this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

So no, you aren't familiar with the Marxist stance on Electoralism. For reference, they are Marxists.

No, they do not need to win the election to end Capitalism. Participation in bourgeois elections is to delegitimize the system (such as pointing out Dem/Rep collusion to kick them off the balot in Georgia), and advertise their platform.

Marxists believe revolution is necessary and electoralism is a sham.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That sounds like a way to get a lot of people killed and end up worse than how you started.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Historically, Marxist revolutions have dramatically improved conditions.

[–] Grebes 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

You'd have to be a bit silly to think the Tsarist regime was better for Russia, the nationalist Kuomintang for China, the fascist slaver Batista for Cuba, etc.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

The vast majority of every poverty alleviation statistic for the last 50 years has been China.

Generally speaking, third world countries do not advance without tackling the worldwide capitalist system. This is because it is set up to enrich international corporations largely seated in the heart of first world countries, particularly the US, and can only sustain itself through the maintenance of profits acquired through exploitation of those third world countries. Unequal exchange, forcing international business-friendly labor laws on them, preventing them from building up their own industries so they must import necessities, structuring their economies around whatever the imperial core needs (lithium, oil, an underpaid service industry), forcing them into situations where they have a ton of dollars and therefore must import using them, etc etc.

Under this scenario, conditions in these countries regularly degrade. Poverty and a lack of infrastructure, low wages, and the necessity of a pro-international-capitalist government means petty autocracy around the basics of life. High unemployment, rates, few prospects, a brain drain, and eventually internal violence via black markets, the associated organized crime, the government, and those who correctly recognize the problem and attempt to directly combat it (fighters for national liberation, socialists, etc). Things are not good and they rarely get better, quite the opposite. They shift according to whims far outside their control at virtually any level, as they are enslaved by capital right down to their national government. Resistance movements rise up for simple things like insigenous rights, land rights, etc, and the federal government suppresses them with far greater violence.

When organized anticapitalist forces win a revolution, they tend to work directly against the problems that fomented the revolution. They address issues of land rights, abolish systems like feudal relationships and the most heinous capital relations, invest in public education, utilities, housing, etc that were denies by their xapitalist comprador governments.

And the US responds. It attempts to destroy them, as it requires control over its vassal states to maintain its position at the top of a conveyor belt moving their resources and other labor products over to itself. Much of what you see that is negative in countries run by socialists is of that particular legacy. The US killed 20% of the population in North Korea and tried to isolate it so it spawned Juche. After the fall of the USSR, its primary trading partner, the US unleashed a massive series of sanctions, attempting to starve the country of everything needed to run it. The meme of a starving, poor North Korean is from the poverty created by fuel and food from sanctions. You until the late 80s North Korea regularly outperformed South Korea. This playbook has repeated many times. Those countries that can both carry out the initial revolution and then defend it against attack do much better than the alternative offered to them.

You might be thinking, "hey, but what about Japan or Taiwan or Estonia? They are doing okay." This is true, though you should keep in mind that they have been propped up in order to act as forward bases against targets of US Empire, namely Russia and China. And they are reigned in and will be subjugated as soon as it is seen as more beneficial than not for US interests. Japan experienced this in the 90s when the US created a massive recession for them.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_revolution and clicked on the most recent successful entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War

The civil war was characterized by numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including summary executions, massacres, purges, kidnappings, and mass rapes. It resulted in the deaths of over 17,000 people, including civilians, insurgents, and army and police personnel; and the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly throughout rural Nepal.

That's not great.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Who did the killings? What are the numbers on social violence, social murder, in the previous status quo? The capitaliat status quo is one of poverty and disposession, hard lives and early deaths due to a lack of infrastructure, safety in workplaces, poor nutrition and healthcare, environmental degradation, etc.

That violence is intentionally maintained by the capitalist order, it is violence done to every working person, but particularly those in the global south like Nepal. Include it in your calculations. Watch it dwarf those numbers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You'll notice that the government did far more of the killing than the Communist revolutionaries. And, like I said, metrics are improving since overthrowing the previous regime.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn't Nepal just a liberal government with a major party being nominally Maoist?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Could be, I haven't investegated as much as I should have, I probably could have attacked the notion that sortition was a good idea of gathering information on Communist movements.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Survivorship bias, after we murdered everyone that was having a bad time everyone was having a great time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Do you seriously believe that?

