OK, so what's the solution? If you're skeptical to the point of cynicism about everybody, you'll never support the folks who actually have good intentions. So how do we do a better job vetting people who are political newcomers?
Don't support candidates running for Congress with no prior organizing experience. Pressure opportunists like J4C to run for lower offices first before stepping up to the big leagues. Dude could have just run unopposed for a school board position or something, but that's not glamorous enough for TikTok.
That's not a bad idea, but we can't really afford to spend 10 years building a bunch of candidates' resumes. We need people on the left to shoot for those bigger offices today.
Electoralism is seeking political power directly through elections, and is dumb. Entryism is seeking political station with a secondary goal - either subverting an established (a lot of people accuse the Corbynites of being trotskyist entryists doing this to Labour) or as an agitation tool - basically all the useful stuff.
By those definitions, entryism is better, sure, but electoralism isn't bad. Look at the Sanders campaign. Running, even without winning, did a lot for the left, making that campaign useful in terms of entryism. But had he won, of course that would be good, too, so it doesn't really make sense to say electoralism is useless.
Also, there's the argument that you can't do serious entryism into electoral politics without a bunch of people who are genuinely seeking power through that election (i.e., electoralism). If you just throw your hat in the ring and don't try to run a serious campaign you get smoked, which is a bad look and can discourage people as easily as it can radicalize them.
DSA- backed candidates also wind up being unaccountable to the membership most of the time, because membership in the DSA isn’t required for endorsement and accountability basically begins/ends at the point of endorsement.
Ideally, you want to, yourself, be a member of an organization that fields candidates from within the organization to run on a democratically-decided platform.
I hope that changes in the future as DSA continues to grow but it's not quite feasible right now in the congressional districts we backed candidates in. I think for NYC city council there may be a push for requiring membership, at least I will be pushing for it. The chapter is large enough that its city council candidates being backed in this way is viable imo.
Problem is even then, once they get elected they can just nope out on DSA, and since they didn't run specifically on a DSA ballot line but a dem one, DSA doesn't have recourse by pulling them off of the ballot
Join an ML party that is focused on doing local community work in-person. Support your local efforts rather than whatever is going on somewhere long distance
I guess don't throw weight behind them unless you see actual campaign progress and popular support in their constituency.
Of course, some people will write off electoralism entirely (which is understandable), but before going that far there's the obvious problem that his strategy was shit. If you're going to donate (or risk Corona to vote) then do it for someone who already has an actual chance.
Even if I didn’t have my own opinions on what the correct use of electoralism is and from what party, the fact still remains that this is an approach and strategy that never helped neither the working class nor the socialist movement materialy in any way.
Electoralism helped establish policies like the minimum wage, workplace health and safety protections, anti-discrimination measures, etc. Each of these policies absolutely, unquestionably helps the working class. You can (and should) say that none of these are enough, and that they've been rolled back over time, but to write them off completely is doomerist nonsense.
Electoralism is also leading the charge to challenge the stigmatization of socialism in American politics, which is a prerequisite to growing any meaningful socialist movement. If every single politician is rabidly opposed to any sort of anti-capitalist ideology you never get any mainstream discussion on the topic. Capitalism just gets taken for granted; it's so orthodox it never even gets mentioned. But if you get even a few politicians who are willing to challenge capitalist orthodoxy even occasionally, suddenly you mainstream the issue of capitalism and alternatives to it.
You don't want to put all your eggs in the electoral basket, but ignoring the most visible and most easily-accessible levers of political power in this country is a recipe for failure.
Electoralism is also leading the charge to challenge the stigmatization of socialism in American politics,
Yes but only by running real socialists. By running CIA-socialists like the Dems do you do not destigmatize actual socialism so much as pervert the word to mean social democrats which is exactly what the bourgeoisie would like to do. They want people's conceptions of what is possible on the left to be no more than welfare capitalism built off the exploitation of the global south.
If you really want to change things you need to run on actual socialist platforms. PSL and maybe PCUSA seem like the best parties for that. They have the most members, good platforms, good ground organizing outside of elections.
You don’t want to put all your eggs in the electoral basket, but ignoring the most visible and most easily-accessible levers of political power in this country is a recipe for failure.
Entryism into the Democrats is doomed to failure. If you do this you are not only foolish but you are wasting precious time and energy. They have decades of experience subverting attempts at pulling them left even into Bernie-liberal territory. Biden and his success with Republicans has convinced them to move further right. Besides they are fundamentally a party of capital. They serve capitalism, they will rig things, they will cheat, they will lie, they will change rules all to keep even minor reformists away from power and from raising taxes on those they serve.
Who have the Dems run who is a "CIA socialist"? How are you defining that?
If you really want to change things you need to run on actual socialist platforms.
