Democratic Socialists
Democratic Socialists
62 comments
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What about democracy? Can't voting fix our problems?
- Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy's job for them. Youtube Audiobook
- Why not just vote leftists into office: what's wrong with democratic socialism?
- Halim Alrah - Why liberal democracies are a sham.
- What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn't Sweden socialist?
- On the unraveling of the Nordic welfare states: increasing inequality and forced austerity.
- Scandinavia's covert role in western imperialism
- Paul Cockshott - On Socialism and Democracy. 2 3
- Comrade Hakim - Why electoralism always fails.
- An Overview of Leninism, audiobook. Lenin - State and Revolution , audiobook
- LeftVoice - Bourgeois Democracy - What do Marxists mean by this term?
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The voting for leftists into office one is there twice.
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Fixed
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Thank you, as a democratic socialist this is what I was looking for.
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More like, under new management.
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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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Marxist: Let me mock one of my closest ideological allies. That will help bring about revolution.
Democratic Socialist: The fuck did I do to you, bro?
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Democratic Socialists are anti-communist. Either they are reformist, which is wrong, social democrats, which is welfare capitalism, or seek to separate themselves from existing socialism by implying it isn't democratic. None of the above are based on allyship with Marxists. At best, demsocs can be recruited from for better orgs, or aligned on specific movements like Palestinian liberation.
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The DSA has everyone from reformist soc dems, to anarchists, to MLs, to Maoist Third Worldists
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and that's precisely the reason it's been so effective
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This is so dumb.
If you want change, you have to take power. Power is where the people think it is.
If people can't even realize their own power as workers and unionize, they're not about to rise up in some glorious revolution. And even if they did, the majority would just do capitalism again, because most people can't imagine anything else
But the economic system is collapsing. When it does, we need power. That's how this works. We take local, State, and federal positions and use them to do progressive things, to improve material conditions.
And then when we get to an inflection point, we need leaders who already have the support of the people. We need populist progressives in power
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Ernst Thälmann tried that
Many others within germany were also trying that too. It did not work
We must build duel power, not power within the bourgeois system
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Power exists where people believe it to be. You want to build up alternate systems? Go for it, I think that's great. I'd join up. Let me know when that's an option on the table
But you can't ignore where the power actually is. No revolution happens without organizing around people already in power.
And as much as you can learn from the past, we're well into uncharted territory. You can read all the praxis you like, but those are the writings of academics.
At some point you have to talk to people, you have to get average people on board. You can't do that by giving them pamphlets, they're not going to read them.
You do it by picking your strongest argument, like housing or taxing the rich, and you get them on board. You give them leaders to rally behind, you gain their trust by improving material conditions for them. You fix their problems and win their loyalty, you tell them you're going to fix their problems, and then you do everything you can to get money out of politics so that we can unfuck things
If you want to organize on the side, go for it... But we live in an extremely low trust and antisocial society. I just don't see it happening anytime soon
The perfect is the enemy of the good
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This is simplistic. If reform works, do it. If it cannot, use force. Even Marx, if I remember correctly, supported the reformist Chartists in relatively democratic countries like England (while supporting revolutionary methods in feudal Germany).
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@Confidant6198@lemmy.ml I am not a marxist. Destroy it anyway.
62 comments
Democratic socialism just means you believe in democratically governed socialism, not that you think you can just vote capitalism into socialism. There's both reformist and revolutionary democratic socialists. I both believe in democracy and also see that the only way to overturn capitalism (at least in the US) would be through revolution. All the democratic part means is that they're opposed to monarchies or dictatorships.
Are you saying that you can have undemocratic socialism?
Isn't that what USSR was, dictatorship?
besides the oxymoron of a dictatorship of the people, yes, you can have government that claim to be socialits that are a dictatorship
Yes, under a dictatorship, it's literally happened before. Are you being serious or is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha where you go "socialism can't exist without democracy so the label is pedantic"?
Socialism under one party governments have happened, that is not democracy, even if democratic elements exist within. You can't have democracy under one party, the people need the ability to form an opposition party if the need arises.
All socialism is democratic, so "democratic socialism" in practice either means reformist socialism, social democracy (capitalism with safety nets, usually dependent on imperialism), or is a means to distance this new socialism from the really existing socialism in the world today and historically. Reformism is wrong and doesn't work, social democracy is still capitalism and depends on imperialism in the global north version, and the last is just red scare "left" anti-communism that reeks of chauvanism.