Leftists Vs Centrists Vs Right Wingers
not “pragmatic” and incremental enough for you, lib?
neither will doing nothing
It’s not that avoiding elections altogether is necessarily the correct approach, but this is just one more example of AOC and her co-thinkers doing electoral politics wrong. We desperately need more independent socialist candidates with a sober, correct understanding of the fact that if they win seats they’re fighting on the enemy’s turf and shouldn’t join any coalitions with libs or liquidate themselves under a liberal or popular-frontist banner. By operating within the same party, AOC and friends have repeatedly had to bend the knee to Pelosi and the neoliberal clique.
Who the fuck is we? We’re not anybody. We are an undifferentiated mass of political consumers. We have no shape or political will and no ability to express that will even if it did exist. This chart might as well be a ranking list for people’s fantasy football leagues, it doesn’t mean anything for you and me and we have no way to impact it.
By “we”, I mean the US working class, and the fledgling socialist movements and organizations that can grow and eventually be in a position to lead working-class struggle without sabotage or intervention from Democrats or other NGO/petty-bourgie/class-collaborationist element. The potential to building an independent workers’ party, capable of running independent socialist candidates who fight exclusively for the working class and cannot be bought out by capitalists, exists. Everyone on this website reading this can and should be seeking ways to organize independent working-class coalitions, and to operate only on a united-front basis with misled succdem and entryist groups (e.g. Sunrise, DSA) rather than a popular-frontist one, including in our own communities.
Not only should we disregard whatever the hell AOC and other entryists are doing, but we also crucially stop acting like passive consumers of politics and actually learn to participate in politics and build a power base for the working class, starting from the local scale and working up from there. Even if you’re stuck at home and mostly socially atomized, you can still spread Marxist agitprop through social media to plant seeds in the minds of liberal workers who might radicalize a few years from now. If you’re in an org, make sure that org can publish editorials on a consistent basis. A century ago it was standard for Marxist groups to publish their own newspapers and pamphlets, and some still literally do this in addition to maintaining their own websites with archives of their public material. Putting up leaflets is also a good tactic for raising a Marxist banner, making passersby aware that your org exists in their community. Joining an org while also belonging to a trade union allows you to “sink roots” into the working class, linking up union rank-and-file with a potentially revolutionary movement and potential revolutionary party. Once we’re organized enough at the local level and have community support from local workers, we can start running independent working-class candidates, using a strategy similar to that of Kshama Sawant in Seattle (minus the counterproductive cheerleading for Dem entryism, of course).
Imagining that shouting loud enough or writing enough letters to your congressman will get m4a passed or even voted on is pure liberalism. Organize a collective front and stage strikes/get militant if you want to effect actual political outcomes. Everything else is either jerking off or whining, or god forbid a mix of both
if you believe in direct action organizing I don’t see why you would see forcing a vote as somehow a bad thing, you can organize and do electoral pressure to push from all fronts, saying this is a waste of time is just giving yourself an excuse not to do anything and reeks of “I’m smart because I think this is dumb but I’m also not doing anything to help”
no, it’s eating up the spectacle and expecting it to deliver results. organize. forget the fucking democratic party.
Accusations of ultraleftist abstention I get, but how the fuck do you read the decision to stay out of this fight as opportunist? CTH, for example, is clearly taking an “”“ultraleft”“” anti-entryist position here, not an opportunist one. Probably significantly different from whatever V****'s motivations are. Pressuring Pelosi externally to win M4A is something I can get behind, but why tie this campaign to the doomed struggle to control the uncontrollable (from the inside) Democratic Party? Why trust AOC to lead this sort of fight when this is her strategy to win leverage? She’s still playing the fucking shell game without understanding that it’s a shell game and encouraging the left more broadly to do the same.
My use of sarcastic scare quotes was to emphasize the false conflation with an actual ultraleft position (complete abstention from elections) and the “ultraleft” position of breaking completely away from entryism into capitalist parties. You’re correct that if we’re gonna do electoral politics, we should do so putting forth our own program/platform with a list of carefully-formulated demands we want to fight and organize for, and putting forth our own working-class candidates to represent us, ones subject to instant recall by party membership and committed to only taking pay equivalent to that of an average/typical working-class person from the community they represent to ensure they still have skin in the game.
this isn’t even an external pressure campaign… “call your reps” is the fucking opportunist line. AOC, I get. she’s hitched her wagon to this eternally-doomed strategy. I’m honestly more skeptical of the rest of the people pushing this. this whole thing seems to me like socdems arguing with each other about the best way to flail ineffectually and there are more opportunists than not involved.
My point was more that this campaign isn’t external when I said I could get behind externally pressuring Pelosi. Calling your rep just for the sake of clogging their answering machine is a funny way to piss them off but if they’re a Dem and you’re a Marxist you can’t gain leverage by threatening not to vote for them unless they do XYZ because you weren’t gonna vote for them as a matter of principle.
it is organizing to get a M4A vote on the board and having people call their reps/protest for them to vote Yes
The country just voted into the presidency the one democratic candidate who was against m4a. Reps have zero reason to pay attention to any amount of calls
no, that’s mobilization. organizing results in an actual structure after the immediate fight. moreover, it’s strategically bad. the democratic party has absolutely no reason to vote for this, no matter who calls their phones. they don’t answer to their constituents. they answer to capital. this whole strategy is magical thinking.
