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-Those seeking a way out of this impasse pointed to three key notions: The first was “grassroots”, since any new movement would need to establish the largest possible social base, while supporting all the other forces that shared its goals. The second was “communication”, since a new movement would also need to spread its values and policies as broadly as possible, by combining old and new media activism with street activism, canvassing and new forms of political action. The third was “electoral action”, which, in the context of a democratic state, constituted an essential tool for establishing and reversing power relations between social groups. Left-wing “electoral vehicles” had historically emerged as the culminating point of a long process of self-organization, promoted by social movements that shared the same long-term goals. It was therefore be argued by many that the grassroots and the communication phase should be prioritized over the electoral one.
+Those seeking a way out of the political impasse of the early 2000s pointed to three key notions: The first was “grassroots”, since any new movement would need to establish the largest possible social base, while supporting all the other forces that shared its goals. The second was “communication”, since a new movement would also need to spread its values and policies as broadly as possible, by combining old and new media activism with canvassing and new forms of political engagement. The third was “action,” which meant finding ways to mobilize the grassroots base in practical activity against capitalism and for the reorganization of society on a just and sustainable basis.
-Proponents of electoral activity cited Machiavelli's teaching that political action is nothing but the result of the struggle between the will of political subjects and ever-changing conditions which are not of their own choosing. In such a struggle, timing is essential, even more in times where opportunity windows open and close very rapidly. Thus they called for building electoral vehicles that were tightly connected with broader social and political movements, going well beyond traditional parties.
+In the context of states that still preserved democratic forms of rule, "action" often took the form of participation in elections, which was seen by many as an essential tool for establishing and reversing power relations between social groups. Left-wing electoral vehicles had historically emerged as the culminating point of a long process of self-organization, promoted by social movements that shared the same long-term goals, so it was often argued that the grassroots and the communication should take priority over electoral activity. Proponents of the latter countered with Machiavelli's teaching that political action is nothing but the result of the struggle between the will of political subjects and ever-changing conditions which are not of their own choosing. In such a struggle, timing is essential, even more in times where opportunity windows open and close very rapidly. Thus they called for building electoral vehicles that were tightly connected with broader social and political movements, going well beyond traditional parties.
-[by **Richard**] Voter suppression had long been the major electoral strategy of the racist right in the U.S., going back to the Federalist era, the tragedy of the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the slave-holding South with the nation-wide triumph of Jim Crow, and again in the 21st century with the the reversal of the Civil Rights era’s victories of the 1960’s. The usual voter suppression tactics were revived with renewed Gerrymandering, closing of polling places, strict voter ID laws and massive arbitrary purging of voter rolls all aimed at minorities and the poor.
+[by **Richard**; edited 11/18 by Fred] In the United States, voter suppression had long been a key element in the electoral strategy of the racist right wing, going back to the Federalist era, the tragedy of the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the slave-holding South with the nation-wide triumph of Jim Crow, and again in the 21st century with the the reversal of the Civil Rights era’s victories of the 1960’s. Such voter suppression tactics were revived in the 2010s with renewed gerrymandering, closing of polling places, strict voter ID laws and massive arbitrary purging of voter rolls all aimed at minorities and the poor.
-Obviously, the way for the anti-racist left to counter this strategy was to mount a vigorous  voter registration campaign. This had been the strategy of the Rainbow Coalition proposed by Jesse Jackson, but the national Democratic Party never endorsed it. The DNC, dominated by the millionaire donors and established politicians, was afraid of being challenged by an expanded base and apparently preferred losing elections to the Republicans (who won the presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote). The real scandal of the Democratic defeat of 2016 was not the largely ineffective Russian stealth propaganda campaign, but the illegal suppression of the populist Sanders challenge which left Donald Trump as the only populist in the field.
+Obviously, the way for the anti-racist left to counter this strategy was to mount a vigorous voter registration campaign. This had been the strategy of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, but the official Democratic Party never endorsed it. Dominated by millionaire donors and established politicians, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) feared being challenged by an expanded base and apparently preferred losing elections to the Republicans (who won the presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote). The real scandal of the Democratic defeat of 2016 was not the largely ineffective Russian stealth propaganda campaign, but the illegal suppression of the left-populist challenge by Sen. Bernie Sanders, which left Donald Trump as the only populist in the field.
