Capitalism! How fun!!
Progressive liberals like Bernie Sanders aren’t much different and only marginally better, critiquing “crony capitalism” / “neoliberal capitalism” / “uber-capitalism”, without directly challenging capitalism itself.
Political efficacy, in my opinion, is a better strategy than fruitless idealism.
Reformism keeps not working, as evidenced by the last 45 years of ever-worsening neoliberalism, but liberals will keep trying anyway.
Marxists are not idealists; they are materialists, specifically, dialectical materialists.
Revolution doesn’t exactly have a good history either. If anything, it’s shown to be a significantly worse option. It’s a pipe dream to believe that a revolutionary party would relinquish political power after gaining it.
Okie doke. What’s your suggestion then? You think a Marxist candidate can win one of the two primaries? You think a Marxist candidate can beat both parties in the general? What exactly is your alternative to incrementally progressive policy?
That’s not rhetorical, if you have a serious alternative I’m sincerely eager to hear it.
No socialist State has ever been won at the ballot box, though electoralism has its tactical uses in the interim. It’s mostly done through helping the working class develop class consciousness, through labor organizing and militant labor action, through developing dual power, and then ultimately replacing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Few people remember that Communists and other socialists helped us win the weekend and the eight hour workday, and these weren’t won through elections but through labor militancy. They don’t remember because we were purged and memory-holed by two red scares and a cold war.
Cool. You can directly criticize capitalism. Do your grassroots. Don’t hate on Bernie because he is using the most effective tools at his disposal. What he’s doing is, probably, better overall for the general state of socialist thought in this country than any alternative at his disposal.
You can take direct labor action without denigrating the man for following his path: trying to move the window from inside the system. If you think you can do better, do it. As it stands, do you think you’ve done more, to actually shift overall labor sentiment in this country to the left, than he has through his “marginally better” moderate progressivism?
Marxists, Anarchists, and any other form of leftist stands to gain real traction not from electoralism (outside of highlighting the soon to be mentioned actions), but from organization, such as Unionization.
Cool, I agree. But moderately better politicians like Bernie calling out crony capitalism is better than not. Labor is still free to organize.
