https://twitter.com/HowieHawkins/status/1320368404746874880?s=20
Spartacus should just VOTE, we’ll never elect a progressive tribune if he keeps crushing the legions
Probably because it's incredibly difficult to do anything big unless you're in power
Which is why we need people who walk it to have a firm theoretical grounding and we should criticize them from the left where their actions are misguided or indefensible.
But we do need to get into power, otherwise we're dead in the water. We should be wary of sellouts, but we can't be scared of the types of compromises it takes to obtain power.
i dunno about needing to be in power to actually change things. it seems that anytime someone in power represents the interests of the people they do so from a compromised position, always willing to sell out and stifle the actual movement.
most of the progressive policies that have been implemented throughout US history were not a result of having a voice in politics, but as a result of the people protesting due to a lack of a voice. people willing to do sit ins and marches and rioting.
the civil rights movement didn't advance because there were black politicians, it advanced because of protests and an unwillingness to take no for an answer.
having a token progressive in congress hasn't really gotten us anywhere, and almost perpetuates the cycle of passivity.
I think these are all good points, but I don't see how climate change (or other similarly enormous problems) are going to get addressed without taking over the formal levers of government. For instance, mutual aid is great, but it's not going to get us Medicare for All.
I think these are all good points, but I don’t see how climate change (or other similarly enormous problems) are going to get addressed without taking over the formal levers of government.
i don't disagree, i guess what i'm trying to get at is that electoralism and a few social democrats in office aren't going to get you the 'formal levers of government' in time to actually address specifically the issue of climate change.
it doesn't hurt to have people in office be sympathetic to the cause, but it's simply not enough, and seems to contribute to this liberal idea that all you have to do is vote. we've drifted further and further to the right for the last 40 years, and a lot of that has to do with people not protesting nearly enough, and specifically not in an effective enough manner, because they feel that if they just cast a ballot that it's going to make the difference needed.
electoralism and a few social democrats in office aren’t going to get you the ‘formal levers of government’ in time
Well, we don't know that, and we don't know if a non-electoral strategy (if it's viable at all) will work in time, either. No one knows how to build socialism in the imperial core, so we shouldn't write anything off completely. We especially shouldn't write off what the vast majority of Americans think of when they think of politics.
We should be working every angle that might feasibly provide a solution. One might pop up where we're not expecting it, and modest gains in one area might help another area considerably.
You could have a concession akin to universal healthcare in a very short time if we actually had a political leadership of the working class with a class struggle perspective.
Our political power as a class comes from our role in production: our labor allows for capitalist profits and our labor is what runs society. Nothing happens without the permission of the working class, and we literally do not need the capitalists, it’s the other way around. If we withhold that permission, if we actually threaten power on a class basis and in our capacity as workers, they will scramble to make that shit available.
this isn't a path to power. the problem isn't the compromises, it's who you're compromising with. we will need to make compromises to take power - no arguments there. but our power does not derive from the bourgeoisie and power within the bourgeois state only comes with their consent. so these compromises with a bourgeois political party can at best result in things that the ruling class is capable and willing to compromise on. willing is an important word there - it doesn't matter how many compromises you make before you have leverage. if they profit more by just ignoring you, symbolically appeasing you, or threatening you in the backroom, they'll just do that.
so this isn't a path to power, even if you do want a social democratic state (you shouldn't, but that's a separate argument), because it's putting things in the wrong order. compromises only matter when you're at the negotiating table and AOC/Sanders/whoever else are emphatically not there.
lol before fantasizing about moving biden left, how about we first try to move the soc dems left
She is not an opp. She is a member of the Democratic party, WTF did you expect?
Don't matter how progressive they are. When they join that party, they always, always, always shift to the center-right position.
she isnt making socialism cooler or more hip( thats unmaterialistic, the world getting annihilated before our eyes does)
Materialism doesn't mean "100% of a person's political opinions are determined 100% by material conditions, and nothing else." Stuff like propaganda and whether it's acceptable to discuss X-ism in mainstream society absolutely matter, too. Pushing the idea that socialism is a program we should be considering is an essential prerequisite to creating socialism.
