With the exception of a certain user recently, of course. Lol
Seriously though, this railroad strike vote doesn't suprise me. I stopped caring about AOC good/bad a long time ago, and i feel thats the general consensus here. They've proven time and again that they are Social Imperialists that are expressly not trying to form a voting block to move the party left. They're libs with no ideology that whine about commitee appoints as why they have to vote like ghouls. They all do more harm than good to any kind of real movement if people conflate their shit with socialism.
I knew she sucked when she made that eulogy tweet over McCain. Like she was still a bartender at this point, and she still bend the knee and genuflect to the political establishment that she wasn't even officially a member of.
You don't have to read a single paragraph of theory to understand AOC is complete trash.
she was still a bartender at this point
it's pure media mythologizing, she was an intern for Ted Kennedy years before she ever did the bartender gig that got her the prole cred. She also majored in International relations at Boston U and worked with the peace corps in Niger.
Wow, not the peace corps. I do remember being young and dumb and… wanting to join in hopes of helping the world this country destroyed. Good thing they make it really hard to get into, because I didn’t want to go through 15 interviews. It was only later in life I learned that they’re just as bad as many other parts of America imperialism. And it also makes sense why she is the way she is.
I went full death to america when I saw the beginnings of covid apartheid shaping up, and have not gone back
I'm not them but I would guess they mean the elites getting to isolate at home while the companies they own force workers to keep showing up and being exposed to the virus without any protection, no sick leave, no healthcare, etc
This is basically the hexbear party line
I don't think it's possible to take any socdem seriously. It's pretty clear that they haven't read any marxist/anarchist/syndicalist literature. I barely have, but if they did they didn't take it to heart or they wouldn't be registered democrats
If any politician has read marx, I would suspect Bernie has but who knows
When Bernie lost in 2020, it was interesting seeing all the libs that attached themselves to him and his campaign show themselves as unprincipled grifters
I think a lot of people who viewed themselves as 'progressive' bernie supporters genuinely mean 'like teddy roosevelt', who obviously isn't left-leaning in the slightest, even for back then considering how socialists of all kinds were running around. Including how Roosevelt was very much an imperialist
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty certain the powerful communist, anarchist, and syndicalist movements back then weren't concerned with electing progressives into office
Bernie would've been alright if everyone else around him was more left than him, sorta like Lula, but it was the exact opposite. He was surrounded by the standard Dem political-campaign-industrial complex.
both liberals and conservatives share a fixation on AOC
leftists do not
Perfect summation. The day you realize you don't care about AOC is when you can be sure youre a leftist
the dessalines takedown should really be enough for anyone who's not a radlib piece of shit to stop caring about her
Watching Bernie give the establishment dems my money turned me off of any involvement with the democratic party, and I feel pretty vindicated by everything that's happened since. Now it's just keeping my hate pure and learning to organize better
Everyone here knows "The Squad" is a dead end, but on a related note I'm not sure a viable large scale socialist movement will emerge in the US without some kind of national level leadership. Mike Duncan was talking about this on a podcast interview a few months back, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I think he might be right, but I have a hard time imagining some figure or figures like this emerging. Maybe I'm being too much of a doomer here, idk. Someone please tell me how wrong I am so I can feel better about the future lol.
EDIT: I think what I'm really saying here is that we need PUNISHED BERNIE to lead the revolution :punished-bernie:
Yep, and that's part of what worries me. Anyone actually left who comes anywhere near that level would probably be killed or derailed long beforehand. I wish I could see some around that, but who knows what the future brings.
I think his point is at least worth considering. This is from the interview, and it's a response to a question about why mass protests haven't been resulting in any real change:
MD: There are several reasons why I think that that isn’t happening. One is that, in my experience studying all these revolutions, there needs to be some kind of what I would call a revolutionary column, from the top down, that is moving against whatever the existing system is. And that you can have popular protests, and popular protests are a necessary component of any social revolution. But unless you have people inside the inner circles of power–what in our case would be like, the politicians in the Senate, maybe we’re talking about leading tech billionaires who are going to be able to fund things surreptitiously, the way that, say, the Duke d’Orléans was surreptitiously funding most of the revolutionary journalists that were driving events in 1789, like Camille Desmoulins–absent that kind of force inside the political structure, it’s gonna be difficult for that popular movement to translate into actual grabbing of political power. You do need somebody who’s there, ready to take it over.
MD: And you take the Russian Revolution as a perfect example. The February Revolution did not happen just because the workers in Petrograd rose up and were marching through the streets. It also happened because members of Tzar Nicholas’s own family–those politicians who were absolutely in the cabinet, who were serving as the senior councils that were powerless at the time–were all of a mind that Nicolas probably needs to be removed at this point. And so pushing Nicholas out of the way–if the ruling class elite in Russia or in France had, in fact, been united, I don’t think that those revolutions actually come off. It’s never, I don’t think ever, going to be enough to simply have people marching through the streets. You need that upper rung to be willing to move in and pop the people that are in power, and push them out of the way.
