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If I were a professor, I'd teach a course called Socialism 101, where every student must spend every moment on Venezuela. Their eyes glued to the grim results of policies endorsed by the Bernie Sanders of the world. The class actually is happening right now. But is anyone watching? Not if "Game of Thrones" is on or if President Trump tweets. Those take priority.

It's too bad. For the past decade, we have watched an oil-rich country descend into chaos, where toilet paper is worth more than actual currency and their currency not worth it a crap. It is Socialism 101. A government that controls production and distribution creates scarcity followed by a sham elections, arrests, dictatorship, corpses in the street.

But it never starts out that way. It begins with a left-wing populists and its fan base. Self-absorbed elites portraying a holy hell as a heaven and waiting.

So, where are they now, these Venezuelan fan boys? Sean Penn, Jeremy Corbin, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore -- he's doing a play down the road -- Danny Glover, or the writers at Salon who once labeled Venezuela a miracle. Where are they hiding? Why aren't they saying anything? I guess when you see the starving kids, the dying babies, infant mortality at 30 percent, maternal death up 66 percent, it is hard to show your face. As apologists, they played a role in it. The technical term: useful idiot.

As people die in the celebrities' utopia of the month, the stars inevitably move on, off to find another radical to romance. Funny how this never happens in free markets. Maybe if we killed more people, the stars would love us.

Greg Gutfeld currently serves as host of FOX News Channel's (FNC) The Greg Gutfeld Show (Saturdays 10-11PM/ET) and co-host of The Five (weekdays 9-10PM/ET). He joined the network in 2007 as a contributor. Click here for more information on Greg Gutfeld.

Link:
Gutfeld on the consequences of Venezuelan socialism | Fox News - Fox News

By Gregory Krieg CNN

(CNN) -- Relegated for decades to the back benches of American political life, a resurgent socialism, championed by figures like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is emboldening a new generation of mostly young, tech-savvy progressive activists and organizers.

Over eight months, beginning with President Donald Trump's election victory and throughout the chaotic beginning of his administration, the Democratic Socialists of America have seen a massive spike in their ranks, from 8,000 in November to more than 25,000 as this week's biannual national convention begins in Chicago.

DSA members were on the front lines of the fight against Republican plans to overhaul Obamacare, often marching alongside more moderate protesters in defense of the law. And they are a vocal part of the emerging coalition in support of a single-payer health care system, or "Medicare for all." But their ambitions are broader, with plans now to redraw the boundaries of socialism's influence in a country that has been traditionally hostile to similar movements.

Activist Charles Lenchner, a New Yorker who worked on former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign and co-founded groups like Ready for Warren, in support of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and The People for Bernie Sanders, is running for DSA's National Political Committee this weekend. We spoke about the future of DSA, the opportunities and roadblocks up ahead, and his candidacy. (The interview has been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.)

Krieg: You've been around the world as an activist and an organizer, most recently as a member of DSA and co-founder of Ready for Warren and The People for Bernie Sanders. How did you get started?

Lenchner: In high school. Israel, where I spent most of those years, has lots of political parties and all of them cultivate youth leagues, so there is a lot more going on, as opposed to in the United States where you don't have political parties in a parliamentary sense. So there isn't really an infrastructure that exists at all levels that gets young people interested and involved.

At age 15 or 16, I assumed people were curious about each other and connect and see what's up. I thought that Arab citizens would be as interested in connecting with me as I was with them. I can now laugh at that, but that's how I felt at the time. It was very wholesome. Most wholesome I've ever been.

And then, as the army got closer, I became more left-wing and more invested in figuring out how to end Israel's occupation and more ideological because I saw that it was really just the left that was trying to end it. So I got involved in left-wing organizations.

Over a year before my draft date I organized a youth group and this youth group recruited people who pledged to refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories. Think of me as a high school senior meeting every week with other young people who are all intent on being jailed. We were going to be drafted, go to basic training, and then they'll send us to the West Bank and we'll say no, and then we'll go to jail. That was plan.

And that's what happened. I was the first one of the group to be drafted and the first one to be sent to the West Bank and the first one to be sent to prison. All in all I spent about two months in Israeli military prison during the First Intifada for refusing orders to serve there.

I was already fully committed to left-wing politics, but imagine living your life knowing that you survived two months in prison. It's very hard to become demoralized. I've been in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. What are you going to throw at me now?

Krieg: How does someone go from the experience you just described -- entering left politics as a young person, organizing, being jailed -- to your life this past decade, when you've mostly worked for or on behalf of relatively mainstream politicians, like Dennis Kucinich, and causes?

