I just want to say I'm not sure if America will/can vote for any semblance of Social Democracy, let alone any true left ideology. There's been too much cultural contamination from capitalist propaganda for far too long here. This culture worships cops, imperialism, and (obviously) capitalism. Even when the shit straight up murders some of them, they come back for more like cattle coming for food but being led to slaughter. To top it all off, it's encased in a belief this is the best system the world has to offer.
Starvation. For all the "Holodomor" shit neoliberals and conservatives love to spew, late-WW1 era Russia was plagued by famine. The anti-serf revolt of the late 19th century had given legs to a lot of local working peoples' movements and the state wasn't really organized enough to suppress revolts that erupted during recession. WW1 moved a lot of young people out of the country for extended periods, taxing the agricultural communities. And when the fourth year of war saw another devastating defeat to the Germans, many of the soldiers were coming home with empty bellies while carrying dead friends were greeted by starving relatives.
The conscripts revolted and the Tsar abdicated his thrown. Then the new republican government tried to launch a new war effort in the spring, triggering another revolt and a final end to Russian aristocracy.
The next decade was a horrible civil war, in which the White Guard aristocratic loyalists - with support from foreign governments - tried to install a military junta and failed. The Red Guard - loyal to the Bolshevik leadership - took the reins of a broken nation and proceeded to spend the decade after that rebuilding and industrializing. This pretty much ended famine in the Russian Soviet State until WW2 broke out.
More importantly, the Russian left had already attempted a revolution in 1905, and so was developed, experienced, and organized enough to readily fall in line behind the Bolsheviks (and a few left-SRs who would soon join the Bolsheviks) who had rightly condemned and split off from the succdems in the 2nd international who voted for the war in 1914, by the time they were beginning to see the Russian succdems (Kautskyites, Menshies, most SRs, etc.) go full opportunist and sell out to the lib-dem Kerensky regime between the February and October revolutions. The experience of the 1871 Paris commune was still in living memory; the very oldest Marxists at the time might have even lived to see 1848 or grown up during its aftermath.
The US left is, broadly speaking, nowhere near that level of organization or arguably even consciousness yet. We haven't had our 1905 moment yet and yet some think that 1917 is right around the corner, despite the lack of community organization, the lack of organized rank-and-file pushback against conservative and opportunist trade union leaders, the lack of even a succdem workers' party with any meaningful national presence (even TERF Islandhas had one of those!!), and the lack of workers' councils ready to step in and actually replace and abolish the police. Most of us haven't fully absorbed the implications of the failed 1968 general strike in France, or the contemporaneous sabotage of the Black Panthers. We have had the working class's historical memory practically erased in this country following the collapse of the USSR, Marxist baby thrown out with the revisionist bathwater.
We have had to spend the last decade re-learning or re-discovering foundational Marxist principles that would have been obvious to our counterparts 120 years ago, and muscle memory to those 100 years ago. We still have a lot of catching up to do to even the European succdems, and we'll also have to surpass them quickly before even beginning to do the work that the 3rd international had started in late Tsarist Russia, all while pushing back against creeping fascism while the empire and the climate collapse all around us.
Some may call this doomerism, but as someone who has tried desperately to radicalize anyone I can in America, this is the truth. Hell, I openly call myself communist and I don't think it was even 3 or 4 years ago that I unironically believed "communism only works on paper so capitalism it is" and was still more progressive than many people I knew.
The only thing we can do is get up and continue organizing when and where we can regardless of the election cycle. Immediate tasks include basic tasks like consistently publishing and signal-boosting Marxist agitprop both online and offline, getting newly-radicalizing workers and young people (especially POC workers and youth) to join Marxist organizations, cultivating relationships and organic ties to our workplaces and communities (this part is really fucking hard now because of covid19), sinking roots into the working class and trade unions, and doing the foundational work of cobbling together local and then regional united-front coalitions that'll form the foundation of a mass workers' party, at which point we'll have come close to catching up to the still very low bar met by the succdems on TERF Island and in continental Europe.
Throughout this process and through the experience of organizing we will be educating and developing highly-invested and dedicated cadres in the Marxist orgs that'll eventually form the basis of a Bolshevik-like revolutionary party (aka the "vanguard party"), rooted primarily in the working class and the hyper-marginalized layers with lots of skin in the game, with some highly-dedicated PMC types along for the ride.
