How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

A thorough analysis of the current DNC method du jour of soliciting money from citizens -- weird-ass spam texts written in all-caps targeted at the elderly. It is a disgusting, shameless tactic and a great example of why the Democratic party is a capitalist dead-end.

Once abolition is framed as an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever, it becomes easy to dismiss as unrealistic. Instead of being seen as a strategy for dismantling institutions that reproduce capitalism and racial domination it’s framed as either the fantastical idealism of anarchism or the limited purview of policy reform.

Good piece.

It’s important to acknowledge that this retreat from abolition emerges from a real contradiction facing the socialist movement. The George Floyd uprising was the largest mass rebellion against policing in a generation, and yet it produced few lasting structural victories. It’s reasonable to ask whether the movement’s politics, including the rallying cry to abolish the police, contributed to that outcome. But this mistakes the primary lessons of 2020. The principal failure was not that abolition proved to be bad politics or messaging, but that the socialist movement lacked the durable organization, institutions, mass base, and independent politics necessary to adequately absorb the energy of the uprising and carry it forward once the streets emptied.

Strong organizations are always taking calculated risks, and to do so, occasionally march into the unknown; they must, if they’re to innovate, succeed, and excel. But we're not calculating the risks.

I am skeptical of the DSA's focus on electoralism, here is another good critique of it.

We can no longer place ourselves in a position of passivity where our endorsed elected officials are permitted to govern exclusive of our involvement after we’ve attached our name to them.

New York City may be part of a dying empire, but the USA is the dying empire. [..] The only reason DSA has gotten this far in the first place is that we are in an era of imperial decline, meaning the status quo will no longer be good enough. Normal methods of governance no longer suffice, not even from the standpoint of the elite.

The contemporary DSA is rife with arguments for and against supporting a hypothetical AOC run for president in 2028. The "inevitability" of AOC is often bandied about and I cannot say I am a fan -- we are many legislative sessions from that point and AOC has not had a flawless record on those. I consider it viable to run candidates that are outwardly identifying as Socialist/Communist, assuming that the goal is not victory for the candidate but victory for the party, and the party remaining the spearpoint of the people.

I do not believe that AOC, or the current incarnation of the DSA, fits that bill. The DSA is not (yet, perhaps) an electoral Communist organization. Even if it was, I would have some concerns about an electoral-first strategy (an extremely Kautskyist angle, if I may say so!).

In summary, to meet the minimum standard of "good governance," AOC would need to go well beyond liberal progressivism and embrace a radical socialism that she has thus far avoided.

I found this piece a good dismantling of some of the assumptions surrounding the electoralist, Kautskyist approach that favors Just Winning The Presidency as the be-all-end-all of American socialism. The goal is not the presidency, the goal is the world.

My argument, as laid out in both of the two relevant articles, is that a President AOC with DSA’s endorsement but no accountability to its program will not be willing or able to do what it takes to have a "successful" socialist Presidency, thus fatally discrediting the movement when she flounders. Hopefully the evidence already provided makes it clear which of the two futures is more likely.

The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment.

Voluntarism, programmatic idealism, and strategic moralism are typically treated as separate mistakes. This essay argues that there is one error in three domains—the substitution of an ideal political form for material analysis—and that only reversing the direction of determination can correct it.

Don't agree with 100% of this piece but found it an interesting, if deeply academic-brain written, read. Loved this little tidbit from the American analysis section:

The absence of an American labor party is not a contingent historical lacuna waiting to be filled by the right organizational initiative. It is a structural feature of American class politics that has shaped the forms in which class interests can be expressed and the terrains on which they can be contested. The two-party system is not simply an obstacle to socialist politics but a terrain through which class forces are organized. The question of what engagement with that terrain can produce is a strategic question requiring analysis, not a moral question requiring a verdict.

Where I principally break with the analysis is with takeaways like this:

The democratic and electoral terrain is not, as the abstentionist position maintains, simply a mechanism for reproducing ruling class hegemony without remainder. It is the primary terrain on which the political consciousness of tens of millions of American workers is being actively shaped, and the question of whether the left engages with that process or withdraws from it in principled disgust is not a moral question but a strategic one with determinate political consequences.

To which I would say: Is it? Did the Sanders campaign make actual waves in the American proletariat? Is Mamdani a win for socialists, or is he an absorption of New Deal liberalism into the Democratic Party program? From within the borders of the States, I don't think these are easily-answered questions. Working within the electoral frame has some advantages, but I truly doubt the easy answer of "a lot of people vote, therefore that is where power lies and where we must strive". American voting is a complete mess -- both in terms of participation as well as upper class capture. Not to mention the number of institutions in the American government that are not beholden to any mass politic (like the Supreme Court, or in a broader sense the American military). It's things like that that make me doubt the so-called "democratic route to socialism".

A map of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary through its political geographies: Conservative LA, Liberal LA, and Left LA.

Beautiful website with some claims I find a bit presumptive but still educational. I agree with the authors that there are effectively three cities voting in LA, I am not so sure about the projected turnout in races.

None of the three front-runners I believe will be substantively different than Bass in running Los Angeles -- Raman is a compromised candidate with a spotty voting record especially on public housing, Bass is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative liberal, and Pratt is a fascist. I have no faith that Raman will not fold immediately to conservative interests, Bass already has folded to conservative interests, and Pratt... is a fascist. The biggest scam in Los Angeles' city budget remains the LAPD, and I do not believe any of the three front-runners have the power to dismantle the funding apparatus of the LAPD.

Anyway, that's my opinions. I recommend reading the piece regardless -- my commie griping aside, I do think this is a well-argued article with some really lovely data visualization work. Where I am fully in agreement with the authors is the fact that this sort of power mapping is crucial to understanding how and why LA is the way it is.

The endorsements by Hernandez, Jurado and Soto-Martínez are aimed at denting left-wing support for Nithya Raman, who polls show is battling Spencer Pratt for a runoff spot against Mayor Bass.

Archive here.

Really odd moves here from some local candidates running on a DSA-LA slate. It's things like this that make me skeptical of electoral strategies by Left organizations like the DSA -- there's a worrying lack of discipline around these individuals.

I don't think that there is any guarantee of individual actions hewing to the Party line unless the Party is sufficiently fierce about discipline and political education. I'm not even a Nithya fan by any means, but this just looks sloppy and disappointing.

The committee's own data shows that DSA's growth derives not from its sect-like internal processes but from its moments of class-like political action. The organization grows when it acts as a political force in the world, and withers when it retreats into self-administration.

I consider myself electorally-critical at best and thus I would argue with many of the points brought forth in this story, but I do think there's value in it overall. The nature of the DSA is that it tends to spike in population when it has something to rally around, and it withers when it does not. In this, at least, myself and the author are aligned. You must be a shark, always moving, never staying still. Grow the tendency, guide the tendency, shape it into a party, take control.

The CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and DSA are not identical, but all suffer from a palpable stagnancy.

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.