Lenchner: It was a long process. I've been continuously in the US for about 17 years now. In those years, I started off working for organizations that were based in the Middle East and then I moved into politics by working with Kucinich in 2003. It was a very long, slow process of becoming a more professional activist and understanding the world I'm operating in. I'm still learning and careful not to pretend to be that guy who knows everything. I'm not. But the left has a tendency to put itself in this self-imposed ghetto. For me, it was always clear that the best place to be in politics is where the energy is. And being able to participate in mainstream movements isn't a contradiction to being a leftist. I would turn it around and say, if you want to be a good leftist, how can you defend not being where the people are?

Krieg: DSA is growing, obviously, but a 300% or 400% spike in membership doesn't happen if you're healthy to begin with or if you'd had more than a few thousand people as late as last Election Day. The organization has been around for decades. Why did it become so stagnant -- and why is it multiplying now?

Lenchner: The reason why it grew so rapidly is a combination of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

It is a reminder that while individuals and organizations have a certain amount of power, the circumstances that we exist within, those are the determining things. The people that have carried the torch for DSA for years may have asked themselves, What are we doing? Handful of people meeting in living rooms, having meetings that attract few new members. What are we doing here? Now, we know. They were keeping the organization intact for this moment. In that sense, it's a reminder that you may sometimes feel as though you're not in the center of things the way you want to be, but everyone has a role. And all those DSA folks who kept the torch alive for all those decades when it wasn't as prominent -- we would not be here if not for them. We owe them everything.

Krieg: Beyond the reaction to Trump and the energy created or channeled, or both, by Sanders, why is this group now growing so fast -- and what is going to take to keep that up beyond these current circumstances?

Lenchner: We're an organization that is simultaneously socialist, but also very rooted in a real world of politics. We've participated in Democratic Party primaries like with Bernie Sanders and in other elections around the country. We have a tradition of not being outside the political system, but just on its left edge. That's true for us in a way that is not true for a lot of other left wing organizations. That meant that we were in the position where we could really grow.

Also, because DSA had so few chapters and, in a sense, because DSA was small, it meant that new people joining the organization had the real feeling that they could make it their own. If we were a stronger, more robust organization eight months ago, then people joining us would have been swallowed up by a whole system ready to instruct new members. Instead, we opened up the doors to 15,000 people who now have the challenge of figuring out what they want the organization to be. We're lucky that DSA is the kind of open organization where that is the kind of challenge that is welcomed and not seen as a threat.

Krieg: So when a political organization, especially one dedicated to democratic principles, quadruples in size it is effectively a different thing. Most of the people who are members now were not a year ago. How does DSA keep manage its identity now when, as we'll see this weekend, rival factions begin to emerge and potentially clash?

Lenchner: Let me answer that this way: my head is at -- I'm imagining us as an organization of 100,000 members and I keep asking myself, What are things going to look like then?

What are the kinds of realities that we're going to face if we grow another 500% of the next few years? What is it going to look like when we elect multiple DSA members to Congress? We've had people in high political office. When it happens again, the next wave, some of the conflicts that we might suffer from today will be irrelevant. It's important to hold on to that fact and realize we're on a rocket ship trajectory and that things that loom large today are going to seem insignificant in two or three years.

Krieg: Do you envision DSA as being an organization that, as time goes by and in addition to its advocacy, runs candidates for as many offices as possible, or do you see more in the vein of the Working Families Party, which might have a ballot line but is fundamentally, electorally, is about providing support and endorsements in primaries?

Lenchner: DSA is not a political party and that's an important distinction. We are not on any ballot. Our sense is that instead of committing ourselves to being a political party, we have the freedom to run people within any political context that makes sense. That might mean a nonpartisan election, like they have in Seattle, it might mean inside a Democratic primary, it could mean as a third party member -- all of these options are open to us precisely because we are not a political party. Becoming a party would constrain us. Instead, we get to offer a hand to any alliance, any relationship where we think we can advance a left agenda. That means forming coalitions with other entities and it means creating in this country, for the first time in many generations, entire constituencies that are devoted to democratic socialism.

When you think of constituencies in American politics, people often break it down by demographics. What do women of color want? What do white seniors want? But imagine a world where, in addition, you have ideological blocs that are saying, We're the constituency for single-payer, we're the constituency for not instigating disastrous wars in the Middle East -- creating entire blocs of voters that hold firm to those principles -- and threaten any politician who disregards them.

That's what DSA, with a big boost from Bernie Sanders, is bringing back to American politics.

Krieg: When we've spoken in the past, you tended to be either advocating a policy or for a candidate. Building a political organization is obviously not that. It's more abstract. Maybe more difficult. You can't, as an example, paper over an internal policy dispute with some beloved candidate. How is it different?