Universal healthcare isn't a socialist platform?
Entryism into the Democrats is doomed to failure.
It's downright laughable to say this when we're only a few months out from Bernie leading the Democratic primary, and when we keep seeing Bernie-esque candidates knock off centirst Dems at lower levels.
Compare that to the success of revolutionary leftism in the United States. Obviously no leftist strategy will have tons of skins on the wall here, because we're in the hellworld of the imperial core.
Non-revolutionary, language appropriating liberals. With no anti-imperialism or international solidarity, no support for AES, convenient agreement with all state dept talking points. And just generally not being a threat to capital and conveniently diverting people away from real socialism (which they conveniently deride themselves as "not real socialism"). Anti-communist leftists, what Parenti called the unkindest cut.
Universal healthcare isn’t a socialist platform?
Ah no. Free stuff is actually not what socialism means. Neither is it government doing things. I forgive you for thinking it as that is a deliberate and loudly blared lie. A socialist society would do many things (including providing healthcare) but to achieve any of them it must overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establish control over the means of production. Socialists can force concessions from the capitalists when the capitalists panic but that should not be mistaken for the primary goal. If they want to give healthcare as an appeasement I wouldn't necessarily say we'd have to refuse it but it wouldn't be the goal of the movement so much as an attempt to buy it off that we would have to ignore and continue pushing after.
It’s downright laughable to say this when we’re only a few months out from Bernie leading the Democratic primary
What you said is laughable. He led until he didn't, he only led in a split field. They organized behind closed doors to block him and did so handily. He did not go to the convention, he wasn't close, he was destroyed by South Carolina, and the primaries that followed on Super Tuesday sealed his fate. So no. He wasn't close. He only appeared that way for a short while and only as a result of a heavily divided field. And they will do that every time. Stop drinking your own pro-Bernie kool-aid. That's what skewed your view of reality.
Let me tell you something liberal. Bernie is the furthest left candidate you're going to see for some time at the national level. And frankly he is unacceptable, he was the hardest compromise. AOC is to his right, the other people getting in are to his right. They don't even want realistic plans for M4A. AOC undercut him by contradicting him to the press during his campaign regarding a key part of how it would be implemented by suggesting a government plan option which would just be sabotaged, underfunded, and intentionally destroyed from within to save the healthcare industry then discarded when it has "failed". She's a piece of shit imperialist too. One who thinks reading theory is elitist.
This kind of renewal of image is necessary from time to time for the Democrats, to fool young, bright-eyed, impressionable, misled liberals into thinking they're achieving anything. What have they got? A handful of powerless House reps (and for every one of these liberals that won a dozen lost their primaries) one old man who will never run another presidential campaign. A party happy to sabotage even someone as far to the right as Bernie. You cannot win. You investing energy into this rigged machine called electoralism is by design. The capitalists designed it to subvert popular change, to destroy popular movements, and to keep the levers of power firmly in their hands.
The Democrats have spent decades subverting similar movements. A century in fact if you count FDR saving capitalism.
And Biden, he is their champion and he stands a very good chance of winning. Even if he doesn't you saw them, the voters and the party officials tripling down on moving right. This isn't a ship you can take. At best you can hope to shatter it into pieces.
How can you possibly create a revolution unless you move a significant part of the population much further left? How can you possibly move a significant part of the population much further left without people in the political mainstream who will advance leftist ideas?
You can be dead set on the idea that revolution is ultimately necessary to achieve socialism, but that doesn't make politicians who are de-stigmatizing socialism bad, even if they aren't revolutionaries themselves. We're in no position to turn down good-faith allies even if we don't agree with them 100%. For instance, calling Bernie "unacceptable" is a fast track to getting nothing done. You can't be a serious revolutionary -- i.e, literally willing to kill and die for socialism -- if you're not even willing to work with people on the left who don't perfectly align with you.
Free stuff is actually not what socialism means.
Did I say that? Of course not. Universal healthcare is unquestionably socialist. It involves public ownership of the means of production (M4A would essentially destroy private health insurance companies and create a publicly-owned, non-profit replacement; the NHS goes farther with publicly-owned providers). It prioritizes the well-being of people over the accumulation of profit. From an empirical perspective, even the poorest socialist countries have prioritized the creation of a universal healthcare system.
Obviously universal healthcare is not a full overthrow of the capitalist state (another thing I never said). If you call everything under capitalism capitalist, you'll get nowhere because you give capitalism credit for a bunch of good, non-capitalist things, and you have a lot less to show people when they ask what good socialism has done. The goal isn't to win some academic debate about what is or isn't socialism; the goal is to create socialism. Pointing out the effectively socialist facets of the capitalist state advances that goal. Quibbling over an academic question like "can anything be socialist if the capitalist state is still in place?" does not.
