Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome comrades to the North Bay podcast. We have a very special episode today. Uh, Malloy from the discourse collective was kind enough to offer his time at our Vallejo live show about the dictatorship of the teens. This was an event we put on and recorded in conjunction with the DSA North Bay organizing committee. And there isn't really a whole lot, uh, I need to tell you guys about this up front. So without much further ado, let's just go ahead and roll into the episode.

Speaker 2 1:21

Hi, welcome. Hello.

Speaker 3 1:24

One of the members of the organizing committee of DSA North Bay and also a member of the North Bay podcast collective, which have pulled together this thing. I would like to start by just covering, uh, guidelines for respectful discussion and community agreements and finally have a sense of humor

Speaker 4 1:44

because

Speaker 3 1:46

I mean, I'm hilarious. Um, Malloy tries to be hilarious instead of Siberia, so, um, yeah. All right. Again, thank you for coming and go teams. I'm an old.

Speaker 5 2:01

All right. So like you probably heard the theme of this discussion and Q and a session later is going to be the dictatorship of the teens, which is a play on of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat because we all know that the youthful and energetic teens are going to get together and kick flip all of us olds into a volcano so they can eventually take over and create socialism. It's not just a, an important topic in kind of an academic sense, but right now in, in the DSA and in a lot of left movements, the average age of an activist has plummeted. And right now we're looking at most people in their twenties who are getting out and getting active. And that makes me feel old. But, uh, ultimately we do think that it's, it's quite a good thing. Um,

Speaker 6 3:00

okay.

