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.
We have to face it, a lot of internet communists are not really communists and would quickly settle for a few reforms. Give them free healthcare and free college, and I’m sure these people would turn against actual communists, saying that “we’re too radical and idealist” or that “it’s the best we can do right now”.
My favorite one is when they say that voting for a social democrat candidate will bring socialism because people will love the reforms and will want to go further. Do these people know nothing of history? We have a century of social democratic policies in Europe and socialism still hasn’t arrived!
The objective of social democracy is to weaken the popular support for socialism and communism. Not to mention that policies like free healthcare or free college, would envolve drastic changes in American society, which would only come if there is enough pressure from the masses. This implies that there is a lot of militancy in unions and radical left parties. Otherwise you can vote for Bernie or whoever, they will only accomplish insignificant reforms.
It’s not just you, I’ve Def seen an uptick. These electoralism arguments are so stale.
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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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That comment is pretty bad. I don’t think the direct implication of the OP is to equate the two elections but to.point out the similarities between them, which from the excerpt seem extremely striking.
Then the commenter just throws around stuff about understanding material conditions. Did they do that? Did they find a good reason to not take that message to heart? We will never know because they will never tell.
Yeah, they are pretty revisionist. Famed for banning other commies.
