west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
I see a lot of agreement, not “the opposite” in this post. You talk a lot about nuance but didn’t cite an example when you’d use it to navigate a difficult subject to grasp, or what that might look like. You also lean into the America bad trope without showing you can do any different. If it is opposite then make that point, not the word salad of how hard it is to be a ML and be right all the time, btw on topics the left very broadly agrees about as your examples.
Cuba’s embargo is not supported by the left. If you’d like to expand more on my points, then what good does attacking AOC as AOCIA bring to the cause of Cuba’s starvation?
Just because you agree with me on my points doesn’t mean they aren’t nuance.
What good does deriding AOC do? Well, the ML strategy with electoralism is to demonstrate that electoralism doesn’t work. AOC has some history of working with CIA carve outs and she has a tendency to be quite performative in her politics. But we don’t really think individual Congress people have any real power to change anything. No one really cares if you vote for her or not. But if you try to use her as an example of how voting can change things, we’re going to point out her history and her record and sow the field with the ideas that honestly she’s just another sheepdog like Bernie is, attracting organizing power, labor and effort when it needs to be directed at revolution.
I don’t know why the standard should be that I can tie deriding individual politicians to the Cuba situation. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s less “nuance” and more “arbitrary bullshit”.
Wouldn’t a full fledged abandonment of electoralism, the kind that would be required to look at AOC as an enemy, just be excellerationism? I guess if your loyalties are always strictly dismantling* US stability then you’d just view it as starving the beast. In this way you’d be pretty well aligned with incompetent fascists, since the US is in a spiraling decline that will now inevitably result in us losing our authority on the world stage. Just for different reasons than they would use I guess.
In that way, how can leftists take MLs seriously, when their world view is largely agreement, but their actions and attacks are directly opposed to democratic socialists a lot of the time. You also have to couple in that while you may attack fascists too, any division amongst the left is multiplied by 100x over divisions in the center or right since billionaires hold the microphone.
It’s not really arbitrary when those you agree most with are also in your crosshairs on actions of substance. It’s also very telling that most situation here on Lemmy that at least I see ML presence it’s on these edge cases, rather than things like Rick Scott almost single handedly showing a failure of electoral politics when he created the nations biggest organized Medicaid fraud ring, something people being polled seem to care about, and then was elected into office anyways as an equal to Bernie Sanders. Is this a blind spot on my part or do you feel calling out the best representatives as more impact for your message that the system sucks? What we see is us working and you complaining.
Edit: word missing.
Before I dig in, I just wanted to express gratitude for the discourse.
Let’s separate out voting from electoralism. Is refusing to campaign, door knock, and labor for AOC accelerationism? I don’t think it is. Especially if that energy is instead put towards building a mass movement to prepare for revolution. Revolution is not accelerationism. Accelerationism is the process of deliberately making things worse in the hopes that people will become more desperate. As we’ve seen, people are becoming more desperate regardless of whether AOC is in office.
This phrasing is a little strange, potentially telling. My loyalties are not dismantling US stability. They are dismantling the US as an entity entirely. The US, as a settler state, is a genocidal occupation of lands with the only legal basis being the papal doctrine of discovery and the use of military violence. I don’t want the US to be unstable, I want it to be dissolved and for a new state to be created in a process led by a coalition of indigenous and black people, primarily women, with white people playing an important but well structured role in their self-governance. There’s a big difference. You can’t really starve this beast. The US is not going to be starved by anyone and not organizing for AOC or other Ds is not going to starve the beast either.
The only “starve the beast” mentality that makes sense here is telling Ds that just because they’re the only other option to the Rs doesn’t mean they automatically get our votes. The Ds actually have to do something positive, not merely avoid doing some of the negative things the Rs do. And the Ds can’t even do that. 100+ Ds voted with Rs to expand the ability of DHS and ICE to use customer data from retailers to aid in their operations. We’re not talking about Ds that make things better here. We’re talking about Ds that position themselves as opposed to Rs and then don’t actually have any proactive lasting positive impact.
The US is in a spiraling decline for reasons that have nothing to do with voting. The primary reason the US is in decline is because the US is a contradictory construction, founded in genocide and chattel slavery, claiming to be driven by values while being at war for 99% of its existence, killing millions around the world regardless of which party is in power, and always and forever expanding the prison-industrial complex making it the most authoritarian construct in the world today with 300% more of our population being managed by the criminal justice system than any other country. It’s economy, like the European economy that birthed it, is fundamentally reliant on a process of unequal exchange and cannot actually function when a large enough part of the world begins to develop sustainable economies on their own. The spiraling decline is ALSO part of the contradiction of white supremacist patriarchal capitalist leadership, resulting in worse and worse leaders over time, with fewer and fewer options for continuing the genocidal gravy train. Electing the right people can never fix this problem. It is, in essence, entirely unfixable. The US was doomed to fail. The European colonial project was doomed to fail. They are unsustainable projects and they were always on a collision course with the consequences of their actions. We don’t need to accelerate it. We need to organize a response to it. Voting is primarily about choosing which enemies are in office, which is useful for organizing, but the people in the institutions are bound by the institutions and the institutions are fundamentally in a death spiral. The representatives can’t save it.
