Mind you, I’m biased since I’m not from the US, I’m Balkan. So a quick heads up there. Plus I’m a hardline commie so yeah. Just did some research on this because It caught my eye.
I haven’t really noticed this here or at Lemmygrad. But a lot of online “leftist” spaces, especially on Reddit, are over hyping this shit too much lmao.
Zohran so far:
- denounces Hamas
- denounces Venezuela and Cuba as dictatorships
- intends to keep zionist Jennifer Tisch as police commissioner
- hired Obama staffers
- ‘don’t sell out bro!’
This circlejerk about a social democrat getting elected is doing my head in, people are acting like the October revolution happened.
Just don’t act surprised when magically not much actual change happens in New York. Also don’t give me “Oh but the pipeline!!!1!”. Yeah If the pipeline actually worked, Bernie and AOC supporters would have been actual marxists by now (Also as a Serb, fuck Bernie, Parenti was right about your dumbass).
I have a pet peeve with American “anti-capitalists” in general. Where they constantly just whine how everything is expensive, no public transport and no free healthcare. Yet they’d probably be fine with the world suffering as long as they got those three things + whatever treats they want.
Don’t forget to join a good org nearby you, read and organize folks!
There are supposed communists on this website showing their whole ass over this lol. Like sure, it’s cool if some people get fed in NY. But trying to claim this as a huge win for socialism is embarrassingly liberal. People are still falling for this shit? Almost ten years after sanders started his shtick?
Many are still infected by liberal electoral brain. Even when they’ve learned a bunch of communist stuff, a person may perceive merely winning an election as a concrete victory, when of course we know it absolutely is not. The exaggeration of electoralist wins is essential for electoralism itself and the exaggeration of wins in general is always a bad sign for any org a person might join. It means the core of organizing work is achieving a fantasy, not grounded in the task before us, and tends to mean that those with level heads get harassed for insufficiently supporting those who “worked so hard” for the “win”. It turns the supposed communally-oriented project into one of self-actualization and vendettas. And it means that when deliberation creates new goals and plans, they are wrong goals and plans.
Get a load of Lib Engels over here
I am once again begging people to understand that these communist theorists were speaking about RUNNING IN ELECTIONS AND STANDING IN BOURGEOIS PARLIAMENTS AS POLITICALLY SELF CONSCIOUS MEMBERS OF A WORKING CLASS PARTY AND AS PART OF A WIDER POLITICAL PROJECT.
Find me a quote of Marx, Engels, Lenin, any non-revisionist communist theorist or revolutionary, endorsing entryism into a 150 year old imperialist bourgeois party that is completely controlled by capital, endorsing misleading the working class into believing that entryism into these parties is a vehicle for proletarian revolution and working class liberation. You won’t find one because it doesn’t exist. In fact, abusing quotes from Marx or Engels to justify liberal entryism is the quintessence of revisionism.
Like dude, it’s fine for you to get the warm and fuzzies over mamdani because there’s a little liberal deep down that you haven’t killed yet. We all feel that way sometimes. But please don’t use the words of some of the most intelligent and dedicated revolutionaries of all time to post-hoc justify what essentially is a vibes response from your limbic system.
And I’m begging know nothing online posters to look up the history of how successful third parties emerge in the United States, it’s through interparty RUPTURES
WE DON’T HAVE A POLITICALLY SELF CONSCIOUS WORKING CLASS PARTY and you’re not gonna build it from scratch in the imperial core, 100 years of sectarians trying has made that clear enough
We are one step behind the self-conscious conception, so we are forced to meet the masses where they primarily engage with politics and that’s the two party system, the point is to create a rupture within the party, pushing the capitalists out or more desirably forcing them to push us out so we can use the resulting rallying-cry leverage to create a viable third party with the self consciousness you’re looking for and that requires victories, Bernie’s dumbass couldn’t give us that baseline, Zohran has gotten far closer
All the benefits of electoralism that quote outlines are fully realizable even within the degraded conditions we find ourselves in, the quote isn’t promising imminent revolution, it’s observing the emergence of self-consciousness among workers after electoral contention and that doesn’t always require your book club conception of a ‘workers party’
That is how successful bourgeois third parties completely captured by capital have emerged, yes. Not sure how it’s relevant though.
Again, how are these images relevant?
During imminent inter-party ruptures that lead to the birth of viable third parties, the host party experiences a crash in popular support, while the emergent party goes from electoral victory to electoral strength, leading to a complete realignment of the entire US political system
Bernie was supposed to trigger a similar rupture 10-5 years ago through his victories, but his incompetent liberal ass obliterated that momentum and led to a resurgence of neoliberalism
But now, Trump’s second victory, the Gaza Genocide, and Zohran’s rise has restarted the countdown to an interparty rupture
Ah yes I forgot, American “socialists” get to have a little exceptionalism, as a treat
You’re just throwing out buzzwords now, nothing I outlined above implies exceptionalism, a multitude of countries face similar degraded conditions that require interparty ruptures to generate more radical third party challenges to the status quo
Mexico and the emergence of Morena is a good example
I think the difference with Engels is that he advocated for communist electoralism and not hiding or shirking from true communist beliefs. Not triangulating your way into a more lib position just for power.