-The amazing success of the grass-roots 2016 primary campaign of Sanders, an avowed socialist as well as several public opinion polls revealed that millions of Americans preferred socialism to capitalism. Socialism was no longer identified with totalitarian Communism as during the Red scare, and people were eager to learn more about it. And when the racist, misogynist, bully Trump was “elected,” many gave up on the existing political system altogether and began looking for alternatives.
+The amazing success of the grass-roots primary campaign by Sanders, an avowed socialist, as well as several public opinion polls, revealed that millions of Americans preferred socialism to capitalism. Socialism was no longer identified with totalitarian Communism as during the Red scare, and people were eager to learn more about it. And when the racist, misogynist, bully Trump was elected with a minority of the popular vote, many gave up on the official political parties and began looking for alternatives.
-Within less that two years, a more-or-less moribund organization with the attractive name of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had 50,000 new members and counting. DSA was the latest incarnation of the historic U.S. Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation. The SP’s perennial Presidential candidate was E.V. Debs, who was thrown into prison by Democrat Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to the U.S. entry into WWI (in 1920 Debs garnered a million votes from his cell in Leavenworth).  The SP was decimated by the post-WWI Red scare and later was pushed aside by the more radical Communist Party. The post-WWII Red scare reduced both parties to mere shells.
+Within less that two years, a more-or-less moribund social democratic outfit with the attractive name of [[dsa-history|Democratic Socialists of America]] (DSA) had 50,000 new members and continued to grow rapidly. The revitalized DSA rapidly broke with its past, resigning from the neoliberal Socialist International (which included France’s François Holland and Greece’s Papandreou) and rejecting subservience to the official Democratic Party, while struggling with the issue of what kind of electoral strategy to pursue without falling into the same trap. [end Richard]
-In 1958 a Trotskyist splinter-group, the International Socialist League, whose leading theoretician was Max Schachtman, dissolved into the SP/SDF, whose leading lights were Michael Harrington and Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. This merger dynamized the old SP through activity in the Civil Rights struggle and the growth of its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which foreshadowed the “new left” and educated a whole new radical generation, many of them still active a half-century later, in the fundamentals of socialism.
+In subsequent US elections, DSA-supported candidates gained ground rapidly. Before long [Bernie Sanders, Michelle Alexander, Rev. William Barber, Barbara Lee...] had won the presidency and DSA loyalists gained a majority in both the US House and Senate. Hopes and fantasies burgeoned among these Utopians and their supporters. But in the daily operations of government, the new DSA regime and its officers were soon confronted by capital flight and other forms of sabotage by the now fearful one percent. The rich and their corporations moved their accounts to offshore banks, sharply cut back on investments and new facilities in the US, and sped up the transfer of portable operations to other countries. State security bodies such as the FBI and NSA leaked information claiming that bots launched and financed by Russia, Iran, and Venezuela had been crucial in DSA's electoral success. President [Sanders...] and the DSA members of Congress spent months defending themselves from these accusations, while trying to entice corporations to return jobs and resources from abroad. Meanwhile, fascists among Trump's supporters sought organize a racist backlash against the new socialist regime.
-However, under Schachtman’s influence, the new SP strategy, “political realignment,” called for working within the Democratic Party to eliminate the Southern Dixiecrats and turn the Dems into a “labor-liberal party” – a strategy which eerily prefigured Nixon’s successful 1968 “Southern strategy,” winning the racist Dixiecrats over to the Republicans. In the 60s, the SP, loyal to the Dems, refused to condemn JFK’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and LBJ’s escalating Vietnam War, and it also opposed community control of NYC’s de-factor segregated public schools, as well as the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. The SP thus lost the support of the student movement, the Black movement, and the antiwar movement. However, the SP retained its influence in the establishment labor bureaucracy, where its members held leading positions which they used for despicable ends, doing their best to squash the antiwar movement and the burgeoning labor rank-and-file movement of the later 1960s.
+[**Friedman** 10/31/18] Millions of working women, working and unemployed Blacks and Latinxs, immigrants, and large parts of the 90% were by now disappointed and pissed off. Their lives were not improving. The environment continued to deteriorate as global warming intensified, bringing on devastating rain and windstorms, coastal flooding, and inland wildfires that ravaged large parts of the country. Working people got poorer and poorer, and the cops continued to run amok in their communities, even as 1/4 of the cops and their families were on food stamps due to cutbacks. As the Utopians had long expected, all hell broke loose.