One who thinks reading theory is elitist.
This trend of tearing down people on the left with bad-faith interpretations (or blatant misrepresentations) of their statements is pathetic, counterproductive, and needs to be ended.
OK, so what's the solution? If you're skeptical to the point of cynicism about everybody, you'll never support the folks who actually have good intentions. So how do we do a better job vetting people who are political newcomers?
Don't support candidates running for Congress with no prior organizing experience. Pressure opportunists like J4C to run for lower offices first before stepping up to the big leagues. Dude could have just run unopposed for a school board position or something, but that's not glamorous enough for TikTok.
That's not a bad idea, but we can't really afford to spend 10 years building a bunch of candidates' resumes. We need people on the left to shoot for those bigger offices today.
Really just shows the futility of electoralism.
It doesn't show that electoralism is futile; it shows that electoraism has limits and is not a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Electoralism != Entryism
What do you mean?
Electoralism is seeking political power directly through elections, and is dumb. Entryism is seeking political station with a secondary goal - either subverting an established (a lot of people accuse the Corbynites of being trotskyist entryists doing this to Labour) or as an agitation tool - basically all the useful stuff.
By those definitions, entryism is better, sure, but electoralism isn't bad. Look at the Sanders campaign. Running, even without winning, did a lot for the left, making that campaign useful in terms of entryism. But had he won, of course that would be good, too, so it doesn't really make sense to say electoralism is useless.
Also, there's the argument that you can't do serious entryism into electoral politics without a bunch of people who are genuinely seeking power through that election (i.e., electoralism). If you just throw your hat in the ring and don't try to run a serious campaign you get smoked, which is a bad look and can discourage people as easily as it can radicalize them.
Look at DSA backed candidates, whose campaign staff is active in other organizing organizations.
DSA- backed candidates also wind up being unaccountable to the membership most of the time, because membership in the DSA isn’t required for endorsement and accountability basically begins/ends at the point of endorsement.
Ideally, you want to, yourself, be a member of an organization that fields candidates from within the organization to run on a democratically-decided platform.
I hope that changes in the future as DSA continues to grow but it's not quite feasible right now in the congressional districts we backed candidates in. I think for NYC city council there may be a push for requiring membership, at least I will be pushing for it. The chapter is large enough that its city council candidates being backed in this way is viable imo.
Problem is even then, once they get elected they can just nope out on DSA, and since they didn't run specifically on a DSA ballot line but a dem one, DSA doesn't have recourse by pulling them off of the ballot
Join an ML party that is focused on doing local community work in-person. Support your local efforts rather than whatever is going on somewhere long distance
I guess don't throw weight behind them unless you see actual campaign progress and popular support in their constituency.
Of course, some people will write off electoralism entirely (which is understandable), but before going that far there's the obvious problem that his strategy was shit. If you're going to donate (or risk Corona to vote) then do it for someone who already has an actual chance.
The tricky part about this is it creates a chicken-and-egg problem.
deleted by creator
Electoralism helped establish policies like the minimum wage, workplace health and safety protections, anti-discrimination measures, etc. Each of these policies absolutely, unquestionably helps the working class. You can (and should) say that none of these are enough, and that they've been rolled back over time, but to write them off completely is doomerist nonsense.
Electoralism is also leading the charge to challenge the stigmatization of socialism in American politics, which is a prerequisite to growing any meaningful socialist movement. If every single politician is rabidly opposed to any sort of anti-capitalist ideology you never get any mainstream discussion on the topic. Capitalism just gets taken for granted; it's so orthodox it never even gets mentioned. But if you get even a few politicians who are willing to challenge capitalist orthodoxy even occasionally, suddenly you mainstream the issue of capitalism and alternatives to it.
You don't want to put all your eggs in the electoral basket, but ignoring the most visible and most easily-accessible levers of political power in this country is a recipe for failure.
Yes but only by running real socialists. By running CIA-socialists like the Dems do you do not destigmatize actual socialism so much as pervert the word to mean social democrats which is exactly what the bourgeoisie would like to do. They want people's conceptions of what is possible on the left to be no more than welfare capitalism built off the exploitation of the global south.
If you really want to change things you need to run on actual socialist platforms. PSL and maybe PCUSA seem like the best parties for that. They have the most members, good platforms, good ground organizing outside of elections.
Entryism into the Democrats is doomed to failure. If you do this you are not only foolish but you are wasting precious time and energy. They have decades of experience subverting attempts at pulling them left even into Bernie-liberal territory. Biden and his success with Republicans has convinced them to move further right. Besides they are fundamentally a party of capital. They serve capitalism, they will rig things, they will cheat, they will lie, they will change rules all to keep even minor reformists away from power and from raising taxes on those they serve.
Who have the Dems run who is a "CIA socialist"? How are you defining that?
