At risk of sounding like I'm defending CPUSA, this is the wrong reason to criticize them. If you're going to vote, chances are the best candidate on your ballot is a shitty liberal Democrat and you should vote for them because you shouldn't vote for the Republican. I'm not gonna shame anyone for not voting but pretending it is somehow superior to voting Democrat is absurd and abstention is at best just as bad as voting for the liberal.
Marx and Lenin both advocate for supporting the progressive forces in elections that communists are not competing in. The problem is that CPUSA doesn't do anything at all. They don't compete in elections, they almost never do non-electoral work. I assume their entire efforts are dedicated to party congresses and People's World. They submitted to the Democratic party in the 1930s and have been feckless and incompetent since. Their relation is not a temporary alliance but an utterly humiliating bowing down to Democratic party politics and erasing the memory of their own radical history.
Jokes on you, they tell their members to phone bank for "the most electable" candidate, like Clinton over Obama, then Obama over McCain and Romney, then Clinton over Trump, and recently Biden over Bernie and Trump.
They even have an Illinois member of their central comittee, or whatever those liberals call it, helped run Obama's campaign to become Illinois senator.
The problem isn't that they don't do anything, that would honestly be preferable. But the leadership of the party act as the left-wing sheepdogs to the DNC and was in the process of liquidating the party until Bernie came along and gave the corpse of the Socialist movement a solid kick in the ass to jump-start it before getting his ass kicked himself.
Yeah that's bad I guess. I assumed the kept it to just telling their members/the public to vote Democrat. Actually dedicating resources to Democratic campaigns is a waste of time.
"Voting democrat is the same as not voting at all and that there is no precedent for not voting".
“Years and years ago it may have been an acceptable tactic to organize a people’s ticket of solid worker and revolutionary credentials and arm it with an ideal platform—only to be defeated by a mud-slinging opportunist-warlord, demonstrably inferior, scum-willing pig. Then pass out a pamphlet to explain to the people how the system has failed them, or speak it in Pershing Square—or, years ago, in the Campus Hall. Today it is not a tactic—it’s counterrevolution[…] The effect has been reformism rather than revolution. When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to its credibility and destroying our own. With all the factors of control over the electoral process in the hands of the minority ruling class, the people’s party can always be made to seem isolated, unimportant, even extraneous. If these tactics still give the appearance of revolution to some after decades of miscarriage, we are justified in replacing them as vanguard[…] Stupidity is not unknown to our long-range political policy makers. Participation in electoral politics organized by the enemy state—after recognizing that the whole process must be discredited as a conditional step into revolution, and particularly participation that tends to authenticate this process—is the opposite of revolution. It’s a tactic for the ultra-rightists. With history as a guide we could never make such monumental errors” (* Blood in My Eye * , p. 25-26, 28).
Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye. 1972. Black Classic Press, 1996.
"Marx and Lenin advocate for supporting progressive political parties in bourgeois elections that communists are NOT competing in." First, "shitty liberal Democrats" are not progressive. Second, as far as I have seen Marx and Lenin have only supported participation in bourgeois elections if a communist party already exists (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX9_kXYMSck). Regardless, conditions in the US are entirely different.
And that's fine. Our individual votes or abstentions largely don't matter. There's nothing else for organizations to say beyond "vote blue" when there's nothing better though.
At risk of sounding like I'm defending CPUSA, this is the wrong reason to criticize them. If you're going to vote, chances are the best candidate on your ballot is a shitty liberal Democrat and you should vote for them because you shouldn't vote for the Republican. I'm not gonna shame anyone for not voting but pretending it is somehow superior to voting Democrat is absurd and abstention is at best just as bad as voting for the liberal.
Marx and Lenin both advocate for supporting the progressive forces in elections that communists are not competing in. The problem is that CPUSA doesn't do anything at all. They don't compete in elections, they almost never do non-electoral work. I assume their entire efforts are dedicated to party congresses and People's World. They submitted to the Democratic party in the 1930s and have been feckless and incompetent since. Their relation is not a temporary alliance but an utterly humiliating bowing down to Democratic party politics and erasing the memory of their own radical history.
Jokes on you, they tell their members to phone bank for "the most electable" candidate, like Clinton over Obama, then Obama over McCain and Romney, then Clinton over Trump, and recently Biden over Bernie and Trump.
They even have an Illinois member of their central comittee, or whatever those liberals call it, helped run Obama's campaign to become Illinois senator.
The problem isn't that they don't do anything, that would honestly be preferable. But the leadership of the party act as the left-wing sheepdogs to the DNC and was in the process of liquidating the party until Bernie came along and gave the corpse of the Socialist movement a solid kick in the ass to jump-start it before getting his ass kicked himself.
Depressing and accurate assessment
:vote: :i-voted:
Yeah that's bad I guess. I assumed the kept it to just telling their members/the public to vote Democrat. Actually dedicating resources to Democratic campaigns is a waste of time.
You're wrong on two counts
i'm not gonna do that
And that's fine. Our individual votes or abstentions largely don't matter. There's nothing else for organizations to say beyond "vote blue" when there's nothing better though.