Edit- y’all are getting salty. Clearly I agree with Lenin that revolutionaries should work in reactionary parliaments. But that is not the same as the DSA who think electoralism is the key to meaningful change, and not a combination of legal and illegal strategies.
Venezuela and Bolivia made big strides leftward through elections. And no American revolution is going anywhere until we create a bunch more leftists, which the DSA is at least trying to do. But memes are fun.
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That, and Bolivia and Venezuela have not actually yet escaped from capitalism, both still have majority private sector economies. In other words it’s still an open question whether electoralism “worked” to overthrow capitalism, but they have made major gains.
Yeah, it's much more difficult for exploited nations to do this. If they can make real leftward progress through elections, we should be able to do the same.
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You can't just do incrementalism. Incrementalism never produces the immediate unequivocal results I crave.
idk some lib probably
You need more than 1000 leftists in a trench coat to do a revolution
Tbh at least in Chavez's case he armed the people, made basic socialist structures on the ground with collectivos and completely made the ermy from scratch as a people's army. Way more in line with the Leninist line of doing things after getting power , whatever way you happened to find a way to get it(well surpise he and the other people around him were trots) . Social democrats and democratic socialists in the west never have even shown any inclination of actualy taking such lines of trying to repurpose and rebuild the state machinery after taking power at any degree, and any even remotely possible electoral success in America will be way too far from such actions as it will be at best Bernie level miliquest social democracy. Its much ,much ,much more logical to compare any socdem/demsoc electoral success that may happen in the US to those that have happened by socdem/demsoc parties in the west and particularly Europe in the last 60 years and see what the outcomes were, how and if they helped with class conciousness and unionism, if they correlated with the socialist movement making progress etc (spoiler alert, none of those things happened)
Latam electoral success was it riding an actualy revolutionary anti-colonial movement and sentiment with Chavez and co being communists that won through elections and found themselves in a situation of just being able to enact strong welfare state policies and nationalization economicaly but aditionaly they worked to keep internationalism as a major point, they worked to transform the state to a more workers state, not just "workers friendly" and consolidated power in army and police by tranforming them away from bourgeois forms. Also they constantly tried to elevate the class conciousness of Venezuelans and have the people coalesce around the government in revolutionary and anti-imperialist terms. I dont see any reason to believe that any electoral socdem/demsoc movement or success in america will emulate any of those characteristics and not the charactersics of the dozens and dozens of socdem/demsoc electoral "successes" in various countries in Europe and follow the same story. The cultural ,historical and material conditions in Venezuela and bolivia (morales similarly describes himslef as a marxist lenninist lmao, but also is closer to Allende than Chavez), the character and ideology of the parties and masses behind those movements and the actions they did when they got in power seem way too divorced from America to site them as examples that electoral organizing can strive for , especially when you have way way more examples of how things turn out in much more comparable conditions and populations/countries