The concessions obtained through SocDem goverments in European countries came about because all those countries had thousands of actual communists in varying posts in the government and the concessions were to reduce class consciousness and weaken the communists.
To understand the magnitude of difference, imagine if the US House of Reps (total seats 435) had 40 honest-to-god Communists in power, with another 80 left-of-Bernie SocDems : thats what the French legislature was like in the 60s and 70s.
Instead the US has 3 extremely mild SocDems who may or may not be grifters.
I hope you see the magnitude of difference here, there is no real way of moving the admin left and whatever minor leftward shift you may see is what the ruling class themselves, by their own accord, decide is necessary to keep the threat of civil unrest from getting too high.
So whenever you see any liberals IRL or online talk about how we need to become like Norway or whatever, remind them No Communists in govt = No European style Social Democracy
Nah, the guy way more conservative than Obama is definitely gonna go left, trust me bruh
I tried to make the same point to people putting all their eggs in Bernie's basket. Even if by some miracle he won and the establishment didn't just fucking off him for doing so, then it would have been 4 years of being backstabbed and undermined in every conceivable way and then subsequently scapegoated for the next 20 years for all America's woes.
True.
I would also add that a large part of the concessions from capital during the 60's and 70's was due to fear of the USSR and communism spreading throughout Europe. Capital will not cede anything unless its very existence is threatened.
"What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost." --Uncle Joe, anticipating the neoliberal reaction back in 1926
You may say “leninist approach to electoralism and organization hasnt given many results in the west for socialism”
God that's such a dumb argument. If that was the case the CPD wouldn't have murdered Fred Hampton in his sleep for feeding poor kids. Incredible that the fash police state knows and makes it clear who they consider enemies but socdems can't comprehend who their allies are, pathetic.
Eh maybe, but I think this is also a result of Bernie's popularity. He's been explaining how socialism isn't scary and would improve people's lives, so reactionaries moved on to the next term they don't understand fully which is anarchism.
Another example is the Young Lords getting garbage collection policies implemented in poor neighborhoods by outclassing the government in activism and work there. Civil rights came because of the split threat of the communists and the Vietnam War splitting need of use of force with black radicals at home.
The only time that the establishment will push Biden left is when he's at the top of a few flights of stairs
china really seems to be the only way to bring about global communism. that is unless the ruling class decides it would rather nuke the planet.
In my country (Denmark) this was very explicit. Oddly it's not something that is general historical knowledge, which I can only guess is because the topic isn't of much interest here.
I was reading political considerations from social democrats following WWII, and they were concerned with raising wages or providing housing since it would "damage the recovery process" but they felt it necessary to do to avoid an increase in communist popularity which was at an all time high.
In general, the massive increase in public spending in the period between WWII and the seventies went almost uncontested, even though the increase in public spending increased faster than the total growth in GDP. Since then however, public spending compared to growth has remained almost unchanged, but these actual numbers are ignored in the discourse.
Things like universal health care, large scale social security and free universities were barely contested in their creation, compared to what even suggesting a tenth of such projects would have led to had this been done today.
This is also to say that the kind of social democracy we have here is completely stagnant. There is enough love of the welfare state that politicians can't remove the institutions, but it is also completely impossible to establish further such things. That we have the public institutions that we do is purely a matter of historical circumstances; the threat of communism and particularly the Soviet Union. Anything scaled back is never recovered, unless it happens to become the main focus of the left coalition for an election and they win.
Since the 70s there's always been some kind of ultraliberal fringe that want US conditions with basically no social programs, but the parties specifically for these people like Fremskridtspartiet or Liberal Alliance don't do any better than the "socialist" party, which is to say they have influence but only so far as the two big centre parties want to court them for support over others.
There's old school communists around, but usually older urban workers or things like a small maoist fisherman groups. Class is not a serious political topic because most people are relatively well off, and the "socialist" party has become more centre-left over time.
Unless you want the ultra liberal voters, which aren't that many, you don't say that you want to privatise healthcare or university, since even centre-right people want these things done by the state, though they would also support having private alternatives. What the less radical right leaning parties support are typically budget cuts and sometimes tax cuts, but in actuality they can't do much because the left parties just fight them in parliament and they need to get the votes from either the ultra liberals or the centre-left parties, and getting the latter votes for some concessions is usually easiest.
It's actually the centre-left that ends up privatising the most, since the right leaning parties won't stop them when they're in power and propose this, and third way style social democracy has been a thing since the early 90s. Denmark will be one of the last countries in the world to have a revolution, the status quo simply dominates both in politics and in the minds of the majority of people.
I wish I could rep this a million times. So tired of hearing people say "we just need to bully/push Biden left", as if anyone in that administration would even stop to ask if you were ok if they saw you bleeding out on the street.
