internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
but I feel like the people who oppose congestion pricing / are pro-car operate on feelings and vibes.
you’re describing a small percentage of the population here–most people have no strong opinions on congestion pricing (because it doesn’t really have a prior in the United States), and as such it’s extremely important to write articles like this which can show them that it is working and it benefits them in every way
congestion pricing has been pretty consistently found to make air quality better for obvious reasons (fewer cars on the roads) so you can safely infer this is also the case here. unfortunately, there are several significant air quality variables outside of NYC’s control that are probably going to make reductions less obvious than, say, Stockholm or London. most recently, nearby and unseasonable wildfires caused the city to have several days of terrible air quality. back in 2023, those huge Canadian wildfires caused the same problems on and off for their entire duragion.
Columbia effectively committed to a punitive line that threw its student protesters under the bus last year; this is, unfortunately, not a very surprising development with that in mind
i’m removing this because it’s a completely empty calorie comment with literally no relation to an extremely detailed, well done article. please don’t make comments like this, thanks.
Aside from the obvious stuff like promoting mutual aid, grassroots agitation efforts are probably your best bet. Organize in workplaces and other places where people meet, get them angry and suggest effective courses of action.
respectfully: this is just not a serious proposal. and the fact that you think nobody is doing these things—rather than what is actually the case, which is that people do them but they are simply not effective or easy-to-scale acts of political praxis in an American context—is indicative that you should stop making confidently bad tactical prescriptions.
and i’m not even going to address your fantastical idea of how to build a spontaneous general strike out of “mass protests” when it is evident you have bad tactical prescriptions. you’re not even treading new ground here, really. Peter Camejo’s speech “Liberalism, ultraleftism, or mass action” is the definitive dunk on your flavor of politically delusional theorycrafting, and that speech turns 55 this year:
This is the key thing to understand about the ultraleftists. The actions they propose are not aimed at the American people; they’re aimed at those who have already radicalized. They know beforehand that masses of people won’t respond to the tactics they propose.
They have not only given up on the masses but really have contempt for them. Because on top of all this do you know what else the ultralefts propose? They call for a general strike! They get up and say, “General Strike.” Only they don’t have the slightest hope whatsoever that it will come off.
Every last one of them who raises his hand to vote for a general strike knows it’s not going to happen. So what the hell do they raise their hands for? Because it’s part of the game. They play games, they play revolution, because they have no hope. Just during the month of May the New Mobe called not one but two general strikes. One for GIs and one for workers.
Being out for the count before anything actually happens doesn’t seem to be good strategy
you’re right, people have never martyred themselves (and, in a sense “been out for the count before anything happens”) for successful political change before. do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? you are the classic person who–even if they are legitimately radical, which i don’t think you are–upholds the status quo by, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, “lives by a mythical concept of time” and always wants to wait for a more convenient season to do something. but plainly, the more convenient season will never come if nobody does anything because they might be “out for the count”.
on Chiapas:
on Rojava:
on Revolutionary Catalonia and various aspects of the anarchism there:
most of these should be findable on Anna’s Archive, or by just googling the title. if not, i can track copies down.
this is not serious enough for the mod shield, but my god stop misusing the word clickbait and stop being confidently incorrect. some of you literally just use this to mean “thing i don’t like” or even “thing that explains itself in a way that is not my fancy”–neither of which is what the word actually means.
So… I’m not really pro-capitalism as you’d likely conceive of that term,
i don’t know what you think “not really [being] pro-capitalism” means, but the fact that you can neither straightforwardly state that you believe in socialism nor elaborate substantively on your economic beliefs is an indicator you’re just some sort of radical liberal. and that’s fine–and radical liberalism is nice and all for this moment–but it is not a serious ideological system with credible tactics that will eradicate fascism or solve the inequalities and inequities that create the basis of right-wing authoritarianism.