Lenchner: Because DSA is, by design, a big tent organization, it means that the more successful we are, the more competing and cooperating strands there are going to be. So in an effort like the Sanders campaign, you might work with unlikely allies, but you have a mission. You are winning votes for one person.

When you're with an organization that has more than one school of thought, you don't always have that one defining goal that makes everyone line up and work together easily. In that sense, we're probably going to have some of the dysfunctions of a family, where we all come together for holidays but it doesn't mean we don't fight. I don't know that this is a bad thing. And it's not as though our counterparts in other places don't have their own internal fights, as well.

I was thinking, even within the Trump White House, I can't think of anyone at DSA talking about someone else at DSA sucking their own c--k (A reference to Trump's now-former communications director). We're just not there yet! And, frankly, because we don't hold that much institutional power, there is a great deal of good humor and patience that might not exist if we were actually in control of levers of policy and budgets in this country.

Krieg: There has been a dust-up, among DSA people and friends of the movement, in recent weeks over Syria policy, a particular blog post seemed to trigger it, and there is going to be a vote on BDS (a movement to divest from and sanction Israel) in Chicago. What do you think is the single most pressing issue, politically, facing DSA now?

Lenchner: I wouldn't say "pressing," but I can tell you there is clearly a spectrum where, on one side, you have people who feel as though DSA has been a little bit too attached to Democratic Party politics and their goal is to liberate DSA so that it's more free to explore building power and competing outside the framework of Democratic Party primaries or supporting Democratic candidates.

And then, in contrast, you have other folks who are saying, well, we don't think that the Green Party strategy is very useful. We don't think that other socialist organizations that have hovered on the margins have been especially successful. We think that if the majority of working class voters are still inside the Democratic Party, it makes sense for us to compete there and make sure Republicans don't win.

But you have to remember that it's not two completely different schools of thought. Even the people who are one side will still concede that the other folks have a point and ought to win some of the times. So, for example, there are very few Democratic Party loyalists within DSA who aren't perfectly fine working with the Working Families Party, which is in fact a third party. Or that aren't supportive of efforts to back someone like (Seattle city council member) Kshama Sawant, who belongs to a rival organization (called Socialist Alternative), but clearly has earned broad left support. And on the other side, even the folks who have more of an affinity to third parties, I haven't heard anyone say that working for Bernie Sanders was a mistake. Not a single one.

We live with these contradictions in a much more intense ideological way and that's something that, for instance, regular Democratic Party politics doesn't have to concern itself with.

Krieg: Do you expect the measure to support BDS will pass?

Lenchner: Yes. By an 80% margin.

Krieg: Which brings us back to the Democratic Party. You're talking about keeping a foot inside the tent. BDS is not looked upon too kindly by many liberals. Democratic leaders in Washington have their names on a bill that would effectively criminalize it. How do you manage those channels -- do you try?

Lenchner: The truth is that, most young people, don't have that loyalty to the traditional politics of supporting Israel, right or wrong. Because DSA is made up largely of young people who don't need to worry about fundraising goals for the DNC, they don't need to worry about Chuck Schumer's fundraising for the DSCC -- why shouldn't they support policies that are much more critical of Israel? There is literally nothing institutionally to prevent them from going to the mat for something like Palestinian human rights. There is just no barrier to that.

Palestine is a wedge issue on the left. It is a convenient marker. As in, "Are you really on the left? Show it by supporting BDS. Oh, you won't do that? Well, you're not really a leftist." BDS is a litmus test -- not that consequential at this point -- for an organization that is trying to assert itself as "not-the Democratic Party." It's not as if DSA is suddenly becoming an organization primarily focused on foreign policy.

Krieg: When you announced you would be running, there was a line that caught my eye -- you say you want to "professionalize the management of DSA." Given the scorn so many progressives, and certainly leftists, have for professional consultants in politics, how do you go about making this argument with people who instinctively reject it?

Lenchner: First of all, let me be clear: I adore the current staff. But they are going to expand and change to meet the needs of a growing organization.

When I was younger, I was lucky enough to be taken to Scandinavia, to places like Sweden and Denmark, and I found there that the government and various other entities fund youth organizations where the people in charge are young people -- high school and college students -- but the staff are adults who have been working there for years. And it was clear that the hierarchy was that the staff was under the control of these elected student bodies. I thought it was great. The young people are in charge! But when it comes to filing your taxes or making sure the payroll happens on time, why wouldn't you have people who do that for a living be the ones doing it?

