Reply to John Reimann: There are two matters to address: one substantive and one personal. I will address the substantive matter first, as it is more important.
John is right against the machine-hacking claims, and his reply to Krystin Bird deserves support. He did the work in 2024 that most of the left did not: he ran the claims down and found them empty. Seven hundred thousand machines, air-gapped and physically dispersed, cannot be covertly manipulated at scale, and the mail-ballot version of the claim dissolves under the same scrutiny. But the point should be pushed one step further because the conspiracist frame does not merely misinterpret the mechanism incorrectly. It misrepresents the danger, presenting it in a way that undermines its seriousness. The threat to the November count is not covert. The threat is open, legal, and administrative: it includes roll purges disguised as citizenship verification, the state boards that will refuse to certify, and the National Guard being held in reserve for the voting machines that Trump has publicly regretted missing out on seizing in 2020. A left that focuses solely on watching for hackers at night will overlook a theft that occurs in broad daylight, on official letterhead, and with subsequent court approval sought. The fraud narrative and the counter-fraud narrative both share the false premise that the count is decided in secret. The count will be decided by organized force, theirs or ours, in the open. That is why the question of what actions we take within existing organizations is not merely a topic for debate; it is the central issue. Now, let me address the personal question, which deserves a straightforward answer. Yes, I am a DSA member. I am an at-large member, having been driven out of my local chapter for attempting to do what John did. I am also a member of Solidarity and Tempest. John has set an entry fee for the right to speak, and now we must address this fee as a legitimate argument. as a legitimate argument. I want to reject the standard, not just meet it. If the criterion for participating in a debate is a service record, then debate collapses into the comparison of biographies, and John's biography would win that comparison against nearly anyone on this list, which is precisely why it settles nothing. Arguments stand or fall on their content. "Come back when you've done it" is the logic by which every bureaucracy John ever fought inside his union told him to sit down. And here is the thing: I never criticized John's record. I criticized the conclusion of his article, which contradicts his record. A militant who spent thirty years fighting in both his local and central labor councils, knowing that most of these efforts would fail; who was expelled for his actions; and who attempted to engage again last month at the East Bay convention has no business concluding an analysis with the hope of spontaneous renewal, as no organizing center currently exists. His practice for three decades was the answer to the absence of a center: you act as the center's advance guard inside whatever bodies exist, however miserable, and the fights you lose identify the minority you can organize. That is not my lecture to him. His method is sound, but I object to the fact that the final paragraph of his article abandons it. If the perspective of waiting on spontaneity had been taken seriously in 1975, John would never have raised a single resolution. The thirty years are a refutation of the conclusion, and I would rather have those thirty years. Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42557): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42557 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120334411/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
