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The ‘AOC Left’ Has Achieved Plenty
(nymag.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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The counter-revolutionary role of social democratic parties is primarily to redirect "radical" class-struggle back to harmless channels like the democratic party and its organs- when it cannot, suppress it. These sometimes involves spewing "militant" sounding rhetoric from time to time- but always, very carefully, they hyper-focus on incidental things like the "greed of individuals" and avoid implicating the wage labor system or private property itself. This is becoming more difficult for them to manage as radical class struggle intensifies and starts becoming political versus merely economic. As it happens their counter-revolutionary role starts to become more and more obvious which is why you see them moaning like in this article about people not falling for their bullshit anymore. When they ultimately fail to contain the class struggle they will side with the fascists and turn their guns on the working class like they did in both world wars.
Uhhhhh what? WWI was pre-fascist, WWII had social democrats on the same side as liberals and communists against the fascists.
WWI: social democrats and liberals aligned themselves with the White Army against the Bolsheviks, a coalition of far-right elements and monarchists WWII: social democrats align themselves with the Friekorps to suppress communist uprising
These aren't the only examples.
Both of those examples are from shortly after WWI. And both involve attempts by armed communist groups to seize control of the state, which for good or ill is not something we're going to be dealing with in the US for the foreseeable future.
Social democratic parties are currently involved in the suppression of radical elements in the labor movement through the union apparatuses they control. They've been pushing sellout contracts favorable to the company on the workers, preventing those movements from crossing over national lines, suppressing/ censoring dissent on channels they control, limiting/distorting information, and rigging elections. This is all becoming very obvious to the rank-and-file and that's why it's becoming harder for them to control dissent. Whether or not an armed struggle is imminent, the social-democratic parties are going to be one of the main obstacles to the independent labor movement's success up until and through the next capitalist crisis and general conflict.
Is there anywhere in particular you're referring to? The US at least doesn't really have a social democratic party, and the closest thing we do have, the Democrats, certainly don't have any level of institutional control of the country's labor unions.
What I mean about the US not having a social democratic party is that the Democrats are to the right of what we'd usually refer to as social democrats - at best a hybrid between a social democratic party and a liberal party. Classic European social democratic parties were born as socialist parties aiming at a gradual parliamentary transition to socialism, which through a combination of moderating themselves and being defeated electorally never actually managed to get there. DSA does have a lot in common with that earlier version of social democracy, though in the present day they're more aligned with the further left parties like die linke or podemos than the official still existing social democrats.
As for the union issue, you're not distinguishing between unions being a major constituency of the Democratic Party and their being controlled by it. Democrats are obviously not as consistently pro-union as we'd like, but they for the most part accept them as a valuable part of their coalition who they need to keep happy, as opposed to Republicans who want to bathe in their blood.
What you're calling "socialism" is not socialism You're talking about capitalist reforms. Socialism is the end of private property and wage labor which can't be established through parliamentary transition due to the class nature of capitalist society - ie. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Democracy is mainly a smokescreen that conceals this real dictatorship. The bourgeoisie sometimes grants concessions to the working class and implements reforms in order to avoid an all-out revolutionary struggle, but this is not socialism or "a path to" socialism, these are done to preserve capitalism. When reforms fail, the bourgeoisie has historically resorted to fascism to utterly crush the struggle by force.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/bordiga02.htm
This report on fascism details how the Italian bourgeoisie state was complicit in its takeover.
This is all very tangential to the actual issue. It doesn't really matter from the point of view of the struggle whether they're controlled directly or indirectly. You've been nitpicking very insignificant points the entire time without addressing the main points and it's starting to look like trolling at this point.
I haven't described what my conception of socialism is, just described one mechanism socialists have used and are trying to use to enact the changes we want. So far we have not ever seen a developed capitalist society transition to socialism, so I don't think parliamentarism has been ruled out as a mechanism for that happening any more than anything else has been.
I think this point just seems insignificant because you're not getting what it is. Unions are not controlled either directly or indirectly by the Democratic Party. Instead, unions are one of the social forces that control the Democratic Party, which is ultimately an incoherent mess of forces and agendas stuffed into a big tent by the oppressive American electoral system that only really allows for two parties.