This is the kind of demsoc I can support. One who understands the concept of solidarity. Something American “leftists” have not yet begun to grasp.
How can you shout at us about unity while simultaneously throwing socialists under the bus by denouncing and distancing yourself from the USSR or Cuba?
In regards to your edit, I think our best strategy is a professional party that hastens national suicide so the hegemonic empire will collapse. Only once this happens will the American masses be susceptible to radicalization. Before this there is too much material benefit from empire and any reformist movement will always turn social-chauvinist and imperialist.
Cuba is one thing but how is it relevant to current solidarity to stake out a position on whether or not a political system that has not even nominally existed for nearly three decades was or was not true socialism? The decisions of the various actors over the course of Soviet history were products of the material conditions of a time and place that no longer exists, conditions that in most respects are entirely unlike those of the present-day United States. I don’t understand why people feel the need to have endless struggle sessions about people and events and decisions that bear such little resemblance to the situations they actually face.
Whether you like it or not, the USSR is the face of socialism. You can deal with this by trying to detach the USSR from socialism, or by defending the USSR from the propaganda and smears that have shaped western perceptions of it. You don’t have the luxury of ignoring it, although every ultra and radlib wishes they could.
I wouldn’t take a tribute made right after his death before kruschev’s speech came out for much. Allende was extremely critical of non democratic action, supporting the Hungarian uprising and Czechoslovakian one.
Plus Allende got his start in a socialist party that was a popular coalition of trotskyists and anarchists, and some social democrats, against the Stalinist supporting Chilean communist party.
