"Go on, call me a tankie, you are only cancelling a lib"

  • RNAi [he/him]
    hexagon
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    4 years ago

    Yeah!, and look how well their legacy is doing, oh wait shit

    Losing the URSS and the rest of countries was a disaster, even for the scabbiest scabs from the imperial core.

    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      look how well their legacy is doing

      Either of them are infinitely more successful than any leftist movement in the U.S. Dismissing the methods of some of the most recent leftists to have gained real power is absurd.

      Losing the URSS and the rest of countries was a disaster

      Absolutely; I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. What I'm saying is that -- post-USSR -- we have examples of leftists gaining power through elections.

      • RNAi [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Yes, I get it, but the motherfuckers are too strong.

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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          4 years ago

          How anyone can reach this conclusion is beyond me. Bernie -- not even an unusually strong candidate -- was the clear frontrunner in the primary until he got kneecapped by unprecedented (and lucky) Democratic coordination. They're not too strong; eight months ago they were all getting their asses beat by an old man from a state most people forget who had to build a political base from scratch.

          • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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            4 years ago

            its entirely delusional to think Bernie was ever going to win or that real change could come from such a thing

                  • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                    4 years ago

                    How many times do we need to repeat this to you to understand? The conditions for revolution in a colonized state and a colonizer state are not the same?

                    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                      4 years ago

                      As I've mentioned elsewhere -- to you, in this thread -- no one knows how to create socialism in the imperial core. Writing off electoralism when no one has a surefire answer is ridiculous.

                      • blobjim [he/him]
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                        4 years ago

                        Bruh it ain't happening through elections. We didn't even see a quarter of what the capitalist class could do to stop Bernie and pacify people. Look at the UK, Corbyn was sabotaged by half his own party.

                        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                          4 years ago

                          OK, what's your solution? Honestly, I'm all ears, but so far I've seen no other workable idea.

                          • blobjim [he/him]
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                            4 years ago

                            Just keep radicalizing and organizing more people and building consensus. Bernie Sanders has been doing live streams with people from a dozen different organizations and unions since he dropped out. He's got tons of people that trust him and will work with him even if they aren't as left-leaning as he is. That's really good. Most revolutions as far as I'm aware haven't been perfect socialist projects, but included lots of people who joined a movement because they had similar goals or trusted that movement. Having that support doesn't mean he can win an election, but he can win in other ways.

                            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                              4 years ago

                              Just keep radicalizing and organizing more people and building consensus.

                              With the end goal of...?

                              Most revolutions as far as I’m aware haven’t been perfect socialist projects, but included lots of people who joined a movement because they had similar goals or trusted that movement.

                              If the goal is a revolution, where will these non-socialist who have similar revolutionary goals come from? A classic example of what you're talking about is a colonial independence movement where communist revolutionaries and non-communist revolutionaries join together for the purpose of evicting the colonial invader. But nothing like that specifically is going to happen in the U.S.

                          • Rev [none/use name]
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                            4 years ago

                            There is no magic bullet, there is no one thing that can lead to a revolution, imperial core or not - it is a multi-pronged approach. The pillars that have to be engaged simultaneously upon which any and every revolution has to rest are:

                            1. Propaganda - word of mouth, social media campaigns, demos, getting into the news with a positive message/spin, viral street art.
                            2. Activism - taking part in social justice protests, helping materially marginalized and vulnerable populations as well as just helping out in the community, training camps, mutual help orgs, political campaigns.
                            3. Establishing communes, co-ops, sanctuary cities and regions where socialist policy is implemented.
                            4. Infiltration and sabotage - getting sleeper agents into positions of power, getting agent provocateurs into hostile structures in order to stage false flag ops and take out those orgs from the inside, whistle blowing.
                            5. Militancy - bank heists, hostage taking for ransom or in order to enforce/prevent certain policy, targeted clandestine mass assassinations (of cops, military personnel, politicians, bourgeoisie), taking over criminal syndicates.

                            All of the above done in concert build an actual revolutionary front that is able to wrestle power away from the bourgeoisie, as was the case time and again: Russia, Cuba, Greece, Yugoslavia, China, etc. The only other option that had success historically was a military coup by progressive officers. The second is arguably very unlikely if not outright impossible in the imperial core.

                            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                              4 years ago

                              or idiot fascists that are easily routed by other world powers.

                              You're vastly underestimating the danger of a U.S. that goes full fascist.

                      • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                        4 years ago

                        Yes we know how to create socialism, we have done it dozens of times. we still need capitalism in the core to reach the correct conditions of crisis that it has reached in periphery states - WW2 was an anomaly that reset the clock on capitalism due to mass destruction of capital.