Speaker 7 3:01

I don't think you guys need to be hearing me yammering on too much further. Uh, I just want to recognize and thank Malloy here for showing up from the discourse collective, a group that had been doing a lot to sort of talk about and advance a lot of really interesting and important left theory as well as using that to talk about current events and cultural artifacts like, uh, movies and television shows. So in the immortal words of Comrade Jeb, please clap. So, um, hello. Uh, so it's kind of weird to hear the phrase dictatorship for the team because it was like a joke in a DM. I kind of blew up. And so now you're like, it's like marks, it's like a, it's like it's a pun and um, it's kind of outgrown itself. But I'm here and I have to say dictatorship of the team is what we're going to be talking about. So just to contextualize, before I get into the 10 pages I have in front of me to contextualize where I'm coming from, I am a young person. I am a youth activist. I'm in why DSA. And most of the activism that I do involves people in my age range. So the left is in a strange place right now. It's sort of disembodied from its past. We're relearning a lot of the basic aspects of, of activism that, uh, really died out in the post Soviet and of history. Francis Fukuyama kind of a, a world we've been living in. So in that light, I think it's important to view all of these movements, all of these new, uh, approaches to activism, not as a sort of personal endeavors or decisions that individuals are making to produce new kinds of organization, but experiments and as attempts to build new forms of power that maybe have not been tried before. So that's the context. I'd like to put all of this talk about youth activism within that we're at a point where the left can really take a lot of diverse stances and a lot of diverse approaches to power. And I think that's something we should encourage now to break into this. Nine 11 was 16 years ago, over 16 years ago. A young people, myself included, remember it, if we can remember it at all as a hazy darkness at the very beginning of our lives. Um, were raised in its shadow. And so this is after history has ended history ended before we were born. And the long present day that we've been living in has just been a hammering out of rough spots in the world and the shaping and creation of a final grandiose empire of capital. And we live it. We've been sort of swept along by this process and we did not have very much say in it's a establishment. So we have interminable wars raging round the world political and economic crises that punctuate a slow decline of labor share of the Pie and our ability to organize as workers. And we live for the most people in my age bracket, uh, with near absolute certainty that we're going to die poor than our parents. And that will never taste the illusory profits of the American way that we're never going to be fully, uh, in cultured in a capitalist society ever again in the way that post new deal Americans work. So history had ended, but on a flat, no, it was not the triumphant a capitalists, uh, uh, circling the wagons and then calling it a day. It was a, it was, it was just pitiful and the attic and we're stuck there and we've been stuck there for 20 years. There was no real resistance to this kind of consumption of neoliberal capitalism. There was no global reaction to it in the same way that there was at other turns of the century. And they're still remains, no large organized global resistance to capitalism. Um, those grand politics of the 19 hundreds packs and the treaties and the rewards and the panics have all sort of coalesced into a steady humming machine that if fed a certain amount of labor and a certain amount of workers, blood, sweat, and tears will output capitol reliably. And that's the end of history, just a working steady machine. And as young Americans, we stand on top of and within that machine we don't really see the horrors that we stand on top of. We don't engage with the effects of imperialism, but we're distantly aware that they're there. And a resistance to those things, resistance to imperialism really fell by the wayside. And we just accepted the world as it was. But now we're at a unique point in our lives and in history history ended. But now as restarting the dream state of bipartisanship, a mythic third way, a neoliberal path to greater things beyond the cold war has, has vanished compromises over. And this, uh, we're standing soberly looking at the disaster around us. Climate change and economic degradation around the world are steering us in the face. Economically. Young people wake up out of this haze and discover that a horrifying vision of life under capitalism has been constructed and that we now have to deal with things like the gig economy, internships, this endless delay of the stability and, and position in society that a salary provides this endless perpetuation of childhood that is a reality for most young working people. Young people will never again experience the, uh, the compromise of the new deal, the, um, the concessions made to labor that saved capitalism from itself in the 1930s. A young people know as a collective truth. The capitalism isn't working and it isn't working for them. And this is our powder keg. This is what sustains a lot of leftist energy today. And so there remains a terrifying question. What is to be done, how do we convert this sort of vague does consent this discontent with capitalism into a movement. How do we convert the lived experiences of young people into political power? And so I have a few proposals. It's a big question before I get into the actual process of establishing that power. I want to talk about DSA itself. If you, if you were following the, the last NPC election, there has been a, there's been a rapid growth of, of DSA but also a rapid change in the infrastructure of Dsa and there are just too two brief briefly I want to point out two things that I've noticed and I think are prime targets of the kind of work that youth organizing can really help break down. And those two things are careerism and insularity careerism an insularity or things that GSA has really struggled with in the past. Careerism being this approach to, to left this organizing as a, um, as a sort of a place to hang your hat, a place where this is your organization. You own this organization where you come in day after day, week after week, and you expect nothing to change and you expect no challenges to be thrown up at you. And this very, this is the description of GSA for most of the Social Democrat herring Tony and period where it was a book club. It was a book club for a small number of people who had the time to get together and meet up and talk about how much things sucked, but couldn't really put that into practice. More insidiously, they play both sides of capitalism and socialism. Socialism is dangerous. Socialism is hard to do. Socialism is hard to agitate for. It's much easier to sit back and talk about your favorite books and, uh, enjoy your time with your pals. But it's much more difficult to go out and agitate workers to strike and much more difficult to put yourself in at risk. And so when you view an organization like DSA as a place to build a career on your, you're playing both sides, you're, you're trying to produce some, some leftist movement that you don't actually have to work in, that you can sit back and manage and management. And this professionalizing of leftist edge of leftist organization is opportunistic and it unfairly burdens people in the organization who are actually putting in the legwork and the, the on the streets on the ground kind of action. And that has mostly been combated, that has been, there's been a major push against that in a wide Esa. And hopefully we'll continue into DSA as a whole. The other thing I wanted to touch on was insularity insularity within a DSA. And there's a really good example of it, uh, with, uh, the last, uh, NPC election where we saw the effects of someone being in a position of power but appearing unreachable and unreasonable and impossible to deal with. And Gee, wouldn't it be great if he wasn't there anymore? But now we've got to like tango with him to, uh, to get it figured out. Yeah. Cough, cough. Um, so to establish this non insular, uh, active campaign, you really do need to remind leadership that they are accountable to us and that they need to not only be open to listening to our suggestions but open to be being replaced. And the question is how do you create a culture in GSA where people are not viewing it as a personal pet project where people are viewing it as something that grows and if it grows outside of what they are able to do, they step down and they open up space to new activists who can engage with the organization in new ways. So this process has to be streamlined, this process of