MD: And also, you need the funding for all of these things. Like Lenin was taking money. Famously, Lenin was taking money from the Germans, we know that in 1917. But even before that, he’s going and having meetings, when he’s in exile, with British capitalists who are sympathetic to the liberal, constitutionalist wing of the Russian revolutionary sector–like the cadets, people like Pavel Milyukov or then, Kerensky is a little bit to his left–that are sympathetic to that constitutionalist movement in Russia, and see somebody like Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a group who could advance that interest, which is popping the Tsar and removing him from power.
So the Bolsheviks are taking money from like, capitalist entities in the West, as a matter of course. So if you don’t have those sorts of things going on inside of your hypothetical revolutionary coalition, you have a bunch of people massing in the streets, but nothing, really, in terms of realpolitik, is going to happen. And right now you can tell how much the liberal elites in the Democratic Party, or in just sort of the liberal business sectors, are just terrified of any kind of mass, grassroots political movement. They just want everybody to go home. That’s what they want to have happen. So they can just get back to the business of going through the motions of being leaders of a country without actually having to be leaders of that country.
I read this as him basically saying you need a vanguard party to successfully carry out a revolution, and this party must have real power and influence. In the modern day US, most avenues that might propel leaders to that position have been almost completely blocked off to the left, but having key people in those positions seems like it would be critical. As timid and milquetoast as Bernie was, he was still a figure that large numbers of people were able to rally around. It feels like we really need that, but actually left. That seems tricky to pull off.
Hmm what's the argument against building locally and then consolidating?
Building locally is great of course, but how exactly does this consolidation work? That seems like the really hard part, not that building locally is easy by any means. Back to the topic of "The Squad", it would help to have national figures like that actually leading things, but anyone who is capable and willing to do that would have been pushed out or assassinated long before. I'm not saying it's impossible or anything, but it's just something I've been thinking about. :thinkin-lenin:
It's basically just the opposite of splitting: you make separate commie orgs and despite the inevitable infighting (between commie orgs) you push really hard and merge them. This was more or less the USSR's advice to every group of communist parties in a given country. It recently happened in Nepal.
Imagine if PSL and the commie caucuses of the DSA and I dunno Socialist Alternative or something all grew and competed with each other, doing better in different parts of the country and thereby discovering better ways to organize under the slightly different conditions. Then folks in each party build campaigns to merge because we don't disagree enough to stay separated (pretend that Socialist Alternative got more ML and less Trot for the sake of argument). Then they merge and bam, suddenly there's one big party like 2X as big as the largest previous one with all kinds of experience and successful organizing strategies.
I think we'd have to get very lucky to have a national leader that would whip up support and build a party rather than the other way around. Aside from them getting killed off, most likely a given random who got that attention would not be answerable to a group of socialists demanding a party line or basic standards, so they could easily drift off into nonsense and liberalism.
bear (Hah!) in mind that this is an extremely american website
no one outside yankeeland gives a fuck about them
You see AOC is merely doing her part as a deep cover 3rd worldist
By denying these first world labour aristocrats their ability to strike, shes immiserating the working class in the imperial core
You chapoids simply cannot comprehend the ultra-leftism that she is practising
Whose a goooood accelerationist, it's you, yes you are Clifford. No treats for you, after all that would be anti-accelerationist
Do you mean on this site or in general? I'm pretty sure it's clear on this site that all the goodwill she built up during the Trump years has been soured. Outside of that, people still love her and you'll still hear a lot of libs singing her praises and sharing her tweets.
For years, with AOC I never expected her to accomplish anything electorally. I never expected her to do anything much to combat US imperialism. Really, my only hope was that she could use her platform to get broadly socialist ideas out into the mainstream and at least chip away at Americans' red scare fever dreams. It was an incredibly low bar but at least I figured I wouldn't get disappointed. So in that sense I defended her up through maybe 2020 or so.
Well... I'm disappointed. When did AOC get elected, 2016? 2018? Has she done anything to move the needle like I described? Maybe I'm missing something but I really don't think she's had any impact on the national consciousness w/r/t to socialism or hell even social democracy or things like M4A. Maybe that's largely the fault of the media and the DNC but tbqh it really doesn't seem like AOC even wants that role and is really just happy to be a politician and doing her gosh darn best to try and fail to make things happen electorally.
I just don't care about her anymore. She's on my "pay no mind" list. Ilhan's been on that list for a while now btw.
The low bar thing is so true. If any of them wanted to actually further an agenda all they would have to do is just not vote with dems ever. Use every vote as an oppurtunity to shiw where a left postion is incompatible with the democratic party. Being on committees doesnt mean shit. Media attention and the ability to raise money are the only real power, and its wasted on thise libs.
I've also paid them no mind for a while until seeing a few posts recently.
She's not even talking about universal healthcare. She was complaining about fucking ticketmaster. Like fuck ticketmaster but that's like number 10,000 on the list of problems to be adressed.
Given how Parenti wrote him off, it seems like he's triangulated himself a few times in SocDem ways
It could just be as simple as getting old. I've seen it with family members. At some point you kinda lost that "spark".
