I agree with you but I wanna ask the deeper question that is really bugging me.
What the fuck is a success? Is it related to the length of time that a radical experiment stays going, its geographic wingspan, or how well it adheres to its principles and for how long?
One could just as easily call the Soviet Union a failure for its downfall at the end of the century as one can call it a success for it's economic accomplishments in the first half.
The point of analyzing things like this dialectically is we learn from the failures and successes of each movement led by the people, as a ML I always will be biased but as comrades we all understand at some level we all need to organize together.
Right, and I guess my main point is "[ideology] doesn't have any historical wins" is deeply subjective take because everyone draws different parameters around what counts as a win. But yeah we need to organize together.
Every success we're likely to see in our lifetimes is going to be a qualified one, just as every failure will be a qualified one. It's more of "these groups of outcomes are worth celebrating/praising and these other groups of outcomes are worth lamenting/damning" than a crystal-clear definition in either direction.
Three examples:
Say there's a U.S. president who pulls us completely out of Iraq and Afghanistan, who ends our military actions that directly kill people (e.g., our perpetual drone assassination program), who stops supporting actions that directly kill people (e.g., refueling Saudi bombers over Yemen), and who shuts down 30% of our foreign bases. There's a lot of "success" in this scenario -- we're killing fewer people, we're taking meaningful steps towards ending U.S. empire, etc. -- but there would still be tons of work to be done to achieve socialism.
Say we get M4A but nothing else changes. Again, lots of "success" here, and again, tons of work yet to be done.
Say we achieve something that could fairly be called socialism. The American government is explicitly a socialist one, we've undone empire in a way that makes that first scenario look amateurish, major industries are nationalized, smaller industries are entirely filled with worker-owned enterprises, all the basics of decent living are fully guaranteed, etc. Absolutely a "success," but we'll still have "failings" when problems occur (and especially when we handle them badly), and we'll still have "failings" where we insufficiently advance the conditions of people this country has historically ground underfoot.
I agree with you but I wanna ask the deeper question that is really bugging me.
What the fuck is a success? Is it related to the length of time that a radical experiment stays going, its geographic wingspan, or how well it adheres to its principles and for how long?
One could just as easily call the Soviet Union a failure for its downfall at the end of the century as one can call it a success for it's economic accomplishments in the first half.
The point of analyzing things like this dialectically is we learn from the failures and successes of each movement led by the people, as a ML I always will be biased but as comrades we all understand at some level we all need to organize together.
Right, and I guess my main point is "[ideology] doesn't have any historical wins" is deeply subjective take because everyone draws different parameters around what counts as a win. But yeah we need to organize together.
Every success we're likely to see in our lifetimes is going to be a qualified one, just as every failure will be a qualified one. It's more of "these groups of outcomes are worth celebrating/praising and these other groups of outcomes are worth lamenting/damning" than a crystal-clear definition in either direction.
Three examples:
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Success is apparently turning the US into scandinavia, good luck with that. I say success is turning the US into Syria.
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So we have to stop doing it to other countries