Universal healthcare isn't a socialist platform?
It's downright laughable to say this when we're only a few months out from Bernie leading the Democratic primary, and when we keep seeing Bernie-esque candidates knock off centirst Dems at lower levels.
it’s downright laughable to try the same thing every 4 years and lose every time
Compare that to the success of revolutionary leftism in the United States. Obviously no leftist strategy will have tons of skins on the wall here, because we're in the hellworld of the imperial core.
Non-revolutionary, language appropriating liberals. With no anti-imperialism or international solidarity, no support for AES, convenient agreement with all state dept talking points. And just generally not being a threat to capital and conveniently diverting people away from real socialism (which they conveniently deride themselves as "not real socialism"). Anti-communist leftists, what Parenti called the unkindest cut.
Ah no. Free stuff is actually not what socialism means. Neither is it government doing things. I forgive you for thinking it as that is a deliberate and loudly blared lie. A socialist society would do many things (including providing healthcare) but to achieve any of them it must overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establish control over the means of production. Socialists can force concessions from the capitalists when the capitalists panic but that should not be mistaken for the primary goal. If they want to give healthcare as an appeasement I wouldn't necessarily say we'd have to refuse it but it wouldn't be the goal of the movement so much as an attempt to buy it off that we would have to ignore and continue pushing after.
What you said is laughable. He led until he didn't, he only led in a split field. They organized behind closed doors to block him and did so handily. He did not go to the convention, he wasn't close, he was destroyed by South Carolina, and the primaries that followed on Super Tuesday sealed his fate. So no. He wasn't close. He only appeared that way for a short while and only as a result of a heavily divided field. And they will do that every time. Stop drinking your own pro-Bernie kool-aid. That's what skewed your view of reality.
Let me tell you something liberal. Bernie is the furthest left candidate you're going to see for some time at the national level. And frankly he is unacceptable, he was the hardest compromise. AOC is to his right, the other people getting in are to his right. They don't even want realistic plans for M4A. AOC undercut him by contradicting him to the press during his campaign regarding a key part of how it would be implemented by suggesting a government plan option which would just be sabotaged, underfunded, and intentionally destroyed from within to save the healthcare industry then discarded when it has "failed". She's a piece of shit imperialist too. One who thinks reading theory is elitist.
This kind of renewal of image is necessary from time to time for the Democrats, to fool young, bright-eyed, impressionable, misled liberals into thinking they're achieving anything. What have they got? A handful of powerless House reps (and for every one of these liberals that won a dozen lost their primaries) one old man who will never run another presidential campaign. A party happy to sabotage even someone as far to the right as Bernie. You cannot win. You investing energy into this rigged machine called electoralism is by design. The capitalists designed it to subvert popular change, to destroy popular movements, and to keep the levers of power firmly in their hands.
The Democrats have spent decades subverting similar movements. A century in fact if you count FDR saving capitalism.
And Biden, he is their champion and he stands a very good chance of winning. Even if he doesn't you saw them, the voters and the party officials tripling down on moving right. This isn't a ship you can take. At best you can hope to shatter it into pieces.
How can you possibly create a revolution unless you move a significant part of the population much further left? How can you possibly move a significant part of the population much further left without people in the political mainstream who will advance leftist ideas?
You can be dead set on the idea that revolution is ultimately necessary to achieve socialism, but that doesn't make politicians who are de-stigmatizing socialism bad, even if they aren't revolutionaries themselves. We're in no position to turn down good-faith allies even if we don't agree with them 100%. For instance, calling Bernie "unacceptable" is a fast track to getting nothing done. You can't be a serious revolutionary -- i.e, literally willing to kill and die for socialism -- if you're not even willing to work with people on the left who don't perfectly align with you.
Did I say that? Of course not. Universal healthcare is unquestionably socialist. It involves public ownership of the means of production (M4A would essentially destroy private health insurance companies and create a publicly-owned, non-profit replacement; the NHS goes farther with publicly-owned providers). It prioritizes the well-being of people over the accumulation of profit. From an empirical perspective, even the poorest socialist countries have prioritized the creation of a universal healthcare system.
Obviously universal healthcare is not a full overthrow of the capitalist state (another thing I never said). If you call everything under capitalism capitalist, you'll get nowhere because you give capitalism credit for a bunch of good, non-capitalist things, and you have a lot less to show people when they ask what good socialism has done. The goal isn't to win some academic debate about what is or isn't socialism; the goal is to create socialism. Pointing out the effectively socialist facets of the capitalist state advances that goal. Quibbling over an academic question like "can anything be socialist if the capitalist state is still in place?" does not.
This trend of tearing down people on the left with bad-faith interpretations (or blatant misrepresentations) of their statements is pathetic, counterproductive, and needs to be ended.