People who created actual socialist states didn't just let the material conditions on their own bring people around to socialism. They went out and convinced people to join their side.
if US leftists want someone to believe in its not gonna be some democratic politicial, they should look at the PSL or any socialist party in the US because the dems just want to mantain the status quo
Yeah, all the people who have moved left over the last four years because of bernie need to realize that the dream of taking over the Dem party is and always has been dead in the water. The harsh reality is that we have to have our own revolutionary party. Otherwise opportunists like aoc will derail any kind of mass movement.
Conditions in 2020 were as ripe as they ever could be for an incursion into the party. There was no distinguished leader, factionalism among the party's right flank, an unprecedentedly reviled opponent in the Republican party which ensured whoever got nominated would likely win, and a media ecosystem which would be forced to accept Bernie as the nominee after calling Trump Hitler for four years. There was never, and will never be a better time to strike. I think this is the only reason why it was worth it.
We threw everything we had at it in the best possible conditions and we still couldn't even draw blood. The millions of people who donated and volunteered on the campaign have now been personally snubbed by the party, and seen the media and party work in concert to undermine their goals. Those people will never forget how the political system moved heaven and earth to prevent people from having any sort of relief. I consider this to be a necessary step in radicalization. It, more than anything else, is what's responsible for me abandoning the electoral arena forever. It made it clear who the real allies were, and who the bullshitters were. It put them through a test they normally are capable of escaping.
You can't radicalize the masses by knocking on the doors of strangers and asking them if they want to throw bricks at cops with you. You have to take them through the steps and show them that the game is rigged. When they get personally invested in a political movement and see for themselves how the elite conspires to crush them, that is what will take them to the next stage of radicalization. This is true for any kind of organizing. If you are working on radicalizing a tenant union, you can bring people together to make a modest and reasonable demand of the landlord. When the landlord rejects this reasonable demand, people will feel personally slighted, and become more willing to escalate.
Now, when it comes to engaging with Democratic Party politics, the conditions will never be as good as they were at the start of this year. It would be foolish to put anywhere near as much effort into it ever again, but millions of people went through those motions with us, and their minds have been opened to alternatives in the face of crushing defeat.
Lot of good points. Aside from the media and Dem establishment being against him the other main take away should be that the deep and low masses (people who don't vote) didn't buy into bernie's schtick. And this is for good reason! A lot of the working class and poor masses are way ahead of where online socdem leftists are at. They know nothing can be changed via the Dem party.
Conditions in 2020 were as ripe as they ever could be for an incursion into the party... There was never, and will never be a better time to strike.
Consider:
- Material conditions will continue to deteriorate for vast swaths of the population.
- The mainstream acceptability of socialism (or at least New Deal-scale approaches to problems like healthcare, education, and climate change) will continue to increase.
- Bernie, for as good of a candidate as he was, still has a number of significant flaws. He's an old white guy from a tiny state who is honest but not particularly charismatic, he had to create a whole left-ish movement from scratch, and he had a health scare in the middle of a campaign.
It's not hard to imagine a scenario where people are worse off than they are today, where socialism is more popular than it is today, and where there's a better candidate on the left wing of the party.
Shitting on AOC is like stabbing your appendix off, I much prefer not being stabbed over the off chance of not having appendix issues someday (if I even survive being stabbed)
Ding ding!
And hell, succdems aint even useless. Like half this site started as Bernie bros, I know I sure did
I dont disagree with that. But folks on here want her to expend a shitton of political capital she has accumulated for something that is gonna get shot down immediately. I want us to win damn it, not just flex our ideological purity
That’s the sort of wimpy games that makes dems lose.
Fight the battle. She has power and she won’t use it.
Edit: flexing political ideology is how you win.
Especially against opponents that are so ideologically vapid.
