you mean except for their primaries…80% of Dems support M4A

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.

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.

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”

;-)

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).