In the same way, DSA needs to focus on being a participatory democratic organization, but things like making sure fundraising letters are sent, or making sure that internal elections are done properly, or providing support for programs -- that's the kind of stuff that I feel like there's a division of labor among people who have specific job functions and the organization as a whole, which is made to function politically. But that expertise is not well distributed or made available at the chapter level. And in some ways, the left sometimes has a hard time drawing a line between those two things.

I'm not certain that the person who is making sure people renew their membership dues has to be motivated by pure socialist principles. I'd like them to be motivated by what the percentage of membership renewals.

Krieg: So we're a little more than six months into Trump's time in office. DSA grew in his wake. Where do you want the organization to be in three and a half or so years, as the country is going back to the polls in November of 2020?

Lenchner: I don't know if I have a direct answer. I think that socialists are more likely to be impactful in local elections. The situation we had with Bernie in 2016 is kind of unique. I'd point out this: There is always going to be a conflict within the Democratic Party between people who want things like single-payer and other folks who are focused on fundraising and making peace with corporate interests that are more aligned with Democrats. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a fact of life in our political system. What's new is that there hadn't been as many organizations mobilizing the left side of that equation and being able to do it by raising small dollar donations, enough that can actually compete with the big money that comes from PACs and wealthy individuals.

That's new and that constituency isn't just DSA, bravely alone waving a red flag, that's a whole sector -- that's Our Revolution, that's (new Our Revolution president and former Ohio state senator) Nina Turner, that's unions who supported Sanders, that's people like Kshama Sawant in Seattle. DSA is one component in the growth of larger left impacting American politics.

And that sector is now able to exert so much power we're seeing Cory Booker try to legalize marijuana at the federal level? Seeing folks like Kamala Harris rhetorically endorse single-payer? We're basically seeing a massive shift of otherwise mainstream Democrats bend over backwards to use the words and the policy positions of people that are far to their left -- and they're doing it because we actually have the gravitational pull for a change.

Just imagine where that will take us after DSA spends a few years capacity-building and learning the skills and knowing the differences between voter file software and how to manage active canvassing campaigns. Once we get that better mastered, I think you're going to see the number of openly socialist candidates holding office rise from less than 100 to many thousands, as was the case in the heyday of the Socialist Party.

TM & 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

See the article here:
Will Trump backlash make American socialists great again? - WENY-TV

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has 25,000 members. Its growth over the past year has been massive tripling in size and no doubt a product of the increasing rejection of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has visited severe economic insecurity on the vast majority, particularly among young workers.

No socialist organization has been this large in decades. The possibilities for transforming American politics are exhilarating.

In considering how to make such a transformation happen, we might be tempted to usher those ranks of new socialists into existing vehicles for social change: community organizations, trade unions, or electoral campaigns organizations more likely to win immediate victories for the workers that are at the center of our vision. Why not put our energy and hone our skills where they seem to be needed the most? Workers needs are incredibly urgent; shouldnt we drop everything and join in these existing struggles right now?

While its crucial to be deeply involved in such struggles as socialists, we also have something unique to offer the working class, harnessing a logic that supports but is different from the one that organizers for those existing vehicles operate under. Heres a sketch of a practical approach rooted in that vision that can win support for democratic social change in the short run and a majority for socialist transformation in the long run.

For socialists, theory and practice must be joined at the hip. Socialists work for reforms that weaken the power of capital and enhance the power of working people, with the aim of winning further demands what Andr Gorz called non-reformist reforms. We want to move towards a complete break with the capitalist system. Socialists, unlike single-issue activists, know that democratic victories must be followed by more democratic victories, or they will be rolled back.

Single-payer health care is a classic example of a non-reformist reform, one that would pry our health system free from capitals iron grip and empower the working class by nationalizing the private health insurance industry. But socialists conceive of this struggle differently than single-issue advocates of Medicare for All.

Socialists understand that single payer alone cannot deal with the cost spiral driven by for-profit hospital and pharmaceutical companies. If we do achieve a national (or state-level) single-payer system, the fight wouldnt be over; socialists would then fight for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. A truly socialized health care system (as in Britain and Sweden) would nationalize hospitals and clinics staffed by well-paid, unionized health care workers.

Socialists can and should be at the forefront of fights like this today. To do so, we must gain the skills needed to define who holds power in a given sector and how to organize those who have a stake in taking it away from them. But we cant simply be the best activists in mass struggles. Single-issue groups too often attack a few particularly bad corporate actors without also arguing that a given crisis cannot be solved without curtailing capitalist power.

Socialists not only have to be the most competent organizers in struggle, but they have to offer an analysis that reveals the systemic roots of a particular crisis and offer reforms that challenge the logic of capitalism.