We cannot ignore modern conditions, we live under degraded conditions that prevent the organic emergence of communist electoralism
Our goal has never been to turn the democrats into a worker’s party through some socdem alchemy, the goal was always, whether some of us were conscious of it or not, to rupture the Democratic Party wide open and destabilize the two-party system
We weren’t supposed to be the Democrat version of the Tea Party, we’re supposed to be the socialist version of the early Republican Party when it burst out of the Whig party, using the modern breakdown of liberal institutions as the fuel for that rupture, mirroring the national breakdown that led to the demise of the Whigs
The proof of this potential for a party rupture exists right in front of our eyes; the popularity of Zohran-type candidates versus the universal disgust a supermajority of Americans hold the DNC, DESPITE both of them being “Democrats”
That’s our ticket to third party emergence and THEEEEN WE CAN START the building of communist electoralism
Modern conditions aren’t spontaneously creating communists. Existing leftists are creating new leftists through education, and opportunities to educate are created by events. The conditions just make people more susceptible to the education, they do not perform the education.
I didn’t say conditions are spontaneously creating communists, where are you getting that reading? My comment is about how a rupture can occur within the current two-party system and how that can lead to a viable third party that existing leftists may use as an opportunity to educate (I’m using your words for the highlighted bit, because in the event of realignment after a rupture, I’d hope leftists would do more than educate, they’d organize)
Apologies then, it came across to me as suggesting that things like Bernie weren’t really responsible for the growth of the left, but instead simply the conditions. What I worry about is that people think the conditions are all there is to it. The conditions are creating the events, and the events are where the left grows. Bernie’s near miss was a result of conditions. Zohran’s win is a result of the conditions. The communist’s job is to seize the moment and use it correctly. A lot of people seem to one to dismiss the moment rather than seize it though.
It’s cool, I understand your point and I agree honestly
Then citing Engels in this way is silly, isn’t it?
No you’ve made one of the classic blunders - when I quote theory to support my argument I am a dialectician who is applying prior experimentation to my own unique material conditions, when you quote theory to support your argument you are a dogmatist book worshipper
No, because those are general observations that can and have been replicated under multiple different sets of conditions, modern or otherwise
They are general observations that apply to the US right now but also the US has special degraded conditions so they don’t apply? Friend, you are blatantly contradicting yourself.
NO, the general observations apply, your misreading and anti-electoral interpretation of the quote does not
Degarded conditions in the US does not allow for the independent emergence of viable workers parties, but the benefits outlined by Engels can be replicated by socialists attempting to rupture the two-party system
Get a load of Rosa over there and how that worked out for her.
What is this sentiment besides a complete embrace of defeatism?
It is reminding you of the history and context that you are either unaware of or intentionally conflating. Engels is describing the German Social Democrats, specifically, and their entry into electoral politics, framing themselves as a class struggle party using this means to wage class struggle itself. If you know your history here, the German Social Democratic Party (you might know them as the SPD nowadays) consistently moved right and failed to respond to fascism, instead framing itself against the new and more militant faction of the communists, the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD. As part of these developments, where the SPD protected its status in the bourgeois stare apparatus rather than enjoin class struggle, Liebknecht and those repeating him proclaimed the famous, “Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!” Both him and Rosa were murdered by the party Engels is describing and allowed the rise of the Nazis through the ownership of material decay and attenuated and unbelievable attempts to agitate.
And just to be clear, NYDSA isn’t even remotely as principled as the SPD ever was. So what is “we”? They don’t think of communists as part of them, they sneer at you and call you tankie and conflate imperialist urbanism with socialism. They have no real functional relationships with labor, they just sometimes show up at labor actions with posters and awkwardly mill around. This is “us”, the Marxists fomenting class struggle? Are you sure?
Yes, the German Social Democrats are the only party in history to ever experience the electoral benefits described in that quote, no other party has been able to replicate the observations Engels was making in his time
And electoralism is definitely the reason Rosa was murdered by the Freikorps…WW1 and the devastating effect it had on the SPD? Never heard of it
Instead of writing silly sarcastic comments, please try your best to engage with what I actually wrote.
Who are you arguing with? I think you’ve entirely forgotten what we are even talking about. You’re getting angry at people in your head, not me.
Who were Noske and Ebert and what did they have to do with the SPD and Rosa? Do these actions say anything about why we shouldn’t be blanketly optimistic about electoralism by “socialists” and be cavalier about who we, by default, consider to be in our ranks or count as wins?
What you should be asking is how WW1 empowered Noske and Ebert and how the national question sunk the prospects of Rosa’s faction, instead of imagining an unbroken thoughline from when Engels endorsed electoralism in 1895 to when Rosa lost her life, as if externalities of world historic importance didn’t take precedence
who is claiming it as a huge win? the huge win is how mad Cuomo and shit are. Everything else is a potential mild improvement at most, and manufacturing consent for imperialism at worst.
I’m not gonna name names or link to arguments in other threads because that’s petty shit, but trust me that I have been having back and forths with users who have called this “a victory for socialism”, like, verbatim, lol.
If nothing else it’s a propaganda victory for now and I don’t see why you can’t admit that
It could certainly turn into a propaganda failure if he ends up betraying his base or just failing to do anything but that hasn’t happened yet
I dunno though, is it a propaganda win if a bunch of people now consider themselves “socialists” but think socialism is when the mayor opens a grocery store?
Like sure quantitative change leads to qualitative change but it seems to me it’s gonna take a whole lot of education from actual communists to turn those libbed up Mamdani voters into class conscious proletarians…. Which is kind of the exact situation we were in beforehand.
If it is a propaganda victory, who is receiving that propaganda and how will it change them? Will I have an easier time recruiting and educating people for my org?