Chana

The DSA IC is the least Trot committee and therefore the best one.

It is being liberal cowards who toe the party line while being excluded from the party strategy table. Their role is to sheepdog and that means they eat shit when they inevitably support a reactionary candidate or policy or party line that is likely to get walked back. The alternative would be that they act as real critics or gadflies, but they are comfortably avoiding being so lest they get the Bernie Bro treatment, which is to say, party pushback (as weak as it is!).

They are more right wing than they describe themselves to be, yes, but they do not even allow themselves many opportunities to appropriate the left and create some kind of socdem "resistance" because of this calculus. AOC would love to be the pro-Palestine darling if it didn't mean a direct confrontation with the party machine and donors.

That's a very good point

Consider that this is not why their tune changed. The mass starvation is not what the media and NGOs care about to the exclusion of bombings, but it is the prelude to a very sudden increase in deaths, an unignorable number, and they want to get ahead of this and begin hand-wringing so they can pretend to have always been against this despite actually supporting it for 2 years. It is a successor to "we are working hard on a ceasefire" and "look we are providing air dropped aid", i.e. cynical PR.

A major, common error in thinking is the presumption that socialist politics is crossing your fingers that one figure ends up not being a piece of shit or incompetent. This is actually a bourgeois way of engaging with politics, where a common person's role is basically to be a fan or support a candidate, and the candidate has inordinate sway over what that actually ends up entailing, both strategically and in terms of what their political statements and programs are.

This is a fundamental hurdle that any growing socialist must overcome in order to become competent. If your org depends on just one person, it is not a successful or sustainable project, let alone a socialist one. The org must focus on populating itself with competent people and to collectively decide on strategy and actions and for those implementing them to be subordinate to the competent body at large.

This lesson seemingly needs to be painfully learned over and over again. This is a big part of why vanguardism and demcent were emphasized by Bolsheviks. They recognized that the chaos of undisciplined organization made them weak to bourgeois tendencies, including listening too much to just one guy, and they were constantly losing their "just one guy"s to execution and imprisonment and exile. In modern imperial core bourgeois electoralism, the (much less serious) electoral socialists lose their "just one guy"s predominately to self-interested climber (petty bourgeois) tendencies and naivete like suddenly learning that you will be killed without 24/7 security so you better get friendly with the bourgeois state.

The only reason to consider running as a Democrat is for ballot access. If you try to run third party, the Dems eventually come for you by changing ballot access rules for third parties. This is a good example of how electoralism is an energy suck and not effective for mass organization: the bourgeois electoralists will change "the rules" on you constantly and make you spend all of your energy on elections, leaving no room for actually organizing the masses.

DSA electoralists have reversed the power equation, thinking that electoralism is primary for growing a movement. They are wrong, and so every "win" they gain is easily subverted and reversed because they absolutely, 100%, do not build a mass movement from their electoralism. The movement needs to be built more directly with known effective organizing methods, particularly org membership, education, and actions.

There are no examples of anticapitalists gaining power from this.

The only value for any minimally principled socialist to run as a Democrat is to get ballot access. Trying to take over the bourgeois party that doesn't have to play by any internal rules is and always has been foolish and unserious.

Hey don't forget the old classic of: simply shoot at cops from alleyways at night.

This is, unironically, the traditional method of expressing principled hatred of cops in NYC.

Is the American left prepared to go through this?

All 235 of us are armed and ready.

This is great man theory. A real socialist will set up struggle sessions in Central Park.

Western leftists are basically touch-starved but instead of it being touch it is any whiff of domestic socialist politics. They're desperate for anything vaguely in their lane and get parasocial real fast.