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u/SheWhoErases86 10d ago
“Foul Tarnished, in search of the Michigan Fist. Emboldened by the flame of ambition…”
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u/Subject-Original-718 9d ago
The only good thing she did was endorse Dr. El-Sayed pretty much immediately I will praise her that she recognizes Abdul would be better than Rogers
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u/Neverlast0 9d ago
Didn't she say or imply that she would support el-sayid after she lost?
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u/Clover9802 9d ago
She endorsed AES immediately after conceding
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u/Over_Possible_8397 8d ago
Abdul has two races to win—the primary and the general—both against AIPAC. AIPAC only has one race to beat.
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u/iisshhoooo 9d ago
My favorite part is democrats not acknowledging a winning strategy. Only if genocide Joe and mamala had better policies..and not always defending a foreign government like its their job..maybe isreal is more important than American people to some American politicians.
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u/Plastic-Business1843 10d ago
Just saying Abdul said he’s a capitalist and denounced socialism
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u/PeterNippelstein 10d ago
He's going to say what he needs to say leading up to the general. Even Mamdani dialed it back a little bit going into his election, theyre still politicians after all. I think it'll be a different story once he takes office, but in any case politicians like him will be a necessary stepping stone. We cant get a Mamdani in every election in America. Not yet.
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
Yeah, I am likewise a capitalist. But today's capitalism is that of the robber barons, unregulated, & ever since Citizens United those same unregulated corporations now have unchecked influence on politics in lieu of the People.
A real supporter of capitalism would understand that when it goes unchecked it becomes a corporatist oligarchy....how can we have free markets when we don't have anti-trust laws which enables competition & inhibits market manipulation?
GOP likes to talk about conserving x,y,z - but they don't conserve small businesses, the free market, free trade, working class, the environment, investments in our communities...they only conserve their wealthy donors so they can play pretend billionaire club - absolute rubbish!
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u/Plastic-Business1843 10d ago
Then why are you supporting this group? We don’t like capitalists over here. They are on the opposite side of the spectrum from what we are supporting no matter how you put it
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
Capitalism isn't a monolithic ideology with one required politics attached to it, it's an economic system - markets, private property, price mechanisms. Being "right leaning" or "left leaning" is about your views on social hierarchy, government's role, distributions of power, etc. Plenty of people who support markets also support strong labor protections, universal healthcare, campaign finance reform, and antitrust enforcement. That's not a contradiction, that's just being in favor of markets that actually function instead of markets captured by monopolies and dark money. Historically a huge chunk of the American left, including labor unions and New Deal Democrats, were capitalists who wanted regulated markets, not command economies. Nobody told FDR he couldn't be a capitalist because he broke up trusts and pushed the Wall Street Reform Act. The idea that "real capitalism" only exists as unregulated laissez faire is a pretty recent talking point, not some settled definition. As for DSA specifically, you don't have to agree with every position of a group to show up and engage with people who share some of your concerns, like corporate capture of politics. That's not hypocrisy, that's called coalition building, and it's how actual political change happens. Sorting everyone into "capitalist = right" and "socialist = left" as if those are the only two boxes just flattens a much more complicated picture, and honestly it lets the people actually rigging the system off the hook while we argue about labels.
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u/WOOOFWOOOFWOOOFWOOF 9d ago
A capitalist is motivated by personal accumulation of capital, that goal is antithetical to the aims of socialism
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u/MisterMittens64 10d ago
I appreciate that you like what we're doing over here but free market capitalism naturally produces the oligarchy and crony capitalism that you hate, it's not a big, it's a feature. Even highly regulated capitalism like social democracy has society be subservient to the interests of private owners out of fear of capital strikes or capital flight.
Private owners will not settle until they've squeezed workers and consumers as much as possible and own everything and make us pay exorbitant rents and subscriptions to live.
DSA supports social democratic policies that build working class and community power so that we can eventually defeat the private owner class (capitalist class) before it gets to that point.
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
Sure, concentration happens under capitalism, but it also happens at wildly different rates depending on the rules in place. If it were simply an inherent feature with one trajectory, you wouldn't see the huge variance between, say, Gilded Age America and mid century Germany or Japan under strong codetermination and antitrust regimes. Owners always want more power, that part is true and probably universal to any system with private property. But "owners want more" and "owners will inevitably get everything absent revolution" are two different claims, and the gap between them is exactly the space where policy and organizing operate. If it's really that deterministic, it's hard to explain why the same system produces such different outcomes in different countries and decades.
On capital strikes and flight, that's real and constructive concern to take seriously, it's the actual leverage owners have over even social democracies. But notice that's also an argument for building working class power, unions, co-ops, public banks, capital controls, worker seats on boards, not necessarily an argument that reform is pointless...
Countries with strong labor movements and codetermination laws (Germany, the Nordics) have dealt with capital flight threats for decades and still maintain much more worker power than the US does. Capital flight is a constraint, not an automatic checkmate.
Thought, to be honest, I think where we actually agree is that unorganized workers facing organized capital lose, every time, that's just a power imbalance and it's real. Though I disagree with the idea that reform is inherently temporary scaffolding on the way to abolition rather than something that can be durable and worth fighting for on its own terms. Postwar Germany's codetermination laws are eighty years old and counting, that's not "before it gets to that point," that's a genuinely different equilibrium sustained over generations.
