So, in that event, is the idea to just hope that a revolution will break out instead?
Yeah, yeah organize too, but revolution is ultimately the desired final conclusion from said organizing, is it not?
Call me a doomer or whatever, but odds are that ain't gonna happen any time in the foreseeable future, things are gonna have to get way, waaayyy worse before it's even a realistic possibility imo.
Not to say organizing should be completely abandoned in favor of electoralism either, of course not, it just feels foolish to me to give up on either lane.
To me, it feels like the best course of action would be to pursue both at the same time until one or both leads to success. To increase our chances/odds by pursuing 2 avenues instead of putting all of our metaphorical eggs in one basket.
Basically I'm saying we should keep both options open instead of limiting our scope, and chances of success with it.
I guess you could say I'm a big-brained centrist on this issue.
People will come in here with more nuanced takes, but my thing is that we can't give up any avenue. The class war is fought on all fronts, and we need to fight in every space.
True, but electoralism is useful for propaganda only imo. At least over the long term.
i wouldn't be here and reading (well listening) to theory and stuff if it wasn't for electoralism (following bernie, landing in r/cth) so the propaganda angle definitely works. same for my partner and a few of my close friends.
I agree, for the most part. Of course, there are short-term material benefits for ppl that matter a lot too. But, in terms of creating full-on socialism, I agree that the benefits are mostly long-term, and ‘culture-forming’, like propaganda
The example of Universal Health Care is really interesting, because it’s both.
It is, obviously, a huge material benefit to the people. Undeniably. And that act of bringing in and maintaining a socialized health care system has huge propaganda value when it comes for pushing for actual socialism.
So ya, electoralism is an arena worth fighting in, for both short-term material gains, and for the longer-term culture-shifting value. It’s not unique in that, though, every institution is the same. It’s just that electoralism is explicitly political, and the state weilds a lot of power haha
I don’t disagree in principle, but looking how the pieces are arranged on the board right now (talking about the US), I don’t see much material gain for the proletariat to be had by engaging in electoral politics. The left wing bourgeois party just doubled down on centrist neoliberalism again, rather than make even the smallest concession to workers. Capturing the big parties is a dead end. If we’re talking about building a third party, honestly I think building a revolutionary party outside electoral politics is less of an ask and more likely to be effective at this point.
Not to mention that most if not all of the tangible gains made by the proletariat in the US have historically been won from industrial/militant struggle outside the bourgeois political apparatus. Advances that were then taken away by that same structure.
I'm curious how you feel in a situation with limited resources. I think the game gets funky at that point. What I mean is nobody is about to go door-to-door for Biden, right? The DNC is never going to run someone more left than Biden ever again, right? So electoralism would be trying to push new players through in my mind. Shahid Butar and people like him would be invaluable allies without question. But what if all that fundraising, door-to-door, and energy went to building leftist infrastructure like shelters, food banks, labor for the elderly, representation for arrested protestors, etc? Is there a point where a dollar put into public works and infrastructure is less valuable than a dollar spent trying to elect a leftist in the goal of creating socialism?
This is correct, I think, if for no reason other than working class folks expect us to have an electoral answer for how we want to improve their material conditions (as they should). Telling them to not worry about politics because everything will be better after the revolution ain't gonna cut it.
I mean, you could abandon the strategy of sideline cheerleading for “progressive” Democrats, which is effectively what most people here mean by “electoralism.”
Like, there are other ways to engage with bourgeois elections as an agitational site besides participating in the system in more or less the least effective way possible.
When people say electoralism they mean uselessly funneling hope and energy and money into the black hole that is the Democratic party. Most of us do not mean to say you can't do anything by voting just that you can't do anything by voting for the Democrats. The point is establishing a vanguard party and then voting them into power in order that they might gain some exposure during the election even if they lose and that if they win they might use their power and platform to spread the vanguard party's platform.
Reformism of a party designed to trap and kill leftward movement is beyond futile, you're wasting your time and more unacceptably you're leading others to waste their time and energy and hope as well.
If you want immediate results then stop calling yourself a socialist and go be a liberal. If you want just minor reforms while daydreaming of something better that you refuse to believe could happen in your lifetime and so you'd rather settle then go be a liberal and stop associating with socialism.
So there is no "both options". There is one option and it is not settling, not being fooled by the very transparently false siren song of the Democrats, it is activism, it is organization, it is stuff outside the electoral realm and then using the electoral realm to feed more fuel back into that through exposure. If your vanguard party can happen to pass reforms of some sort okay but don't count on it.
