Everyone knows different dog breeds were invented by god in the 18th century

Thanks, Joe von Hindenbiden

Repeal Taft-Hartley and pass the PRO Act while we’re at it

I didn’t mean you specifically but I’m so glad that happened! I’ve recently left the US but while there I was active with DSA, labor organizing, and a local urbanist collective. My biggest gripe with the American left was always their insistence on throwing their weight behind this or that Democrat. Maybe now it will finally be clear that mass mobilization is the only way forward. We did this in the 1930s and we can do it again today.

Please actually do this. Not on the internet. Join a local activist chapter. Go to the meetings. Use your speaking voice. Contrary to what politicians and corporations tell you, it is possible to organize society in a way that does not result in oligarchy.

What is wrong with it? I’ve been using it for years and it does what it’s supposed to do.

The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They’re the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin’s work.

Everyone in the US is complicit. Everyone in NATO member countries is complicit. Everyone not fighting to overthrow their imperialist government is complicit. Again, not the point.

Ok so how does not voting help with this?

You are complicit by living in the US and paying taxes which fund military aid to Israel. Not voting does not absolve you. And in the case of this election, it makes you slightly more complicit because one of the war criminals who is running is slightly worse than the other.

The idea that not voting is some form of protest that has material consequences for the ruling class is ahistorical. It took centuries of struggle to attain universal suffrage. The people in power are perfectly happy to have only a small fraction of the demos exerting any political power at all; in fact this is how most civilizations have functioned for the past few thousand years.

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They’re only useful for parties imo. Otherwise you put your spatula (or whatever) in the dishwasher and have to wait all week for the dishwasher to fill up with all the other dirty dishes just so you can have your clean spatula back. But yes in the US they are in every kitchen.

Listen how can I get a quart of milk from the store without also taking two chairs, a loveseat, a sound system, my heater and air conditioning unit, some steel armor plating, and a storage unit?

The issue is with what they are actually able to accomplish, not what they say they’ll do. And that goes for every Democrat since Carter.

Not enough data for language scrape

My local is great but I don’t have any others to compare to so it’s a pretty vapid description. There’s a PSL here too and they come to a lot of our events. It’s always interesting to hear from the more radical formation.

The thing with DSA “party discipline” is that it’s not a political party. It’s basically a nonprofit with local chapters that all have their own agendas, some of which run candidates. So I’m interested to see what happens with a more centralized (as far as I understand it anyway) structure like PSL.

In terms of labor organizing I do think the political climate matters. The rail strike is an example of national scale union busting, but on more local levels (Starbucks, Amazon, Cemex…) that the NLRB actually matters. Here’s an article about it.

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/how-bidens-nlrb-has-boosted-bottom

Right. If democrats want those votes then Biden needs to make significant progress on ending the genocide now. The threat from third parties exerts an outsize pressure on the Democrats to actually do something. But of course they likely won’t, and instead Trump will take advantage of this.

Yeah, I’m just wondering why they’re launching a national presidential campaign rather than trying to win locally first. See for example DSA’s (the veil falls lol) cadre candidates like Zohran Mamdani.

It seems to me like PSL is skipping this step and going straight to national, with the net result of devoting a lot of energy that could be spent on worker organizing on a campaign that everyone knows is not going to win.

This also bears the risk of helping Trump win by siphoning off votes from Harris, and a Trump victory will have damaging effects on the NLRB, an organization which in its current state is making it a lot easier for workers to unionize.

So I’m just not seeing how any third party presidential run ties into building worker power, but maybe I am missing something.

To illistrate this, I just typed “restaurants” in Google Maps in downtown Prague and the first result was an ad for KFC (it looked like a real result but it said “sponsored” on top). But I do have a US phone.