As socialists, our analysis of capitalism leads us to not just a moral and ethical critique of the system, but to seeing workers as the central agents of winning change.

This isnt a random fetishizing of workers its based on their structural position in the economy. Workers have the ability to disrupt production and exchange, and they have an interest in banding together and articulating collective demands. This makes them the key agents of change under capitalism.

This view can be caricatured as ignoring struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, and more. But nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is majority women and disproportionately brown and black and immigrant; fighting for the working class means fighting on precisely these issues, as well as for the rights of children, the elderly, and all those who cannot participate in the paid labor market.

Socialists must also fight on the ideological front. We must combat the dominant ideology of market individualism with a compelling vision of democracy and freedom, and show how only in a society characterized by democratic decision-making and universal political, civil, and social rights can individuals truly flourish.

If socialist activists cannot articulate an attractive vision of socialist freedom, we will not be able to overcome popular suspicion that socialism would be a drab, pseudo-egalitarian, authoritarian society. Thus we must model in our own socialist organizations the democratic debate, peaceful conflict, and social solidarity that would characterize a socialist world.

A democratic socialist organization that doesnt have a rich and accessible internal educational life will not develop an activist core who can be public tribunes for socialism. Activists dont stay committed to building a socialist organization unless they can articulate to themselves and others why even a reformed capitalism remains a flawed, undemocratic society.

But socialists must also be front and center in struggles to win the short-term victories that empower people and lead them to demand more. Socialists today are a minority building and pushing forward a potential, progressive anti-corporate majority. We have no illusions that the dominant wing of the Democrats are our friends. Of course, most levels of government are now run by Republicans well to the right of them. But taking on neoliberal Democrats must be part of a strategy to defeat the far right.

Take the Democrats, who are showing what woeful supposed leaders of the resistance they are every day. Contrary to the party leaderships single-note insistence, the Russians did not steal the election for Trump; rather, a tepid Democratic candidate who ran on expertise and competence lost because her corporate ties precluded her articulation of a program that would aid the working class a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free public higher education.

Clinton failed to gain enough working-class votes of all races to win the key states in the former industrial heartland; she ended up losing to the most disliked, buffoonish presidential candidate in history. If we remain enthralled to Democratic politics-as-usual, were going to continue being stuck with cretins like Donald Trump.

Of course, progressive and socialist candidates who openly reject the neoliberal mainstream Democratic agenda may choose for pragmatic reasons to use the Democratic Party ballot line in partisan races. But whatever ballot line the movement chooses to use, we must always be working to increase the independent power of labor and the Left.

Sanders provides an example: its hard to imagine him offering a radical opening to using the s word in American politics for his openly independent campaign if he had run on an independent line. Bernie also showed the strength of socialists using coalition politics to build a short-term progressive majority and to win people over to a social-democratic program and, sometimes, to socialism. Sanders gained the support of six major unions; if we had real social movement unionism in this country, he would have carried the banner of the entire organized working-class movement.

Bernies weaker performance than Clinton among voters of color though not among millennials of color derived mostly from his being a less known commodity. But it also demonstrated that socialists need deeper social roots among older women and communities of color. That means developing the organizing strategies that will better implant us in the labor movement and working-class communities, as well as struggles for racial justice and gender and sexual emancipation.

Socialists have the incumbent obligation to broaden out the post-Sanders, anti-corporate trend in US politics into a working-class rainbow coalition. We must also fight our governments imperialist foreign policy and push to massively cut wasteful defense spending. We should be involved in multiracial coalitions, fighting for reforms like equitable public education and affordable housing.

Democratic socialists can be the glue that brings together disparate social movement that share an interest in democratizing corporate power. We can see the class relations that pervade society and how they offer common avenues of struggle. But at 25,000 members, we cant substitute ourselves for the broader currents needed to break the power of both far-right nativist Republicans and pro-corporate neoliberal Democrats.

We have to work together with broader movements that may not be anti-capitalist but remain committed to reforms. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers lives. If we stay isolated from them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance.

Of course, socialists should endeavor to build their own organizational strength and to operate as an independent political force. We cannot mute our criticism against business unionist trends in the labor movement and the middle-class professional leadership of many advocacy groups. But in the here and now, we must also help win those victories that will empower workers to conceive of more radical democratic gains. Our members are disproportionately highly educated, young, male, and white. To win victories, we must pursue a strategy and orientation that makes us more representative of the working class.

In the final analysis, socialists must be both tribunes for socialism and the best organizers. Thats how the Communist Party grew rapidly from 1935-1939. They set themselves up as the left wing of the CIO and of the New Deal coalition, and grew from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand members during that period.

