The concessions obtained through SocDem goverments in European countries came about because all those countries had thousands of actual communists in varying posts in the government and the concessions were to reduce class consciousness and weaken the communists.
To understand the magnitude of difference, imagine if the US House of Reps (total seats 435) had 40 honest-to-god Communists in power, with another 80 left-of-Bernie SocDems : thats what the French legislature was like in the 60s and 70s.
Instead the US has 3 extremely mild SocDems who may or may not be grifters.
I hope you see the magnitude of difference here, there is no real way of moving the admin left and whatever minor leftward shift you may see is what the ruling class themselves, by their own accord, decide is necessary to keep the threat of civil unrest from getting too high.
So whenever you see any liberals IRL or online talk about how we need to become like Norway or whatever, remind them No Communists in govt = No European style Social Democracy
Young liberals who are brainwashed by hating the orange man are slowly being outnumbered by people who are SocDems at least, if not outright Leftists. The overton window is sliding Left for people born after 1985ish, at least for people who would have just been “liberals” if they were 15-20 years older.
china really seems to be the only way to bring about global communism. that is unless the ruling class decides it would rather nuke the planet.
Jamaal Bowman tweeted this, which means we will have at least one Left-of-Bernie Congressman next year
I mean thank goodness, but also we need to be getting more than 1 every 2 years (if we want to do electoralism). Luckily AOC is in good with the libs, and this guy might be too, so we’ll see if momentum picks up.
It’s baby steps, but it’s also really, really cool to have a member of Congress tweeting old cartoons that literally have a gross fat cat labelled “the capitalist class”. I can’t recall anything approaching that level of class consciousness from a major politicion in my lifetime. AOC certainly hasn’t done that shit.
The “Squad” is mostly a joke - especially Pressley who is a bog-standard careerist lib that got lumped in with Omar and Tlaib for being young and black.
I’m in agreement with you, I just have no idea what the implications are. If electoralism is a dead end under capitalism, then what do we do? I’m trying not to be a doomer.
In my honest opinion the Left in USA has not put enough effort to justify their dissapointment. What did we really expect to achieve posting memes and donating $27 to a SocDem? Even the largest “Big Tent” leftist organisation has a measly 70,000 members, that’s 0.02% of the population. Quite a few DSA members are uneducated in Marxism or straight up opposed to it.
Leftism is still very nascent, you may not feel that way because you have been a leftist for so long, but real leftism has only just begun.
DSA explicitly says in their non-party documents, since they’re the whipping dog radlib wing of the democrats and not an actual independent political party, that they will not cooperate with any Marxist group.
These leftist parties have always felt weird to me. They all invariably end up either impotent or tear themselves apart into obscurity. Im not saying they are useless, but they are just oh-so-easy to manipulate and wreck. All the effort you put in them could be gone at any time.
I tried to make the same point to people putting all their eggs in Bernie’s basket. Even if by some miracle he won and the establishment didn’t just fucking off him for doing so, then it would have been 4 years of being backstabbed and undermined in every conceivable way and then subsequently scapegoated for the next 20 years for all America’s woes.
