The strategy Hasan is arguing for is to create a party like organization that runs on the Democratic Party line. The point is not to rely on Democratic Party infrastructure or to do entryism. I’m pretty confident Hasan doesn’t believe the Democratic Party can be reformed. Rather he’s just arguing that running in bourgeoisie elections is next to impossible in the US on a third party ballot line.

This is basically the strategy that I believe most of the DSA endorses. The problem is the DSA doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure or consensus to act like a real party and discipline their candidates. That’s not the same problem as the one you’re describing though.

They just became jaded posters and podcasters.

I think that’s only really true for people that were the most visible supporters of Bernie. Plenty of people who had door knocked or phone banked for Bernie turned towards more real world organizing.

Unless the DSA is actively preparing for the innevitable betrayal the exact same thing could happen again.

It’s not consensus within DSA but I believe a significant enough portion of the org wants DSA into a party that just runs on the Democratic ballot line until they’re forced out. The problem is DSA is so ideologically incoherent that different factions resist the kind of centralization necessary to make that happen.

I think a break is the consensus opinion but there is a lot of wiggle room in how exactly DSA is supposed to break from the Democratic Party line.

It was started by Marxists who thought if that if they criticized liberal identity politics enough they could get reactionaries to develop class consciousness. Total idealism, but unfortunately that describes most of the US left.

Bro I swear, this isn’t over investment leading to overcapacity and then crisis again. No no, we’re building the machine god! We’re gonna unshackle capital from its dependence on humanity. We’re gonna merge with the chatbot and live forever! This isn’t a cult. This is the heaven you’ve always dreamed of!

You didn’t even get to their internal company culture which is strange and totally fucked in its own weird way. The thing that makes Steam different is that it’s privately held. That’s allowed Gabe Newell to ignore all the standard business practices that most American tech companies abide by. However, Newell is just as much of a narcissist as any other billionaire and so Valve naturally became his own little fiefdom.

I think that’s ultimately what a lot of these rich fucks want. It’s why I think there is this trend of billionaires funding their own startups so they can have total control over how it operates. In no way has that ever worked out to the benefit of their employees or society at large.

I think in the long term you are correct. However, in the short term social reform can often engender a reactionary backlash that increases social instability. For a weak state that’s on the defensive against global capital, social reform can be seen as unnecessarily risky. That’s especially true if substantial fractions of the party hold socially conservative beliefs themselves. Personally I agree that not addressing these issues directly is a mistake even if I think care has to be taken to education people and create public support for reform.

I think part of the problem is that when faced with external threats countries tend to become more conservative. I think like China today the USSR likely did not want to introduce social instability by addressing various social issues. I think Cuba is a great example of how to do things differently.

I think they have working prototype reactors but that’s about it for now. They have plans to build some pilot plants and hopefully if things go well they’ll expand from there.

Even the whole lead up is similar with years of sanctions intended to weaken the country. Just now there is barely any pretext for the intervention. You would think they would want another 9/11 to blame on Venezuela but nope they realized it doesn't matter.