A large majority of the population sees elections as the primary, if not the only, legitimate form of politics;
Electoral gains can open up possibilities outside elctoralism; and
All other organizing strategies are at least as unlikely to work.
We're not going anywhere unless we get (at minimum) tens of millions more people to agree with us. Right now, elections are the only way to get somewhere near that amount of people interested in a long-term political project.
I don't think you're wrong, but that's also sort of my point. I'm not aware of socialism as having ever managed to win when 1. is true to a religious degree. We can't get anywhere near tens of millions of people to agree with us when voting is the only legitimator of political power and Americans vote almost entirely via a shared petit bourgeois class consciousness. Almost all political decisions of the last 70 years in at least the u.s. have been predicated upon depoliticizing the electorate. You can't do an electoralism without mass support, and you can't build mass electoral support prior to climate collapse when all bases of potential support need to be thoroughly deimperialized in their thought before they'll consider any candidate to the left of Pete Buttigieg. The existing builds of socialism that I'm aware of at least all made ready use of a thoroughly oppressed and otherwise unpolitical worker/peasant mass. There's a real difference between farmers and industrial workers that have been proletarianized as a single class consciousness without being politicized and a stratified labor aristocracy that benefits from the treats of neocolonial occupation and has been explicitly depoliticized via mass education. I think the point is that we have to try to come up with a path to resistance that exists outside of electoral politics because the bourgeoisie has a much greater stranglehold on that process in the imperial core than has generally existed in the periphery. I'm really not sure what the answer is. I'm not convinced that electoralism is even dead. I just think that given how imperial even Bernie is, it's hard to say that it doesn't feel dead.
I'm pretty optimistic about electoral politics, at least as a means of pipelining libs leftward. There's a well-worn path from the Bernie campaigns to places like this one, and plenty of more people from those campaigns have wound up in a place we might criticize as too liberal, but that's still to the left of nearly all mainstream politicians in the past 40-50 years.
All of this happened in the last 5-6 years, too, and promising politicians keep running and winning (see India Walton). Bernie isn't the best we can do after a long, sustained effort -- he's the best who was left after a century of anticommunist purges and propaganda.
I mean, maybe you're right. I just know that when I look around at the existing political landscape, I don't see an electoral path to change that avoids the worst of the climate crisis to come. I see the u.s. running aground against China the second it senses a real threat to the neoliberal world order from within or without, and from that point everything changes. Maybe that makes anti-imperialist electoral politics plausible. I'm willing to grant that. I just don't see it making much headway in the current political climate. It all just gets mired in neocolonial reaction, i.e. identity and positioning.
I agree on climate change -- we're not going to be able to do electoralism fast enough to head off the worst of that. But I don't see any other realistic path that would work faster, so I think we work the angles we have now and then work new ones as they present themselves.
I think it would be fair to say that at least part of my aversion to electoralism as a viable path are the local conditions that I see. I'm in one of those progressive cities with an almost fully segregated divide between black and white city residents, to the extent that most black citizens of the area technically live in less progressive suburban areas on the periphery. So the poor is largely ghettoized and then the white progressives are incredibly racist and paternalistic in that post-civil-rights liberal way. I don't think that doxxes me unduly. I also don't see any more realistic path, but I sometimes feel like that's for lack of trying. It's hard to build any kind of new strategy when no one living remembers any tactic ever working. I'm of the mind personally that any novel answers about how to beat neocolonialism will come from outside the imperial core; I think the best goal in the imperial core is to stress the military/we're-the-good-guys contradiction in order to give revolutions a fighting chance. But I'm not out there doing praxis, so no one should really listen to me anyway :marx-hi:
Those are the very reasons we need to write off electoralism with such vigor that those millions of people give up on it too and join in some of the actual struggle/fight.
We're not going to convince anyone of anything if they think we're a joke, and there's no quicker way to make someone think you're a joke than to start talking about how you hope to achieve a revolutionary change with zero participation in electoral politics. That makes you sound like some right-wing militia LARPer who thinks a popular rebellion against the tyrant Joe Biden is just around the corner. It's the quickest way to poison the well with ordinary people -- they might still humor you, but in the back of their mind they're thinking "this guy's a crank."
