I’m an anarcho-syndicalist, but I always want to know more about other socialist ideologies. I was never able to understand the one party state of ML, and tbh it was a major friction point for me before now. It makes a lot of sense actually to have struggle-unity-struggle within the party instead of dividing the proles among multiple parties
Personally I think it will need to be a political revolution rather than a violent revolution, and it has to happen within the imperial core, ideally in the US. I’d say this even if I weren’t a US citizen. Modern imperialist powers have military strength far beyond the capabilities of any ground-up proletarian army, and our bourgeois democracy is much more comfortable with extreme action towards leftists. I think a violent leftist revolution in the US would see nuclear weapons being utilized, so for that reason we’d need to have political capture.
To get to that point, we need to start locally and use plain language to explain leftist concepts to people, because the academic jargon can be dense and has a lot of anti-communist propaganda surrounding it. By starting locally, we create the groundwork to move immediately to a classless society rather than a slow transition via socdem. I think it would be best to continue the push for ranked choice voting, but until we get that win, we should use local efforts to radicalize the democratic party from the ground up. The democratic party is very poor at mobilizing local democrats, so local capture should be relatively easy. We will need patience, expecting a socialist president within 8 years is extremely optimistic to say the least and only sets us up for disappointment.
Personally I think it will need to be a political revolution
How are you going to get the bourgeoisie to peacefully relinquish their dominance when they rig primaries against people like Sanders and eliminate threats like the Black Panther Party?
I like to think of it like a union campaign that was found out before filing with the nlrb. It will be challenging, but it’s still possible to win with a well organized committee. Their union busting tactics will be backed by their monopoly on violence (alwayshasbeen.jpg), but to me it’s better to be arrested 20 times than to be turned into nuclear ash. By focusing locally, we’ll have the groundwork to capture the democratic primaries. Above all else, the democratic party wants to win elections, so they’ll move left too in the process. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to focus on local elections. Start in small towns, then cities, then counties, then states, and finally federally. The presidency will likely be the very last political position to have a socialist elected.
The evidence for me lays in the states of Minnesota and Michigan. In states like New York and California, they have successfully captured the legislature. The democratic party doesn’t do shit in those states and seems to be regressing.
However, MN is a solid purple state despite their voting record, and MI has been contested back and forth for decades. Both states got a democratic majority in all branches of government, and they both got hard at work passing year’s worth of progressive policies in the last year. In typical liberal fashion they only went after policies that had a supermajority of support, but they likely succeeded in securing the next election because of it.
A lot of the opposition that baby leftists like ancoms have to ML concepts and ML states stems from a lack of education and knowledge. This is not their fault, obviously a bourgeois education system purposely hides information about the historical and present realities of socialist states, distorts their ideologies and purposely misinforms. The reason why they do this should be fairly obvious when considering the class interest that a bourgeois state represents.
However that also means that in order to break through this barrier of ignorance and miseducation people need to put in the work and actively seek out the information that has been withheld from them, which can be quite tough as there are sometimes significant language barriers simply due to the fact that there was historically very little translation of Russian and Chinese literature on these subjects.
If you want for instance to educate yourself on how the Soviet system actually worked, like the nuts and bolts of it in detail and not just in sweeping generalizations written by people with an ideological agenda to discredit it, you need to go digging in fairly obscure literature. The same goes for the Chinese system where there is plenty of literature of course in the Chinese language but much of it is just not accessible outside of China, in part due to the purposeful suppression of this information by the western information space.
But when you actually begin to learn how the political system of the PRC works in detail, right down to the lowest local levels you see that there is actually an incredible amount of not just political and ideological struggle but active grassroots democratic participation. And this is replicated all the way from the bottom to the top of the system with the government constantly working on a loop of input from the people, crafting policies, putting them into practice, them listening to the feedback and criticism and repeating the loop all over again perfecting their policies bit by bit each time.
