this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Political efficacy, in my opinion, is a better strategy than fruitless idealism.
Reformism keeps not working, as evidenced by the last 45 years of ever-worsening neoliberalism, but liberals will keep trying anyway.
Marxists are not idealists; they are materialists, specifically, dialectical materialists.
It is the liberals who are the idealists.
Revolution doesn't exactly have a good history either. If anything, it's shown to be a significantly worse option. It's a pipe dream to believe that a revolutionary party would relinquish political power after gaining it.
Okie doke. What's your suggestion then? You think a Marxist candidate can win one of the two primaries? You think a Marxist candidate can beat both parties in the general? What exactly is your alternative to incrementally progressive policy?
That's not rhetorical, if you have a serious alternative I'm sincerely eager to hear it.
No socialist State has ever been won at the ballot box, though electoralism has its tactical uses in the interim. It’s mostly done through helping the working class develop class consciousness, through labor organizing and militant labor action, through developing dual power, and then ultimately replacing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Few people remember that Communists and other socialists helped us win the weekend and the eight hour workday, and these weren’t won through elections but through labor militancy. They don’t remember because we were purged and memory-holed by two red scares and a cold war.
I appreciate all the links you're posting in this thread, I'm learning a lot.
Which are the socialist states in existence right now? Are European countries socialist? Nordics? I know these classifications are subjective but I would love to hear what you and others think.
Actually Existing Socialisms (AES): The five predominantly recognized AES states are China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and, [North] Korea.
The Nordic model is a social democratic one, which is still fundamentally a capitalist one. This is what someone like Bernie Sanders claims to want.
Sanders gets away with calling himself a socialist because Americans have forgotten what socialism actually means: “social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.” Americans have forgotten what socialism means because the American socialists were persecuted into obscurity in the 20th century. So now even the vocabulary for socialism is lost in Orwellian fashion.
Now, is north korea socialist? Do the workers there enjoy democratic control over the means of production? Or really democratic control over anything? I'll admit that info from North Korea is mostly not great but it seems to me that they are run only by the one ruling family.
I have similar doubts about china and have always seen it as more state-capitalist than anything else. Simply because it seems to me that individual workers do not own the companies they work at. It seems to me that China has corporations structured almost exactly like our own in the west. Unless I've been misled and these massive Chinese corps really are co-ops with the workers having an equal say in the decisions of the company.
I think these are very good questions. You can’t rely on Atlantacist government propaganda or corporate media to get good answers to them, unfortunately. The don’t like there to be any threats of a good example, which is why the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro hundreds of times and why Cuba is still under a trade embargo. It’s one of the reasons they never stop attempting regime changes (the other reason being to steal countries’ natural and labor resources).
North Korea is especially difficult for a Burgerlander like me to get a clear picture of. I hope the Kim dynasty largely acts as a state figurehead, but I haven’t investigated and have no idea.
China does have a limited capitalism going on right now, which, if I understand correctly, is a part of the ongoing Reform and Opening Up project. From my (still fairly ignorant) P.O.V., I can’t help but imagine a risk to this strategy, where the capitalists become strong enough to wrest control. The project has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, though. The government recently took the capitalist real estate speculators to heel (to the dismay of capitalists everywhere and the delight of people just wanting a place to live), so it seems they haven’t lost control. Their professed long-term plan is to phase out capitalism entirely.
It’s worth noting that no Marxist worth their salt will paint any of these socialist countries as utopias, especially given that Marxists reject utopian socialisms.
Oh I know that China has lifted lots of people out of poverty and is generally popular with the population. But they engage in massive censorship among other issues and I just can't see how there can be a democracy (which I consider the most important component to make something socialist) with that degree of control. What I meant with China is it seems to me the state is the capitalists. The state has control over all the means of production in the country and I believe it uses it for its own benefit over the benefits and desires of the workers at those places.
I guess I'm just an anti-authoritarian first and my issue with capitalism has always been the authoritarian nature in which we parcel out resources and I can't see bringing up China or northkorea as examples of what I want. Though I do often have to push back against liberal narratives especially about Vietnam and Cuba and China.