The point is establishing a vanguard party and then voting them into power in order that they might gain some exposure during the election even if they lose and that if they win they might use their power and platform to spread the vanguard party’s platform.
The left tried this for decades and got nowhere. There have always been leftist third parties doing exactly what you're calling for; we know that strategy doesn't work, at least not in America. And it's not as if any other true third party has had any meaningful growth in the past several generations, so there's no blueprint to work from.
What has worked -- in terms of creating space to radicalize people and at least introducing leftist ideas into the political mainstream -- is running DSA-style candidates in Democratic primaries. Something similar worked on the right as well: a bunch of Tea Party ghouls ran starting around 2010 and they've had similar success radicalizing people and getting their ideas picked up by the mainstream.
The reason the Tea Party won is because reaction is not threatening to capital. Liberal. It's the same reason why the Democrats will not permit you power or allow you your pathetic built on the backs of the global south reforms and welfare capitalism.
Democrats and Republicans do not functional identically. The Democrats act as a kind of trap for leftward momentum and politics, catch, neuter, water down, lower expectations, hijack the language of and then steam-roll over any remaining opposition and get them thrown out of the conversation as unproductive "purists". The Republicans on the other hand are mask off agents of capital, fuck you and fuck any minor welfare or child labor laws, maximum money for the capitalists NOW type of people. And yeah also the party of 'fuck minorities, fuck non-Christians, etc'.
The DSA are pathetic. What worked is the right combination of conditions. There was no DSA in the 20s and yet we had a socialist movement. The contradictions of capitalism are rising again, inequality is rising again. I'll grant you Bernie (and almost Bernie alone) sparked the idea back into the popular imagination. But he's done for, he's over. The DSA are a dead end like him.
The truth of the matter is we exist in the belly of the beast, in the very center of the imperial core. You will not like hearing this as liberals never do and never accept it but the US is unlikely to succumb to socialism, it will probably be one of the last places that does. However it holds back global revolution. The duty therefore of us is to sabotage it. It is to build anti-war, anti-intervention sentiment, it is to cause it to flounder and flub, to destroy its alliances, to cause internal tensions so it cannot maintain proper global domination. This does not carry the reward of healthcare for all. But you weren't going to win that anyways and if you did it would come with a devil's bargain for even more extreme imperialism and brutality against the rest of the world, it would come with a demand of more extreme nationalism at home.
Now I can't say that in the short term running more people in the Democratic party wouldn't help, it might. But medium and long-term you really have to get out as fast as you can because they will compromise your people and you will find they are not your people but opportunists anyways and there goes your movement, it becomes the Democrat's movement, it becomes an obedient dog for the CIA.
Okay, dude, just a side note: You're kinda coming off as "that one leftist who unironically calls everyone that disagrees with them a liberal". Ya know, the kind that gets made fun of on here all the time?
It's cringey and it takes away from whatever point you're trying to make.
They're making a good point. I don't think abandoning the DSA is necessary really. It's an organization that we can actually do entryism in. It's something that's palatable to people who aren't class conscious yet and are just agitated. It's also heavily localised unlike the Democratic party. DSA chapters are in almost every city in America and can be used to quickly organize tons of people because they've already worked out some of the internal structure that's needed.
PSL in my town works in conjunction with DSA and BLM, we're all united on one front right now and I think pulling people into these orgs (whichever you happen to be in) is important, because I see the peope in them working in solidarity utilizing the existing structure of the orgs for action and organization.
So yeah, the DNC is a lost cause, but these newer orgs are still pretty loose. They aren't as linked to a national party and they are great as platforms for expanding influence.
I was just saying that unironically calling everyone a lib is uncalled for and a dick move, which it is. lol
Imagine coming to Chapo of all places and complaining about being called a liberal and more than that being called a liberal with an explanation instead of just a crude "fuck you lib".
