I don’t just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of “legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community” 
takes.
I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we’re Russian/Chinese bots.
Sure they still do that but they’ve slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.
How do you guys feel about democratic socialism? I feel like it’s the only realistic way to get socialism without bloodshed - though I also understand the US is a long goddamn way away.
Be gentle pls, I’m still learning ❤️
Edit: thanks for all the replies!! There’s a ton to read through so bear with me
This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed - Charles Cobb
instructive example; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history.
Very very good book highly recommend.
Look up the Spanish civil war. Democratic Socialists won the government through elections and all of the right wing elements in the country banded together to overthrow what was a mildly socialist government. Take note of how Hitler’s Germany aided the Right faction under Franco, but no liberal nations aided to rightfully elected socialist government. Great Britain, France, and the US all decided to stay neutral as a military dictatorship overthrew one of their peers.
My point is that right wing elements won’t let you vote away their power. And that liberal governments, while they nominally espouse the rule of law and democracy, will let fascism run over socialist movements.
They just didn’t vote hard enough.
That isnt true, those “neutral” countries were actually helping Germany rearm, so were indirectly contributing to the Franco faction
I hate to be this person, but I would highly highly highly recommend listening to Season 2 of the Blowback podcast if you haven’t yet. It goes over the Cuban revolution and explains some of the ‘bloodshed’ that was necessary. It also gives you an idea of what a real revolution looks like (hint: it’s more boring and tame than you’d think). I just started listening to it and it’s literally blowing my mind. Making me feel like a lot of this is more achievable.
Let me preface this by saying that I am deriding the people who fed you that line, not you for repeating it.
Moderates love to talk about how their proposals are more “realistic” than the radical ideas. While this is not false as a rule, it is overwhelmingly asserted without evidence and never has that been more the case than with the “Reform or Revolution?” debate. For the sake of convenience, here’s what I told another DemSoc:
“Ah,” the close reader says “But what the user you are responding to now said was ‘the only realistic way to get socialism without bloodshed,’ which is a somewhat different claim!”
Correct, I’m covering my bases. The second point that I want to make is that “without bloodshed” is doing an immense amount of heavy lifting for the justification of your idea, and it is no coincidence that it is also a lie of catastrophic proportions. Let us pretend that what we have already established is false – that the rich and powerful are like the Jurassic Park T. Rex, they can’t see you if you move slowly enough – is true, and in the far-flung future we can succeed in voting our way to socialism. Who does this save? Most directly, it protects the capitalists and their jackbooted thugs, plus the fascist paramilitaries that would assist them in fighting to suppress communist revolution.
“But doesn’t it also save people on our side?” the reader now interjects “Surely you don’t proffer a fantasy in which the Vanguard triumphs over Washington without casualties!”
Right you are, many revolutionaries would die. However, what you are failing to take into account is that a potential revolution is not the only violence that may exist or does exist in society. Specifically, you are entirely ignoring the extraordinary violence of the status quo which kills people every day. There’s a reason for the old slogan “Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied.” Injustice will keep being done every day, people will be threatened, starved, tortured, murdered, forced to live like animals, every single day while we wait for this far-flung future where the appointed time has finally come and the moderates declare that we as a society may now have justice, on a boiling planet with a peace soaked in the blood of people who never had a chance to fight back but were butchered by the state just the same.
But dropping now the counterfactual that such a future exists, what we are left with is the understanding that the job of the moderates is to continuously stall the radicals, claiming to support change while only stifling it, to be on our side while constantly betraying us, to abhor violence while tacitly perpetuating a violence bloodier than a thousand revolutions.
LMAO I fucking love this comparison
I’m gonna come right out and say I have had many disagreements with you on many of your alts and frankly do not like you.
BUT, this is a very very good post and is very thoughtful and I wish you would make more of this sort of post than being (at times very problematically) so hostile with your comrades.
There’s a person here that I could potentially have immense respect for and your writing chops are not at issue here. Just have a bit more humility sometime and you could probably be a great writer.
For what it is worth, I have always respected you, and now all the more so for your willingness to be constructive and encouraging with someone you dislike.
part of becoming a leftist for me was realizing that winning is more important than honor, and that the two need not necessarily be distinct. Winning for the sake of our cause will deliver the moral high ground once we have socialism and end poverty.
It’s all fine and honorable to say we can and should get socialism without bloodshed, purely through democratic elections, but that hasn’t historically been a viable strategy (Chile, Spain, Germany, and current issues within Venezuela). There’s only been one instance I can name where a country voted its way into socialism, and it was Czechoslovakia in 1946. But even then they had to do a Soviet backed coup two years later in 1948 to fully seize power.
The best strategy is the one that works and achieves victory, not the strategy that can claim moral superiority in defeat. There’s no honor in defeat, it’s just defeat.
Romania technically voted it in, probably with a majority since it left the Axis in 1944 and joined the Allies, but the Soviets were leaning on them heavily.
