DC last night:
- https://twitter.com/loran076/status/1323907767887867904?s=19
- https://twitter.com/FranceNews24/status/1323917050369245185?s=19
- https://hexbear.net/post/47055
it’s more likely in the next few days that the fash will take the streets, especially as trump announces how he will contest the election. after all, chaos is his best bet for getting the powers that be to allow him to retain power without a fight. so don’t fucking tell people to stay home. it’s absolutely critical that everyone pays attention to what’s happening in their own backyards and steps up to engage in appropriate community defense.
the election is just a stage. stop confusing it with the conditions that compel people to act.
I agree in principle but disagree on the specifics. this is a damn good time to agitate AGAINST the false democracy, to point out the ways in which it robs people of meaningful choice and agency in their own lives, and to advocate for a new system. this isn’t the time for milquetoast socdemism.
My phrasing might have erred a bit too close to opportunism. Given that the US left is still extremely scattered and tiny relative to the working class as a whole (even if the left is growing more quickly now), we should strike a careful balance between crafting a message that will reach the DSA-adjacent progressive libs and anarchists and other newly radicalizing layers - who might still be terrified to death of Trump while only somewhat scared of business-as-usual neoliberals like Biden - while retaining a hard line against the two bourgie-funded parties, putting forth a clearly articulated alternative and a path to socialist revolution from existing conditions. This means condemning Trump’s obvious contempt for democracy while reminding them of the Dem ratfuckery during the primaries, and arguing for the necessity to organize and build an independent workers’ party - not just the smaller revolutionary party, but a mass party as well.
If that last part sounds like succdem shit, unfortunately it’s still a necessary transitional step in between our current situation - one in which there’s no real political representation for the working class at all - to one in which we eventually have a large enough revolutionary core within a larger grassroots independent left united front/mass movement to actually carry out the tasks of revolution. The tasks of the 1st and 2nd internationals were prerequisites for the tasks of the 3rd - and in terms of organization we’re still arguably on square one here in the US.
yea, I mostly agree, I just want us to be careful about accidentally stumbling into tailism. the reformist platform will start to gain support over the next couple of years as covid accelerates the current crisis of capitalism and the ruling class begins to try and save itself. but that means our advocacy shouldn’t stay limited to a fixed view of today but rather lay the seeds for tomorrow. we should be agitating people to ask why these overwhelmingly positive policies with bipartisan support haven’t passed and use that as a launching pad to a line that analyzes the class war that has, up to this point, made such policies impossible. that way, when liberal politicians start to promise reform, we will be there and have credibility when we say no, transfer power to the masses.
I got you. The immediate tasks of coalition-building to build up the working-class forces capable of fighting for socialism carry with them the risks of going full opportunist like the 2nd international did, throwing the revolutionary baby out with the ultraleft bathwater. The most revolutionary elements and organizations of the coalition are necessarily going to have to attract as many higher-quality working-class and marginalized revolutionary fighters as they can from within the broader coalition, putting forth an unmistakably Marxist program which calls out the contradictions, including popular demands and phrasing them such that a) some version of the demand is theoretically immediately economically feasible, representing a winnable material gain for the workers but b) politically infeasible without sustained pressure from an organized mass movement at minimum, or in some cases without years of sustained organization for socialism.
For example, the demands for Medicare for All and to implement an NHS carry with them the implicit call to organize and work towards abolishing or at least greatly diminishing the private health insurance sector. The demand for an ecosocialist Green New Deal is an implicit call to place, at minimum, the energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation sectors under the democratic control of the working class - it’s a call for democratic central planning, a key feature of socialism (side note: Hawkins’s version includes a budget which explicitly calls for funding the GND by slashing the military budget, making the program anti-imperialist). These implications are usually buried underneath the surface to more easily reach workers at a lower level of class consciousness, but anyone beginning to question reformism and to draw revolutionary conclusions, who begins talking with Marxist organizers, will through Marxist education and through the experience of organizing begin to uncover the contradictions.
Why is this popular policy that many of us want and need, theoretically winnable even under some form of capitalism, not policy? Because the ruling parties answer to the capitalists and the policy hurts the capitalists’ profits. How do we achieve this policy? By fighting and organizing the masses for socialism, attracting the workers’ attention though a campaign for the best feasible version of this policy as a transitional step.
Around the time of Occupy, the popular demand for the $15 minimum wage was eventually won in some parts of the country, in the process increasing the organizational capacity, confidence, and expectations of the workers and socialists who organized the Fight for 15 campaign, such that they were better prepared to fight for the next campaign and less willing to settle for scraps. Kshama and SAlt have consistently erred too close to opportunism since the 2016 Bernie campaign, but their partial victory from the minimum wage fight (especially in Seattle) is evidence that this sort of approach can work so long as the hard line against Dem-entryism and other forms of tailism and opportunism is maintained.