The Socialist Party, on the other hand, condemned the New Deal as a restoration of capitalism. In saying so they were partly right: the New Deal was in part about saving capitalism from itself. But such a stance was also profoundly wrong in that it distanced the Socialist Party from popular struggles from below, including those for workers rights and racial equality that forced capital to make important concessions. This rejection was rooted in a concern that those struggles were reformist; it led the SP to fall from twenty thousand members in 1935 to three thousand in 1939.

Of course, there are also negative lessons to be learned from the Communist growth during the Popular Front period. They hid their socialist identity in an attempt to appeal to the broadest swath of Americans possible. When forced to reveal it, they referred to an authoritarian Soviet Union as their model. And by following Moscows line on the Hitler-Stalin Pact and then the no-strike pledge during World War II, the party abandoned the most militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the Communists put themselves in a position that prevented them from ever winning hegemony within the US working-class movement from liberal forces.

Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.

The road to DSA becoming a real working-class organization runs through us becoming the openly socialist wing of a mass movement opposed to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus. If we only become better organizers, with more practical skills in door-knocking and phone-banking and one-on-one conversations, we will likely see the defection of many of our most skilled organizers who will take those skills and get jobs doing mass work in reformist organizations.

Such a defection bedeviled DSA in the 1980s, leading to a donut phenomenon thousands of members embedded in mass movements, but few building the center of DSA as an organization. We must avoid this. Simultaneously, if we dont relate politically to social forces bigger than our own, DSA could devolve into merely a large socialist sect or subculture.

The choice to adopt a strategy that would move us towards becoming a mass socialist organization with working-class roots is ours. This is the most promising moment for the socialist left in decades. If we take advantage of it, we can make our own history.

See the rest here:
What Should Socialists Do? - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine

The Democratic Socialists of Americahave a big question to answer a 24,000-person strong question. According to a recent announcement, thats how many members the group claims to have, thanks in part to the interest in socialism prompted by the insurgent presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and as a reaction to theelection of a far-right president in Donald Trump. But, as800 delegates descend on Chicago forthe DSA conventionthis week, the group must figure out how itsmasses of card-carrying socialists will engage in electoral politics.

Local chapters have debated how much energy to put into running for office versus engaging in issue advocacy, and whether to align with Democrats or work on building a new political party.

EnterJabari Brisport a DSA-endorsed, Green Party candidate for New Yorks 35th City Council District whooffers one potential path forward for the group.

A flyer for a New York City council candidate forum hangs outside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Brisport is a 29-year-old African American artist and activist who was born and raised in the 35th District, which includes portions of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept, he described his motivation for running, and his thoughts on the larger political zeitgeist.

Grassroots politics runs deep in his family as does radicalism. Brisports mother is a former Black Panther. Hespent years organizing around local causes, and was an enthusiastic backer of Sanderss presidential campaign. Unlike Sanders, however, Brisport chose to end his cooperation with Democratic Party after the election.

Last year, I was really just fed up with the party, he said. After Bernie lost the nomination, I decided to moved on out to the Greens who, honestly, ideologically Im closer to and are a better fit with me. I was also tired of arguing with other Democrats over things I think are basic, like whether money influences politics.

The New York City Councils first-past-the-post elections, where whoever gets the most votes wins outright, running as a third-party candidate is tough.But because Brooklyn is so heavily dominated by Democrats,Brisport is essentially trying to introduce atwo-party competition. In doing that, hes walking a path similar to Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative councilwoman in Seattle who defeated a Democratic opponent on a platform designed around democratizing wealth and power in the city.

The incumbent in the 35th District is a former art museum executive named Laurie Cumbo,who moved into the district to run for office in 2013. Brisports main ideological difference with Cumbo is their divergent approaches to developing Brooklyn.

Hers is what Ive seen called the Guggenheim Theory of development, which is that if you bring lots of really glitzy art spaces to an area, really great concert halls, really great art museums, so on and so forth, thatll bring economic improvement to the area, he noted. Which is like a half-truth. Because it brings more wealth and improvement to the area but also pushes out the poor people.

What Brisport is describing is the process of gentrification, which has swept his part of Brooklyn in recent years, drawing the ire ofAfrican American and West Indian communitiesin the district. Brisport claims to offera more democratic form of growth guided by the local community.

Give more community control, he suggested, pointing to the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights. Brisport opposes plans to turn the 138,000-square-foot armory into a bonanza for private developers. Instead, he is supporting residents who want to turn the site into a community land trust. Under such a model, land development would be approved by a nonprofit controlled by the local community.