turnover, of power between generations as to be a formalized process and has to be something that we actively encourage not only through our rhetoric and through our campaigns, but also through the actual infrastructure of our organization. So we have to reject leaders that do, not that we cannot call it hold accountable, but we should not reject leadership. We should not reject the structures that we can build now to ensure that the leaders we have in the future are ones that we can hold accountable. The solution to these interlinked issues is not a tendency towards structuralists Nis structurelessness, uh, and the tyrannical Vori void that imposes on growing organizations. But instead we have to demand the establishment of a structure that streamlines this, uh, this process and, uh, actively opposes egotistical and career, his traits. And it has to be one that empowers young organizers and new organizers to step up to the plate and take on responsibilities, uh, that they would not be able to otherwise. And this brings me to the topic that we're here use organizing. So careerism minutes. We already were two things that I discussed a lot in reference to the DSA convention this year and a while there, I was wondering how we would establish a culture that actively opposes these tendencies and going in blind. I went to the, a white ESA conference. I was at a, I was at the conference and I was watching the votes and reporting on them for discourse collective. And what I saw was really amazing. I saw young people, uh, was incredibly agile sense of, of organization and a sense of how to whip votes, how to maintain order in your caucus, how to, uh, approach votes with a serious and, and, uh, tactical mindset. And it, it blew me away. One thing I remember was a series of votes. Why was I was writing them down, uh, so I could, I could tweet them out. And the series of votes happened in, it'll under a minute, three votes that, uh, dug us out through several layers of Robert's rules. That one, one teenager, like 18 years old called one after another after another. And it was, it was a, it was like watching some well oiled machine just click on. And it was incredible and it was not the kind of organization that I'd been watching for two days in, um, in the rest of DSA. And it shows, it's the, the, the work that they've done really paid off. Why do you say, as a strong radical national coordinating committee, uh, with zero white men for the first time in the history of this organization ever, and that's an achievement that national DSA will not be able to replicate for at least a decade. And, uh, that you've got to ask, well, why is this, why is it that this youth wing is so much more actively radical and so much more, uh, seemingly so much more committed to making good on the, uh, the claims that DSA wants to make? I think it points to a serious amount of energy and a serious approach towards organizing that youth activists have that I think if DSA wants to be a powerful organization that is able to challenge capitalism, we need to tap into. So I think we're safe in saying that young people today are in a particularly cruel economic bind, unable to access the benefits of global capitalism. Uh, we're also sort of squashed underneath it. We increasing costs of living, declining returns on investment of increasingly expensive college degrees ever diminishing legal protections. As you enter an ever a saturated workforce, you have a pretty pretty bad outlook on the future. If you are young and unskilled and were unable to truly separate ourselves away from this in a masturbatory way, if you're able to step away from capitalism, you're probably not the kinds of people who are being made the victims of it. If you're able to remove yourself from the degradation that capitalism puts on people, you're probably in a position where you didn't really care which way it turned out one way or another. So the fact that young people today are in this bind makes them perfect organizers because they know already what it's like to live under a failing economic system and they want it gone. And we see this reflected in polling between 34 and 50% of young people are dissatisfied with capitalism, whatever that means. It's a larger number than any generation America before. So we want to tap into that. And so the question is how effective can we be because this is dangerous. It's not just that they are a dissatisfied with capitalism, it's that they get to make a choice. Now they get to make a choice between what comes after capitalism and what comes as a response to capitalism. And that's a choice that can take you down some pretty, uh, pretty scary roads. And we know what some of those roads look like. We know, uh, we're not heading into a future with fewer Charlottesville's. We're not heading into a future with fewer Richard Spencer speeches. We're heading into a future where those are going to be active currents, which we as Socialists have to combat. And those people prey on the same economic failures of a privileged class they prey on would be white nationalists, depressed young men typically. And they garner their favor by promising them some dream state of, of ethno nationalism or something. But we have to combat that and we have to be aware that we are at a very sensitive point in history. The issue for us in one hand is, uh, you know, we need to make ourselves known were leftists were here, were distinct from liberals, but also we need to be aware that we are not converting the youth socialism. We're not approaching them as a, as like a religious group that wants you to start believing what we believe we are showing them. Rather we are showing them the position they already live in. You're contextualizing their lives and telling them, yes, it's okay that you're mad about your tuition being $60,000 a year. It's okay that you hate your boss. It's okay that you think your landlord is a terrible person because they are because it's true. And to give the, give a voice to their discontent in a way that is positive in a way that is emancipatory and for a lot of these young people in a way that they've never heard before is a powerful thing. And those people who already know the realities that capitalism isn't working for them to provide a voice for that is what our organization needs to do. If we want to increase membership in the long run, um, out of these afraid and confused young people, we can very easily find a good socialists and good organizers and we can encourage their involvement with our organization if and only if we're able to respond to the actual needs they have. So Dsa has to focus on outreach at high schools and colleges and find the kind of energetic young people who already know that capitalism isn't working for them and have time and time again proven themselves in our, in this organization to be effective. Organizers. Look at the things that, why do you say has done already it's campus unionization efforts and anti Daca protests. Uh, these are these real material gains that young people are making in their own communities. So if we are able to embed ourselves into those struggles that these young people already know and already lived through, we will be able to magnify the effects of what DSA can do today. And in the future. DSAS history until very recently until, uh, the election really is one of a couple thousand people who, uh, had vague discontent, kind of annoyed, kind of don't like capitalism, kind of want something better, but really we're not able to latch onto a specific public discontent. And now we have one, now we have a, we have a very clear symptom of capitalism that people are very mad about and people really don't like. And if we want to not go back, not go back to being a club. No, we're good. We're a bigger club, but we're still a book club does not work. We need to be an active radical organization. And to do that we need large numbers of young people entering this organization and forming the kind of culture that we will move forward with, um, with real structure, with humility, with an understanding that they're participating in something bigger than themselves. And as we move forward with those young people, and as we take them and show them that this is how you do organizing, this is how you create a, a, a chapter at your college. This is how you whip votes. As you do that you build power in places you did not initially think that you could. So we, the dictatorship of the team is this a, is this idea where between me and some other, uh, why do you say organizers, which started out as a joke and now it's kind of, you know, we're here. Um, so we want to see DSA play a more active role in youth activism, driven by young people and engaging with them in terms they understand about issues they understand and away from the secretary and conflicts that have defined a lot of the um, uh, the work that's