Aight sure, begin with the ones that dont want you to have healthcare
"It will be a privilege to lobby him"
"It will be a privilege to lobby him"
"AOC doesn't burn political capital arguing with administration that obviously will not be changing its mind"
sorry but nothing positive will come of that fight and litigating everything within the party before you're a decent-sized caucus won't produce great results; she realizes Biden isn't going to change his mind, and there is literally no alternative in this particular election that can challenge the two party consensus, as shitty as it is
voting doesn't matter but let's not act like the greens have any real power or will have any power for the foreseeable future
enough backbone? no dude she's got basically three other people in Congress, with a handful few more coming in
she can't successfully challenge shit until there's a bigger DSA caucus
every minute spent litigating dumb shit is besides the point of her main value, which is probably just doing really intense casework to help her constituents
that is the real immediate value of AOC and others like her if you're taking the electioneering route here as a strategy, until there's a remotely sizeable enough caucus to successfully challenge shit (which obviously, will take far too long)
you can disagree with it all you like, that's the unshakeable reality of the situation and is the utter limit of the working within the Democratic Party, but change was never going to come from solely within that wretched institution - that doesn't mean it's pointless
Yes, thank you. This is such a foundational part of MLM theory that many on the US left need hammered into their brains.
Is AOC a MLM? Or a ML? Or even a M??
No, so why are so many people here talking about her like she is? If you're anti-electorialism, then what the fuck does it matter that AOC (a soc-dem) watered down a Green Party (a barely functioning electoral party) proposal? Like, it should literally be of no significance to you.
EDIT: "OMG a soc-dem did something all soc-dems do, I cannot believe this has happened... and even though I think electoral politics is pointless and I'm a full-blown Marxist, I'll act angry and shocked by this surprising and unexpected news about what this soc-dem did." This is what some of you sound like. A lot of you keep putting her up like she's a full-blown socialist and acts disappointed every time she does something when she never claimed to be that. Same with Bernie.
Not sure why yr getting down voted for this. It's obviously true
yeah like I don't think people realize that ballot access is an intentional wall that will make any third party pointless
welcome to the hard reality of how fucked America is
There will never gonna be a “big” and “leftist” enough caucus to change the policies of the DNC and reform it or push it towards even social democracy, let alone socialism. How mcuh clearer can this be
Buddy, you're making a strawman here to argue against - you're arguing exactly what I am here. I'm not saying AOC is the end-all-be-all of politics. I come from a union family and it's pretty crystal clear to me what the real effort needs to be in is radical labour organization in minimum wage jobs, especially during the pandemic, as something with a ton of value and yet doable in the status quo. If you're idealizing ONE way to get to socialism you're thinking about it all wrong. AOC is the best we can do for an elected rep now. That doesn't mean she's the best we should hope for in 2022, or that maybe we shouldn't expand our hopes too much. We don't know until it happens.
There is still value in having demsocs in office as the best-case scenario for one election, and hoping they go on to do more. This isn't a more moderated version of leftism, meant to expand the appeal (like the neoliberal turn of the 90s for the Democrats) to white grievance voters, this is the first actual ratchet left of American politics in decades in terms of how congress is ideologically composed, probably since Bernie was first elected
you just used two paragraphs to assert things aren't going to happen but you don't outline any of the historical cases you're talking about, or any sort of fundamental theoretical underpinning; sorry but just asserting something six times in a row doesn't make it true or guaranteed
that's pretty telling
the difference is all of those countries had established left-wing parties, cultures, and institutions
America has absolutely none of those institutions right now (not even as a hollowed-out shell, since anything remotely resembling the New Deal has been purged a very long time ago from the Democrats) and basically has to rebuild them from scratch; there is no electoral or organizational capacity that is stable or extant; you have to build all of those institutions to actually be able to do literally anything, and sorry, you’re going to need to appeal to deeply propagandized people who probably have no fucking idea what a labour union actually is or what socialism means
this isn’t entryism because you’re not really expecting to change the party, it’s just impossible to be elected as a third party in America with how ballot access works
you can’t just look at Europe and apply it to America
her main value, which is probably just doing really intense casework to help her constituents
Casework for her constituents is good, but her real value is helping put leftism in the political mainstream. And she doesn't need to be a Maoist to do that -- she just has to function as an entry point for people to learn that there are alternatives to the left of centrist Democrats.
