Is there hope?
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I have been hearing this sentiment over the past three election cycles but let’s be honest, we went from single-payer healthcare being on the table to getting zero concession over a global pandemic to literally silence over any healthcare related agenda through the years.
The fact is that even if 99% of the people support socialism, there is no left wing movement in America to transform these sentiment into actual political movement.
Despite all the talks about third party socialist movements, I literally have no idea what their strategies are to take political power at the heart of global imperialism. Where is the analysis of the principal contradictions of American capitalism? Where are your concrete strategies to take power beyond milquetoast anti-war protests? How are you going to leverage these contradictions to achieve your political goals (real, not imagined/fantasized)?
If the American left cannot answer these questions, there will not be any movement so any kind of leftist rhetoric is going to be useless. Propaganda needs to work side by side with political actions, not in the absence of it.
Are you really going to see these concrete strategies if you're not part of the parties? It's not safe at all to be openly revolutionary in America as any flavour of socialist as can be seen by MOVE, BPP, hell even as someone who isn't openly revolutionary like MLK Jr.
You are strategizing on an ideological level, what are your opponents going to do about it?
If you go back and look at the days of the Russia and Chinese communist movements in the early 20th century, left wing intellectuals openly discuss and debate about political strategies and militant tactics, and it is this endless cycle of iterations that drove their movements forward.
Let’s take Mao’s land reform, as an example. Once you have grasped the principal contradiction and its solution (the transformation of feudal peasant class into a revolutionary class, skipping over the proletariat stage), you unleash the full potential of the revolutionary fervor of the working class that even Chiang’s army that outnumbered the Red Army by many times was completely and utterly defeated.
What was Chiang Kai-shek doing to do about it? Nothing - the CPC won because of its ideological superiority, not because it had the largest military or resources.
You cannot cheat historical and dialectical materialism, just like you cannot defy the laws of physics. Marxism-Leninism is called scientific socialism for precisely this reason!
It wasn't safe for the Bolsheviks or the CPC's Red Army, either, and they still did it. The conditions were especially bad in China when the Japanese invaded. They massacred entire villages if they even suspected they were providing aid to communists.
"If conservatives have the choice between abandoning conservatism or abandoning democracy, they will abandon democracy," applies to American liberals when given the choice between communism and reaction. MOVE, the BPP, and MLK were all opposed to by "white moderates" that would rather uphold white supremacy than allow black liberation if it means socialism.
harsh truth tbh good post
Watch out, they’ll call you a doomer lib for this one