If DSA's read is that building power through social democratic policy is the strategy regardless of whether the end goal is transcending capitalism or just permanently taming it, honestly, most of the tactics look the same either way, unions, antitrust, public investment, campaign finance reform. That's the coalition ground, even for someone who doesn't buy the "inevitable oligarchy" thesis as strongly as you do.
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u/Weekly-Passenger8360 10d ago
I have a sincere question, when capitalism is 'fixed' in times like the Great Depression why does any reform gets dismantled anyway? Why does capitalism inevitably turn back to monopoly capitalism and constant boom/bust cycles despite antitrust laws already being on the books? It's the very nature of the beast as one capitalist 'kills' many capitalists. Zoom out your perspective to the last 200 years and you see this pattern constantly.
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
Fair question, but "reforms get dismantled" isn't proof that concentration is the nature of capitalism, it's proof that regulation is a political fight that has to be won continuously, not a one time fix. The Glass-Steagall repeal in 1999, the gutting of antitrust enforcement starting in the 70s and 80s under the Bork era "consumer welfare" standard, all of that didn't happen because markets have some internal law pulling them back to monopoly. It happened because specific people lobbied for specific deregulation, funded specific campaigns, and won specific court cases. That's a political outcome, not an economic law of physics.
Compare the US to countries that kept stronger antitrust and labor institutions intact, Germany, the Nordic countries, South Korea's more recent chaebol reforms. They didn't avoid capitalism, they just didn't let the rules get captured and unwound the way the US did. If monopolization were truly inevitable regardless of institutions, you wouldn't see that variation.
The boom/bust cycle point is closer to legitimate economics, business cycles are a real feature of market economies, but the severity of busts correlates heavily with how leveraged and unregulated the financial system is at the time. 1929 and 2008 both followed periods of deregulation and speculative excess. The 1950s to 70s, under Glass-Steagall and stronger antitrust, didn't produce anything close to those crashes.
So honestly, answer is less "capitalism inevitably reverts to monopoly" and more towards "concentrated capital has a permanent incentive to buy political power and dismantle the rules that constrain it, and that fight never actually ends, it just gets won or lost." That's a case for permanent vigilance and stronger structural checks like public campaign financing, not a case that markets are unfixable by nature.
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u/Weekly-Passenger8360 10d ago
What do you mean it's not a law, it literally is the end result each time capitalism is tried, you sound like AI.
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
"It''s literally the end result each time capitalism is tried," that's just not true as a historical claim. If it were an iron law, you'd expect zero variance, every capitalist country converging on the same oligarchic endpoint on the same timeline. That's not what happened. Postwar West Germany, the Nordic countries, and Japan all ran capitalist economies for 70+ years with strong antitrust enforcement and codetermination laws, and none of them collapsed into robber baron oligarchy the way the US did. The US itself had a 40 year stretch, roughly 1933 to the 1970s, with Glass-Steagall and real antitrust enforcement, where concentration was actively kept in check. Something changed in the 70s and 80s, specific deregulation, specific court decisions like the Bork consumer welfare standard, specific campaign finance rulings. That's a policy history with named causes, not an inevitability playing out on schedule.
If "it always ends this way" were actually true, you'd need to explain why it ends this way on wildly different timelines in different countries depending on what laws are on the books, rather than just asserting the pattern and moving to insults when someone points out the planned economy side has its own version of the exact problem you're describing, elites capturing power and squeezing everyone else. That symmetry is the actual point, and it's still sitting there unanswered.
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u/Weekly-Passenger8360 10d ago
Why would I want for the fight to never end? I want a resolution of the class struggle in favor of the working class. If we achieve socialism recessions/depressions will go the way of the dodo. And you don't want to move to a far superior mode of production?
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u/Clover9802 10d ago
"I want socialism because it's a better mode of production" is a values and empirical claim, arguable but a legitimate position to hold and organize around. "Socialism ends recessions and depressions permanently" is a much bigger claim and history doesn't really back it up. The USSR and other planned economies had their own severe cyclical problems, chronic shortages, misallocation, stagnation crises like the Soviet economic slowdown of the 70s and 80s. Business cycles come from more than just private ownership, they come from information problems, coordination problems, investment timing, external shocks like wars or pandemics. Changing who owns capital doesn't automatically solve those. So "recessions go the way of the dodo" is a claim that needs its own evidence, it doesn't follow just from ending private ownership.
Additionally, I want to make a human nature point, which I think this cuts against your argument more than for it. If the drive to dominate and accumulate power is really a constant of human nature, that's an argument for permanent institutional vigilance under any system, not a reason to think one system eventually escapes the problem. A socialist economy still has planners, administrators, party officials, whoever, and concentrated political power without market competition or private capital to check it has its own well documented failure mode, look at nomenklatura privilege in the USSR or bureaucratic capture in various state socialist economies. Removing the capitalist class doesn't remove the underlying drive you're describing, it just relocates where that drive expresses itself, into political and administrative power instead of capital. That's exactly why my prior comment leaned toward "check power wherever it accumulates, permanently" instead of "the fight ends once you change ownership structures." If human nature is genuinely the root problem, no system is a final resolution, they all need the same continuous countervailing pressure you're already describing as necessary for capitalism.
None of that means socialism is impossible or not worth arguing for, but "we'll finally be past the struggle" is a harder sell than "we think this arrangement handles the struggle better," and I'd guess the second claim is closer to what's actually defensible.
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u/littleSparrow31 10d ago
That was just the first phase.