You have to get the person you're trying to convince to take you seriously, and for the people we're trying to convince, elections are serious politics. In addition to the other good reasons to put effort into electoralism, that point is enough on its own.
There were tons of things that I read when I was a baby leftist that I thought were batshit crazy. But hearing them made me start to investigate them, and on a lot of those things after investigating them, I came around to that way of thinking. If those writers had coddled me and worried more about seeming valid to their propagandized reader, then I never would have progressed or developed my understanding of the world.
Other reasons to not champion electoralism include:
When you use your influence to steer people back into the current political system, when that system inevitably doesn't work, you lose a bunch of those people too - they got burned out doing something that could not possibly work, and now they are not available to move on to the real work of organizing and fighting.
The only way to actually make change is outside of the political system, and any effort directed into the system will just be recouped or redirected. You should be funneling out anyone who is even possibly questioning things, not send them back in.
There are ways to talk about electoralism that don't make you a crank, just like there are ways to talk about capitalism or communism without coming off as a complete crank.
If your only goal is to pander to the lowest common denominator, you will literally never get anywhere.
You're right that hearing things that sound crazy leads some people to look into them, but I don't think that strategy works as well or as quickly as you might think. Leftists have been saying those things for decades, yet the left in the U.S. remains small. To me, that looks like a strategy that works great on some people (you and me) but falls flat with most. And we need a strategy with mass appeal -- that's not pandering to the lowest common denominator, that's a prerequisite for any mass movement.
When you use your influence to steer people back into the current political system
I don't think we should steer people into the current political system -- as in, into electoral politics and nothing else. I think the best approach is to look at any possible way of moving the ball forward and pursue as many of those as possible, dividing our efforts according to whichever produces the best results (and electoral politics have at least pipelined a bunch of people to here and other openly-left spaces). It's electoralism AND everything else, not OR everything else. This is the easiest way to talk about electoralism (and raise issues with it, and present alternatives to it) without sounding like a crank.
The only way to actually make change is outside of the political system
But at some point we need to either take over the system from within or tear it apart from the outside. The latter is at least as unlikely as the former, and if the latter winds up being the only possible path forward it'll help to have people who know the machine so they know where to stick a wrench in it. Besides, absent completely rebuilding society from the ground up -- likely impossible -- it'll help to have people who can bring working knowledge of what came before.
I hear what you're saying, a mass movement is what everyone wants. I don't think that's how you get there, at least not a mass movement that has revolutionary potential.
If you want a mass movement, the easiest way to get there is to go where the masses are and create a message that they will understand and can easily support.
If you want a mass movement that has revolutionary potential, you stick the flag in the ground and call people to you. You do it with resolve and courage, you don't go half way in between the masses and you, or anywhere except where it should go.
The potential of people to see and come to your revolutionary thinking is dependent on their consciousness and the way to build consciousness is through a combination of revolutionary theory, programs for the people, and the heightening of the contradictions of capital and the state.
You cannot take over the system from the inside. It must be destroyed, root and branch from the outside, and something else built in it's place, in which case, knowing the current system is a hindrance to building that potential future, not a bonus.
You want more people to come to a class consciousness or revolutionary consciousness? Do the work of organizing, teaching, and insurrection. As more people see the current system as broken, or are willing to think that there may be a better way, more will be willing to engage in and investigate things that they would have at some point called crazy.
If you want a mass movement that has revolutionary potential, you stick the flag in the ground and call people to you.
I see the theoretical appeal of this, but it's been tried for a long time in the U.S., and it hasn't worked. I'll support groups that keep trying it, but it doesn't make sense to put all of our eggs in that particular basket. We know we can build a mass movement in the electoral arena around baby leftist stuff like Medicare for All, and we know there's a pipeline from that to "The USSR Was Cool And Good, Actually." That's far too promising to abandon.
As for the feasibility of taking over the system from the inside, we really don't know what is or isn't possible, because to date no one has built a socialist government in the imperial core (or at best you have a sample size of one, depending on what you think of Imperial Russia). But we've seen leftists come to power through elections in the imperial periphery (look at South America), and we've seen leftists (or at least baby leftists) win elections in the U.S. (including higher and higher offices at more local levels). Again, that strikes me as far too promising to abandon.