Of course sometimes they will get things wrong, and some experiments will not work out, this is to be expected. But what really sets a proletarian democracy apart from a liberal bourgeois system is that the state actively makes an effort to correct course, respond to the public’s needs and work in the best interest of the people. In the US the opposite is the case and we have seen this proven by academic studies which show that the policies implemented by the government have virtually zero correlation to what the people want.
And the result of this are reflected in the approval ratings of the respective governments, with China having one of if not the highest approval ratings in the world and the US one of the lowest.
And by the way China is not a one party state. Yes it is a dictatorship of the proletariat which means that the communist party, as by far the biggest political force with almost a hundred million members, will always be the primary driver of the state, but there are other political parties independent of the CPC which are also represented in the National People’s Congress. These are kind of like special interest groups and although they are a minority they play a fairly active role in the political discussions that take place. They get to represent their interest groups and give input, and participate at least to some extent in shaping policies.
Is the existence of multiple parties necessary for a system to be democratic? No, not at all. The PRC would be no less democratic even if no other parties but the CPC were allowed. Then all of the democracy would just happen in one single party, making it effectively a no-party system, kind of like Cuba. But it is an interesting factoid that most westerners are not familiar with.
Democracy is not simply voting for one party or the other, it is a process of self-determination that can exist in many different frameworks, not just in the framework of liberal multi-party parliamentary systems. More than any other civilization in the world, it is the so-called West that has never really understood the concept of democracy as it has always been too obsessed with procedure and formal structures rather than with the application and representation of the will of the people, their real interests and their material needs. Most other civilizations already had much more advanced democratic traditions in one way or another before European colonialism came.
I wouldn’t call myself a lib, but this explanation for a one party state makes way more sense than anything else I’ve seen.
Our explanations can help new socialists too :)
Stick around, maybe you’ll learn some more
I’m an anarcho-syndicalist, but I always want to know more about other socialist ideologies. I was never able to understand the one party state of ML, and tbh it was a major friction point for me before now. It makes a lot of sense actually to have struggle-unity-struggle within the party instead of dividing the proles among multiple parties
That’s great to hear!
Out of curiosity, communists would like to see a classless stateless society too, but how do you propose we get there?
Personally I think it will need to be a political revolution rather than a violent revolution, and it has to happen within the imperial core, ideally in the US. I’d say this even if I weren’t a US citizen. Modern imperialist powers have military strength far beyond the capabilities of any ground-up proletarian army, and our bourgeois democracy is much more comfortable with extreme action towards leftists. I think a violent leftist revolution in the US would see nuclear weapons being utilized, so for that reason we’d need to have political capture.
To get to that point, we need to start locally and use plain language to explain leftist concepts to people, because the academic jargon can be dense and has a lot of anti-communist propaganda surrounding it. By starting locally, we create the groundwork to move immediately to a classless society rather than a slow transition via socdem. I think it would be best to continue the push for ranked choice voting, but until we get that win, we should use local efforts to radicalize the democratic party from the ground up. The democratic party is very poor at mobilizing local democrats, so local capture should be relatively easy. We will need patience, expecting a socialist president within 8 years is extremely optimistic to say the least and only sets us up for disappointment.
How are you going to get the bourgeoisie to peacefully relinquish their dominance when they rig primaries against people like Sanders and eliminate threats like the Black Panther Party?
I like to think of it like a union campaign that was found out before filing with the nlrb. It will be challenging, but it’s still possible to win with a well organized committee. Their union busting tactics will be backed by their monopoly on violence (alwayshasbeen.jpg), but to me it’s better to be arrested 20 times than to be turned into nuclear ash. By focusing locally, we’ll have the groundwork to capture the democratic primaries. Above all else, the democratic party wants to win elections, so they’ll move left too in the process. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to focus on local elections. Start in small towns, then cities, then counties, then states, and finally federally. The presidency will likely be the very last political position to have a socialist elected.
