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.
we're all going to be dead in the long run
this kind of nihilism is just learned helplessness.
it's an econ joke
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.