We can't write off electoralism as a waste when:
We're not going anywhere unless we get (at minimum) tens of millions more people to agree with us. Right now, elections are the only way to get somewhere near that amount of people interested in a long-term political project.
I don't think you're wrong, but that's also sort of my point. I'm not aware of socialism as having ever managed to win when 1. is true to a religious degree. We can't get anywhere near tens of millions of people to agree with us when voting is the only legitimator of political power and Americans vote almost entirely via a shared petit bourgeois class consciousness. Almost all political decisions of the last 70 years in at least the u.s. have been predicated upon depoliticizing the electorate. You can't do an electoralism without mass support, and you can't build mass electoral support prior to climate collapse when all bases of potential support need to be thoroughly deimperialized in their thought before they'll consider any candidate to the left of Pete Buttigieg. The existing builds of socialism that I'm aware of at least all made ready use of a thoroughly oppressed and otherwise unpolitical worker/peasant mass. There's a real difference between farmers and industrial workers that have been proletarianized as a single class consciousness without being politicized and a stratified labor aristocracy that benefits from the treats of neocolonial occupation and has been explicitly depoliticized via mass education. I think the point is that we have to try to come up with a path to resistance that exists outside of electoral politics because the bourgeoisie has a much greater stranglehold on that process in the imperial core than has generally existed in the periphery. I'm really not sure what the answer is. I'm not convinced that electoralism is even dead. I just think that given how imperial even Bernie is, it's hard to say that it doesn't feel dead.
I'm pretty optimistic about electoral politics, at least as a means of pipelining libs leftward. There's a well-worn path from the Bernie campaigns to places like this one, and plenty of more people from those campaigns have wound up in a place we might criticize as too liberal, but that's still to the left of nearly all mainstream politicians in the past 40-50 years.
All of this happened in the last 5-6 years, too, and promising politicians keep running and winning (see India Walton). Bernie isn't the best we can do after a long, sustained effort -- he's the best who was left after a century of anticommunist purges and propaganda.
I mean, maybe you're right. I just know that when I look around at the existing political landscape, I don't see an electoral path to change that avoids the worst of the climate crisis to come. I see the u.s. running aground against China the second it senses a real threat to the neoliberal world order from within or without, and from that point everything changes. Maybe that makes anti-imperialist electoral politics plausible. I'm willing to grant that. I just don't see it making much headway in the current political climate. It all just gets mired in neocolonial reaction, i.e. identity and positioning.
I agree on climate change -- we're not going to be able to do electoralism fast enough to head off the worst of that. But I don't see any other realistic path that would work faster, so I think we work the angles we have now and then work new ones as they present themselves.
I think it would be fair to say that at least part of my aversion to electoralism as a viable path are the local conditions that I see. I'm in one of those progressive cities with an almost fully segregated divide between black and white city residents, to the extent that most black citizens of the area technically live in less progressive suburban areas on the periphery. So the poor is largely ghettoized and then the white progressives are incredibly racist and paternalistic in that post-civil-rights liberal way. I don't think that doxxes me unduly. I also don't see any more realistic path, but I sometimes feel like that's for lack of trying. It's hard to build any kind of new strategy when no one living remembers any tactic ever working. I'm of the mind personally that any novel answers about how to beat neocolonialism will come from outside the imperial core; I think the best goal in the imperial core is to stress the military/we're-the-good-guys contradiction in order to give revolutions a fighting chance. But I'm not out there doing praxis, so no one should really listen to me anyway :marx-hi:
Those are the very reasons we need to write off electoralism with such vigor that those millions of people give up on it too and join in some of the actual struggle/fight.
We're not going to convince anyone of anything if they think we're a joke, and there's no quicker way to make someone think you're a joke than to start talking about how you hope to achieve a revolutionary change with zero participation in electoral politics. That makes you sound like some right-wing militia LARPer who thinks a popular rebellion against the tyrant Joe Biden is just around the corner. It's the quickest way to poison the well with ordinary people -- they might still humor you, but in the back of their mind they're thinking "this guy's a crank."