done in leftist organizations and inspiring them to commit to building power and standing up to capital, not just now, but for the rest of their lives. We're writing some forthcoming proposals, uh, which include a manifesto that includes calls for the establishment of mentorship programs for youth leaders in wide ESA by veteran organizers of DSA. So we can train young people to become organizers and maintain a, a, uh, independence and uh, uh, the ability of white Esa to operate as an independent structure. But not as a fledgling structure, not as a structure that can't accomplish what it needs to, but as a structure that you can learn in a structure that young people are working with each other and working in a community that they subsystem. So I'm of the opinion that the best way to learn is by doing. And the best way to define the practices that make for effective organizing in the 21st century is to experiment and to allow young people to experiment and hone their skills. Let them knock on doors, let them get harassed in public. Let them get the kind of treatment you get when you are a socialist in America. Because it isn't a, it isn't easy. It is not easy being an organizer. And if you come into this organization comfortable and expecting that you're going to have a blast all the time, you're probably going to be out the door very quickly. Um, but young people on college campuses are, uh, Craig, myself, there, not just college campuses. We'll get to that. Young people are very energized and very ready to, uh, to move on in their political education. So the present structure of DSA forces members to graduate out of DSA of why DSA already. Uh, if you're, uh, uh, I think it's 30 now, um, if you're above 30, you, you graduate out of white ESA and enter GSA. And so what I think is an interesting potential pipeline for this new leadership and a way for us to combat those old tendencies in Tsa is to have a infrastructure within DSA that takes youth leaders, youth activists from their chapters. From there, why DSA chapters after years of mentorship, after four years of, of putting in the legwork that makes the chapter run and then giving them the opportunity to enter into DSA and cochair a, a a meeting or run a committee and take the leadership skills that they've honed and learned that there are universities, have their high school campuses and apply them at a broader scope because that's the way you train leadership. That's the way you train people who view leftist organizing as a actual struggle. So think schools that you could teach them through the mentorship programs include things like how to run Robert's rules, how progressive stack works, how to host and run meetings. That's not easy. And a lot of young people don't know how to do that. They might have the energy, they might have the uh, the time and the uh, the willpower. But you need to have these technical skills down. And I'm using those skills to hone, honing those skills, providing a structure for them to learn in and then converting them into actual work being done in the organization. There's work already being done by the activist Agenda Committee, which I've been a part of. So the chapters are being or making connections with national and creating resource pools so that they can participate in the push for Medicare for all. That's a perfect example of the kind of thing that we want that uh, me and a couple of other like minded young people want to see happen in Dsa. A relationship, one on one, uh, or groups of, of young people coming to national, coming to their local chapters and saying, we need help on this and you have experience and you have knowledge and we need to use it. And national respecting their autonomy and providing that information to them nationally. Why do you say is creating this sort of centralized infrastructure to provide these resources and mentorship to both their new emerging chapters? They have something like 200 chapters now. This next generation that they are attracting through their, through their outreach is a radical radical group. Uh, they're energized and they're ready to have their energy directed. So we need to provide the infrastructure for that because otherwise you're going to have young people spinning their wheels and we're not going to be able to convert it into real work in the real world. So creating resources and creating, creating accessible resources for young people is important. Creating the infrastructure to move young people in large numbers into the organization is important. But also to create links between different youth organizations like campus clubs and uh, high school, uh, clubs, uh, is really important because then you're able to embed yourself in these local issues at a much fine, much finer grain than you would be able to do just with a DSA chapter. So an example of the, the difficulties that we've encountered while trying to implement these strategies was a, it was pretty interesting. So at the Yda say convention, it was sort of highlighted the kind of resistance you're going to see if you're doing it with our youth organizing was a failed attempt to rename. Why do, yeah, it was then called YDS, renamed YDS to campus DSA and a call it campus DSA. And that was shot down. And this was one of the reasons why there was like this coalition of young people there who were whipping votes and getting, oh no, we're shooting that one down. We don't like it. And they had um, that a debate and then a vote, which they called and whipped really well because, and they were discussing this with me afterwards and they told me why they were so opposed to being called campus DSA. The logic is that why do you to say needs to and is in the process of disengaging from borzois university campuses. The university is not a working class institution. The university is incredibly expensive and expanding outside of it and expanding into high schools and community colleges is of critical importance because we need to go to where people are feeling the effects of capital. And again, if you want radical young leftist, if you want people who are willing to put in the work, you go to people who know already that it's not working and that they need an alternative and the failures of an academic left are all around us. The book club mentality of DSA is just one example of that. But you look at the, the insane fractious fighting between different organizations and arguments over minutia of, of theory when it's patently clear that we've lost, that the left is not in power and these arguments are taking us nowhere. And if we're serious about building a militant socialist movement of militant union movement, we need to overcome that. And we need to overcome that by reaching out to people who are desperate for an alternative. And that means going to the people and going to where they are. High school chapters, for example, Hays High and canyon high in Texas, Hanford High and Washington and Arcadia high in Pennsylvania, or some incredibly important places for youth outreach because it gets people into GSA at young, at a young age. Uh, treat teaches them how to engage with politics in a radical and masturbatory way and creates a political consciousness that lasts not just for the period of time that they're at the high school and in the club, but for the rest of their lives. Their first exposure to real political work is in a socialist organization that really leaves an impact on a person. And even if they, even if they dip out of, of the organizing for awhile, they're political consciousness is forever informed by the fact that they did that. They did work for DSA. And as they enter the workforce, as they get, uh, get a landlord, as they move out of their parents' house, as they get a job, the little stings, a little little marks of capital that you get cumulate over your lifetime or contextualized by those young people as this is why we need socialism. This is, I think, the most pivotal point because if you can get people interested in our organization early in their lives, then you will have them working with us as organizers working with us as comrades for a very long time. And a DSA is growing and DSA has a potential to embed itself into and provide a to two and real support to a multitude of struggles across the country. However, if we're, if we're serious about a project for socialism, that's a very, very tall order and we have to prepare for a very long journey. And it's not just a journey that we, uh, we went a couple of elections and we get so and so elected in such and such place. But we undertake a long and difficult journey through some of the more gruesome parts of capital. We will, we will see horrible things happen in this country continuously. And those will be our reminders that how important the work we're doing is. So we have before us a generation of young, energized people who are allied,

