I don’t know why you seem to think I’m an electoralism dead-ender when I’ve been more than willing to tell you multiple times over your participation across this post that electoralism is not the be all end all of organizing and is wrought with shortcomings in terms of directing organizational energy and leftist fervor.
I’m a Marxist Leninist, as you seem to be. We both understand that bourgeois democracy will not bring about revolution in any way except for its own failures that radicalize the working class and galvanize them against capitalism, where socialism would then grow out of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin wrote about extensively. There is no reforming capitalism into socialism. My take on electoralism is that electoralism will happen regardless of whether or not anybody on the left chooses to engage with it, and it is impossible for the electoral system to bear fruit anywhere near reliably. If the electoralism that is happening though does indeed present an opportunity to remove some pressure from the boot off the neck of the working class, it would be stupid not to engage in it in a high profile manner. If you succeed, you have alleviated that pressure, good for the working class and your prospects of organizing in the future. If you fail or are ratfucked, you have opened up the door to radicalization for so many people. You’d be lying if you said the failure of Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020 weren’t the very driving factor that galvanized and grew the now significantly more prominent, albeit not yet major political force, of the emergent American left. You may have lost some demoralized people along the way, but they were reached for a time, and it was the left that reached them.
I don’t think you, or many strictly anti-electoral leftists think about that enough. The cultural hegemony of the right in our media and social contexts MUST be pierced, and that includes in the news and politics, which are now media that are as widely consumed as culture and entertainment as any other legacy media. The long game we are playing now isn’t the same it was 100 years ago. We can’t sit these out and be complete no names out there in the public cultural sphere anymore and expect to see any major success. Electoralism is entertainment that is widely consumed. It’s culture that’s widely consumed. It sets agendas that are widely consumed. If we seriously ignore the opportunity to get our ideas out there, or worse, let our “camp” be publicly represented in a public forum believed to be legitimate by our least thought out, most opportunist, most chauvinistic, least consistent, most internally criticized bunch of us on the left, we are doing ourselves an immense disservice. Why are we preemptively disarming and stripping ourselves of any free legitimacy we may receive by simply existing prominently in the public eye. How is it good for base building to simply not exist to the average person? Why should we surrender our ability to be heard in a public forum seen as legitimate by the average proletarian, regardless of how useless that forum actually is at creating change itself? Any time even a drop of our agenda slips into mainstream electoralism, people flock to it in numbers we don’t see represented in our other organizing work. Why is that?
It’s where the working class is looking, and there is no possibility of stripping a critical mass of people away from it in a way that can effectively redirect that energy elsewhere independent of the failure of the electoral system itself. It is not possible in a society in which dire and obvious civil rights have been extended to the entirety of the population and where crisis capitalism has driven the working class to constant attentiveness to cultural, economic, and political crises bundled up for their consumption. You have to be present anywhere the working class is to be found. You are willingly turning over the airwaves the working class are tuned into to the forces of the right if you simply surrender electoralism to them.
Every success the left gains through electoralism is a success that at best is neutral and at worst eats short term revolutionary potential. Every victory of the right is a radicalizing setback for the left. What you are actually doing is teaching people they deserve rights in a setting n they actually pay serious enough attention to and can learn that there are other people out there to be reached that feel the same way. You are building a critical mass of people who actually give a fuck that you and each other exists. The working class will not win through electoralist victories. The working class will win through electoralism failing it dramatically and in a way it can’t ignore.
I don’t know why you seem to think I’m an electoralism dead-ender when I’ve been more than willing to tell you multiple times over your participation across this post that electoralism is not the be all end all of organizing and is wrought with shortcomings in terms of directing organizational energy and leftist fervor.
I’m a Marxist Leninist, as you seem to be. We both understand that bourgeois democracy will not bring about revolution in any way except for its own failures that radicalize the working class and galvanize them against capitalism, where socialism would then grow out of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin wrote about extensively. There is no reforming capitalism into socialism. My take on electoralism is that electoralism will happen regardless of whether or not anybody on the left chooses to engage with it, and it is impossible for the electoral system to bear fruit anywhere near reliably. If the electoralism that is happening though does indeed present an opportunity to remove some pressure from the boot off the neck of the working class, it would be stupid not to engage in it in a high profile manner. If you succeed, you have alleviated that pressure, good for the working class and your prospects of organizing in the future. If you fail or are ratfucked, you have opened up the door to radicalization for so many people. You’d be lying if you said the failure of Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020 weren’t the very driving factor that galvanized and grew the now significantly more prominent, albeit not yet major political force, of the emergent American left. You may have lost some demoralized people along the way, but they were reached for a time, and it was the left that reached them.
I don’t think you, or many strictly anti-electoral leftists think about that enough. The cultural hegemony of the right in our media and social contexts MUST be pierced, and that includes in the news and politics, which are now media that are as widely consumed as culture and entertainment as any other legacy media. The long game we are playing now isn’t the same it was 100 years ago. We can’t sit these out and be complete no names out there in the public cultural sphere anymore and expect to see any major success. Electoralism is entertainment that is widely consumed. It’s culture that’s widely consumed. It sets agendas that are widely consumed. If we seriously ignore the opportunity to get our ideas out there, or worse, let our “camp” be publicly represented in a public forum believed to be legitimate by our least thought out, most opportunist, most chauvinistic, least consistent, most internally criticized bunch of us on the left, we are doing ourselves an immense disservice. Why are we preemptively disarming and stripping ourselves of any free legitimacy we may receive by simply existing prominently in the public eye. How is it good for base building to simply not exist to the average person? Why should we surrender our ability to be heard in a public forum seen as legitimate by the average proletarian, regardless of how useless that forum actually is at creating change itself? Any time even a drop of our agenda slips into mainstream electoralism, people flock to it in numbers we don’t see represented in our other organizing work. Why is that?
It’s where the working class is looking, and there is no possibility of stripping a critical mass of people away from it in a way that can effectively redirect that energy elsewhere independent of the failure of the electoral system itself. It is not possible in a society in which dire and obvious civil rights have been extended to the entirety of the population and where crisis capitalism has driven the working class to constant attentiveness to cultural, economic, and political crises bundled up for their consumption. You have to be present anywhere the working class is to be found. You are willingly turning over the airwaves the working class are tuned into to the forces of the right if you simply surrender electoralism to them.
Every success the left gains through electoralism is a success that at best is neutral and at worst eats short term revolutionary potential. Every victory of the right is a radicalizing setback for the left. What you are actually doing is teaching people they deserve rights in a setting n they actually pay serious enough attention to and can learn that there are other people out there to be reached that feel the same way. You are building a critical mass of people who actually give a fuck that you and each other exists. The working class will not win through electoralist victories. The working class will win through electoralism failing it dramatically and in a way it can’t ignore.