Awesome, yeah, you’re so right! I’m going to go vote in an American socialist to be president. Oh, you’re telling me that the entire American political establishment has made this course of action impossible by setting all manner of social institutions, from the press to the criminal justice system, in direct opposition to socialism? You’re telling me every single attempt to establish socialism by democratic means has been subverted and squashed by military operations backed by the US government and the US intelligence apparatus? And that these blatant affronts against democracy are still celebrated by reactionaries in Guatemala and Chile who spent decades murdering leftists for their brief time as the dominant political group, for the horrible crime of putting the means of production in the hands of peasants and workers?
You’re telling me that the only successful attempts at establishing a proletarian state had to “anti-democratically” suppress bourgeois political parties to maintain stability in the face of American imperialists? And that all avenues of peaceful revolution have been tried and inevitably lead to the forceful encounter and resolution of the historical dialectic between classes through violent revolution, just as much as this was the case in every major change of mode of production in history?
Dear golly me then, looks like those Marxists in Palestine, Cuba, the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Angola, and countless other countries that fought off colonizers aren’t just savages who weren’t capable of understanding the noble ways of the Western Left, and liberal democracy isn’t the way for workers to achieve political power. You’re not going to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Awesome, yeah, you’re so right! I’m going to go vote in an American socialist to be president. Oh, you’re telling me that the entire American political establishment has made this course of action impossible by setting all manner of social institutions, from the press to the criminal justice system, in direct opposition to socialism? You’re telling me every single attempt to establish socialism by democratic means has been subverted and squashed by military operations backed by the US government and the US intelligence apparatus? And that these blatant affronts against democracy are still celebrated by reactionaries in Guatemala and Chile who spent decades murdering leftists for their brief time as the dominant political group, for the horrible crime of putting the means of production in the hands of peasants and workers?
You’re telling me that the only successful attempts at establishing a proletarian state had to “anti-democratically” suppress bourgeois political parties to maintain stability in the face of American imperialists? And that all avenues of peaceful revolution have been tried and inevitably lead to the forceful encounter and resolution of the historical dialectic between classes through violent revolution, just as much as this was the case in every major change of mode of production in history?
Dear golly me then, looks like those Marxists in Palestine, Cuba, the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Angola, and countless other countries that fought off colonizers aren’t just savages who weren’t capable of understanding the noble ways of the Western Left, and liberal democracy isn’t the way for workers to achieve political power. You’re not going to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.