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.
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 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
Fair haha
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.
How do I learn non lib analysis
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.