No they don’t, if they did, they’d do something for their constituents instead of deferring to the Republicans even when they had a supermajority
The evidence for me lays in the states of Minnesota and Michigan. In states like New York and California, they have successfully captured the legislature. The democratic party doesn’t do shit in those states and seems to be regressing.
However, MN is a solid purple state despite their voting record, and MI has been contested back and forth for decades. Both states got a democratic majority in all branches of government, and they both got hard at work passing year’s worth of progressive policies in the last year. In typical liberal fashion they only went after policies that had a supermajority of support, but they likely succeeded in securing the next election because of it.
I want you to know i think you mean well, but this truly is some of the most delusional, reality-denying wishful thinking i’ve read in a long time…
“move immediately to a classless society”?
“radicalize the democratic party from the ground up”?
“a socialist president”?
I’m gonna go ahead and assume you are very young and still have a lot of liberal idealism to unlearn.
A lot of the opposition that baby leftists like ancoms have to ML concepts and ML states stems from a lack of education and knowledge. This is not their fault, obviously a bourgeois education system purposely hides information about the historical and present realities of socialist states, distorts their ideologies and purposely misinforms. The reason why they do this should be fairly obvious when considering the class interest that a bourgeois state represents.
However that also means that in order to break through this barrier of ignorance and miseducation people need to put in the work and actively seek out the information that has been withheld from them, which can be quite tough as there are sometimes significant language barriers simply due to the fact that there was historically very little translation of Russian and Chinese literature on these subjects.
If you want for instance to educate yourself on how the Soviet system actually worked, like the nuts and bolts of it in detail and not just in sweeping generalizations written by people with an ideological agenda to discredit it, you need to go digging in fairly obscure literature. The same goes for the Chinese system where there is plenty of literature of course in the Chinese language but much of it is just not accessible outside of China, in part due to the purposeful suppression of this information by the western information space.
But when you actually begin to learn how the political system of the PRC works in detail, right down to the lowest local levels you see that there is actually an incredible amount of not just political and ideological struggle but active grassroots democratic participation. And this is replicated all the way from the bottom to the top of the system with the government constantly working on a loop of input from the people, crafting policies, putting them into practice, them listening to the feedback and criticism and repeating the loop all over again perfecting their policies bit by bit each time.
Of course sometimes they will get things wrong, and some experiments will not work out, this is to be expected. But what really sets a proletarian democracy apart from a liberal bourgeois system is that the state actively makes an effort to correct course, respond to the public’s needs and work in the best interest of the people. In the US the opposite is the case and we have seen this proven by academic studies which show that the policies implemented by the government have virtually zero correlation to what the people want.
And the result of this are reflected in the approval ratings of the respective governments, with China having one of if not the highest approval ratings in the world and the US one of the lowest.
And by the way China is not a one party state. Yes it is a dictatorship of the proletariat which means that the communist party, as by far the biggest political force with almost a hundred million members, will always be the primary driver of the state, but there are other political parties independent of the CPC which are also represented in the National People’s Congress. These are kind of like special interest groups and although they are a minority they play a fairly active role in the political discussions that take place. They get to represent their interest groups and give input, and participate at least to some extent in shaping policies.
Is the existence of multiple parties necessary for a system to be democratic? No, not at all. The PRC would be no less democratic even if no other parties but the CPC were allowed. Then all of the democracy would just happen in one single party, making it effectively a no-party system, kind of like Cuba. But it is an interesting factoid that most westerners are not familiar with.
Democracy is not simply voting for one party or the other, it is a process of self-determination that can exist in many different frameworks, not just in the framework of liberal multi-party parliamentary systems. More than any other civilization in the world, it is the so-called West that has never really understood the concept of democracy as it has always been too obsessed with procedure and formal structures rather than with the application and representation of the will of the people, their real interests and their material needs. Most other civilizations already had much more advanced democratic traditions in one way or another before European colonialism came.