our org demands really are backsliding huh.

this was true in 2019

it will not do after March 2020 https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1343601868988178438

a whole lot of the left but especially within DSA, I often hear people saying that no one (from the opposite straw man) seems to have learned from Occupy.

But they keep making the one mistake occupy most showed us was a mistake.

The joke commonly goes that Occupy would shout "WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?" and then be met with deafening silence, and that was taken as them having no demand

but that's not what that shows, not really, is it.

it shows that without actually thinking it consciously, people then already realised that there's sort of a Prisoner's Dilemma here, yeah?

Having only one demand means you deprioritize other demands, that are required for solidarity

you cannot 'build a movement' on a single demand.

a 'single demand' will either not get you wide acceptance, or it will be so broad that it is easy to co-opt.

you need many.

but codifying them doesn't do much -- as things evolve they have to evolve too.

so Points of Unity are the closest we can have to that, but everyone still wants One Demand

but none of these orgs seem to realise as a majority that one demand needs to be the abolition of capitalism, and to get there you need many, multifaceted demands and fights on all points capitalism is rocky,

AND OR THAT SOLDIARITY CAN BE FOSTERED WITH GROUPS THAT ARE COMPATIBLE WITH LIBERATION, no matter how much they make the comfortable white people at the top uncomfortable,

or how many secrets they feel they need to keep to 'keep strong'.
you wont keep strong by being obsturctionist to things like that, you just lose trust of people, and with that, solidarity

and it just boggles me that people claim to want to make mass movements but fail to see every single one in the past few decades have been from, for lack of a better phrase at the moment, 'solidarity-forged-ties', that connect all the disparate blobs

like, sorry, you gotta actually respect people and make the rest of your org respect them too, or many outside of that will see you as untrustworthy and it takes a LOT to get that back

it's not 1950 anymore, times have changed, if you don't at least think about how the technology and media has changed, you're going to still be doing dead drops and phone trees while opponents move two orders of magnitude faster than you

it sucks, it makes doing things harder, but you can't just go back to that and assume it's easier.

it obviously isn't, but no one wants to put in the extra work if they want to use older methods

so we get this flimsy logsitical nightmare, and that's part of why so much is canvassing or signup sheets, just, now using excel spreadsheets instead of printed out ones

cant actually have a mass movement if you think only one demand can work

as a sidenote, its funny, since the same people often also drag out No Shortcuts by McAlevey, while never seeming to have considered what it's core message is

i'd relax on this if any of the slogans were actually catchy, but they're all instead presented as THE demand, even though in the case of the instigating post, DSA has many demands.

and OP is a demand for so, so little in covid

it feels like the center of mass of the entire "US left" looks at the democratic party and goes, yeah, lets compromise with them

having never actually learned the lesson they criticize the dems of

and so they make demands at the level they want, and compromise down from there

are you kidding? a jobs guarantee as one of the frontline public facing demands? When the graphs for Massachusetts look like this?

You're asking for a death sentence with a living wage, not anything to actually help with COVID.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-december-28-2020/download

paying people to stay home and businesses to stay afloat, is the demand.

not a JOBS GUARANTEE WHEN THE JOBS THAT ARE GAURANTEED ARE THE KIND THAT ARE KEPT OPEN WITH DEMONSTRABLY LITTLE REGARD FOR EXPOSURE

for all the ranting about history, no one seems to have looked at the history of the US left outside of the rosy articles on it, because its constantly just reinventing square wheels and then demanding that no they're just as round as the other ones

Singular demands, or a handful of vague demands, are a mistake because they're either making it way harder to build solidarity while keeping your promises, or they're so vague they're useless.

so, you know, let one hundred thousand flowers bloom, instead of focusing on single points of failure.

We've been seeing that with local chapters. It's wild that the national structure and many chapters are still stuck on a road that every map already shows is a dead end.

Especially when other chapters are flourishing with local aid distribution, police abolition pushes, etc

how did the New Deal (Which accomplished far more than the green new deal asks for...) happen?

Well, between the war, the 1918 pandemic, the 1920s and 1929 stock crash, the dust bowl, and as a result and from other things, a strong labor movement,

gave a credible threat to the ruling class that they would lose their power. They panicked, and gave concessions. Throwing it behind them like an oil slick in a 1960s spy movie. Removing steam from the movement as the less-dedicated socialists, communists, etc

healthcare in the UK? same. Scandanavian-style petro-state social democracy? same sort.

you do not get concessions by making them as your starting demand, you get concessions by your ability to make a high level demand and have enough people behind it that the

sort of alternative methods you use (general strikes, violent revolution, widespread electoral organizing, physically blocking parliament, french style labor riots, etc) does not actually matter in the specifics of it, because once you get to that point, and have enough that

its hard to co-opt you, all they can do is make the 'more centrist' layers of the revolutionary onion defect

because they no longer need what they're fighting for, the ruling class gave them half-way to the demand

and thats the concession

Otherwise? Every concession we gained in the last 20 years was rolled back, because that was the plan, as biden shows. They exist to mask that we take 3 steps backwards for every TEMPORARY step forward, right now

the US left does not really understand the scale involved, I think, because you only can really think in terms of city-level populations. but the US is much closer to the entirety of the Eurovision member countries, instead of like, just Germany

328 million people nationally.

100k members doesnt make a dent. so its time to start actually going for solidarity. because until you can mobilize 50k people in one city with 18 hours notice, you're in no position to make demands that can win. just mask the dems.