I just want to say I'm not sure if America will/can vote for any semblance of Social Democracy, let alone any true left ideology. There's been too much cultural contamination from capitalist propaganda for far too long here. This culture worships cops, imperialism, and (obviously) capitalism. Even when the shit straight up murders some of them, they come back for more like cattle coming for food but being led to slaughter. To top it all off, it's encased in a belief this is the best system the world has to offer.
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Starvation. For all the "Holodomor" shit neoliberals and conservatives love to spew, late-WW1 era Russia was plagued by famine. The anti-serf revolt of the late 19th century had given legs to a lot of local working peoples' movements and the state wasn't really organized enough to suppress revolts that erupted during recession. WW1 moved a lot of young people out of the country for extended periods, taxing the agricultural communities. And when the fourth year of war saw another devastating defeat to the Germans, many of the soldiers were coming home with empty bellies while carrying dead friends were greeted by starving relatives.
The conscripts revolted and the Tsar abdicated his thrown. Then the new republican government tried to launch a new war effort in the spring, triggering another revolt and a final end to Russian aristocracy.
The next decade was a horrible civil war, in which the White Guard aristocratic loyalists - with support from foreign governments - tried to install a military junta and failed. The Red Guard - loyal to the Bolshevik leadership - took the reins of a broken nation and proceeded to spend the decade after that rebuilding and industrializing. This pretty much ended famine in the Russian Soviet State until WW2 broke out.
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More importantly, the Russian left had already attempted a revolution in 1905, and so was developed, experienced, and organized enough to readily fall in line behind the Bolsheviks (and a few left-SRs who would soon join the Bolsheviks) who had rightly condemned and split off from the succdems in the 2nd international who voted for the war in 1914, by the time they were beginning to see the Russian succdems (Kautskyites, Menshies, most SRs, etc.) go full opportunist and sell out to the lib-dem Kerensky regime between the February and October revolutions. The experience of the 1871 Paris commune was still in living memory; the very oldest Marxists at the time might have even lived to see 1848 or grown up during its aftermath.
The US left is, broadly speaking, nowhere near that level of organization or arguably even consciousness yet. We haven't had our 1905 moment yet and yet some think that 1917 is right around the corner, despite the lack of community organization, the lack of organized rank-and-file pushback against conservative and opportunist trade union leaders, the lack of even a succdem workers' party with any meaningful national presence (even TERF Island
hashad one of those!!), and the lack of workers' councils ready to step in and actually replace and abolish the police. Most of us haven't fully absorbed the implications of the failed 1968 general strike in France, or the contemporaneous sabotage of the Black Panthers. We have had the working class's historical memory practically erased in this country following the collapse of the USSR, Marxist baby thrown out with the revisionist bathwater.We have had to spend the last decade re-learning or re-discovering foundational Marxist principles that would have been obvious to our counterparts 120 years ago, and muscle memory to those 100 years ago. We still have a lot of catching up to do to even the European succdems, and we'll also have to surpass them quickly before even beginning to do the work that the 3rd international had started in late Tsarist Russia, all while pushing back against creeping fascism while the empire and the climate collapse all around us.
Some may call this doomerism, but as someone who has tried desperately to radicalize anyone I can in America, this is the truth. Hell, I openly call myself communist and I don't think it was even 3 or 4 years ago that I unironically believed "communism only works on paper so capitalism it is" and was still more progressive than many people I knew.
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The only thing we can do is get up and continue organizing when and where we can regardless of the election cycle. Immediate tasks include basic tasks like consistently publishing and signal-boosting Marxist agitprop both online and offline, getting newly-radicalizing workers and young people (especially POC workers and youth) to join Marxist organizations, cultivating relationships and organic ties to our workplaces and communities (this part is really fucking hard now because of covid19), sinking roots into the working class and trade unions, and doing the foundational work of cobbling together local and then regional united-front coalitions that'll form the foundation of a mass workers' party, at which point we'll have come close to catching up to the still very low bar met by the succdems on TERF Island and in continental Europe.
Throughout this process and through the experience of organizing we will be educating and developing highly-invested and dedicated cadres in the Marxist orgs that'll eventually form the basis of a Bolshevik-like revolutionary party (aka the "vanguard party"), rooted primarily in the working class and the hyper-marginalized layers with lots of skin in the game, with some highly-dedicated PMC types along for the ride.
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Yup
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