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- cross-posted to:
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Transcript
The “For the better”, also known as Anakin and Padme 4-Panel and Clueless Padme meme. The first panel shows a guy saying “You should vote dem and push them to be better.” The second panel shows another person saying “So you’re going to push them to be better after you vote?”. The third panel shows the first person saying nothing and staring. The last one shows the second person with a concerned look on her face saying “you’re going to push them to be better after you vote?”.
I mean, it’s a big party and there’s a lot of different members with a lot of different takes that exist on a wide spectrum.
But we watched politicians like AOC and Warren get chewed up. And we watched politicians like Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman get spat out. We’re watching the folks who were crying “Our Party Needs To Win More Young Men To Beat Donald Trump” turn and piss all over Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who has been absolutely magnetic to anti-Trump young men.
There’s a real contradiction between the folks voting Team Blue and the folks claiming to represent those voters. Until that contradiction is reconciled, there can’t be a united front against fascism.
Until lefty slips through a primary. Then the machine backs literally anyone else.
There can be no united front with any liberals. They will use the first opportunity they get to betray any such united front and help the fascists out. Please learn that from history, we need not repeat it.
No liberal organisation is in our best interest. The only thing that helps against fascism are left organisations, extra-parliamentary opposition and extra-legal action.
FFS, even Mao and Lenin didn’t think that way. But then they didn’t see the lay liberal as a serious impediment to their efforts at de-colonization. They saw them as an impediment to the yeoman’s work of reorganizing the body public on a mass scale. And they addressed the impediment through Mass Line politics and iterative, experimental reforms.
Liberals are going to organize whether you want them to or not. And in a country as heavily weighted towards older, liberally educated service sector professionals as your average western state, you’re going to get a lot of them popping up under every regime of any political valiance.
Conservatives have spent 60 years building a media and a body politic that manipulates liberals into supporting their agenda. Leftists will have to learn to be at least as persuasive and compelling. Because liberalism isn’t something you can ignore. And the western leftist movement isn’t in any position to call the shots. The whole point of a Vanguard Party is to spearhead a revolutionary program that can sway and mobilize the body public. It isn’t going to be able to staff every bureaucratic position, much less to impose a universal orthodoxy on everyone, nor should it try.
Liberals and the democratic party are class enemies. Mao and Lenin very well did see the threat of the liberals and their treachery. Lenin quite literally lived through those times when in Germany liberals used proto-fascists to murder socialists and suppress the revolution there.
Liberals can organize all they want. They’ll still fail and hand power to fascists eventually. Let the American scum suffer their fate.
They will always be our enemies. The only way any kind of temporary united front will work is if liberals accept to work beneath us, not the other way around. If democrats were willing to follow a communist party for an united front, then it would be acceptable for the time being. But we should never let liberals lead any such endeavour. Because this strengthens them as well. And when all is well and done we need to exterminate liberals along with any fascists and other reactionaries. No united front has ever lead to socialism.
We’re far better off organising on our own. Our own mass parties need to lead to the establishment of vanguard parties. Or do you really think liberals will allow a Marxist vanguard to take the lead of any uprising or on the political stage at large?
The vast majority of liberals and the bulk of the Democratic (and much of the Republican) rank-and-file are the same working class schlubs you’ll find at any DSA meeting. They’re all still proles, subject to the same degradation of the industrial process as any proper socialist. Their understanding of the world differs, but their material conditions are much the same. Forming a mass line necessarily minds finding common causes that liberals and leftists can unify under, whether it is an anti-war movement or environmental activism or a civil rights crusade.
Organizations of every stripe can and do fail. Fascism, as a tendency, is an eternal existential threat. This isn’t an excuse to distance yourself from your friends, your family, and your neighbors on ideological grounds.
Vanguards are a great way of mobilizing a small number of committed activists to radical action. But the point of the vanguard is to lead the body public, not to fight the body public.
Ignorance is no excuse in the court of law. It should be no different for ideological matters. Liberals choose to become class traitors or were already class enemies by being born not into the working class. They should suffer the consequences of that choice.
Also we’re not just talking about individual people but a political party. It doesn’t matter who the voters are, the party leadership is class enemies, they aren’t working class, the party itself is designed as capitalist party. No compromise should ever be made with those. As quoted before we have nothing in common with the cause of the class enemy. Ever.
I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of a mass line or rather what purpose it serves for us. A mass line that is not lead by Marxists will ultimately benefit those who are not Marxists the most. That is a bad deal for us. Mass lines only work with a communist party in power already.
Take a look into recent history with the Occupy Wallstreet protests for example. They all amounted to nothing and fizzled out because they were “liberalised”.
Lastly the vanguard doesn’t fight the public body. It’s not what I propose either. The public body is not liberals. Those are a parasite inside the public body that needs to be removed. You’re following the enemy’s logic by equating liberalism with the people.
I wish someone would tell the SEC.
Which is, again, the purpose of a Vanguard movement.
At the same time, vanguards need to accrue power and public exposure over time. It doesn’t happen overnight.
You will inevitably have to deal with people who enjoy more authority, access more resources, and command a larger audience than you, who aren’t Maoists.
How do you deal with them? Throw hands? Pretend they don’t exist?
You do not acquire power by handing it over to liberals. That quite in the contrary depowers us more.
As I said we need our own mass parties that are lead by us, not liberal parties or movements.
Take a look at other countries. In the UK Corbyn is currently forming his own party and drawing in great numbers after he was slandered out of Labour leadership.
In Germany Sarah Wagenknecht, long term former leader of the communist platform within the left party, is forming her own populist mass party.
In France the new popular front has been formed under left and not liberal leadership and won the elections.
Joining fold with the democrats is not building your own mass line. It makes you a collaborator in building a mass line for liberals.
Also dealing with class enemies is only something that can be truly done once you’ve consolidated power. Then it doesn’t matter how many of them there are as long as you have the means to hold onto power and decimate them. Every revolution needs its revolutionary terror to take care of counter-revolutionaries.
The goal is not to take part and win in bourgeois elections. That is systematically impossible actually. Taking part in those elections only servers as a platform to reach more people. You don’t need an actual majority for a successful revolution or coup. The Bolsheviks did not have the majority if you look at the first Russian elections after the overthrow of the Tsar, yet they still won the civil war.
Leftists don’t have power to hand. You make it sound like leftist leaders are already in power.
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During WW2, certainly. And it worked out well enough, until FDR plotzed.
United fronts that protect and preserve the lives and livelihoods of residents, accelerate the accumulation of industrial capacity, and generate the kind of economic surplus necessary to enter a socialist stage of economic development are fully within the interests of the working class as a body. But like any large scale public policy, there are winners and losers. It is very easy for a bourgeois media to portray a subset of working people - coal miners during a green revolution, insurance sales reps looking down the barrel of unemployment on the eve of a single payer health care plan, fascist state bureaucrats in the wake of a socialist revolution - as victims of an oppressive left-liberal reform policy.
M: Son of the Century does a great job of breaking down Mussolini’s rise to power. And it was the direct result of large swaths of ex-military and special forces divisions being galvanized by private incendiary media platforms bankrolled by bourgeois class interests. This wasn’t Giacomo Matteotti playing too nicely with liberals. If anything, the socialists’ failure of the 1920s was in not extending their revolution to the professional classes in opposition to the unchecked violence of the Nationalists.
For some reason my dumb ass read united front as popular front back when i wrote it from work, mb mb