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:
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: