No problem!

Thanks!

The State and Revolution is the best work on this, but Reform or Revolution is also a really good work! Essentially, whichever class controls the commanding heights has the ultimate power over the state, regardless of how voting goes.

Great points!

This sounds more like a coup from the Nazis than from the bourgeoisie. How did they push them into power?

The Nazis were handed power directly when the capitalists they were friendly with pressured the state.

I need to learn more about Allende history, but why is that? What makes the military defend capital, not the government?

The state is not outside of class struggle, it is within it. It is not an outside body above the class struggle. The state is there to manage the affairs of the ruling class of society and protect its interests, and the military is the monopoly on violence that the state uses to carry those out. The state is not a neutral body to be taken over and commanded like a mindless tool.

No I don’t. I don’t see what would concretely prevent the state from turning against the bourgeoisie.

What do you believe a state is? How does it function, and how does it run?

Any truth to the idea that the Red Brigades were essentially compromised by agents of Operation Gladio? Moro’s assassination coincided with his signaling to form a coalition government with the Italian Communist Party, which was on its way to Eurocommunism in the 70s but would signal increased ties Washington would not approve of. This is all very outside of my area of knowledge and I’d appreciate anyone helping me out here.

That’s fair, there really aren’t many actual accelerationists. It’s used to collapse Marxist arguments into a simplistic and destructive framing as a strawman more than anything.

Technically accelerationism is less about fascism, and more about concentration of capital. The Democrats are the accelerationist pick in the US as the more competent imperialist party. The ideas behind accelerationism are in capitalism’s built-in death clock as capital accumulates, centralizes, and socializes, not in the explicit pain or terror inflicted directly on the working class.

Other than that, agreed!

How would it materialize concretely in a western social democracy country?

Fascism emerged concretely in Germany in the 1930s. Germany was a poor social democracy at the time, devastated with war debts from World War I, and had a rising communist party. The Nazi party grew from killing labor organizers and communists, and was installed against the will of the people.

Yes, as I said, I’m not talking about reformism, but the party completely replacing the state by the dictatorship of the proletariat, just like a revolution, but from the inside.

This is reformism. I think you’re confusing reformism with social democracy, social democracy is the limit of reformism. An “electoral revolution” is not a revolution, winning elections does not translate to taking the economy by force.

Why couldn’t they do both? Pass the law, and seize the means of production using the state army and the armed workers.

The capitalist state army is not a mindless drone that sides directly with whoever is in charge of the state. It sides with capital. Allende was coup’ed by the Chilean military. Again, you are confusing elected positions as absolute mandates from heaven, because you do not see that the state is reliant upon and reinforced by the mode of production.

A Marxist party could win electorally. They’d still have to have a revolution, coming from the mass armed workers and the communist party. The socialist revolutionaries won the provisional government, but that’s not what dispersed them, they were dispersed by the workers and Soviets, who took the state directly.

There are 2 points to make here.

The first, is that bourgeois democracy is in practice democracy for capitalists alone. It provides the illusion of change, and the possibility for it. The frequent swaps between parties provides instability in governance while allowing capital to progress fairly unimpeded. Because capitalists control the commanding heights of the economy, they control the state, and can rip away the illusion of bourgeois democracy at any time they wish, essentially implementing fascism.

The second is that the state is not a neutral state, it’s a state as it relates to the base of society, the mode of production and distribution. The capitalist state is a state for capitalism, it isn’t a neutral state that can be swapped piece by piece. This is because the capitalist state co-evolved alongside capitalism itself, they are mutually reinforcing aspects. A Marxist party cannot expropriate the bourgeoisie through decree, it must come through force, and the class that holds the commanding heights of the economy holds the force of the state.

This is why change must come through revolution, replacing the capitalist state with a socialist state. Winning electorally does not translate to conquest of the means of production and distribution, the capitalists must be rooted out of their existing positions through an extra-legal movement. The state must not be replaced brick by brick, but smashed and reborn as a worker state. The problem appears to be that you still believe legal measures have power beyond how we choose to enforce them, but in reality laws are upheld or ignored depending on which class they are meant to apply to, because the state has a class character.

Yep, it’s sad but you’re likely correct. I appreciate, of course, the kind words. I think my stance towards revolutionary optimism still makes me feel like history doesn’t have to go down that route. Not just for the people on Turtle Island, but ending the empire quicker would be an enormous weight off of the world. I know I have to set my expectations soberly, but I can’t act with the assumption that the fight can’t be won faster than that, if only because I can’t convince others of a better world being necessary and possible if I can’t also convince them that it’s possible within a human lifetime.

I disagree pretty firmly with it.

Yea, the DSA would only serve, if anything, as a meeting space for revolutionaries frustrated with the DSA, to form a new party. It would be like starting an org, but among comrades that already work together. Thanks for the input!

I generally agree with USU in this article.

No idea, unfortunately.

Good point!

That’s also sadly the case for many people.

For clarity, I don’t mean to say local branches have no value. Everyone needs to judge their own local conditions. As for USU and their position on PSL, this is what they say in their Unity Prospectus:

Many of the Trotskyist organizations, such as PSL, have fallen prey to the same deviations: they have created unassailable central organizing positions which are not accountable to any democratic process, and then held these positions tightly. Whether, like the revisionists, this began as a means of ideological control, it has developed into a system that is resistant to change and to growth.

They maintain that it descends from the WWP and carries over WWP’s Trotskyist roots, which IMO is an idealist reach. Marcy upheld the Soviet line on Hungary, and from then on WWP was gradually more ML, and PSL from its inception as a split from WWP has essentially had widespread ML membership, upholding Stalin and AES. This is why I think there’s a bit of inter-org bad-faith going on in that assessment.

Lot of great points, and of course I don’t mind your participation! I expected this thread to be a bit “spicy” so to speak, and am genuinely happy with everyone bringing their own points forward so I can correct my own views. One thing I want to respond to in particular is the study group and the publication of new theory.

I focus a decent chunk of my time refining my basic Marxist-Leninist reading list, and we actually began a study circle over on Hexbear for it a couple of days ago, led by comrade Edie. Pedagogy and study has been a particular area of interest, and one I have always felt was sorely lacking in online spaces in ways that keeps the theory relevant to the modern day, rather than looking like a bibliography of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin/Mao. Their works are critically important, no doubt, but there is very little good new theory being written.

I’ve actually considered dabbling in that realm myself, but basically want to hold off on that until I consider myself having graduated from “baby ML” to “proper ML,” which I anticipate to be in a few years time. You’re right, reading is not the same as developing, and I want to sharpen my development far more so that I can help contribute to new theory development, largely in the form of Red Sails style essays.

Thanks for your input!

Yes, I guess I could say my ideal scenario is a perfect party forms and rapidly reaches sizable membership numbers, but I am trying to balance that with pragmatism in the immediate moment.