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!
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
lol just take your L jesus
If you’re gonna start a dog pile, at least offer an argument instead of smug reddit energy
If you want to support electoralism at least support a working class party, not democrats
There is no viable working class party in the US and I support electoralism only to the extent it can normalize socialism among the masses and trigger a rupture within the Democratic Party, that can lead to the birth of a new independent working class party, cause that’s the only viable route we have at the moment
I will wait for you to directly reply to what I say.
Which is more important to the outcome of the German revolution? WW1 and it’s effects or the electoral strategies of German socialists during the 1890s-1910s?
Most Marxist scholars agree it’s the particulars of WW1 and the contradictions of imperialism, you seem to think the original sin lies in the fact German socialists embraced electoralism 40s years before the revolution
I don’t believe that’s a tenable position and frankly strikes me as you just having a bone to pick with the very concept of elections
I guess I’ll be waiting a long time, then?
I’m sorry where you just waiting for me to agree with you that being "blanketly optimistic" is ill-advised? Yeah, sure being a bloomer all the time is stupid, what a brave take
This whole time I thought you were trying to make some broader but misguided point about the historical relationship between revolution and electoralism, but apparently you just wanted to play Captain Obvious, my bad