I don’t think you get me. You likely don’t have until 2026. A lot of the infrastructure for a full authoritarian takeover is already in place.
okay, let’s suppose this is true: what would you like me as an individual to do besides what i am already doing. help organize a general strike? one is already being organized for 2028, and you can’t exactly spin up the infrastructure for one of those in a matter of months unless you operate under a very incorrect idea of how unions work. a strike is a massive financial, political, and organizational commitment–to say nothing of how a strike necessitates buy-in from the workers who engage in it (perhaps 40% of whom are in favor of the current administration, and would thus need to be convinced to organize against it).
or maybe you propose some sort of political violence? maybe firebombing a government office or assassinating an elected official? aside from op-sec considerations, those would be very stupid ideas to take up. bluntly: we’ve been there and done this. most left-wing political violence in the West does nothing to substantially harm the state, and frequently, it actually legitimizes authoritarian violence in the eyes of the public. the primary base of support for ideas like this are ultraliberals and ultraleftists who confuse the spectacle of political violence for meaningful political action–people who, in other words, think the most transgressive action they can take is the most correct one.
and if not these, what else? organize boycotts? people already do those. organize public marches? people already do those, to the point where it’s impossible to keep up with all of the ones being organized. organize sit-ins and other nonviolent protest? people already do those. i don’t know what you expect here that isn’t already happening.
If not wanting to get arrested and tortured (again, this is not a hypothetical) is slothfulness then… Uh… Okay?
if you aren’t willing to face meaningful political consequences for what you believe in, then what tactical or ideological advice could you possibly have that i should care about? the law has already pacified your politics and your convictions into uselessness–you have essentially stated you won’t fight for what’s right because it would inconvenience you.
this is also contradictory to what you’re arguing in the first place: how is this position of yours any different from Sanders’ supposed failure to meet the moment with tactics and radical politics? if fighting for what’s right means potentially being arrested and tortured then, yes, as unpleasant as such a commitment sounds you should be willing to be arrested and tortured!
First, I never said I was a socialist.
well then i definitely don’t care what you have to say in terms of criticism—if you’re not a socialist then the ideological framework from which you make that criticism is incorrect on merits and an incorrect basis on which to build a political movement which will ever resolve the crises you identify here. these crises are symptomatic of capitalism and a product of it;[1] you cannot separate the economic system out here, nor will superficial political and economic reforms ever prevent what is happening now in America and Europe from occurring again in the future.
you need only look at the Nordic and Finnish democracies—where genuinely social-democratic reforms still define many aspects of society and are load-bearing aspects of the contemporary political culture—to illustrate this. they still have massive problems with reactionaries, would-be authoritarians, and open fascists gaining political credibility; but this is unsurprising if you recognize that, at the end of the day, they still live in a hegemonic economic system which cannot exist without necessarily impoverishing some people to make others wealthy, and creating debilitating social and political inequities. you will never deprive reactionary politics of their oxygen and grievances until this is resolved, and socialism is the only economic system which can bring this about.
Sorry I can’t pass your little purity test; now actually do something something so you don’t end up like us.
luckily, i am. most of my waking hours are spent doing behind-the-scenes political work, and i can also literally point you to some of the public-facing work i’m doing well in advance of our next elections. see, just as a sample, my Support 2026 and Oppose 2026 lists, or my For a “Bill of Rights” Package in Every State, County, and City which lays out an electoral strategy for American socialists to adopt and whose basic planks i’m pushing for within DSA in the lead-up to this year’s convention. don’t put your slothfulness and excuses for why you can’t do political work on me, a person actually doing political work as a volunteer day job because i want the things i believe in to be built in my lifetime.
and in the specific case of Trump, he is literally the stand-i for a “successful” capitalist to many people ↩︎
Responding to that post wasn’t worth my time
okay, so you don’t have an answer or a strategy, and when challenged on that you resort to denigrating people as “liberals” for disagreeing with you. thank you for clarifying that your opinions are worthless.
It might have been less disappointing if there was no goal to be honest.
unless you’re actively doing political work yourself, i genuinely do not care (and nobody else should care either) what you think is useful or useless advocacy. you do the work, if you’re so strongly opinionated that how Bernie is going about this is the incorrect approach–but don’t complain that other people are doing things “improperly” if all you ever do is post or craft opinions. socialism already has far too many people who speak but do not act.
That aside it’s still missing the final touch; what are people meant to do in and after attending these rallies? Just… Exist?
do you think that people become class conscious and politically aware of the necessity of socialism through their own volition? these rallies are political education and political mobilization–they are making people aware of the relation between what is happening in their country and the economic structure that facilitates it, and getting them back into being politically engaged in the first place (because many of them probably ended their political engagement in November, and are not used to caring about this stuff outside of the usual cycle of American electoralism).
quite simply: there will never be a mass socialist movement without people like Bernie doing stuff of this sort–there is no basis for socialism in the American public as a whole, and this is and has to be the first step in rectifying it. and once again: even if you have criticisms, i don’t think you currently have a right to voice them, considering you don’t sound like you’ve done a second of politically educating the people around you. if i’m wrong, feel free to demonstrate that–but bluntly you sound like a poster who is all talk but no action.