Speaker 8 32:28

okay,

Speaker 7 32:28

that have the potential to be allied with us in a socialist movement. We have to seize this movement and act it quickly and effectively. Following the initiative. Example of this new breed of socialists who have already today already overturned a Social Democrats stranglehold on DSA internals who have already established radical socialist factions within DSA who have a diverse and radical NPC who have had their membership triple people who have been putting in hard work in local struggles with one-on-one nitty gritty campaigns that will echo out through their lives and will, if permanently change the political landscapes wherever they are. They have committed themselves to a lifelong struggle. Uh, for socialism. And unless DSA encourages them to continue that struggle and encourages them to commit to that struggle in DSA, DSA will not be the place where this kind of liberatory politics happens. We want it to be the place where that happens. So we need to establish the kind of support structures and establish the kind of infrastructure needed to ensure that our organization is not measured in decades, uh, is not measured in a number of votes that we get, but it's measured in the amount of actual change that we cause in the world, the amount of actual power that we can exert for the betterment of people's lives. And that is the dictatorship of the team. That is the continual renewal of our organization.

Speaker 8 34:13

Okay.

Speaker 7 34:14

Thank you.

Speaker 8 34:24

Cool.

Speaker 5 34:25

Okay, so, um, uh, we're gonna have a little bit of a Q and a and discussion session. So if you guys want to think of some questions or comments you'd like to make a go ahead and do that and we'll make sure that we respond as well as the, as well as we can. I think that the, the, I want to open it up with this question and maybe a little bit of a little bit more of a historical context. So we have actually seen this play out before in, in fairly recent history, the students for a democratic society back in the 60s was along with urban and black and Hispanic movements. Uh, really the core of the, the left left movements at the time and one of the big problems that they ran up against was that they were students and no less so then. Then today as Molly mentioned, they came from a privileged bourgeois and mainly white background and this actually caused a lot of problems with organizing across that class divide. Even though they were organizing for leftist and socialist movements, they, they still had a very, very difficult time crossing that class barrier. And today, even though we do see a lot of really energetic left activists and organizing coming out of y DSA and primarily college campuses,

Speaker 7 36:05

this

Speaker 5 36:06

still, this is still something that we have to really grapple with, especially in a time where other methods of organizing, like unions have never been at a lower level. So I kind of want to just, um, uh, ask you to maybe touch on, on how you think that we can actually move forward in a much more intersectional and emancipatory way with the acknowledgement that a lot of us, uh, who are actually going to be able to have the time and energy available to do that come from a very different background from a lot of the people that we are trying to organize with. Yes.

Speaker 7 36:48

Um, I don't think you can really run a socialist organization without actively engaged. I mean, you can run a social organization any way you want, but if you want to run a successful socialist organization and it needs to be where working people are. And so I think DSA has historically not done this. DSA has been a pretty comfortable place for a, a, a leftist organization. And if we are serious about taking this intersectional and active role in the various modes of oppression that exists in the United States, it's going to take a lot of deliberate construction of organizations within like caucuses and, uh, uh, committees within DSA that make their specific goal to avoid those mistakes that we've done before. And that's difficult because a lot of the work that's being, I mean, even now, the work that YDS say does, is still mostly limited to college campuses. And that's a problem and they need to be reaching out from there. And the only way that they can do that is with the support of DSA, with the infrastructure that they can provide to build chapters that are in places where maybe you'd have smaller initial membership but would be able to build membership over time. Uh, in places where it's harder to do canvassing in rural areas. I myself live in a rural area and a workout there is basically impossible because you are your middle of nowhere. Building power out in those places requires the strength. And the infrastructure that a large organization like DSA can provide, but only by directing it towards specific and known goals. Like we do not want to be a campus organization. We want to be a youth organization. Otherwise you're not, you're willing to make the same mistakes SDS did and you're going to make the same mistakes that a campus organizing historically does. I don't think there's like a single, like do this and you're good answer. If there was, we, we probably should just do that, but I think it's going to take a lot of experimentation and a lot of 'em a lot of hard work, uh, from the dozens and dozens of people who I've talked with and who I've interviewed who have discussed that

Speaker 9 39:08

the

Speaker 7 39:09

movement that they've taken towards, uh, making sure they don't repeat those historical mistakes. Okay. I think part of it is a numerical question. Um, campuses are a pretty popular, I mean, campuses right now are being used very strategically by a right wing and fascist organizers because there are public space, they're a government sanctioned space. And so you can very effectively amplify a small movement like the alt right by putting it in the limelight, in a place where you know, there'll be resistance. So using campuses in that way is a little underhanded and that there's nothing beneath these people. But the response from White Esa and the response from a lot of, I mean there's ones from a lot of campus organizations has been fairly fairly good in the, in the recent past. Most of it is do direct action, uh, organize with other clubs, organized with other groups, organize with chapters of groups like salt or Iso that are in the area and um, make it known that fascists are not welcome at my campus. But I would like to see movement beyond just responding to the sort of gauntlet of the, of fascists. Like, Oh, now they've come to my campus and now I have to do something about it. I think what would be interesting to see and what I'm hoping to, uh, uh, see done by DSA is yes, going to college campuses and trying to recruit, but also reaching out to other places where young people are, which includes high schools and going out there as college students and saying, are you interested in like doing union work around here? Getting them talking about a California has an amazing apprenticeship program which virtually no high school students know about or take advantage of. The reason is because there's a very strong push to get them to go to colleges because it makes a high schools look good and it, um, there's nothing like that tuition grant money that keeps, uh, each coffers full. So educating students and educating young people in general about how they can make positive changes in their environment, in their communities outside of just simple responses to fascism is an important direction. Cause I don't think that a organization that just responds to things that happen around you is the kind of organization that's going to get very much done in the future. Um, so yeah, it was there. There was like a second part, something I, yes, I think they have, I don't remember the specific one, but there was one recently I'm thinking Indiana where, why do you say was involved in a unionization effort? But a lot of the work that they do with actions anyway is alongside campus unions, graduate student unions, which are another place to mobilize students and maybe maybe convert their IG discontent into, okay, now I'm joining a socialist organization. That's a, that's a pretty big a hill to get over. And uh, you do that by working alongside them and showing them that, hey, you know, we're here and we're doing good work and if you're interested, we meet on Tuesdays. Stuff like that.

