it’s the tricky thing about being an “organizer”, or a “political party”. yes, your role is to ensure something happens, not to be content waiting for a spontaneous Godot. yet you can only be the spark, the match. how the flame burns must be determined by the fuel, from the bottom up. 1/

forgetting this simple thing has led is to where we are. 2/

post-Obama in the US, civil society beyond prosperous educated professionals, for whom Obama governed, does not trust the US Democrats. he governed in our name but usurped all control, insisted on driving, places he chose, he said we should be grateful to go. /fin

land value tax is a different issue. (i'm favorably disposed, but it's just a distinct question.) i agree there's been a creep towards financial surveillance at a small scale, that we should intentionally counter. 1/

i object very strongly to your presumption that the rich and at a large scale fund flows are irrevocably anonymous. among the most important current projects in the world is piercing the veil of shell corps and breaking "confidentiality" offered by tax havens. 2/

this is an active fight. just this year, though i think there are continuing court challenges, in the US we've become required to file beneficial ownership declarations for LLCs and corps. 3/

there's much yet to do, especially piercing shielding of beneficial ownership of real estate, but project has been made over the last decade, and continuing this work is essential. you can't counter plutocracy if all the wealth and expenditures are hidden. 4/

crypto is a place where "wealth" can flow in any quantity with perfect privacy, but if we are non-idiotic, we can prevent shielded wealth from ever becoming spendable in the real world. 5/

exchanges can require pedigrees, crypto in quantity without such pedigrees become as unsaleable as conflict diamonds. yes, of course, enforcement is always imperfect and there are always leaks. but we can and should surveil and regulate high-dollar financial flows and stashes. 6/

we'll likely backslide on this over the next few years, since we will be ruled by plutocrats. hopefully, rule by plutocrats won't last forever, and we'll be inclined to clip the wings of plutocracy during the hangover. /fin

I don't know much about Mason, don't mean to pretend that I do! But the perspective strikes me as from the inside of mainstream parties like US Dems and Labor. He looks outward with mixed feelings to a "left", characterizes Corbyn as a threat rather than at least to some degree an opportunity lost.

He's gentle with an identity politics left, who he thinks misguided and is trying to persuade to more constructive approaches. He's not gentle with a left whose foreign policy views are "tankie", even though their economic views are often vigorously social democratic.

I happen to agree with him that both the id-pol focused and "tankie" foreign policy focused portions of a leftish coalition are making grave errors! but i think he's making an error by deciding one can be pulled into coalition, while the other must be banished to the adversary and shunned.

The id-pol people are right to observe that important social disparities break along identity lines in ways not fully captured by material notions of class. But they are wrong to make that a foundation for political activism, because identity advocacy becomes divisive and zero-sum.

Similarly the "tankie" left is not wrong that Western foreign policy has included a lot of horrors. They are wrong in imagining powers like Russia, China, and Iran are therefore superior because they resist Western foreign policy.

Both groups are badly mistaken. But both groups need to be brought into coalition on material social democratic interests. That is the power, and only hope, of social democracy.

Whatever else divides us, whatever we disagree about, a solid material basis for all will leave us much better off than we were, and more able to address those issues.

There will still be racism and sexism in a robust social democracy, but it will matter less, you can tell the racists and sexists to fuck off and just live your life.

Foreign policy will still be complicated under social democracy, but if you view capitalist corruption of a military industrial complex as an important source of Western foreign policy horrors, social democratic reform will make it possible to collectively think more seriously and ethically.

Basically, it seems to me that Mason has a very inside view of what kind of errors leave people "on the broad left" redeemable, and what kind render them pariahs.

Also a bit too technocratic here, "It is entirely possible to defeat and contain right wing populism if social democrats and their allies adopt an evidence-based and professionally executed strategy..."

"Evidence-based" and "professional" has been the hallmark of mainstream center left parties. It has not served them well.

The next bit is "...mobilising our substantial support within civil society and our working class roots." That inverts the direction of causality. A successful socdem movement will need to organize the party such that it is *mobilized* by civil society and working class roots.

in 2016, i was a class reductionist, a Bernie bro, sensible moderate centrist Democrats kept telling me. "If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?" 1/

now those same pundits disdain me as a progressive, a "leftist", whose failure to disavow with sufficient energy the identity politics of which i was skeptical back then now has lost the election to the fascists (who they won't call that, to whom they are now building sensible moderate bridges). 2/

i don't think it is my position that has changed. /fin

i mean, if they still had houses.

(now i feel very mean. i really am sorry for everybody, celebrity or uncelebrated, who lost their homes. it really is a terrible trauma.)

it may have been (i don't know enough to say), but that doesn't get at the question. if it was a small movement, if a sliver of the working class constituted the whole of the movement, the generalization may hold. 1/

if you want to claim he's wrong, you'd want to claim a substantial portion of the working class were anarchist or sympathized with anarchism (or with upscale severely limited government liberalism) more than with other more dirigiste movements. which is possible, but i doubt. /fin