You are unread. Your statement reveals that much. You and the person I am replying to still have internalized liberalism and it prevents proper thinking and causes liberal-bad-think. I do not say you are unread/uneducated to put you down or call that person a liberal merely as an insult to cause spiteful injury. I say both of them because they are true assessments. I was once a liberal too, I once had liberal thinking. You are clearly not well read in Marxist theory or not applying it anyways. You are expressing liberalism as is that person. Their comparison of the tea party to the Democratic party and left infiltration is like comparing apples to a 737 airplane carrying them for the very important reason I illustrated above. For it fails to account for the primary antagonism, the primary problem which is there are two sides roughly speaking, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Reactionaries serve the bourgeoisie as do the Democrats, they did a lot of red baiting in the last red scare and will do so again soon among many other things. Electroralism is best thought of as a game, a rigged system put in place by the bourgeoisie to distract people from other mechanisms of change which actually work, it is to distract people and make them think at once that they have an avenue for easy change (just go out and vote every 2 years), and that if the change and material improvements they want don't come it's because they need to continue voting more or there's something slightly wrong with the machine, there's grime on the gears (corruption) clogging it up and if only we clean it a little the machine will work and we'll get what we want.
Now you can disagree. You can say that Materialist analysis and Marxist political theory are garbage and you believe they're worthless. But don't get upset when someone who holds them to be of value and true uses them and political descriptors such as liberal -- which is not a generic slur actually but has an actual meaning.
The Democrats act as a kind of trap for leftward momentum
Democrats can only do this because the left wing of the party is too small to matter. Of course you can steamroll a handful of Representatives when your party has 200+ seats in the House. But you can't steamroll 50 or 100. It's not that the Democratic Party has some magical ability to stop any sort of popular movement -- it's that the left is not yet popular enough to overcome their obstructionism.
The #1 goal for the left has to be getting more people on our side. We're not going anywhere until that happens. And it's unquestionable that a left-wing candidate in a Democratic primary (that people actually pay attention to) will do more to spread leftist ideas than some third party that most people won't give the time of day by default.
To me, it feels like the best course of action would be to pursue both at the same time until one or both leads to success. To increase our chances/odds by pursuing 2 avenues instead of 1.
Are you not just dividing your resources, thereby half-assing two things versus committing to one? And no matter how far off a revolution might seem, achieving the kind of huge change we need through bourgeois politics is even less likely.
No, mainly because people are not a resource that gets split. Revolutionaries can still spare time to vote for example. Pursuing both avenues is better because not everyome will fit on the same path at once as well.
Voting is not “electoralism”. Electoralism implies putting time and energy and money into campaigning, canvassing, everything else the political sham involves. All resources we are short on that I think can be better used elsewhere.
from below but I think you should see this
The truth of the matter is we exist in the belly of the beast, in the very center of the imperial core. You will not like hearing this as liberals never do and never accept it but the US is unlikely to succumb to socialism, it will probably be one of the last places that does. However it holds back global revolution. The duty therefore of us is to sabotage it. It is to build anti-war, anti-intervention sentiment, it is to cause it to flounder and flub, to destroy its alliances, to cause internal tensions so it cannot maintain proper global domination. This does not carry the reward of healthcare for all. But you weren’t going to win that anyways and if you did it would come with a devil’s bargain for even more extreme imperialism and brutality against the rest of the world, it would come with a demand of more extreme nationalism at home.
This is probably the most realistic take that will keep people from getting depressed over electoral losses.
Since the US and US-based corps have such a massive stranglehold on the political and economic systems in place, the best thing to do is agitation. Radicalize your workplace even if you can't form a union, get your co-workers aware that they are the reason business can continue and that if they push back en masse they can demand material improvements (start a secret slack/discord/email chain / Bridgefy or Briar mesh network, etc); talk to your neighbors, empathize with their struggles to pay rent support each other, then try forming tenants unions (and also set up comms); share theory with friends but not in a pedantic "well actually Marx said x" but listen to their problems and offer casually worded responses based in theory
And figure out who is doing good work in your state/city/town/parish/etc and support them (only vote for who's doing a good job, if nobody then don't vote, do the above stuff); go watch city council meetings about schools reopening, see who has bad takes (hybrid models, no mask no testing requirements, etc) and who's asking good questions (need for increased funding, necessary ppe, special needs/disability/impoverished/homeless student support).
These are things that you can do and that do actually help people and are outside the electoral system.
To me, it feels like the best course of action would be to pursue both at the same time
parallel organizing is a good idea
Theoretically this can allow for a peaceful transfer of power
I don’t think this would even theoretically lead to a peaceful revolution, the amount of reactionaries trying to fill the power vacuum would be immense.
Wait... Lenin was a lib?!?!
Haha jk, thanks for that. Didn't know that! DemSocs uncancelled!