Speaker 6 42:28

Yeah.

Speaker 5 42:28

So one of the things that you brought up in, in your talk, uh, was the, uh, touching on the tyranny of structurelessness. And that is, that is a real thing if you, if you don't have, uh, institutions or, uh, structures within your organization that allow people to know what is expected of them and what they can expect of the institution, you tend to essentially recreate the, uh, the hedge demonic structures of society within your own organization. And in a society like ours that tends to be liberal and capitalist and therefore authoritarian institutions. But there is also a, there's also an issue of the tyranny of structure as well. Uh, where, uh, yeah, exactly the, the normal kind of tyranny. And this is obviously a very difficult balance and there has been a lot of, um, I don't want to say factional in fighting within the democratic socialists of America, but it is kind of, and, um, I, I kind of wanted to get your take on, uh, both the, the DSA generally how it is, how the, the more traditional Marxist Leninist and the libertarian socialists and anarchists wing are getting along or not. And uh, in particular where you see the role of the wider ESA in, in sort of guiding where this will eventually fall.

Speaker 7 44:06

I'm a, I'm a fan of a structure when it's used appropriately. I think in the context of these structures matters more, um, more often than the actual structure itself. It's the, the way that you're employing it and the reason you're using it. So I don't think, I think there's some pushes for centralization of, of some things that maybe don't need to be centralized. Uh, if you think about the historical context of where the left is right now, it doesn't make sense to vet members for eight months, right? We want to grow membership. We want to get more people in the left and we're okay if maybe they're not ideologically on the same page as us, 100%, because really what we need is a, a movement of workers and a movement of people interested in joining our organization. But I think in the context of tea of youth organizing, I think structures are probably more important than in DSA has a hole simply because you are hurting. You're hurting cats a little bit there. There are students, uh, we, our students, uh, it's, it's much more difficult to get large numbers of people entering your organization if they come in to, uh, a meeting where nothing is happening. It's time and time again. You see organizers suggest, you know, if you're going to get someone to come to a meeting, give them to give him something to do, give them a, uh, a role and a task and the way that you make sure that those roles and tasks aren't just busy work they were handing them is to create structures that yes, do dictate what you need to do, but do it in a way that is productive. If you are just going to dictate for the sake of dictating and you're not building membership through that, if you're going to just centralize things because you have an ideological commitment to centralize, that doesn't make any sense. The reason why it's important to build those structures is because it's important to be an effective organization. And if there's a situations where it's more effective to lose some of those structures, then fine, you can lose some of those structures. But I think right now DSA suffering significantly from a lack of appropriate infrastructure for things like recalling leadership, uh, which like we went through, um, uh, the issues that GSA has right now are issues that we can solve, but only by refining the underlying infrastructure of it. And that's reflected in, in why Esa,

Speaker 3 46:44

one of the things that I've informally

Speaker 7 46:48

sad

Speaker 3 46:48

and because I say it informally, it means

Speaker 7 46:52

that

Speaker 3 46:53

this is not exactly what I mean is abolish leadership. What I actually mean is significantly reformed the concept of what leadership is. For example,

Speaker 7 47:05

his leadership.

Speaker 3 47:07

Somebody's on a 12 person NPC who can be recalled.

Speaker 10 47:12

Yeah.

Speaker 3 47:13

Or his leadership. Somebody who it feels empowered enough to lead a meeting whether or not they have been

Speaker 10 47:23

okay

Speaker 3 47:24

chosen whether or not they have.

Speaker 10 47:27

Okay.

Speaker 3 47:27

The, uh, self confidence of a mediocre white man to believe that they can lead a meeting. When you talk about power and when you talk about the tyranny of structurelessness, I'm, I'm that nodding, nodding along with you. It's the, the concept that's, that power is embodied in, in one or more specific people that that causes me to lean back a little bit and say, I know that that is not what we explicitly mean when we talk about leadership, but it has, the term has connotations. So all that said extremely informally because it's not something that I actually saw it through before I started saying it. Yes. We here now. What does leadership actually mean in, in the dictatorship of the team and in general? In, in your manifesto of the team?