I'm in agreement with you, I just have no idea what the implications are. If electoralism is a dead end under capitalism, then what do we do? I'm trying not to be a doomer.
In my honest opinion the Left in USA has not put enough effort to justify their dissapointment. What did we really expect to achieve posting memes and donating $27 to a SocDem? Even the largest "Big Tent" leftist organisation has a measly 70,000 members, that's 0.02% of the population. Quite a few DSA members are uneducated in Marxism or straight up opposed to it.
Leftism is still very nascent, you may not feel that way because you have been a leftist for so long, but real leftism has only just begun.
DSA explicitly says in their non-party documents, since they're the whipping dog radlib wing of the democrats and not an actual independent political party, that they will not cooperate with any Marxist group.
These leftist parties have always felt weird to me. They all invariably end up either impotent or tear themselves apart into obscurity. Im not saying they are useless, but they are just oh-so-easy to manipulate and wreck. All the effort you put in them could be gone at any time.
Thats because a part of it is because our ideology exists on the fringes of our society, and that attracts cranks due to it's position relative to societal norms, and the other part is because the Socialist movement is quite literally having to rebuild itself from scratch due to the destruction of the USSR, and the complete degeneration of the Western "new" Left into Social Fascism - primarily due to bougeoise Interference in their drive to undermine Socialist movements in their spheres.
What modern socialist and communist parties must do to become successful is in not just reading and adapting past tactics and organizational strategies utilized by past successful worker parties, but also work on expanding the parties beyond merely chipping away at the center from the fringes to making major in-roads into the mainstream of cultural consciousness as a new and distinct political power separate from the capitalist party.
This is what parties like PCUSA, or PSL are working towards, and so far they've been doing a lot better than those that came before.
I agree with the rest of your post, but I'm going to need a citation for the last bit.
Give Lenin's State and Revolution, or What is to be Done a read
Jamaal Bowman tweeted this, which means we will have at least one Left-of-Bernie Congressman next year
I mean thank goodness, but also we need to be getting more than 1 every 2 years (if we want to do electoralism). Luckily AOC is in good with the libs, and this guy might be too, so we'll see if momentum picks up.
It's baby steps, but it's also really, really cool to have a member of Congress tweeting old cartoons that literally have a gross fat cat labelled "the capitalist class". I can't recall anything approaching that level of class consciousness from a major politicion in my lifetime. AOC certainly hasn't done that shit.
The "Squad" is mostly a joke - especially Pressley who is a bog-standard careerist lib that got lumped in with Omar and Tlaib for being young and black.
That's nice but remember he's still a politician, don't put hopes up just because we're starved for good representatives. Not saying he's a grifter, he could be 100% honest but its always important to look at people's actions rather than their words.
There is absolutely no pushing Biden left. I don't even know where people come up with that or the 'harm reduction' talk.
Look at the DNC convention and all the Republicans they gave more speaking time to than the progressive SocDems.
The message is clear - fuck you if you're poor. This is the "middle class president". Again, fuck you if you're poor. Biden is going to be George W Bush 2.0 and that's what they want. This presidency is going to be a NIGHTMARE of them waging naked class war on us. They aren't even waiting for the election to talk about passing austerity budgets. He has NO plan whatsoever for the insane unemployment rate and worst economical conditions since the great depression. NO plan at all except to push austerity and make the working class foot the bill for capitalism in decay.
The first thing his admin is going to do is start pouring their efforts to outing progressive SocDems in offices, even if that means funding Republicans in races. They don't care. Just nominating Biden is enough of a metaphorical middle finger at you and a reminder of how much the Democratic party absolutely hates you. The psychopaths who run the Lincoln Project have been waiting for Trump to be gone so they can put to use all that money donated to them by jackass liberals, and start funding and building up Republicans to run in midterm races and that's exactly what's going to happen.
Biden will have a year to get the economy and unemployment straightened out, which he has no plans for since he wants to push austerity. When he fails and also the compounding factors of the pandemic, it's going to create a massive backlash from the right wing and our next reactionary movement is going to be make the Tea Party and Trump look tame in comparison.
Trump called Kamala a communist in his last rally. Let that sink in. If barely left of center Bernie is viewed as radical, what hope does this country have through electoralism?
Biden isn't going left but the silver lining to him winning is that it gives leftists the opportunity to show people "See THIS is why we can't have nice things". It's gotta be 4 years of fighting him at every turn because the libs will go back to brunch and there will be a vacuum to fill.
Young liberals who are brainwashed by hating the orange man are slowly being outnumbered by people who are SocDems at least, if not outright Leftists. The overton window is sliding Left for people born after 1985ish, at least for people who would have just been "liberals" if they were 15-20 years older.