But I'm not a Marxist though I do think he had some good ideas and was skilled at inspiring class consciousness. Ive always been more inspired by anarchist philosphy and go by Libertarian-socialist if forced to pick a name. I just think that we've seen now that a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't go away and that you trade one state power for the other.
Maybe they do, maybe that’s mostly the propaganda we’re fed. I’m sure that at least some of the “censorship” is the Chinese State keeping foreign capitalist enterprises from dominating China’s indigenous internet.
I do think that is predominant (though there are also worker co-ops & individual projects). If China is a democratic socialist state, then the “it” in “its own benefit” is largely the working class. This is in contrast with a bourgeois democracy like the US, where the “it” is largely the capitalist class. Our votes are somewhat effective when they don’t conflict with the capitalists, but otherwise not so much. We get fed a lot of propaganda about socialist states having an authoritarian “ruling class,” analogous to our capitalist class, living high on the hog at the expense of the people, but is that really so, or is it projection?
Quite understandable: I came from that place. It took a lot of convincing, because my heels were pretty dug in to a Noam Chomsky/Mark Fisher position. I think one of the quicker/easier ways to seeing arguments on why this position has never and can never succeed, and why the “authoritarianism” of communism has succeeded and is a necessary step on the path to socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. It’s a short book and as such doesn’t—on its own—provide a whole lot of backing evidence; it’s a jumping-off point for further inquiry.
Well I mean we know China blocks a ton of info and publishing must pass state censors. And vpns etc aren't really allowed there. And Chinese corps have some brutal working conditions. I'm not saying there aren't things China has done right that we should look into but I don't see them as a shining example of the working man getting control over his own destiny.
I will give that book a read but I disagree with your assertion that china, or the soviet union succeeded in bringing socialism and I'll continue to work with but never trust leninists maoists etc. due to all the historical violence marxist-leninist revolutionaries have used against anarchists and people who believe like me as soon as they have power of their own.
A few capitalist tech companies started a brutal 996 system, which from what I’ve heard was illegal, and the state has since been cracking down on it. I agree that we shouldn’t assume what China has done to be the best possible path, nor should we directly imitate it, because our material conditions are very different from theirs.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Great thank you for the info and links.
Cool. You can directly criticize capitalism. Do your grassroots. Don't hate on Bernie because he is using the most effective tools at his disposal. What he's doing is, probably, better overall for the general state of socialist thought in this country than any alternative at his disposal.
You can take direct labor action without denigrating the man for following his path: trying to move the window from inside the system. If you think you can do better, do it. As it stands, do you think you've done more, to actually shift overall labor sentiment in this country to the left, than he has through his "marginally better" moderate progressivism?
Marxists, Anarchists, and any other form of leftist stands to gain real traction not from electoralism (outside of highlighting the soon to be mentioned actions), but from organization, such as Unionization.
Cool, I agree. But moderately better politicians like Bernie calling out crony capitalism is better than not. Labor is still free to organize.
Isn't the slogan "workers of the world unite?"
Sure, but it's a question of praxis.
What's the question? Whether or not to unionize?
Unions still operate under capitalism? Not sure how unionizing plays into dismantling capitalism. This is a conversation about politicians like Bernie not going far enough to fundamentally disavow capitalism completely. The question is, what is an effective alternative to incremental, foot-in-the-door political baseline? What could Bernie be doing differently, that would actually be effective?
"What could Bernie be doing differently, that would actually be effective?"
Unfortunately it's not about Bernie doing something differently. The incremental changes cannot only be made at the ballot box or with candidates. It has to be made within the population at large.
Social movements through collective organizing can bring change. Unfortunately the capitalist state knows this as well and that's why any attempts to organize are stamped out quickly through violence, media campaigns to discredit, or various other means.
Okay, do that. Organize. Bernie is doing his incremental thing, because that works in politics. He can't make you organize, that's a you thing. Let him do his thing.
Everything still operates under capitalism until capitalism is abolished. Unions can weaken the capitalist class and strengthen the working class. It’s an interim step. You were looking for a foot-in-the-door; well here’s one.
Sure, I agree, do that. But what can Bernie do, in his domain, that's more effective than what he's doing? If you want to organize, organize. That is a legitimate action. But Bernie's domain is politics, and there's no point playing the politics game badly.
Let him cook. You can do your own cooking.