I don’t think your world view is largely in agreement with MLs. I might be wrong. But this remains to be seen.
Democratic socialists and MLs have a very specific point of contention in their world view - namely the ML analysis is that it’s not possible to vote your way into socialism. This is because of the way reaction works and the experience of revolutionary movements for the last 100+ years. DemSocs disagree, but they haven’t put forth an argument that I understand other than to believe really hard against all evidence that it’s possible. That’s not to say the DemSoc movement isn’t useful. It can mobilize the masses. It can create operating space for more revolutionary organizations, etc. But if it’s just a DemSoc movement and nothing else? It’s not going anywhere. History has shown us that.
Then it would make sense to stick with the most historically grounded and historically effective movement instead of splitting into other movements. The only successful socialist movements have been ML movements. There has never been a successful socialist transition led by a DemSoc movement. So I agree with you. Division among the left can be problematic and I encourage DemSocs to take up a more ML position and do not allow the reactionaries, compradors, and collaborators to continue their divide and conquer approach to maintaining their power.
I disagree that electing people like AOC is an action of substance. It’s an electoral action that has almost zero material impact on war, policing, prisons, and capitalism. Corporate profits are highest under Democrat administrations. Democrats have continued the imperial project without abatement, whether is mass bombing, mass deaths from sanctions, neoliberal policies increasing corporate profits, unequal trade agreements, regime change operations, fucking over unions, or just simply expanding all of the tools of oppression for the Rs to use on the next swing of the pendulum. I would not say that electoralism is an action of substance. Actions of substance would be shutting downs weapons plants, shutting down prisons, shutting down corporate offices, shutting down banks, building and mobilizing a mass movement, educating the masses on how white supremacist patriarchal capitalism harms them and what to do about it, etc.
The reason is because there were 2 purges of communists in the US and survival took priority over organizing for a while. There is no strong long standing ML community or movement in the US because the US deported, black balled, and assassinated people to disrupt it. There’s a reason why they haven’t done anything so nearly as violent to the DemSocs and instead just chose to infiltrate it.
So I want to point out that you’ve taken this primarily from an electoral angle. People care about their lives and they care about abstract financial crimes only in so far as they believe it impacts their lives. Could they have been convinced to vote in a D? Yes. But it wouldn’t have improved their lives. Scott still would have gotten away with it, Medicare fraud will continue to happen because of the incentives, and health care will continue to be abysmal for Americans because of the way society is organized, not because of who is in office.
MLs calling out AOC has zero impact on the system. It has an impact on consciousness. If you really think electoralism is the way to go, then you’re going to need to figure out a way for the voters to stop being lied to by grifters. The Democrats, including AOC, have failed at pretty much everything. The party itself is fundamentally rotten and unreformable and will in no way lead the masses to resolving the contradictions of this white supremacist capitalist patriarchal settler state. Until the masses understand that, they will continue to waste their energy in electoralism only to become fully disillusioned and drop out of the voting pool altogether. It’s not a mistake that 40%- 50% of the people who could vote don’t. It’s because it doesn’t work. What MLs do with respect to electoralism is attempt to raise consciousness about the fact that electoralism doesn’t work in an effort to get people to ask the question “Well, then, what is to be done?”
And what we see if you being corralled by the sheep dogs and the MLs organizing primarily through the PSL, which is still very small, and the rest producing propaganda to raise consciousness about what is to be done.
A group that is quite problematic.
Anarchists would, of course, have problems with any ML group simply because it’s ML, and this is a historical pattern that goes back over a century. One either recognizes that vanguardism has been the only formation that has overturned capitalism and that vanguardism is the only path we know of to liberate the masses or one does not recognize this.
Yes, PSL is made of humans and humans in PSL have done bad things. It’s also true that a few PSL chapters have failed to manage themselves appropriately and local organizers have had meaningful problems because of that. These are not unique problems to PSL. I personally witnessed an organized character assassination of a black organized in my local DSA. I don’t think that makes DSA problematic. I think DSA is problematic because it has an ineffective theory of action.