To me it seems like these rallies lack a coherent goal
i think demonstrating popular opposition to a flagrantly bought and corrupt administration which is being visibly puppeteered by one of the richest men in the world–and tying that to Sanders’s longstanding crusading for the working class and how they are structurally oppressed by capitalism and the oligarchs who benefit from it–is a pretty coherent goal, and one that Bernie has been extremely open about in talking about the tour and why he’s doing it, but sure:
What is the impulse behind this “Fighting Oligarchy” tour?
One of the failings of the Democratic Party and the media has been their unwillingness to take a hard look at the reality facing the American people. We just don’t do that. Here is the reality: You’re living in the richest country in the history of the world. Despite that, you’ve got 60 percent — six-zero percent — of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, struggling every week to pay the bills. We take that for granted. We should not.
Over the last 50 years, despite an explosion in technology and productivity, the average American worker, in real inflation-adjusted dollars, is making less today than he or she did 50 years ago. And during that period, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent — tens of trillions of dollars. What’s more, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured; 25 percent of seniors are living on $15,000 a year or less. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. That is the reality today. It’s a reality that we don’t talk about — and that is why people are angry.
Your politics have long warned about the unchecked power of millionaires and billionaires. Right now, under Trump, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is seizing the reins of the executive branch and carving up whole agencies. Can you talk about what’s so extraordinary — and extraordinarily revealing — about this moment?
I have been talking about this issue for a long time. It is worse now than it used to be — and the American people are seeing it. What does it tell any American when the three wealthiest people in this country — Musk, [Jeff] Bezos, and [Mark] Zuckerberg — are literally sitting right behind the President at his inauguration? What does it tell you that Musk spent $270 million to get Trump elected and is now the most powerful person in American government. What does it tell you that Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, kicked in a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund; that Zuckerberg did the same, and also, when he was sued by Trump for his ownership of Meta, kicked in a $25 million settlement — “settlement” quote, unquote, right? — to Trump. If that doesn’t tell you that a handful of multi-billionaires have enormous control, not only of the economy, but the political life of this country… If you don’t see that, then you really don’t know what’s going on.
As an outsider, I personally would like to see them branch away from the democrats and start a new party.
to push back on this: Bernie is only ever a Democrat by registration for political reasons, and he has a long history of being in left-wing third-parties where he–frankly–has mostly spent his time losing and not getting much done. when he is politically successful that is almost exclusively as a genuine independent not tied to a formal third-party, or as a Democratic-caucusing independent. and even the Vermont Progressive Party with which he is often associated is only a major player in Burlington, and that’s because they’ve completely shoved the Republican Party out of the political system in the city (rendering it a two-party system with the VPP on the left and the Democrats on the right). they generally do not wield much political power themselves, despite being more successful than any other contemporary third-party.
in short: i think there is a very straightforward explanation of why he has not taken this course of action, and won’t do so for the remainder of his time in politics. if building a party doesn’t work it would waste a lot of grassroots energy on a project that simply isn’t politically effective, and there are few reasons to think building a party would work right now. there are an incredible number of man-hours, volunteers needed for party-building, and political capital needed to even have consistent ballot access–and Bernie probably cannot assemble all of that at this point even if he wants to. additionally: major parties obviously have no incentive to make ballot access laws more lenient, so even if such a project got off the ground it could easily be killed by tightening those laws.
