this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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It is an actual concept??!?!
I have been calling it the ratchet effect for years (because it is a ratchet).
Just happy to see someone else calling it that.
Yep, I keep this picture to share anytime people want to talk about how Democrats are the good guys.
Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.
Oh yeah, I've posted it before now and it makes some people really angry. It seems to be a very common idea that third party voters are somehow worse than Trump voters, as though the Democratic Party somehow have a right to all non-fascist votes.
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Democrat leadership would choose Trump over Zohran.
They're lining back up behind Eric Adams, which is functionally the same thing.
They sure shut the fuck up about " blue no matter who" real fast.
The fact that liberals refuse to read just 100 pages of State and Revolution while insisting that they are having new ideas or that the political environment has somehow changed is by far the most frustrating thing about Lemmy comment sections. I'm an anarchist, someone smeared by Lenin in that book but at least I read it and understand. My disagreement is with the vision and form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and how we can build a new commune, not the need for revolution or insisting that somehow, some way after 175 years of the same discussion voting for reform will work.
I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn't Harry Potter in their lives.
I'm curious to hear the objections and alteratives. I'm not fully versed in anarchist thought.
Essentially that there is no way that the dictatorship of the proletarian will ever be temporary and that even though he spends time talking about the evils of the bourgeois state and how it must be dismantled this dictatorship with its "vanguard" (which are just new elites) will necessarily form a new state that will also form self-preservation methods and never transfer to a workers run stateless system. Bakunin calls them a red bureaucracy and Emma Goldman writes about how the Bolshevik state simply replaced the old Tsarist state and became reformist and bourgeois in nature losing its revolutionary character in time. The crackdown of the Kronstadt rebellion was the first seeds of this nearly immediately after the October revolution. The anarchist response and alternative to the centralized state that Lenin believes is required is a decentralized system of worker self-management pods in federated councils and communes, not a top-down elite vanguard run dictatorship.
A lot of the disagreement comes from the understanding and lessons learned from the Paris commune. Lenin believes this is a prototype of a worker's state with recallable delegates, less red tape/bureaucracy and the removal of the existing state but Anarchists don't believe the lesson here is to just create another state, although I personally would argue a dictatorship of the proletariat is preferable to the dictatorship of capital we currently live in, we want more communes that work together. We don't believe the revolutionary character of the commune went far enough to actually destroy the existing state and instead tried to recreate it on a smaller scale.
I think you're erasing the economic component of the Marxist position, as well as conflating the nature of the state, which Marxists and Anarchists somewhat disagree on. Marxist communism, in its stateless form, is still fully centralized and planned, but also classless. It isn't about "transferring to the workers," that basis is the means by which to bring about communism. The millitarization of the state is necessary until the world is socialist and all class contradictions have been resolved, but there will still be administrative positions well into communism.
Anarchism is indeed more decentralized, but this is a departure from the Marxist understanding of economic development. The real argument is not based on how to get to the final stage, but what that final stage even looks like to begin with. Full horizontalism a la anarchism, or a one world collectivized and planned a la Marxism.
I do support anarchists generally, certainly over capitalists, but I think a lot of confusion is drawn between anarchists and Marxists due to having different stances on terms and what they look like in practice.
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I swear Americans have never read a book that wasnβt Harry Potter in their lives.
Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.
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That's not true, they've also read 1984 and thought all "adult" books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring so they don't read anymore, they just pretend ~~idiocracy was a documentary~~ 1984 is like, so true, man
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Ah yes the Corbyn technique.
They tried the Corbyn technique in the primaries. It didnβt stick, and thatβs why theyβre freaking out right now.
I pray for his victory. The establishment centrists and their Zionist allies replaced Corbyn with a neoliberal empty suit. It has been a catastrophe for the left and killed any hope of radical change.
Any hope of radical change through elections.
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The Democrats are afraid Democratic Socialism as it is the anti MAGAβand they should be, the sellouts.
To be clear, all socialism is democratic. "Democratic Socialism" is just for reformist socialism, and I'd argue Mamdani is just to give New Yorkers a taste of what a better world could look like. You can't actually change capitalism by working within it, though, revolution remains necessary. Mamdani could prove beneficial in normalizing socialism.
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The left threatens power. MAGA doesn't.
democrats as in dnc elites donβt give a fig about democracy, socialism or maga. they are freaking out because their employers (superpacs and israel) have shoved a rod up their ass for allowing this to happen. they know if he gets elected then the lobbyists will kick them out and bring in new more shameless hacks. they are grifters who have been riding the two-party lesser evil gravy train for decades now.
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Which is why we need a Democrat socialist party. Unfortunately, voters are incapable of voting for anything other than red or blue.
It's not the voters fault. If you split the Democratic vote, you will only get a permanent Republican government. And that doesn't help anyone.
Politicians like Mamdani are the only way forward. We need more people like him to run for local government like this, and move their way up from there...making way for more like them to take their places, as they go. You can't change things at the top, without laying the foundation for that change, first.
You can't really change the system from within into a fundamentally opposed one. That's why revolution is still necessary.
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The Party for Socialism and Liberation already exists, though all socialism is democratic, it just stands for reformist socialism. PSL is revolutionary, but also runs candidates.
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wow i've never seen this strategy before!
Most of the Democrats are bought off by the same people as the Republicans. All this political theatre is just a show for the illusion of choice. Hopefully more people who can't be bought off get elected, but I doubt it.
Hopefully more people will realize that bourgeois democracy is working as intended, and that it cannot be reformed; it must be replaced.
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I think I was wrong. I think both sides maybe are the same...
This is evidence that the US political system does not function.
There are two paths forward;
- Burn down the entire thing (which Trump and frenemies are currently doing).
- rebuild and reform the existing system (which can happen by voters voting for progressive centralist candidates in local and state representatives en-mass (like in NYC).
I would not call Zohran Mandani a socialist. I would call him a progressive rational centralist.
The existing system cannot be fixed, it depends on imperialism and as such has hollowed out industrialization in favor of finance capital. Mamdani is a "boot of the neck" candidate, someone to show a bit of what's possible with a properly run economy, but even electing progressives elsewhere can't bring about socialism. Revolution is still necessary.
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Counter point, the system is functioning as intended
I would not call Zohran Mandani a socialist.
He literally said, "The end goal is seizing the means of production"
Zohran Mamdani is a Socialist.
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