She's a house rep in a solid progressive seat. She has no political capital
political capital, time, sheer fucking mindpower, what's the point? they're not going to listen, so why even fucking bother? the media probably won't pick it up for anything but an attack piece on your movement somehow
it doesn't matter what's right or wrong, it matters "what can you get out of some engagement" that you're making politically; you need a way to not get sucked into every stupid media cycle fight that everyone constantly litigates and that don't fucking matter
she's not even changing her personal stance on fracking, she just realizes the obvious fact that a Biden admin doesn't give a shit about the environment and isn't getting drawn into attacking the (very likely) future President on something from her own party
Yes the precious political capital that would totally be compromised by checks notes opposing something already unpopular with her progressive base
sorry but nothing positive will come of that fight
Aside from potentially galvanizing her base, yes nothing positive can possibly arise
Seriously this is just defeatism with extra steps
ah yea man it's really smart politics to lose committee assignments (which, to be clear, are your runner's up prize that they'll still give people in safe seats) for pointlessly attacking the nominee when it's clear they're not moving on that file, and the majority of the party now opposes a fracking ban thanks to Biden's actions
I mean also, once again, she still pretty clearly opposes fracking and wants to legislate that, but her wing of the party lost, so they... don't get to do that now? that's how losing works
if you're expecting more from the House I don't know what to tell you, socialism was never going to be built totally by professional politicians, real radicalism is going to have to come from outside of that structure
this is also before he's taken office - you can criticize once, y'know, the President does something bad and still have justifiable cover; the Democrats are just too insane until Trump is gone
Broke: AOC is an op
Woke: AOC is hiding her power level
Ascended: AOC is @BASED_BALL and everything she does is carefully calculated to cause struggle sessions on Chapo.chat
AOC creates the big time struggle sessions. It sucks that 1 of the 5 politicians we can actually have a discussion about is a luke warm succ. I mean they all are. Is Tlaib the best one? I feel like she's the best one.
The way libs feel about Pelosi and Hillary, I feel about Tlaib. Even if she’s a succ. Yaaaaassss kweeen
Orrrrr she's a regular soc-dem, and is doing the same things as Bernie or any other soc-dem would do. Come on with this crap, I genuinely don't understand when people on the left act surprised when a self-described dem-soc/soc-dem does things like this... THEY NEVER CLAIMED TO BE COMMUNISTS OR SOCIALISTS.
Same thing with Bernie. Constantly see MFers shocked that he's supporting Biden... IDIOT, HE SUPPORTED HILLARY FUCKING CLINTON... WHAT ON EARTH MADE YOU THINK HE WOULDN'T SUPPORT JOE BIDEN?????????????????????????????????????
I have many of the same critiques of her as other people, but these struggle sessions go nowhere. No ones mind is changed from this. I have no idea what else to do tho.
Exactly, and the Democratic party has always been a graveyard of social movements, historically. That party has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming the entire time to support anything left from the fucking center.
AOC is a member of that party. It should come as no surprise.
the newbies must be reminded that their political faves are implicated
I don't think labeling them as "OPs" is the way to do that tho. And this is ChapoChat, everybody here should be aware of the difference between communists, socialists, soc-dems, dem-socs, etc.
It's just kinda embarrassing whenever I see stuff like this. A soc-dem does a "soc-dem" thing, and people here react like: "WHAAAAT??? THIS CAME OUT OF NOWHERE!"
She's a soc-dem, you can criticize her when she does something bad, you can praise her when she does something good. You can debate whether she's useful or not. But this is just kiddie stuff. (Same thing when she does something good, and people suddenly forget everything and act like she's comrade AOC.)
yeah okay so THAT's why none of these responses made sense
my bad lmao
The problems with AOC doesn't justifiably make hawkins better than the absolute dog shit that he is.
He did exactly with the green party what Clinton did with the democratic party in 2016 and destroyed any chance at possible competition that was far more charismatic than him.
He's been an activist for 40 years and achieved nothing meaningful.
hoo boy a struggle session within a struggle session, call it strugception
Animal husbandry is fractally fucked up, you can zoom in forever and find new and interesting patterns of fucked up.