(incidentally: DSA, the organization i do work in, has many of the same debates about this subject–and the absurd capacity needed to credibly run third-party is the reason we’re not and are unlikely to become one in anything but the longest term.)
i don’t know how you expect people to engage with this without a definition of what you consider or don’t consider “fighting oligarchy.” as just one illustration: is AOC being so adamantly anti-Amazon that her district missed out on one of their megafacilities not, for example, pretty clear anti-oligarchy work? how about her supporting the Amazon Labor Union? and Bernie has literally a 40 year history of fighting for working class demands!
hey, just a quick follow-up from the last thread you opined in: do you have an actual political strategy you’re working to implement, if you’re so critical of literally anyone else doing that work? you never answered my question about that–and, bluntly, if you don’t have one then i don’t know why anyone should value how you feel on subjects like this.
communism is about works collectively owning the means of production.
to be clear: you’re kind of mixing terms up a bit here and this needs to untangled, because otherwise it will cause problems in answering what you’re asking. the correct word for “worker ownership of the means of production” is technically just socialism. communism, at this point in leftist history, consistently refers to a more specific thing: an ideological system that seeks to create a stateless, classless, moneyless society in addition to achieving common ownership of the means of production.[1]
this might sound very pedantic–and, to be clear, it is likely the vast majority of socialists are also communists–but conflating these terms can be genuinely problematic when asking a question like this for the simple reason that they are understood to be two different things in practice. you can have socialism but not communism, in short. (indeed, “socialism but not communism” is the rule among states that have arguably been socialist. even if you play fast and loose with the defining characteristics of communism and think there have been existing socialist states, i’ve never met a person who believes those socialist states achieved anything resembling communism.)
in terms of the actual question you’re asking: most people would probably agree that no, the properties of socialism and communism make “authoritarianism” or a “dictatorial” figure antithetical to either–at least without that desire for “authoritarianism” being shared across the entire working class somehow. this is the reason many leftists consider most or all existing (and former) states that called themselves socialist–your Soviet Unions, your Chinas, etc.–to not be socialist or to have degraded back into capitalism.
leftists adhering to variants of socialism typically characterized as “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” would obviously disagree with this, however. to generalize a bit: they tend to believe that it is an acceptable tradeoff for a vanguard (the most revolutionary and ideologically advanced section of the working class) to steward and speak for the rest of the working class through the revolution, to the establishment of socialism, and toward the creation of a communist state. separately, they tend to consider the political structures of these countries as facilitating worker ownership of the economy, even if it is not direct. many of them had central planning of the economy, and most of them had highly delegated (for example village bodies which elect city bodies which elect country bodies, etc.) or sectoral (for example X, Y, and Z interest groups must obligatorily be represented in decision-making) political systems that meant workers were represented at every level of government and decision-making.
unfortunately, whether this is “really socialism” or “really communism” is not a falsifiable belief–and while there are better arguments for the view that “authoritarianism” is incompatible with either in my mind, it’s not as if there are no arguments for the contrary view. so you’re never going to get a definitive agreement on this.
yes, i know these have been used synonymously at many points by many communists, and that even the distinction between socialism and communism has varied historically. but most people in my experience in leftist spaces do not use socialism and communism to mean the same thing at this point, nor do i. ↩︎
However, when we talk about modern nation state, I believe we have not seen successful implementation of anarchism yet.
well, anarchism is completely antithetical to modern nation states, so if you’re using that as the basis for evaluation you’re obviously going to be misled. it also begs the question of what a “successful implementation” of anarchism–or any form of leftist ideology in governing–actually is, because ask five leftists and they’ll give you six answers to that. nonetheless, and as far as i’m aware, in spite of their massive difficulties (and despite a non-anarchist self-identification in the first case) both EZLN-held Chipas and Rojava are widely held as successful, practically applied examples of anarchist theories of practice and production. likewise, so is Revolutionary Catalonia.
One problem is that even if it works internally, what would happen when a colonial power tries to conquer it?
i would encourage you to look to the Spanish Civil War or the EZLN occupation of Chiapas as examples, because this was simply not a problem for either of them. particularly in the former case, the Spanish anarchists acted very similarly to a “centralized” power in fighting the Francoists (until they were organized into the broader Republican military).[1]
and it should be noted, as an aside: what eventually undermined them and destroyed their power were not the Francoists but purges and aggression conducted by other leftists in the Spanish Popular Front against them. anarchists are, quite legitimately in my opinion, pretty aggrieved at their historical treatment by other leftist ideologies! ↩︎
in life. most people in NYC have literally never experienced this one way or the other before NYC implemented it, and certainly aren’t seeking out the kinds of spaces that would be partisan on it in some way. their opinions on this are accordingly malleable based on “does this feel good or bad,” and you can see this in how there’s already been a large change toward supporting congestion pricing as the benefits have become increasingly tangible: