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

  • 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.