Speaker 7 48:28

Yeah. So manifesto coming soon. Leadership I think are going again, it's talking about leadership outside of the context of what it's actually doing is academic and mostly useless. Like it's, it's like leadership is, is good when it's doing things that I like and leadership is bad when it's doing things I don't like. But I think unless we create a infrastructure like methods of voting or met or, uh, we've agreed to do this campaign, we have to do it now. Yes. We all must be little. Cincinnati's. Um, you know, we're, we're all, uh, doing our duty. Um, oh, since it is the Cincinnatus Cincinnatus this Roman guy, um, who during a time of war, uh, was like, hey, look, I know how to run an army or some kind of administrative thing. Stepped up, ran the army, and then, you know, after winning a battle or winning a war, um, is being cheered by his men. And he says, ah, no, it's just let me go back to my farm and I'll go back to farming and relax. And it's the idea that you, you walk away from leadership and I think it's, it's, it's kind of like a more extreme example of what I mean when I say, um, that the dictatorship of the teen is about renewing leadership, but I don't think we should be afraid of asking our leaders to step down when they're no longer effective. And I think introducing things infrastructurally, introducing rigid structures that empower us to do that is an a beneficial use of that structure because otherwise you're going to end up in the same situation where, well, you've got this guy in, well, he won't leave. And what are we going to do without, without the structures to actually recall people you can end up in tricky legal situations like, are we discriminating against this man because he's profession, uh, does not allow, is being discriminated against an organization we are not allowing him in. Is that legally okay? Is this, uh, something that we're not allowed to do and we'll get sued for situations like that are very difficult to handle without clear guidelines. And those guidelines need to be established democratically. Those guidelines need to be established with the consent of all of us, but they do need to be understood as serious and strict rules that we have to abide by. Um, because without them, we're just sort of adrift.

Speaker 5 51:00

Any other questions from the audience? Because it is, it is important that, um, uh, we try to make sure that whenever we are in an environment where we are sitting up, you know, in a, in a position of privilege in front of a, a group of people that we actually make sure that we, uh, take the time to step down and really make sure that we are addressing people's issues and needs and concerns. So, um, we really do. If anybody has any questions about either then youth organizing, um, you know, theoretical structure, uh, questions about structure and power or just more broadly, uh, questions about what it means to be a socialist in the 21st century. Uh, we really want to make sure that everybody gets a platform to, to ask that question.

Speaker 7 51:52

Actually, I do have a bit of a question. Um,

Speaker 11 51:57

I'm quite young. I'm 15 and I'm, I really only got like explicitly introduced to socialism like this past year, last year. And um,

Speaker 8 52:08

okay.

Speaker 11 52:09

I know a lot of people in this city in particular that, um, they don't get exposed to that kind of stuff, especially young people. And, um, I guess what are your suggestions on like beginning that dialogue was like young people and talking about like,

Speaker 8 52:27

yeah,

Speaker 11 52:27

like what really is the effects of capitalism?

Speaker 7 52:30

It's a really good question and I think that's one of the big things that people uh, you know or like kind of confused by when they start doing leftist organizing is you know, where to begin. Like everything's really screwed up, everything is like terrible. And so you're like, um, why am I a socialist? Like Geez, there's like hundreds of reasons but you have to get to like a specific one. I think the, the strategy that I usually use or I usually like encourage people to use is to target like a specific known thing that this person is already, uh, not on board with about the way the world's working. And that can be anything from like, uh, their, their job of being manipulative or gross to them or they're, they're landlords or the government that we have, which God where to start, right? There is a lot of like very specific wedge issues. You can point out to people and say, this is, you know, the the for foremost issue for me or reflect whatever their a foremost issue is or appears to be, and discuss that with them and unpack how that intersects with capitalism, how that intersects with people with money ruining our lives. And so it's very conversational. It's very like sitting down with a person and explaining to them why you believe this. But it's also not just one conversation. It's not just you're, you're sitting down and they're going to walk away and go, well Geez, do I pick between DSA or PSL or what am I doing there? You plant a seed of doubt that this is working. And then you come back later and you describe to them some of the work you're doing maybe or ask them how it's going with whatever they're upset with. And You keep building this doubt and uncertainty about you're building off of the doubt and they already have about the way that the world works. And if you, if this, I mean it may not work out and this person may just never engage with you. On a serious political level. Alternatively, you may successfully get this person to come to a meeting. We, and maybe they help you with an issue that they do care about because most people kind of don't care about politics. And so that number is shrinking. But there's a lot of people out there who just do not care about politics, but most people do care about certain things in their lives that they don't like. And you can very easily, um, wedge yourself in there and present an a, a perspective they may not have heard, you know,

Speaker 5 54:59

um, I, I want it to address this as well because it took me a long time to sort of like recognize that I was a socialist. And there's, there's just a lot of propaganda and education against, uh, the idea of socialism that you kind of have to get over. But you know, in, in my own journey and in speaking with a lot of other people about how they got to be where they are and talking to some very, very radical people, a couple of things come up over and over again. The first is that socialism isn't necessarily, or even mostly a, a theoretical or academic thing. It is for most people, the theory and academics give language to a basic understanding and a moral framework for how you approach the world. And so a lot of, a lot of what we see as, um, like the inherent contradictions of capital or you know, analyzing specific structures of power that comes after the, the point where you recognize that there is something just, uh, fundamentally morally wrong with the way that the world works or the way that your relationship between you and your boss or you and your landlord or you know, uh, uh, between you and the way that the government functions. And it is by,

Speaker 11 56:43

uh, like you said,

Speaker 5 56:45

talking to people about their specific material conditions and understanding where, where they're more Allity is pointing them and then giving them the language, uh, to, to express that themselves. And I think that that is a really powerful way to, to not convert somebody, but allow them to get the political consciousness to realize that they were there all along.

Speaker 12 57:13

Okay.