                        All you are doing is mystifying.

                        Tell me this, since you say “Marxism is a science, not a dogma - it is open to critique”

                        Why then, is the critique from your type, your class, always exactly the same reformist idealist pablum? Why are you not even more revolutionary, authoritarian or something else? Why does the revisionist “drift” always gravitate to the right, towards capital - from petty bourgeoise ‘socialists’? Why is the drift never to the left, away from capital, from the poorer and more proletarian socialists?

                        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                          4 years ago

                          we have done it dozens of time

                          Exactly zero times in the imperial core. We had this conversation ten minutes ago in this thread -- why are you just repeating yourself?

                          • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                            4 years ago

                            38 successful Marxist-Leninist violent revolutions through history.

                            Only 1 successful non-violent socialist revolution ever, and it happened in a colonial state and later became explicitly Marxist-Leninist.

                            No but it is your bullshit new synthetic leftist variant that will save the world. The variant your class has been pushing for 200 years without any success whatsoever

                            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                              4 years ago

                              38 successful Marxist-Leninist violent revolutions through history.

                              Again, exactly zero in the imperial core.

                              • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                                4 years ago

                                GDR is in the imperial core.

                                I believe that colonized states need to revolt first, cut off the exploited wealth streams to the core and then the core will collapse and revolt.

                                The core will not revolt first, on its own, while it still has an intact empire.

                                Our role as internationalist communists in the imperial core is to hinder imperialism and prepare and build up revolutionary (not electotal) organizations to prepare for the collapse.

              • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                4 years ago

                You are the one who still believes in electoralism after what we witnessed. Who is the one coping and in denial again?

    • blobjim [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Actually doing pretty good all things considered.

      • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Would be doing better if they didn't let far right fascist parties and movements grow in power and internally sabotage the gains made under the socialist government. You'd think leftist parties in latin america would have learned the constraints of this type of democratic socialism after Allende and everything else.

        • blobjim [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          The point is they can't just remove them. But they've held on to the gains they've made and have good organization and have the military on their side and so on. It's not about "learning the constraints", it's about learning what you can actually accomplish within constraints that you have no way to push past.

          • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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            4 years ago

            Sure they can, and its why ML states have had better success in maintaining these gains without constant internal opposition and sabotage. How did Chile hold onto those gains? There's been a constant internal conflict in Venezuela between these two opposing class interests and parties for years now, its barely holding on under this current system. Bolivia did everything right and they still paid the price for it in the end. This is a repeating failure of upholding this liberal democracy and basing your gains on electoral strategies that do not work to resolve the internal class contradictions and opposition movements.

            • blobjim [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              Bolivia did everything right

              Well, no. They didn't purge the military (probably because they couldn't). In Venezuela, the military is on Maduro's side. In Venezuela, they have a 3 million member militia. But that doesn't mean they can just start kicking out liberals and fascists, because they don't have the kind of international backing to do that. The US would just invade (with bombs, not necessarily troops) and destroy the entire movement, which is probably what Biden is planning on doing.

              • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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                4 years ago

                I mean the US has already invaded and directly worked on destroying socialist movements in virtually every country in latin america. But also Cuba is literally right there lol, the conditions vary but the history of latin america has shown how much is wrong with this democratic socialist approach and the idea that upholding liberal democracy is the correct approach.

                • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                  4 years ago

                  You guys are talking about two separate things here:

                  1. How a socialist movement can gain power
                  2. How a socialist movement can maintain power in the face of reactionaries

                  The same approach might not work for both problems.

                  • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                    4 years ago

                    The answer to both and always been the same through 99.99% of successful revolutions throughout history. Violent revolution and repression of the bourgeois class through a dictatorship of the proletariat.

                  • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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                    4 years ago

                    Well when your idea of gaining power doesn't also uphold it than there is something wrong with gaining power that you can just lose once the internal opposition has done enough to turn people against you. Gaining power that you can't maintain is meaningless, and in some cases even directly harmful when the failures caused by internal capitalist forces can just be blamed on the socialist government. In the case of gaining power through liberal democracy you're inadvertently upholding the institutions that work directly against you instead of building a mass revolutionary movement to deal with those contradictions. Addressing the failure of this approach is crucial going forward.

                    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                      4 years ago

                      when your idea of gaining power doesn’t also uphold it than there is something wrong

                      Sure, hence the "the same approach might not work for both problems." We may have to gain power with one approach and maintain it with another.

                      But that works both ways -- maybe what works best for maintaining power isn't always the best way of gaining it in the first place, at least not in one specific time and place.