he was talking about the proposal to introduce "red flag" laws where if you know someone who you think is unstable and shouldn't be around guns, you can report them, and he was criticising this on the grounds that friends or family members might be making these calls that should only be made by trained mental health professionals. That didn't sound like a particularly great anarchist/anti-authoritarian position to me, but I suppose it is a difficult subject to navigate.

I think the IG post I mentioned was from the Virginia protests, yeah. I agree roughly with what you're saying -- if gun control legislation is ever gonna be implemented it's not gonna be done in an egalitarian manner. And in practice it would be hard to balance these concerns with the very reasonable demands of the kids that did things like wildcat from school in protest over the lax gun laws and their links to school shootings.

I think part of the reason the pro-gun left makes me uncomfortable is the way it is framed in terms of liberal rights (second amendment, property ownership) and an instant equation of guns with freedom. The US working class is one of the most armed in the western world yet it is also one of the most exploited and oppressed, relative to other western democracies. And the most exploited sectors of that class -- black people, Latinos, etc -- show clear majorities in favour of tighter gun control. This poll is from 2010 and was the easiest one I could find through Google but I'm certain I've seen more recent ones backing it up:

I don't envy American radicals trying to deal with this issue -- there's not really any easy solutions or paths forward. American gun culture is a strange beast

Oh, that has reminded me of something else that always annoys me - I've seen this quote floating round a bit:

which is always presented in this kind of disembodied, "well, if Marx said it it must be true" way, without any consideration as to whether it was meant as an eternal commandment or a response to a specific situation - it seems to be from an 1850 address to the Communist League, in circumstances that might be considered to be a wee bit different to the contemporary US situation.

I don't think one should underestimate the need for armed organizing, especially in anti-fascist purposes. The police will never defend an organized working-class against the offensives that the capitalists will throw at them, or even the offensives the police themselves will carry out and support. Of course one should not larp like the red guards or brag about shooting at gun ranges like the SRA but having like your own self-defense groups organized in a broader manner is desirable. Which was typical in the early labor movement across Europe and in America during the late 30's, like the union defense groups against the silver shirts in Minnesota. This union guard did not need to enter into any open skirmishes, they scared of the fascists by simply showing of their numbers, discipline and willingness to defend the victories they had won.

In other words I don't think one should just talk about guns, they are simply a tool that can be used in some forms of organizing. There are still Americans old enough to remember Greensboro massacre and I think it should be remembered by the left also.

(It is also worth noting that gun regulation has almost never been against rich(er) whites, it is almost always aimed at like black liberation groups like Black Panther Party.)

A brief comment on the Biden victory over Sanders and the turn of radical support from the later to the former more recently:
https://anarchistcommunism.org/2020/04/30/noam-chomsky-ex-leaders-of-sds...

Glad to see that DSA has not caved in to support Biden, following the resolution they passed on the question during their last convention. The debate around creating an independent workers party is very interesting and I hope it turns into something fruitful. This is one of the first times that there has been a large socialist organisation and a labor resurgence at the same time in a pretty long while, as opposed to the other times where people have tried to form labor parties in the US. The section that wants a new party seems pretty centered around the left-wing cacuses and like Bread & Roses. Red Star Cacus in San Francisco wrote this pamphlet on the question. There are still a Democrat-loyal faction dressed up in "labor politics", as shown in this lecture by one leading figure.

But their 'Workers Party' is mostly still envisaged, at best, as just a Left wing Social Democratic party on the model of the earlier European social democratic parties that made gains in a different historical period to the present.

I think it depends on what you mean. They are not aiming for copying the programme of the old social-democratic workers parties, or their labor bureaucracy. What I think some cacuses, like Bread & Roses, take influence from is the democratic structure of these old workers parties("freedom in debate, unity in action" as Bebel wrote) and merging socialists and the organized working-class, i.e basing socialist politics on having a base in workers organisations.

To be fair also, the linked pamphlet draws on experiences of CPUSA and other minority cacuses like Collective Power Network have also drawn on the experiences of CPUSA by republishing an old CPUSA organizing handbook.

