Send them this

Lenin said to support Labour, at the time an actual worker’s party with actual socialists. He didn’t, say, support the Liberals over the tories. Although british communists were right to criticise them, they weren’t yet a bourgeois party, which Lenin points out. The tweetster twists paragraphs of Lenin’s words.

The Democratic party would be the equivalent of the Liberal party then, you know, that guy Lloyd George Lenin name-dropped as who we should be fighting. The democrats aren’t the equivalent of 1910s/20s Labour, Eugene Debs’ Socialists are. I don’t see this arsehole advocating for the return of that party, or demanding the democrats put some communists (or even CPUSA members) on safe districts, as was the case for british communists. This is merely a one-sided support for one bourgeois party that this guy claims is left against another that is right. Except of course they’re both right, the most reactionary Labour leaders then were further left than any democrat can conceive.

If I had to call this guy anything, it’d be a grifter. One cannot read theory this dishonestly with good intentions. More likely he hasn’t read, just found excerpts that seemed to support his previously held beliefs.

If I had a dollar every time some “leftist” equates Lenin’s words on participating in bourgeois parliaments to voting blue, I’d be able to fund the revolution single-handedly.

Campaigning for fascism is simply unexcusable and unjustifiable. It’s white supremacism passing as communism

Electoralism isn’t “when cast ballot”. They aren’t doing an electoralism by doing exactly the same as every random as shitlib - voting Dem.

In ‘Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder’ Lenin talks about how communists need to embrace rather than reject electoralism. In particular, he criticizes British communists at the time for not advocating the defeat of right-wingers in elections.

Voting for Dems isn’t advocating the defeat of right-wingers in elections, it is advocating for right-wingers. A communist that would even imply the opposite is deeply unserious at best.

This type of “theory application” is also one of the worst things people can do. They take extremely specific quotes out of their textual and historic context to justify their individual actions in current day.

Saying a “tactical vote” for a right-wing imperialist party is somehow necessary and okay to do, because you have good intentions is literally idealism. It doesn’t matter if you advocate voting for reactionary imperialist parties, because you think they’re awesome or because Lenin said this and that and ultra-leftism and yadda yadda. You’re voting and advocating for imperialist right-wingers.

Your individual vote is irrelevant anyway and posting threads like that person is just an exercise in individualism.

They’d have a point if the Dems were a flawed but genuinely left-wing party or if there was a genuine workers party to vote for in US elections. They’d even have a point in advocating for communists to participate in the construction of such a party (debatable, but at least a point). That’s participation in electoralism.

As is they’re just a randy telling communists to vote for and legitimize their own slave masters. Quoting Lenin out of context and applying it to their individual behaviour doesn’t change that.

That said if you got the time of the day and it makes you feel better, vote for them. It doesn’t matter really. Communist should just definitely not publicly advocate and thus whitewash them and absolutely should misappropriate communist theory to justify such.

“You’re American” would be my best rebuttal.

In this moment here and now I care more about what the brand is of the toilet paper that I buy then the potential outcomes of the US 2024 election. Notify me when a candidate emerges who is against handing over more flaming rocks to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Neoliberalism is fascism is neoliberalism is fascism, ad infinitum. State power and corporate power exist solely to prop one another up in the pursuit of infinite profit. Liberals love to point out the Trump clique’s imperialist ventures and how close we were to World War III, but under a democrat we’re even closer and it’s all NATO’s fault. It’s incredible how well Amerikan intelligence is able to convince people otherwise. On their supposed “feminist” concerns, Roe v. Wade was overturned under a Democrat, period. The nuance of supreme court packing w/e is inconsequential to the point that Democrats have been in basically complete control of the state apparatus and it still happened. Murder of black and brown people by the state still happens. Discrimination against LGBT people is still happening. Nothing meaningful has changed, and nothing meaningful will change based on the color of the party in power.

The “harm reduction” nonsense like this is just ahistorical and shows either an ignorance of US policy or a willingness to throw other groups, often people in other countries, under the bus to temporarily satisfy their own wants and needs. Harm reduction is a strategy backed by actual data to reduce the death toll of drug use. It doesn’t apply to US politics. In US politics, there is only harm transference.

Even domestically with lip service promises, I dont see what voting democrat would even substantially do. The attacks on the marginalized RIGHT NOW as we speak is beyond political show boating. Women have lost some rights NOW. Like right now. In a dem majority in all levels.

The red states have a deep federation under the veneer of the federal government with state’s rights. Florida can reliably count on Texas to share the same code of law in the ways that matter for example.

The disappointing thing is democrats keep desperately believing they can avoid all this through voting. Their opponents are playing an entirely different game.

Democrat and Republican bases are quite affluent compared to the majority of eligible voters, who do not vote.

Lenin would want a Communist party to represent the majority.

The thread, if accurate:

A 🧵:

‘I’m a 🤡’

Simple:

Bourgeois elections are little more than a puppet show. Theater. The US has one party with two arms. However voting for the donkey-party-mascot fascists over the elephant fascists isn’t going to change the material reality or the ruling structure. If women are stripped of our rights it is because the bourgeoisie want it so and voting Dem won’t fix that. If POC are murdered by police and oppressed it won’t fix that because this country was founded on white supremacy.

Fundamentally participating advances the illusion that bourgeois electoralism has results or will do anything. It saps energy from the revolution, it gives false hope and it gives ammunition to those who cry any movement to the left will stop or reverse the harm reduction.

The US lacks any labor party. It lacks any party not totally enthralled with the empire, imperialism, and yes exporting fascism in for example Ukraine. One cannot be a communist and support the lesser fascists simply because they’ll give slightly better rights to the privileged workers at home. What’s not mentioned of course is those rights don’t come with a long-term guarantee and you’ll be stripped of them when it is necessary to do so.

Fuck liberals. Fuck electoralism. Fuck apologists for the fucking vile democratic party that supports Nazis and did nothing but stand by eat popcorn while abortion rights were destroyed. It’s all a show, their “resistance” to the Republican agenda is nonsense, merely a distraction for a short while and at the expense I’ll add of extreme hyper-chauvanism, clamp-downs on anti-imperialists and dissident speech via “muh Russian trolls” fear-mongering, upping the anti-Russian, anti-Asian hate rhetoric, continuing to fund fascists, continuing to arm fascists. It’s all just a slightly different arrangement of game pieces in their sick game and any communist who can’t see that and participates is fucked in the head.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/unity.htm

Surely if you vote in democrats for the 51st time the American populace will realise how useless they are