People from the community organize into a non-profit, and then you can turn over the land to them, instead of wealthy developer, he explained. They can choose who they contract out to. Maybe theyll contract out to a non-profit. Ultimately, theyll have final say in the negotiations.

That same spirit of greater localized democracy runs through the entirety of Brisports platform: From expanding participatory budgeting, to requiring police officers to live in the city, to taxing the rich to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.

One of the challenges ofBrisports run for office and for DSA, in general is defining democratic socialism in a way that Americans will embrace it as a mainstream ideology.

You tell somebody socialism without hearing somebody describe it, they automatically think government owns everything, takes away your property, he complained. Its not necessarily thinking about it as government. Its about We The People. Its about having power and agency over how things are guided.

He cited the financial crisis as an example of how a group of elites were able to negatively impact the lives of millions of people without facing democratic accountability.

In 2008, when the banks crashed the economy, we cant vote out the CEOs of those banks, we have no say over those bankers, he noted. However, if an elected official messes up the economy, you can vote them out. You have a say.

A crowd gathers for a New York City council candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

One of the obstacles Sanderss presidential campaign faced in his race against Hillary Clinton was the strong loyalty shown by older African American voters to the establishment of the Democratic Party. The only cohort of the black electorate Sanders won was the youngest. The establishment party candidates also made strong showingsamong these voters of other ethnic backgrounds in races againstpopulists. In his re-election bid, Chicagos Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for instance, counted on strong black support to beat back challenger Chuy Garcia in his Democratic primary. Sanders-backed Tom Perriello suffered from a deficit among black voters in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary.

For Brisports part, these shortfalls came largely thanksto a coordinated campaign by the partys establishment and the deep Southern tiesheld by Clinton and her husband, the former Arkansas governor President Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party weaponized identity politics a little bit against Bernie Sanders, he said of last years presidential primary. As soon as he started losing the South, they made this whole thing of him not connecting with black voters. Which is insane. Because like, if Coke was really doing well in the South over Pepsi, nobody would be like, Well, I guess Pepsi is having trouble connecting with black voters!'

However, he also said Sanders should have adjusted his approach to appeal to a wider set of voters. Bernie also is a little big guilty, he conceded. At some point, he failed to move things outside of an economic lens. I think he was asked this one question at a debate that was like whats your biggest blind spot as a white person. He said, when youre white you dont know what its like to be poor. I dont know how he got to that conclusion.

I love Bernie. I would vote for him ten times. But Im not sure what he was going for with that statement, Brisport continued. I think his bigger blinder was seeing so much from an economic lens when you do need a mixture of an economic approach and an approach towards marginalized group. When I said weaponized identity politics earlier, I dont mean to say Im anti-identity politics. I understand their role. Its a double-edged sword. Its something to be addressed not something to be used as character assassination.

Brisports criticism matches that of Khalid Kamau, a DSA-backed socialist candidate who won a city council seat in South Fulton, Georgia, in the spring.

I love Bernie, but I think where his campaign failed I dont think this is a personal failure of Bernie, but perhaps of the people that were around him and advising that campaign is that there wasnt enough attention paid to people of color, Kamau told Truthout in March. I am not sure that people of color who were in that campaign were listened to the way they should have been.

New York City council candidate Jabari Brisport (second from left) meets with constituents following a candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Going forward, Brisport believes the best way for democratic socialists to build a truly multi-racial movement is to show up and support communities of every background.

DSA is multi-tendency. Its electoral but also fighting lots of different battles: housing, immigrant justice, climate, labor rights, strike solidarity, education he explained. What theyve been really great at doing is going into these conflicts where the community is fighting. And not only allying themselves with the local community, but amplifying them and also taking a backseat. Not like coming up and saying, Were DSA were running this. But also saying how can we amplify what you do?

New York Citys 2,000-member strong DSA chapter has put its money where it mouth is in diversifying the movement. So far, both of the candidates it supports for city council races comes from non-white backgrounds. In addition to Brisport, DSA voted to endorse Reverend Khader El-Yateem in his Democratic primary in Brooklyns diverse Bay Ridge neighborhood. El-Yateem is a Palestinian Christian and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS) a bold stance in a city known for its stridently pro-Israel politics.

El-Yateem is Trumps worst nightmare. He supports immigrants, is Arab-American and explicitly refuses to take money from developers, NYC-DSA Co-Chairwoman Rahel Biru said in a statement.

Brisport has seen the difficulties in organizing people of different ethnic backgrounds into one movement first hand in his own backyard. He pointed to disputes between Caribbean Americans and Jewish Americans in Brooklyn over housing as an example.

