Chana

The Democratic Party cannot be taken over. It is not a democratic institution. You could have 70% of elected Democrats agreeing with you and being variations on Mamdani and "party leadership" wouod still be outside your hands and they would still be working against you and there would be nothing you could do to advance your position in the party. It is a private, bourgeois institutional governed by ita donors and those donors' supplicants.

More practically, what you could hope for is entryism and then a split. That is the basic claimed premise by DemSocs in DSA who argue for running as Dems. Unsurprisingly, this is a Trotskyist tactic and basically never works. But trying and failing in a very public way may still be a boon for radicalization and growing our ranks.

But only with discipline (or luck)! The Dems will try to coopt everything appealing about DemSocs without stepping on the toes of donors. And that cooption begins with Mamdani himself, who will be constantly pressured to soften his stances and be more lib. DSA has zero discipline whatsoever, so with someone like Mamdani one would have to depend on luck, i.e. just this one guy being principled. This is the DSA way and it is why they eat shit in 90% of their electoralism, they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support. But maybe they got lucky with this one guy.

It's a good bit, I admit.

I do want to note that in the Gospels and really basically everything remotely intended to portray "eye witness" events of regarding Jesus (still stories that copy heavily from one another, hardly multiple accounts), the main message is, over and over again, "Jesus is special, you must believe in him over everything else". Reading these texts, the message is not, "love each other and live in community", it is, "eschew all else if that is what it takes to believe in me, even if that means being kind to your enemies". Just about every parable is just iterations on the theme of, "Jesus is special, he does miracles, you need to believe over all else". The Gospels are written with the exoectation that this would all be wrapped up during their lifetimes, as in Jesus was coming back on Thursday so you better start believing and stop focusing on worldly things.

Which is to say, the figure of Jesus is not exactly socialist, as socialists focus on the material, on community, of creating a better world through the destruction of capitalism. The figure of Jesus is more like a hippie that says, "screw all of that, join my cult, nothing else matters".

Anyways do with this what you will. The "Jesus was socialist" angle is still decent agitprop because most self-proclaimed Christians haven't read The Gospels. Very few people are really engaging with the figure or reading critically, they just learn parables in isolation and a local religious figure tells them what to believe about it.

What do you think Marx meant by this?

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

They are people who fetishize trans people. They tend to be particularly dehumanizing about it.

They're already dead inside

Dialectical materialism. It is not materiap determinism, you have to participate and organize.

Complaints about hexbear: almost exclusively liberals and reactionaries looking for excuses for why they always lose arguments with us. "Spreading pro-Russia propaganda" is a go-to liberal excuse for left criticism of Ukraine or pushing back on racist liberal criticisms of Russia. Liberals want to believe asiatic hordes mythologies about a revanchist Russia rather than acknowledge history or material conditions before 2022. Mention Minsk II and they start namecalling. Mention NATO and they cannot handle the of NATO being worse than Russia.

Defederation and hexbear: when hexbear has defederated from other instances, to my knowledge it has always been about the admins of another instance tolerating transphobia, including chasers. Other instances defederating from us is always supposedly high-minded liberals having a breakdown when they fail to have an echo chamber for left punching. Or in the case of lemmy.world, preemptively defederating "as a last resort" to entirely avoid having to think about this.

Of course, in all of these cases don't forget that these same people and instances tolerate neo-Nazi posting and reverence, e.g. Azov. They are simply being protective of the worldviews handed down to them by their patron saints (talking heads and Reddit admins). Also keep in mind that site admins have a habit of being thin skinned nerds, so even if their users disagree with their logic (like the lemmy.world defederation post comments), it makes no real difference because site admins are basically petty lords over their sites. Imagine being a person that wants to make or be Reddit 3.0 and whose only real complaint about Reddit is a lack of third party apps.

Neoliberal! It's the austerity version.

I've suggested that people here dooming join an org. I offer to help them find one and explain how to do it and what to expect.

To my knowledge, nobody has joined an org as a result of this. Or told me they did. Or even expressed any real interest in doing so.

The organizations are all around us. They are (usually) recruiting. There are communist ones, straight-up MLs with cool people ready to onboard. They organize actions, build coalitions, do political education.

It is not that "the left" has nothing to offer or do. It is that only a small minority of people in the imperial core, even self-proclaimed communists, actually take the opportunity to join an org and do work. Starting that process takes just a few hours. Most prefer to vent frustrations to the exclusion of doing any of this. This site is largely premised on that venting, historically in a way that gets pretty toxic towards one another.

Re: Mamdani, he will not only be ratfucked by Dems et al, he will also inevitably be opportunist. His org is 80% opportunists and it is the nature of US electoralism to "compromise" (clam up / mollify reactionary positions) to get votes and avoid getting shot. So if anyone is in an org, just remember to be strategic about endorsements and what future statements may beed to be made and actions need to be taken if too much support is given. For example, never ever ever ever trust a DemSoc to take InfoSec or OpSec seriously. Do not give them rour real names. That would be a pointless risk. And so on.

The future is what we build together. It can only look like what we put into it.

And maybe a museum that glorifies a worker-killing industrialist and the disposession of everyone that lived in the area.