-The SP soon lost the support of YPSL’s anti-racist, anti-imperialist youth, whom the SP leadership expelled. YPSL members dispersed into SDS, the International Socialists, the Young Socialist Alliance, News and Letters, and other radical groups. Disgraced and isolated, the SP shrank to a marginalized splinter group called the Social Democratic Federation and spun off a more leftwing group led by Michael Harrington called initially the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which later fused with an SDS remnant, the New American Movement, to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which persisted as a tiny group for many years until 2016, when they were rapidly revitalized by a new generation activated by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #NoDAPL, inspired by Bernie Sanders, and outraged by Donald Trump, who were seeking a socialist home. DSA rapidly became “the only game in town” for socialist youth.
+The movement to create decent lives for ordinary people, to constrain the growing police state, and to prevent climate change disaster, had begun to grow itself a head to go with its heart (an inverse of what happened to the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz).  So as they saw their hopes beginning to be betrayed once again, a remarkable thing happened.  In a Starbucks on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, the store manager forced a barista to have sex with him and then described her as a dirty slut to some of the other workers. They walked out and formed a picket line. Other retail workers joined in the picket lines, and also struck their own employers over ways they had been coerced into sex or had their dignity attacked.
-The revitalized DSA rapidly broke with its past, resigning from the neoliberal Socialist International (which included France’s François Holland and Greece’s Papandreou) and repudiating Harrington’s subservience to the Democratic Party, while struggling with the issue of what kind of electoral strategy to pursue without falling into the same trap. [RG]
-[This section improvised on line Oct. 21st meeting]
-As the label "the left" ceased to have substantive meaning - encompassing everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bob Avakian - a new terminology gradually emerged: [Sam Fassbinder on [[https://caucus99percent.com/content/utopians-vs-conformists-part-two|Utopians vs. Conformists]]]
-//Branch here to 3 scenarios in 2024//: [by **Sam Friedman**]
-  * The election is annulled, the people revolt
-  * The social democrats win the election but do their usual thing, and then the people revolt
-  * The social democrats win and succeed in reforming the economy but run up against the environmental crisis
-    * Friedman scenario: then the people revolt
-    * Schwartzmann scenario: solar communism is achieved
-Candidate X [choose among Bernie Sanders, Michelle Alexander, Rev. William Barber, Barbara Lee...] won the presidency in 2024 along with 312 DSA members elected to the House of Representatives and 53 who joined the US Senate. Hopes and fantasies bloomed among the Utopians and their supporters. In the daily operation of government, the new DSA regime and its officers were soon confronted by capital flight: The rich and their corporations moved bank accounts to the banks of other countries, cut back on investments and on opening new facilities in the USA, and sped up their transfer of portable operations to other countries. The FBI claimed to have found evidence that bots supporting Bernie had been organized and financed by billionaires in Abu Dhabi and party hacks in Venezuela. Bernie and the DSA members of Congress spent months defending themselves from these accusations and finding ways to give corporations subsidies to bring jobs back to America. The fascists among Trump's supporters did their best to organize racist reaction against Sanders and his ilk, all of whom they claimed had African-American blood in their genomes, one part in 12,000.
-[//Friedman updates from here, 10/31/18//]
-Meanwhile, millions of working women, working and unemployed Blacks, immigrants, and large parts of the 90% were disappointed and pissed off. Their lives were not improving. The environment continued to go to hell. They got poorer and poorer, and the cops continued to run amok in their communities, even as 1/4 of the cops and their families were on food stamps due to cutbacks. As the Utopians had long expected, all hell broke loose.
-The movement to create decent lives for ordinary people, to constrain the growing police state, and to prevent climate change disaster, had begun to grow itself a head to go with its heart—kind of an inverse of what happened to the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.  So as they saw their hopes beginning to be betrayed once again, a remarkable thing happened.  In a local Starbucks on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, the store manager forced a barista to have sex with him and then described her as a dirty slut to some of the other workers.  They walked out and formed a picket line. Other retail workers joined in the picket lines, and also struck their own employers over ways they had been coerced into sex or had their dignity attacked.
 And then it spread. Walmarts. Insurance companies. The Federal Reserve Bank. The mass of warehouses and truck-related workers who served New York City.

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