You have to get the person you're trying to convince to take you seriously, and for the people we're trying to convince, elections are serious politics. In addition to the other good reasons to put effort into electoralism, that point is enough on its own.
There were tons of things that I read when I was a baby leftist that I thought were batshit crazy. But hearing them made me start to investigate them, and on a lot of those things after investigating them, I came around to that way of thinking. If those writers had coddled me and worried more about seeming valid to their propagandized reader, then I never would have progressed or developed my understanding of the world.
Other reasons to not champion electoralism include:
When you use your influence to steer people back into the current political system, when that system inevitably doesn't work, you lose a bunch of those people too - they got burned out doing something that could not possibly work, and now they are not available to move on to the real work of organizing and fighting.
The only way to actually make change is outside of the political system, and any effort directed into the system will just be recouped or redirected. You should be funneling out anyone who is even possibly questioning things, not send them back in.
There are ways to talk about electoralism that don't make you a crank, just like there are ways to talk about capitalism or communism without coming off as a complete crank.
If your only goal is to pander to the lowest common denominator, you will literally never get anywhere.
You're right that hearing things that sound crazy leads some people to look into them, but I don't think that strategy works as well or as quickly as you might think. Leftists have been saying those things for decades, yet the left in the U.S. remains small. To me, that looks like a strategy that works great on some people (you and me) but falls flat with most. And we need a strategy with mass appeal -- that's not pandering to the lowest common denominator, that's a prerequisite for any mass movement.
I don't think we should steer people into the current political system -- as in, into electoral politics and nothing else. I think the best approach is to look at any possible way of moving the ball forward and pursue as many of those as possible, dividing our efforts according to whichever produces the best results (and electoral politics have at least pipelined a bunch of people to here and other openly-left spaces). It's electoralism AND everything else, not OR everything else. This is the easiest way to talk about electoralism (and raise issues with it, and present alternatives to it) without sounding like a crank.
But at some point we need to either take over the system from within or tear it apart from the outside. The latter is at least as unlikely as the former, and if the latter winds up being the only possible path forward it'll help to have people who know the machine so they know where to stick a wrench in it. Besides, absent completely rebuilding society from the ground up -- likely impossible -- it'll help to have people who can bring working knowledge of what came before.
I hear what you're saying, a mass movement is what everyone wants. I don't think that's how you get there, at least not a mass movement that has revolutionary potential.
If you want a mass movement, the easiest way to get there is to go where the masses are and create a message that they will understand and can easily support.
If you want a mass movement that has revolutionary potential, you stick the flag in the ground and call people to you. You do it with resolve and courage, you don't go half way in between the masses and you, or anywhere except where it should go.
The potential of people to see and come to your revolutionary thinking is dependent on their consciousness and the way to build consciousness is through a combination of revolutionary theory, programs for the people, and the heightening of the contradictions of capital and the state.
You cannot take over the system from the inside. It must be destroyed, root and branch from the outside, and something else built in it's place, in which case, knowing the current system is a hindrance to building that potential future, not a bonus.
You want more people to come to a class consciousness or revolutionary consciousness? Do the work of organizing, teaching, and insurrection. As more people see the current system as broken, or are willing to think that there may be a better way, more will be willing to engage in and investigate things that they would have at some point called crazy.
I see the theoretical appeal of this, but it's been tried for a long time in the U.S., and it hasn't worked. I'll support groups that keep trying it, but it doesn't make sense to put all of our eggs in that particular basket. We know we can build a mass movement in the electoral arena around baby leftist stuff like Medicare for All, and we know there's a pipeline from that to "The USSR Was Cool And Good, Actually." That's far too promising to abandon.
As for the feasibility of taking over the system from the inside, we really don't know what is or isn't possible, because to date no one has built a socialist government in the imperial core (or at best you have a sample size of one, depending on what you think of Imperial Russia). But we've seen leftists come to power through elections in the imperial periphery (look at South America), and we've seen leftists (or at least baby leftists) win elections in the U.S. (including higher and higher offices at more local levels). Again, that strikes me as far too promising to abandon.