There are differing views as between different 'factions' within the DSA it's true and the alternative CPUSA despite the workplace/union militancy of many of it's members is hardly an inspiring model in terms of it's wider politics to put it mildly!

the manual mentioned:

https://dsaorganizer.org/2020/03/21/the-communist-party-how-it-works/

though tbh i prefer the manual mentioned in the red star pamphlet because i believe it is reflective of the third period lessons, though certainly right on the cusp of the start of the popular front

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1935/07/organisers-ma...

Maybe this is just me, but it seems like not the most interesting conversation to be having at the moment? Are Red Star Caucus involved in TANC?

I think it is still relevant to the topic of the thread, I haven't seen this debate grow to such "mainstreams" in the left before.

I can't actually find if they have been involved in TANC(I think its primarily Marxist Center people?), most of the recent "mass work" seems to have been supporting local union struggles with the ILWU.

Oh yeah, I wasn't saying you were wrong to post about it, it does fall under "north american left trends", I was just saying that if I was in or around the DSA I wouldn't really find it to be the most interesting thing to be thinking about right now.

One North American left trend I'd noticed a bit - it seems like a few IWOC/GDC groups have now set up as independent formations, so Oakland IWOC is now Oakland Abolition & Solidarity, Gainesville IWOC is now Florida Prison Solidarity, London IWOC has become Prisoner Solidarity Network (although it looks like they're still a part of the IWW), the Twin Cities GDC became Workers Defense Alliance and so on. The most fully worked-out statement I've seen of the thinking behind this was from the Oakland folk. Anyone got any thoughts about all this? Is it just a bunch of local factors, and/or the kind of stuff that shouldn't be discussed in public, or are there any lessons to be learned, conclusions to be drawn, etc?

I haven't been involved in IWOC for quite some time, so take everything that I say with a large grain of salt, but I think that there might be two things kind of happening:

-One is that it's relationship to the rest of the IWW has always seemed a little bit tenuous, imo. The local that I was part of had at least as many members from the local ABC chapter as IWW members, and I believe that this dynamic of a mix of IWW members and non-IWW activists is pretty common in IWOC chapters. I think a lot of people questioned whether being part of the IWW had any real benefit for doing the work that that we were doing. I suspect that some folks outside of the IWW were kind of suspicious of the more bureaucratic elements of being part of a membership organization while some people in the IWW were skeptical of IWOC as a whole. I don't want to generalize or blow anything out of proportion, there never any big rifts or to-dos, but it was never a very tight fit either.

-The other is that the immense difficulty of IWOC's primary goal, creating a revolutionary union for prisoners, started to become clear as people engaged in the work more and more. IWOC started in the midst of a fairly remarkable wave of prisoner strikes and uprisings, and as that began to wane, I think it became clear that outside activists had a pretty limited ability to affect events on the inside. Union organizing is difficult; organizing a prisoner's union is much, much more difficult; trying to organize a prisoner's union from the outside by correspondence begins to look a little ridiculous at a certain point. So I think that a lot of IWOC locals started to pare back their goals from organizing a union to doing more basic solidarity work for whatever activities people inside the prison system were engaged in. At that point, if your goal isn't union organizing then your existence as an arm of a union seems to make less sense. It was never explicit, but I feel like that was a large reason that my IWOC chapter folded.

The Oakland IWOC statement seemed to make a lot of sense to me, though I kind of felt like they discounted some of the advantages of being part of a national network. National IWOC was extremely helpful for our group in getting off the ground. I think it's probably a loss for newer or smaller groups to lose connection with really established groups like Oakland or Gainesville IWOC. That said, I'm not sure if it's actually that big of a split so much as a natural and somewhat predictable parting of ways due to different priorities

...or maybe there was some big blow-up behind the scenes, idk.

Yeah, that all makes sense to me. I guess there is a certain tension baked into IWOC as an organisation that wants to be prisoner-led, vs being one small component of a larger organisation that uses democratic decision-making, and there's not always a neat solution to that. And yeah, I can appreciate that organising a union at work is tough enough, but being in a situation where the boss has almost total control over what gets in and out, and can send troublemakers to indefinite periods of solitary confinement with almost any pretext, is a whole other level of difficulty.

And yeah, I definitely hope that the groups like Oakland and Gainesville continue to maintain good working relationships with those groups that stay members, everything I've seen so far kind of points in that direction but I don't know if I'm missing something too.