https://twitter.com/the_vello/status/1321435262023536641
Feels like (the good parts of) old chapo again, drop an AOC post and go grab some lunch... come back and there are over 60 replies :)
https://twitter.com/the_vello/status/1321435262023536641
Feels like (the good parts of) old chapo again, drop an AOC post and go grab some lunch... come back and there are over 60 replies :)
Can we please stop with this? We already know she doesn't like neoliberalism, but she's still an imperialist. We've been over this a million times before. She doesn't get it. She's not a Marxist and she sure as fuck isn't a communist. She literally can't even define socialism or capitalism.
She's a social democrat who thinks Canada is socialist. She isn't good. We need to move on from her. Please.
Necessary part of the lib-to-left pipeline though.
I don't believe you.
As somebody replied "no different than Bernie".... which I agree with.
Are you denying that Bernie has had a positive impact on Socialism in the US? You're talking to a former libertarian chud who is now a Dem Soc with sympathies to Marxsm and Maosim here who was flipped by Bern.
I explained my reasoning here:
She's there for the 64% who don't support communism, or even Socialism, yet.
And at that point we'll have enough support to democratically elect outright commies.
Did some math, Millenials are the furthest left generation based on volume (percentage of generation which are leftists) and they make up 22% of the population. Sure people say "Gen Z is to the left" and that is true on an individual basis (more outright commies, but also way more chuds)
So that's really just ~8% of the population, aka we have a long way to go yet.
My point is that, if one third of millennials (and in all likelihood more Zoomers, based on polling showing them consistently even more left wing) are responding well to literal communism, we in all likelihood don't actually need social democrats to funnel people to "the left".
The risk with AOC is her holding back radicalization by placating people with social democracy, opposing anti-imperialism, and misinforming people about what constitutes socialism, which is pretty important to building socialism.
I am heading out, but can you find some of those polls? I have read that Leftist Zoomers tend to be much further to the left, but there is a more even distribution of leftists vs rightists in the GenZ vs Millenials..... like Millenials have way more people who consider themselves leftists, but they're less likely to be communists or socialists and more likely to dem soc or soc dems... hope that makes sense.
GenZ = Deep Leftist
Millenial = Wide, but shallow leftism
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/polls-millennials-and-gen-zers-are-dystopian-socialists.html
In particular, they're the first generation to respond more positively to socialism than capitalism. Admittedly I don't know of any polls measuring Zoomer preference for communism, but it would track if they're generally more opposed to capitalism.
Some other stuff here, although the differences are mostly small.
Meanwhile 16 yr olds are joining my party with a deep understanding of Marxism and the labour movement
The so-called people in the 'lib to left pipeline' are gonna be swept away in one swoop
Based zoomers are what you get when the previous generation of socialists actually preserves the memory of their struggle for the next to learn from. No thanks to the majority of lousy boomers and gen Xers who gave up and threw Marxism out the window and forced us to learn most of what we know almost from scratch and to repeat the mistakes European socialists (in reality, mostly succdems) were making over a hundred years ago.
Thank you for reminding us of this. Marxists must always draw the line at (preferably before) endorsing or supporting candidates with social-imperialist policies. This is the same sort of opportunist nonsense that wrecked the 2nd International when succdems in both Axis and Allied/Entente countries voted to start World War I and forced Lenin and friends to split off and form the Comintern.
Literally no different than Bernie. She's not the one and only solution but she would be able to crack to the door open a bit
I really don't think convincing people that Scandinavia is socialist while condemning actual socialist countries is going to help with anything.
Bernie helped reintroduce class politics to a lot of the country, but he's not useful anymore now that the public has already begun radicalizing. 36% of millennials said they supported communism last year. Not just socialism, which as we all know at this point doesn't mean a whole lot in the public discourse, but communism. You combine this with months of periodic uprisings and I think we're well past the point of needing social democrats to open the door. She's a tailist.
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[Excuse the hastily crafted, disorganized reply here.. have to rush out the door]
People have a hard time distinguishing True SocialismTM and socialist goals and methods, at least when you're referring to democratic socialism.
Is Scandinavia socialist? No. Do they have a pretty strong socialist movement and tendencies in their public policy? Yes.
Just one example: The Danish Social Democrats explicitly say they are a democratic Socialist party. They don't nationalize shit, but they do have a 67% unionization rate, great wages, and nearly no homelessness, higher rates of cooperative ownership of businesses and housing etc.
I don't think anybody here would argue that Danish Democratic Socialism (which can also be called Social Democracy) is worse than American Capitalism.... or even close on the spectrum of equality and erasing class distinctions.
As a Democratic Socialist, I share the many same goals of Communists (moreso than Neoliberals for damn sure)... and if a communist revolution were to pop off I'd jump on the band wagon, but until then I am going to be supporting socdems and Demsocs as they also materially benefit the working class as well.
Growing the Communist movement cannot only be about punching right 100% of the time, you have to lay out a vision for people to reach for. Any movement which exists soley on the premise of nagging the opposition is self-limiting by nature.
(end mental diarrhea)
That's true for all of us regardless of whether we like AOC or denounce her. The solution is the same: in-person organizing and probably media for agitation and counter-propaganda.
I'm not convinced that AOC will prime people for actual socialism who wouldn't already respond positively to actual socialism. Critcizing her and clarifying that she's an imperialist who misrepresents socialism can help push people in an actually revolutionary and anti-imperialist (i.e., actually effective) direction.
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I don't think so, since our cause isn't just healthcare and because we aren't social democrats. You couple that with the anticommunism that comes from denouncing existing and historical socialist states and I think she's just reinforcing hostility and opposition to actual socialism by offering it a left-wing outlet. See NJR's "actually Cuba isn't socialist because it's an authoritarian dictatorship" as an example of this kind of thing. It poisons attempts at international solidarity and drives a wedge between simple demands for healthcare and the necessity of dismantling and rebuilding the system entirely.
People want their material needs met, and social democrats offer them solutions for their problems in the short term which only prolong capitalist exploitation in the long term, especially for the workers in the global periphery.
We can offer solutions to the same problems that don't throw the global proletariat or our own futures under the bus, but they get in the way of that by rebranding their imperialist welfare states as socialist.
But that's the problem: she misleads people about what socialism is, which is actively counterproductive. It waters down our demands into social democracy which hurts the movement.
We shouldn't be supporting imperialists whatsoever. Imperialism is the glue that holds the whole global capitalist system together, and we can't under any circumstances support it if we want to see both ourselves and those outside the imperial core liberated. It's the primary contradiction of global capitalism, and has to be prioritized in order to defeat capitalism.