r/demsocialists

I live in north Texas and I am really trying to stay hopeful for the midterms this year. I saw like 6 flock cameras today and it just makes me feel so fearful and discouraged.
How are we feeling?

I know this might be an answer I can find but I don't know where to look for it and I live in New England so is there any New England candidates a part of the DSA or DSA endorsed in a primary in my region? Any help would be welcomed?

"Jibreel Kateb argues that the pragmatist idealism advocated by Geese Magazine leaves Marxism defenseless against attacks on science in an age of irrationalism and climate crisis."

"The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism."

"What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality"

"Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God."

I’m 20 and feeling pretty hopeless right now. I try my best to take action in the ways I am able to such as obvious things like avoiding AI, walking instead of driving when able to, using clean energy such as solar, engaging in my community, spreading awareness and protesting, calling my state reps, and I guess smaller more personal things like planting native plants, rehabbing wildlife, cleaning up trash.

I still feel pretty hopeless despite no matter how much I try to take action. I am living in Texas and it’s pretty bad here. I feel worried not only for my future, but my younger siblings futures and the future of my peers. Things such as our current climate crisis, active genocides, and southern states like mine proposing bills against queer & trans people of which I have many queer and trans friends and am queer myself.

How do yall stay hopeful for a future despite everything happening? The climate, AI becoming so prevalent, innocent people dying, and scary bill propsals.