"Go on, call me a tankie, you are only cancelling a lib"

  • RNAi [he/him]
    hexagon
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    4 years ago

    Yeah!, and look how well their legacy is doing, oh wait shit

    Losing the URSS and the rest of countries was a disaster, even for the scabbiest scabs from the imperial core.

    • blobjim [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Actually doing pretty good all things considered.

      • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Would be doing better if they didn't let far right fascist parties and movements grow in power and internally sabotage the gains made under the socialist government. You'd think leftist parties in latin america would have learned the constraints of this type of democratic socialism after Allende and everything else.

        • blobjim [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          The point is they can't just remove them. But they've held on to the gains they've made and have good organization and have the military on their side and so on. It's not about "learning the constraints", it's about learning what you can actually accomplish within constraints that you have no way to push past.

          • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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            4 years ago

            Sure they can, and its why ML states have had better success in maintaining these gains without constant internal opposition and sabotage. How did Chile hold onto those gains? There's been a constant internal conflict in Venezuela between these two opposing class interests and parties for years now, its barely holding on under this current system. Bolivia did everything right and they still paid the price for it in the end. This is a repeating failure of upholding this liberal democracy and basing your gains on electoral strategies that do not work to resolve the internal class contradictions and opposition movements.

            • blobjim [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              Bolivia did everything right

              Well, no. They didn't purge the military (probably because they couldn't). In Venezuela, the military is on Maduro's side. In Venezuela, they have a 3 million member militia. But that doesn't mean they can just start kicking out liberals and fascists, because they don't have the kind of international backing to do that. The US would just invade (with bombs, not necessarily troops) and destroy the entire movement, which is probably what Biden is planning on doing.

              • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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                4 years ago

                I mean the US has already invaded and directly worked on destroying socialist movements in virtually every country in latin america. But also Cuba is literally right there lol, the conditions vary but the history of latin america has shown how much is wrong with this democratic socialist approach and the idea that upholding liberal democracy is the correct approach.

                • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                  4 years ago

                  You guys are talking about two separate things here:

                  1. How a socialist movement can gain power
                  2. How a socialist movement can maintain power in the face of reactionaries

                  The same approach might not work for both problems.

                  • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
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                    4 years ago

                    The answer to both and always been the same through 99.99% of successful revolutions throughout history. Violent revolution and repression of the bourgeois class through a dictatorship of the proletariat.

                  • mrbigcheese [he/him]
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                    4 years ago

                    Well when your idea of gaining power doesn't also uphold it than there is something wrong with gaining power that you can just lose once the internal opposition has done enough to turn people against you. Gaining power that you can't maintain is meaningless, and in some cases even directly harmful when the failures caused by internal capitalist forces can just be blamed on the socialist government. In the case of gaining power through liberal democracy you're inadvertently upholding the institutions that work directly against you instead of building a mass revolutionary movement to deal with those contradictions. Addressing the failure of this approach is crucial going forward.

    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      look how well their legacy is doing

      Either of them are infinitely more successful than any leftist movement in the U.S. Dismissing the methods of some of the most recent leftists to have gained real power is absurd.

      Losing the URSS and the rest of countries was a disaster

      Absolutely; I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. What I'm saying is that -- post-USSR -- we have examples of leftists gaining power through elections.

      • RNAi [he/him]
        hexagon
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        4 years ago

        Yes, I get it, but the motherfuckers are too strong.

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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          4 years ago

          How anyone can reach this conclusion is beyond me. Bernie -- not even an unusually strong candidate -- was the clear frontrunner in the primary until he got kneecapped by unprecedented (and lucky) Democratic coordination. They're not too strong; eight months ago they were all getting their asses beat by an old man from a state most people forget who had to build a political base from scratch.