Take this comment for instance. The OP posts a quote by Marx saying basically what Lenin said over 65 years later in Left-Wing Communism: bourgeois elections should be used by a communist party to advance revolutionary platforms.
The commenter goes on to say that Marx and Lenin’s words are invalidated because Lenin participated in Duma’s, basically parroting socdem and revisionist excuses to vote for "the lesser evil, completely ignoring the above that communists should participate in bourgeois political structures as a communist party, not saying vote for which strain of reactionary ideology you think is best.
The comment below it brings up these points, but the fact that the first is upvoted this highly is concerning, especially given how strict the sub usually is in maintaining an ML line.
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The biggest issue I see with jumping into the support of bourgeois picks is that no matter what you do, the revolutionary message is going to be coopted and distilled to appease the elite. Just take a look at Bernie, the perfect socdem. His constant push to getting M4A mainstream has amounted to nothing at the party level. The Democrats have just offered lip service to it with no intention to push for it. So now it’s strengthened the Democrats to make it seem like they care about M4A when it’s far from it.
The La Riva campaign is the best example of following a good line when it comes to electoralism in the US. It’s used as a tool to get further attention in a country where elections are seen as the be-all-end-all of political change, and spread a revolutionary platform amongst the masses. Plenty of comrades have joined PSL due to the election campaigns or have become aware of the party and been further radicalized. There’s no false hope of actually winning, it’s simply using elections to expose the system.
This specific twisting of Marx and Lenin’s words to suit revisionism is something that always bothers me. I’ve seen far too many “communists” use this false reasoning to try to rally others into voting for bourgeois parties.
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