Speaker 3 57:14

Going to try and make this short and sweet. Um, there is an organizing tactic cold one on ones, which is why you have a one on one conversation interview with somebody, uh, to find out what they're interested in and how perhaps they can get plugged in with your organization. And Nick who has sat at the back can't tell you more about one on ones and if you're interested in learning how to do one on ones, he can probably link you to a resources that can teach you more about that because it's a very, there's a method, there's a, this course is about how to, how to give effective one on ones that I have not done, so I'm terrible at them. So don't ask me about them but, but nick can can give you more info on that.

Speaker 11 58:02

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And that was something that like I was a socialist and I was radical before I knew I was radical. I just, it took sitting down and reading like Oh of socialism book for me to really understand that. Um, but I was also fortunate to be homeschooled for a lot of my life and have very radical parents. So there's a lot of, um, I feel like a lot of,

Speaker 12 58:25

okay,

Speaker 11 58:25

rhetoric you see in the media and that's taught in schools that, like you said, goes against all these views. And I think that's a big part of like talking to young people is kind of breaking that stuff down because it's not necessarily moving forward, but you have to kind of go back and unlearn some of the things that like this capitalist society has taught you. So yeah, it's just, it's a, it's definitely a difficult thing to, to break down. And I've been wondering about that myself. Like how, how can I like, since those life things and how can I break it down to like what you were taught in this class that's not really true or, you know what I mean? So, yeah. Yeah, that's definitely want to know more about that. So,

Speaker 13 59:09

hi, I'm Sean. I'm actually a member of the DSA, Northbay occ and I have been sort of attempting to start a why Dsa chapter, um, Solano community college just up the road from here. And, um, that's mostly all I've been involved with. Um, I've done some stuff for a few other organizations that maybe aren't socialists. Um, but, uh, something that I guess I wanted to maybe say was, um, I think that, um, while socialism maybe a linguistically is not popular in the u s um, and it, I would say, especially among young people, it kind of is popular, just not, I'm not so explicitly. Um, yes. Yeah. It's, um, the, the sort of the theories and the, uh, the more practical applications of socialism, um, in my experience have actually been really popular among young people. It's just when you say that you want the, when you say that it is socialist, people go, oh, but I don't care about politics because they don't view their tuition as being political, even though it is, it's just that people don't see it that way. Um, healthcare has recently become political, but um, as far as I guess as far as I know, which I'm only 19, so, but um, it hasn't been for, for as long as many other things. Um, so I think that um, a lot of people really do hold at least sympathetic ideologies. It's just the expression of them through Socialists language is maybe not that popular. I don't know if anything I just said was coherent.

Speaker 7 1:01:17

I think that's a really, that's a big challenge is the um, cause one time I was talking with someone, we were talking about politics and stuff and I was like, oh, this thing is bad. And they were like, I agree it's really bad. And I was like, well, coming up from like a socialist perspective and they stopped me and asked me if I was rushing. I was like, no, but what does that have to do with this? But it's a, we have got a lot of a rebranding to do, which is mostly just a matter of refining how we approach people. Because if you're gonna, if you're talking with people who are going to turn down slowly like serious solutions to the issues that they have because someone has the wrong brand, we're probably not talking to the right people. If you're talking to people who are, you know, desperate for a solution for real issues that they have, they're probably going to be willing to work with you even if they feel a little iffy on socialism and the point is not to get people are, you know, you know already super hyped up to do socialism and yeah, let's do it. It's to get, it's the reach out to people who materially or the people we want to reach out to. Maybe even if they're not ideologically on the same page. It's a lot of like one on ones. There's a lot of long discussions that you have with people, but it, the, the output of that is rather than having 50 people who are sure that they know how to do socialism and they're gonna like really shake this org up, it's maybe 25 people who are ready to do serious work and ready to organize because their lives depend on it.

Speaker 8 1:02:57

Okay.

Speaker 5 1:02:58

All right. So we are a about 10 minutes away from the, when we have our schedule on here. So I just want to really thank everybody for coming out. Um, you know, and asking interesting questions and being a part of what we are doing in our movement and organizing and really a, just really want to appreciate you guys just even for being here.

Speaker 7 1:03:21

Hello. Any final was, yeah, thank you all for coming out. This was really, really great. Uh, I had, uh, I had a wonderful time. You were, uh, I loved your questions and if any of you have any questions for me or, uh, any, you know, any insults you'd like to hurl at me, um, anything you'd like to say? Just neutral. Uh, I'll be wrapping my stuff up here and probably standing over there, so I'll see you then. Um, again, thank you guys for coming out. I really appreciate it and check me out on Twitter at employ boy and check me out on my show. Discourse collected. Um, we do a lot of journalism reporting. Um, and we're fun folks. You'll have fun. Thank you.

Speaker 1 1:04:07

All right, thank you comrades for joining us. I, I hope you guys enjoyed listening to that as much as we enjoyed being a part of it while it happened. If you want to get a hold of us, you can find us on Twitter. Our left coast media handle is at l e f t p. O, d. That's at left-pad. You can find the show specifically at North Bay and o r t h underscore B, a. E if you have criticism, feedback questions or if you want to be on the show, best way to get ahold of us is by Gmail. You can find us@northbaypodcastatgmail.com and you can find our personal Twitter handles at Checka informant from myself and at commune or sauce for sauce. Also, don't forget to follow Malloy at m Malloy boy on Twitter. I want to thank [inaudible] again for joining me

Speaker 6 1:05:05

on this evening and thank you all for listening to us go in peace and be in solidarity.

Speaker 8 1:05:43

Yeah.