Diving into the Wreckage 9.2: The State of the Left and Strategies of Orientation

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Sean and Varn continue the second part of their miniseries on left strategies and orientations. Central to the discussion is the definition and role of what is called 'Rank and File' organizing, something that means many things to many people, but whose bases are often conflated in literature and debate, for example in the DSA. This episode tackles, in turn, the tendencies associated with Joe Burns, Jane MacAlevey, Kim Moody, Marxist-Leninists and syndicalists.

Taking a cue from current events, the conversation revolves around the ongoing United Autoworkers strike in the Midwest: what it might mean for the industry, how a victory might galvanize the broader working class, and how a defeat might play out.

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Transcript

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0:16.8	Welcome to diving into the wreckage Impossible Numbering System 9.2, the state of the left and strategies of orientation. Today we're going to be talking about strategies of orientation around labor, around the DSA,
0:25.0	around law.
0:28.0	Partly to address some criticisms of the last day to the left episode, partly to kind of get our head around the various
0:34.0	strategic orientations that exist right now and partly to bring up some of the
0:40.8	contradictions and the different things get called by the same name,
0:46.3	which is going to be, I think a big thing today when we get into our discussions of orientation towards labor because rank and file strategy
0:57.0	It's about 50 different things to about 50 different people
1:00.0	Yeah and some of them are I think pernicious, some of them are just classic good old unionism,
1:07.8	and so it's going to be very important to distinguish that.
1:11.3	But I also think we have to distinguish a little bit more clearly the
1:17.3	broader tendencies of the factions and slates in the DSA. I have done some more interviews and some more talking to people since the last recording that we did a couple weeks ago.
1:28.0	And then I think we have to look at the overall milieu in regards to the fact that the left is shrinking
1:36.0	in a very real way and I think like that's the elephant in the room
1:41.0	in the last discussion that people just kind of don't want to look at but you know just to remind people my thesis is our current
1:49.6	orientations leave us with a problem that is very similar to the problem of the late 1990s early auts where
1:57.4	You know you have third parties you have sectarian groups you have a couple of clearinghouse back then it was movement now it's movements plus
2:04.6	one organization that's fairly large but nothing seems to be actually growing and
2:12.0	despite the fact that there seems to be more militancy everywhere.
2:16.4	And so that's where I think we are.
2:20.5	We're two weeks out from our last recording.
2:25.0	Subsequent to that, we have seen some very heartening things coming out of the Midwest of the United States. We did on the
2:35.1	Antifada a big episode last week about the ins and outs, the political economy of
	...

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