Theres a general sense in the community that the Jews are buying up the land and controlling everything, he said of complaints hes seen in the Caribbean community. Which is upsetting. He added, Its almost like what I saw Trump do. He saw peoples real concerns about an economy that was failing them and shifting it over to Muslims and Mexicans.

Brisports goal is to end the racial infighting and unite his diverse district behind democratic socialism.

What I tell people is gentrification isnt caused by white people, its caused by capitalism, he said. If you de-commodify the land and you take the profit motive away then we can actually fight against this.

Top photo: Jabari Brisport, a 29-year-old actor-turned-activist-turned-member of the Democratic Socialists of America, poses for a portrait in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

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Jabari Brisport Is Running For City Council to Bring Democratic Socialism to Brooklyn - The Intercept

It is enormously frustrating that conservatives cant capture the moral high ground from the phony virtue-signaling factory that is the modern Democratic Party. Conservative policies not only work better but also are morally superior.

Democrats depend on cliches and false narratives to obstruct true reform which includes shaming many Republicans from believing enough in their own agenda to pursue it with conviction. This is nowhere more apparent than in the endless debate over the fate of Obamacare and the future of American health care.

It is unconscionable that Republicans are unable to muster a simple majority to end the Obamacare monstrosity a freakish beast that does everything it promised not to do and does little it promised to do, a gargantuan scam that is destroying our health care, eroding our liberty and punishing our economy. Its a camel with its entire body already inside the tent of the American idea hellbent on completing Obamas plan to fundamentally demolish it.

Democrats are incapable of offering new ideas because they are ideologically and politically enslaved. Their worldview weds them to the historically discredited notion that great results flow from allegedly good intentions. And their lust for power impels them to exploit identity politics and perpetuate victimhood for the constituencies whose overwhelming support is essential to their political lifeblood.

For example, they cant support decentralization and competition in education, no matter how much that could improve the lives of minorities trapped in inferior schools, or support across-the-board tax cuts even though cuts for higher-income earners help stimulate economic growth, which redounds to the benefit of middle- and lower-income earners because they cannot abandon their class warfare strategy.

Now back to todays more pressing issue health care reform. Their policies have wrought untold disaster across the board, yet they will acknowledge no responsibility for these failures, much less join, in any way, those seeking solutions.

Democrats tell us they would be happy to work with Republicans to repair the glitches in Obamacare. The problem is that we are not dealing with mere glitches. The entire legislative debacle is a galloping cancer on our system.

Further exposing the Democrats fraud, almost all of the Republicans so-called repeal and replace proposals have not actually contemplated repeal at all; theyve just proposed revisions. Yet Democrats, in lockstep, will not even come to the table to discuss them. In other words, except for their failed efforts to fully repeal the bill, all Republican proposals have been efforts not to completely end Obamacare (sad to say) but to partially repair it.

Democrats dont want the system improved. They know its a barely disguised wealth redistribution scheme that if left alone will necessarily eventuate in a single-payer system a euphemism for socialized medicine.

So for now, lets forget Democrats, who have no intention of working with Republicans on this.

What about the couple of handfuls of pseudo-Republicans who dont have the decency to end this nightmare the ones who campaigned on the promise to repeal this law but wont now pull the trigger?

I dont want to hear that their consciences are involved or that they are from liberal states. How about their intellectual honesty and dignity?

Why do they enable Democratic propaganda that millions would be hurt by repealing a law that forces those millions to buy insurance against their will? Why arent they held accountable for giving life-support to a law that is already harming people and would result in socializing one-sixth of our economy?

Dont you just love hearing the self-serving protestations of these squishes, pretending to care so much about people while they are single-handedly (as Democratic intransigence is an irremediable reality) decimating world historys greatest health care system?

There is nothing compassionate about what Democrats and their sanctimonious foxhole-sharing Republican frauds are doing here.

Its time for freedom-loving, people-loving Americans to turn the tables on these charlatans and recapture the moral high ground through aggressive and intelligent messaging. Well never save this republic if we cant make the case that government largesse is fundamentally destructive and incompetent and that the invisible hand of the market yields results across the board that are more beneficial for more people than those of any other system known to man.

Socialism kills, impoverishes and enslaves and only masquerades as compassion while facilitating the compassion merchants consolidation of power. Freedom brings prosperity and, if you insist on using compassion as the be-all-end-all yardstick, is abundantly compassionate.

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Follow David Limbaugh on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at http://www.davidlimbaugh.com.

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DAVID LIMBAUGH: Socialism kills, impoverishes, enslaves - Examiner Enterprise