If you are a "socialist" operating within the system by participating in electoralism, your job as an elected representative are two fold: heighten the contradictions in the political sphere; throw a monkey wrench in the normal day to day activities of the imperialist death machine. That's it, it's really not that difficult. You show up to congress, say you got elected to pass m4a or vote no on ICE funding, vote down imperialist wars, vote down bank bail outs. Your votes will be lonely and will probably have zero effect in the grand scheme of things, but that's the point. A socialist representative, even a squad of them, is functionally weak and incapable of bringing about proper change.

By advocating exactly for the things the working class supports (healthcare pls), showing solidarity with the international proletariat (no wars pls), and trying to give power to the workers (union protections, higher minimum wage) and you fail, time after time, you fail to get any meaningful support from your colleages; you are demonstrating to the working class that this system is not for YOU. You are trying to get them to wake up and realize the system is fundamentally at odds with THEM.

Failure to do this each and every step of the way is opportunism of the highest order. Refusing to stand up for your own demands, and asking to get votes on healthcare, larger stimulus checks, and better working conditions for the working class, is a failure.

I don't know what is in the water on DC, or if it just takes a certain kind of fucking brainworms to even run for congress, let alone win; but goddamn the whole process of slowly "justificating" the process of siding with Pelosi and Schumer on the procedural votes; the idea of not holding Pelosi's entire leadership position hostage is asinine. Nobody cares if you are a latinx congresswoman from the bronx if you don't pass anything fucking meaningful, or "politically" die trying.

  • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
    2·
    4 years ago

    The issue of Medicare for All has loomed so large in the last five years of debates within the Democratic Party that there are relatively few Democratic officeholders who haven’t expressed some sort of opinion about it — and with 118 cosponsors in the House, just “not being a cosponsor” already makes where any given member stands pretty clear. But I suppose it’s just barely possible that a few Democrats who’ve never been asked why they aren’t cosponsors might be asked why they voted no (or skipped the vote).

    The second and more important problem is that there’s no evidence that voters will punish anyone at their polls for how they acted in such a floor vote — especially one where there was no suspense about that result. In the last Democratic nomination battle, a candidate who openly opposed Medicare for All — and didn’t even hedge his bets with any sort of triangulating rhetoric about “Medicare for all who want it” — won the nomination even though exit polls in state after state that he won showed that most Democratic voters disagreed with him on the issue.

    Indeed, on the campaign trail, Biden openly promised to veto Medicare for All in the unlikely event that it was passed by both the House and Senate.

    The grim fact of the matter is that most voters think Medicare for All is a good idea, but most don’t take the idea that it could become a reality in the foreseeable future seriously enough to punish politicians who oppose it at either the primary or general election stage. It’s hard to see how a preordained three-to-one House loss would help them take it more seriously...

    Political theater can be a useful educational tool, but it can’t be a substitute for the long, slow, and often dismally unsexy work of organizing and mobilizing citizens at the grass roots and actually winning elections. And a widespread failure to appreciate these distinctions is the biggest problem not only with the fixation of much of the online left on insisting on engaging in a purely symbolic parliamentary maneuver that might well do more harm than good but with Jimmy Dore’s belief that AOC is a “sellout” who is “standing between” her constituents and health care.

    https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/jimmy-dore-aoc-medicare-for-all-pelosi-house-floor-vote-speaker

    • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]M
      3·
      4 years ago

      I don’t think that’s fundamentally at odds with my point. The failure to win those votes are an educational tool. Your job as a socialist or even soc dem candidate/politician should be to educate and radicalize, because the chances you pass anything useful are functionally nil.

      • gammison [none/use name]
        4·
        4 years ago

        I mean it is at odds in a sense. The point of that paragraph is that there is no possible way for effective propaganda to even be done either way. Making any noise with a vote at all does nothing right now, and to spend any amount of time concerning ourselves with it is a waste of time. Burgis' point is that the educational tool you think the vote is, is in fact illusory.

        I don't totally agree with Burgis' point but I do agree spending any amount of time or effort on pressuring AOC for a m4a vote is a waste of scant resources. You'll notice also that virtually the entire labor organizing and other direct action groups in DSA have rightfully been completely silent on this issue, there's better things to do right now.

      • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
        3·
        4 years ago

        I see two questions here:

        1. Is this a good idea?
        2. If it is a good idea, is it such a blindingly obvious one, with such clear benefits and such modest risks, that we should be raking people over the coals for not doing it?

        I can see a reasonable argument for 1, but I don't see any decent argument for 2. Even if the benefits outweigh the risks, I'm just not seeing it as a hill worth dying on.

        • grisbajskulor [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I'm undecided as well but I don't see what we gain from blindly voting for Pelosi, which seems to be what will happen. I think the primary question is whether or not we want to hold Pelosi hostage at all by making the vote conditional on some issue, which I think most on here agree we should, or if we should vote at all. My use of the word "we" shows my illusion that I have any say in this but still lol

      • longhorn617 [any]
        3·
        4 years ago

        When the bill is killed by politicians who have already said they oppose it and were voted in anyways, who exactly are you educating?