Or was it Biden’s victory and liberal’s exhaustion with politics in a Trump-era world?

I can’t help but wonder if the presence of a Democrat in the presidency just sort of pacifies liberal, left, and radical mass movements and mobilization.

  • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    33·
    10 months ago

    No, if anything Sanders demonstrated the limits of reformist movement in America.

    It is the left who has failed to take this lesson seriously and use it to inform their approach accordingly.

    In other words, without a strategy, the left will get nowhere, with or without Sanders. The Sanders movement, despite providing a tiny glimpse of hope for reformism, is always doomed to fail. It is what we learn from his failure that matters.

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      Yeah I’d also like to add that revolution doesn’t typically happen until reform has some success followed by failure

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            Kinda. If you look at past successful socialist revolutions, most often helmed by a far weaker party than the bourgeois establishment, you can see that they have actual strategy (informed by theory) toward success.

            For example, Mao was absolutely obsessed with land reform. When the Chinese Communists were nearly wiped out during the Long March, Mao was insistent on land reform because he could see the revolutionary potential it could unleash from the rural peasantry. It wasn’t just building a power base after they had been banished to the countryside, he was absolutely convinced that land reform is where it will play a decisive role in the revolution.

            Chiang Kai-shek wasn’t a bad opponent, you know. He was a brilliant military commander and given his vast military resources, could eventually overwhelm the communists. His greatest mistake was to underestimate Mao’s land reform, which cost him the ultimate victory.

            What the American left needs today is to pinpoint - through theory - what would be the decisive factors in defeating capitalism and build an actual strategy around them. The problem is that they don’t even know how and where to begin.