[–] stringere -5 points 2 months ago

That's exactly how it went down last time they were successful.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They do need to win an election to end capitalism, because they have no power unless they win.

They can literally do absolutely nothing to accomplish their goal unless they win, but then since they mathematically can't win either, all they can do is yell impotently into the void.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Which part of "revolution is necessary and electoralism is a sham" was difficult for you?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They aren't running for a revolution, if they were, they wouldn't be on the ballot for an election.

It's all performative nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'll just copy and paste my earlier explanation, hope it makes sense for you this time:

Participation in bourgeois elections is to delegitimize the system (such as pointing out Dem/Rep collusion to kick them off the balot in Georgia), and advertise their platform.

Marxists believe revolution is necessary and electoralism is a sham.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If they want a revolution, they would revolt.

They aren't. They're running, poorly, in an election, where they will be 100% ineffectual and their message, if it's heard at all, completely forgotten.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

"Capitalism itself cannot be reformed. Its supreme law and driving force is the maximization of profit. The only force capable of putting an end to this criminal system is the organized working class. Capitalism cannot be voted out of power—it will take a revolution. The capitalist class will stop at nothing to prevent or overturn reforms by repressing, misdirecting or quelling any form of popular rebellion. Without a complete uprooting of the system that causes all the problems workers and oppressed peoples face, exploitation and oppression will still exist. The capitalist state will continue to rule. Capitalism is a failed system that, in its insatiable appetite for ever greater profits, threatens global ecological destruction on an unprecedented scale, with workers and oppressed people bearing the disproportionate burden of the environmental disaster. More than at any other time, it is the working class that holds the future for humanity. For the people and planet to live, capitalism must go. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is dedicated to building a revolutionary workers’ party in the United States. A party that can unite the multinational U.S. working class is an essential and irreplaceable element in the struggle for socialism."

Taken right from their very public PSL Party Platform online. You clearly are entirely unfamiliar with Marxism and PSL, why act like you know more than you do? I can make theory recommendations if you want, but don't pretend to know what PSL's goals and methods are without even reading the party platform, that's silly.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What I'm saying is the Marxist statements are entirely irrelevant once they agreed to run in an election.

They never grew up out of their Marxist phase in college, have no idea how any of this works, and it shows.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What I'm saying is the Marxist statements are entirely irrelevant once they agreed to run in an election.

No. Lenin advocated participation in bourgeois elections for the reasons I gave, delegitimizing the electoral system and advertising strength and the platform.

They never grew up out of their Marxist phase in college, have no idea how any of this works, and it shows.

What is a "Marxist phase?" You have no idea what they are trying to do or why, and you make up in your mind palace contradictory positions they don't hold because you haven't read Marx.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Marxist Phase - The typical college obsession before people actually grow up and realize it's all nonsense.

See also: Randian phase.

Some people grow out of it, some don't.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You seem to think you've got Marxism all figured out for someone that can't seem to grasp the basics of it. Mind explaining what about Marxism is "all nonsense?"

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's great in theory, but it doesn't actually work in real life. It never has. This is why people look at these Marxists trying to run in a Presidential election and just point and laugh.

It's an angsty philosophy for young people who haven't learned better yet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

It's great in theory, but it doesn't actually work in real life. It never has.

It does work, and continues to. Please explain exactly what you mean here, you're just vaguely gesturing. What was Marx wrong about? What part of Marxism doesn't work? Can you give concrete examples of trackable metrics?

This is why people look at these Marxists trying to run in a Presidential election and just point and laugh.

You do, sure. Marxism is rising in the US, though, as the contradictions within Capitalism Marx noted result in further wealth disparity. It's also increasingly popular worldwide, the PRC is the largest economy in the world and is run along Marxist-Leninist lines. Less than a month ago, Sri Lanka elected a Marxist-Leninist president.

It's an angsty philosophy for young people who haven't learned better yet.

What's better, in your eyes? What would you recommend a Marxist read or learn from to "grow out of Marxism?" Your "great in theory, not in practice" US State Department nonsense has been repeated constantly, every single Marxist has heard that before, I'm talking about actual points.

I suggest you read Blackshirts and Reds, it's a great book debunking common anticommunist myths.