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 :)
AOC undermines the socialist movement by encouraging would-be socialists to vote for and therefore compromise with Democrats, which is class-collaborationist because the Democrats are a 100% bourgeois-controlled party with no mass membership or internal democracy. Her and Bernie's entryism has allowed us to draw important conclusions about the Democrats being ghoulish libs at their core, but this entryism was an avoidable mistake. We should have already learned this lesson from the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988 that eventually turned Black and Rainbow Coalition Dem-entryists (some with even Maoist and Black Panther backgrounds!) into Obama-supporting liberals and Democrats. Even Angela Davis critically endorsed Biden!
If AOC and The Squad remain in the Democratic Party, they will follow the same trajectory and repeatedly betray their working class supporters, misleading the masses into thinking they can have any consistent or meaningful control over Democratic Party policy the whole time.
AOC is damaging the Democratic Party and enabling us to organize leftist and recruit new ones.
Electoralism fucking sucks, I’ve openly acknowledged that. But elected officials by design wield serious power, and when that power is not actively being used to undermine the left on a local level, it enables leftist growth. This is the reason the American left has been so silent for so long. The simple fact that she is coordinating with our local leftist groups for direct community organization has grown our groups from a few dozen organized people to hundreds, not only wielding actual local power but holding elected power which is a powerful tool for either fostering or destroying leftist organization.
I’m glad the power AOC holds has allowed our leftist community to grow. To say this has undermined us simply because AOC is participating in politics while ignoring the fact that it has actively organized and fostered our leftist community is an ivory tower so white I had to put on sunglasses to read your response.
You don’t have to like AOC or her politics. I’ve worked with the campaign and I personally don’t. I know many others who have and still work with her who aren’t fond of it either. But it has given us a strategic ally that (on the local level) doesn’t endorse the typical centrist Dems, and instead has brought working class people into positions of power and writing policy instead of more bourgeoisie attempting to disenfranchise the working class. Cry about electoralism all you want, I’ve watched my leftist and mutual aid community grow exponentially in the last 3 years alone, and every member of this group knows that the system can not be reformed from within. What we do know is that now a few people working from within are not actively conspiring against us and it has allowed us to grow a tangible power base that exists almost nowhere else in this country.
AOC's participation in politics and helping to grow community organizations isn't the problem. Her doing so while running as and governing as a Democrat is the problem. I want to make it crystal clear that I don't favor an ultraleft abstentionist approach to electoral politics here.
As problematic as Kshama Sawant has become, she's repeatedly demonstrated that it's possible to "grow the left" organically and run a candidacy without running as a Dem, and still win under similar conditions. It is also possible to grow the left in a similar fashion and organize with DSA members and other liberals on a united front basis without conceding to shortcomings in consciousness that tend towards time-wasting class-collaborationist bullshit, without endorsing or encouraging their obvious mistakes. The key is to focus on the issues and not the candidates - organizing around demands rooted in a principled Marxist program, including the call to abolish ICE, or calls for M4A or the GND, the Fight for 15 campaign, and so on.
AOC helping to popularize the demands for abolishing ICE and for the GND is good, and we should encourage AOC's supporters to still fight for these demands, but as Marxists we shouldn't reinforce or encourage their delusion that AOC is going to pull Dems to the left, or legislate a transition from capitalism to socialism. This is where Kshama screwed up and erred on the side of opportunism.
Instead of misleading people, we should seek ways to organize the working class and the oppressed to fight for these demands outside the reach of liberal and bourgie saboteurs, which means building alternative to the repeatedly failed Dem-entryist approach, including immediate tasks like forming an independent mass worker's party while simultaneously developing the embryo of the revolutionary party.
This is why the phrase "critical support" exists. Support her for good intentions and the good results she actually helps produce, openly criticizer her bad foreign policy takes and votes. AOC's followers are definitely closer to radicalization than the Khive or Warren stans, it's our job now to move them away from electoralism. Same as Sanders, she is useful to a point but not th end goal.
Unfortunately, because of the role Dem entryists play (unwittingly or otherwise) in sheepdogging would-be socialists into critically and then "critically" endorsing increasingly worse neoliberals and imperialists, critically supporting Dem entryists has the same effect as uncritically supporting Dems in general. AOC and the others are ultimately dragged by the party's puppet strings, regardless of how radical or correct their messaging or demands might be. The experiences of 2015-2020 are more than sufficient to conclude that the Dem entryists have outlived their usefulness, if they were ever useful at all.
Right the politicians themselves are opportunists and we cannot expect to "pull them left" other than in cases of extreme solidarity where they fear for their positions (like MN after George Floyd). However, radicalizing regular on the ground AOC fans and Berniecrats is a viable tactic, especially right now. A huge group of young people just got involved in politics for the very first time this election cycle and got FUCKED by both parties. I know I personally lost faith in electoralism after dedicating hours of my life to a guy who endorsed the enemy, so I expect there are others who feel the same.
Anyway four dollars a pound, I'm not gonna die on a hill for entryism since most people don't even fucking vote.
I agree and this is not what I’m trying to say. I’m also not saying AOC is the best possible elected official participating in our political system.
What I am saying is that material conditions have improved locally to the point that we are organically growing our power base and as an ML it pains me to say that a non-insignificant amount has come from AOC attaching her name to things like our food drives and labor organization, then at the events and over time the actual leftists who participate in them like myself have recruited people and those people have recruited people to the point that in the last ten years before AOC we had a few dozen people at the most to hundreds of people after we had a well known political figure attach their name to us.
Don’t get me wrong, AOC is NOT radicalizing people, but the pipeline is real and working in ways I never thought possible with such efficiency. Our groups have grown exponentially and now are growing organically. The aid we’ve set up to help people has recruited those people into our movement. Our ideology, because of praxis possible due to AOC’s willingness not to persecute the left and instead nominally attach herself to it, are winning the hearts and minds of people. They see US as the champions of these issues in our community, NOT AOC, and that’s the critical difference and tipping point. They may not see the system as incapable of meaningful reform yet, but they do see direct action as MORE capable of reform.
I hope this clears up what my intention was in writing this
I mean she's not even saying she would abolish ICE how people understand that, she wants to replace it a more civil INS-type institution.