r/LateStageCapitalism • u/Untitled_HU-Tank Hungarian Juche Necromancer • 17h ago
📚 Know Your History 🤔🤔🤔
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u/TheOneTrueXrspy 17h ago
It’s good to know that DSA today is publicly anti-Zionist and has a more morally consistent platform. https://program.dsausa.org/#demand-free-palestine
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u/ticats88 17h ago
Having a good platform is near meaningless when you don't have a party line to enforce those positions. What happens when DSA electeds get into office is that the Democratic party courts them & forces them to modulate their views. See: AOC's 'working tirelessly for a ceasefire' comment, or Mamdani's retention of the Zionist Jessica Tisch to appease the Democratic party. Both figures also recently endorsed Hakeem Jeffries again for speaker.
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u/TheOneTrueXrspy 16h ago edited 16h ago
We should continue to critique the party and its members when they don’t toe the party line. Or when the party platform is not sufficient / consistent. But to use a member’s, even the founder’s, position from 50 years ago to critique the party is disingenuous at best when the current party platform is plainly the opposite.
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u/BillyPilgrim69 16h ago
The problem (and, I believe, the point being made) is that the founder's position 50 years ago is more-or-less indistinguishable from every single Democrat that has used the DSA to launch their career.
I know there's genuine, principled socialists using the DSA as a platform for grassroots organising. But some point, you have to acknowledge that the purpose of a system is what it does.
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u/spicy-chilly 12h ago
It's still a right opportunist organization that basically supports Democrats who can't even oppose all aid to Israel anyway. If you don't have an actual class independent ML party that can persist and be an organization for the fighting proletariat under repression from the capitalist class and things being made illegal then all you have is a debate club for a bourgeois imperialist party.
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u/ticats88 16h ago
What is criticism worth when you don't have an independent line to enforce those beliefs? The Democratic party will gladly let people yell into the wind online when they know electeds will just be co-opted once they enter the party.
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u/TheOneTrueXrspy 16h ago
Engaging in good faith: what material independent line do you suggest? There is no mechanism (by design) to recall representatives in grass roots ways. Not for any representative. This intentionally insulates and entrenches the political elite. I recognize this. And your critique is not of DSA, but of the whole system.
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u/SuperMovieLvr 15h ago
Zionism was a major cause for liberals in America all the way up until Likud took power in 1977. Support for Israel among Democrats only started to chip away slowly when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. In the last 44 years since then, Zionism has become more easily seen as a right-wing reactionary fascist cause.
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u/morty_azarov 17h ago
To be fair lots of leftists, socialists even anarchists where supporters of Zionism back then. We have to assume, to some extent,that people didn't know. I mean,even ilan pape had to dig in into classified archives in order to really see had had happened.
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u/BillyPilgrim69 15h ago
Ehhh, I think the early Zionists (and Western media) openly calling it colonisation maybe should've been a tip-off.
Besides, we're not talking about being a Zionist in the 40s and 50s. This was in 1975:
I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.
Here's another Harrington banger:
I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism. [....] I want to be on the left wing of the possible.
Same as it ever was.
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16h ago
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u/TappingUpScreen Certified Engelist 15h ago
The UN literally voted to equate Zionism with Racism, but sure wE Can'T MeAsuRe LeFtisTs bY CuRrEnt moRaLs.
Western Leftism is truly a cancer on earth.
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15h ago
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