Replying to you a second time, there’s a pretty good passage from Vincent Bevins’ book “The Jakarta Method”
“Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.”
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This is a fair take. I’m not a pacifist per se, I just avoid violence as much as I can. If that’s what it takes to be a socialist state though, so fucking be it
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If given the choice between Democratic Socialism and violent revolution, i believe almost anyone would pick the former rather than the latter. However you have to question how the current ruling class would attempt to fight the DemSoc reforms. I can’t really think of any example in human history where the ruling class has willingly abdicated power simply because the majority of the population asked them to.
Concessions can be achieved because of other socialists movements though, as this essay succinctly describes: https://redsails.org/concessions/
These should not be confused with wins of liberalism or dem-socialism, but wins fought for elsewhere by communists and able to be won by concession in the west.
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Democratic Socialism only works in the context of there being a bunch of successful revolutionary socialisms in the region/globally at the same time
I would really suggest reading The Jakarta Method or looking into what happened to Allende to get our perspective on democratic socialism and why it isn’t a viable path.
Thanks! I’ll definitely look up the Jakarta Method. Can you clarify about Allende, though? What does the massacre have to do with democratic socialism? Everything I could find talked about how the US DEA put it’s grubby paws on them and upset the cartels
I’m just going to toss out a relevant excerpt from The Jakarta Method:
I would also suggest Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth which we happen to be reading right now in Hexbear’s book club. We’re a couple chapters in already, but it’s a slow schedule so easy to catch up for anyone interested. (Thanks to @Othello@hexbear.net for cluing me in on it).
thank you for joining!
and we also have a nifty summary and analysis to help people catch up!
I’m gonna keep it short:
To enact democratic socialism or any form of socialism today, you cant simply vote for it, as your current government will fight against it. You cant work within a capitalist government to enact socialism, just look at how hard it is today to simply try to put welfare programs. I’m talking about the USA of course. If you want socialism you will be silenced, attacked, and manipulated by the media and if you are strong enough assassinated by the CIA. So you only way is violence.
Lets look at other countries wanting socialism, you will be attacked by the USA military, so you need a strong army to defend yourself, same thing again, the media will try to say your country is authoritarian and the CIA will try to manufacture events off unrest in your country to justify itself. There are multiple events like this in the past century. So you require violence to defend yourself here.
Things will get better with time, I hope, as more societies try different forms of socialism, but for that the fastest way is a violent socialist revolution, or waiting centuries for the USA and other capitalist countries to completely fall and allow socialist to exist.
Democratic socialism does come with bloodshed, but it’s the blood of democratic socialists getting murdered by US-trained fascist juntas. You can look at any example of actual democratic socialism that isn’t just social democratic libs in the imperial core, the only case where the inevitable reactionary coup got prevented with the measures of a civil society and the rule of law is Bolivia. That’s one example out of dozens of honest, peaceful attempts of global south countries to elect their way out of capitalism and neo-colonial structures. That track record seems way too dangerous to me, i’d take a violent suppression of the comprador bourgeoisie over that any time because i value my own life and that of my comrades over that of capitalist leeches and their nazi lackeys. Better to live in the next Cuba than the next Chile or Indonesia.
And Bolivia wasn’t even bloodless. The reactionary coup regime was brutal towards protests and carried out several massacres. The only thing that made the putschist allow free elections in the end was the very real threat of militant labour activists blockading the capital.
If the Bolivian movement had listened to the liberals and limited themselves to debating the fascists in the marketplace of ideas, Jeannine Añez would still be dictator and not a convict.
Despite all the numerous failures that democratic socialism has had, its the only tendency that has had any actual success in “western liberal democracies”. Someone is welcome to correct me but I’m not aware of any successful Maoist revolutions in liberal democracies. They all get stomped out immediately by a fully developed capitalist state.
Meanwhile we currently have Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez successfuly getting elected and their parties are still in power. But thats because they weathered the reaction. You have to be ready for the reaction comrade.
Evo and Chavez can only win precisely because those countries are not fully developed Liberal democracies but instead periphery comprador resource extraction states (prior to the revolution). I’m not aware of any “democratic socialist” in western nations that has ever won power either and not just immediately became a succ traitor like in Greece
Name a more developed or more western “liberal democracy” than Bolivia or Venezuela that had a successful revolution. My point is its the best example we have to go off.
To me the evidence points to those western liberal nations needing to break and collapse before they have any hope
They tend to become fascist when that happens. Besides if you’re in one of those nations, “we need to break and collapse” is a dead-end political movement.
The daily bloodshed of capitalism is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the only means of progressing historically. The proletariat is the progressive class, not in the social sense but as in the mode of production and form of society. That is the goal. Without bloodshed means that without bloodshed is the goal, with socialism being secondary at best. It would be ideal for sure, but it is also historically proven to be impossible, and as a means supplants the necessity of socialism.
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