Is Melenchon a true comrade or a SocDem pussy?

Is Melenchon a true comrade or a SocDem pussy?

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marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1865/london-conference-program.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/bakunin/
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He's a hardline socdem. Much more left than Sanders, but still a socdem.

Of the new wave of dem"""""socs""""" (Bernie, Corbyn, etc) hes the most left. Stil a dem"""""soc"""""

Old school SocDem, which seems radical in a time where all SocDems have become liberals.

So kind of like those european 70s socdem partiers?

A popular socdem in the era of neoliberalism is a miracle in and of itself.

This board's obsession with identifying social-democrats parallels Holla Forums's obsession with jews. It's one of the most autistic and illiterate shit I've ever seen.

Btw the cyrillic is wrong. It should be
Мэленшон

It's important to distinguish between anti-capitalists and capitalists, even if they're nice capitalists who we like quite a bit.

Sanders, Corbyn, Melénchon are obviously anti-capitalists. The problem is that they run for elections, which this board, with its outstanding illiteracy, thinks is inherently social-democrat.

only stalinists think social democrats are inherently our enemies.

Anyone got a good link to his policies?

Sanders is a socdem though, Corbyn and Melenchon might be hiding their power levels but we really can't know

Sanders is most certainly not an anti-capitalist, Corbyn and Melenchon are ambiguous about their big picture stances on the issue.

Honest to god, I don't even know who to blame for Reform vs. Revolution going from

to

A useless nationalist succdem

But they are social democrats.

Sanders was inspired by fucking Debs to join politics. Is Debs a "succdem" too?

its the grand irony

for the retards in this thread though:

spoiler alert: political struggle for reforms develops proletarian consciousness. it is the role of social democratic parties to take capitalist societies to the limits of humane reorganization, and the role of the socialist parties to push through that limit in a revolutionary way.

He's probably still a socialist but his policies are not

Plenty of socdems are inspired by actual socialists. Does that mean every hippie liberal kid who buys a Che t-shirt should be considered a socialist?

There are thousands of socdem voters and politicians around the world, who were "communists" in their youth or were inspired by Che and Lenin. Are they socialist too?
Sanders is a social democrat, deal with it.

That's an idiotic thing to say. Historically, socialist policies on the ballot have always been the protection of worker's organizations (which Sanders said again and again, need to be revived), co-ops, better working conditions, etc. Everything else is meant to be won elsewhere.

Yeah let's compare who is actually in politics, produced a documentary about Debs and continues to claim him as inspiration with a teenager who buys a t-shirt.

You're a fucking idiot.

Tony Benn drew some inspiration from Marx, but his proposed alternative economic strategies were still social democracy in one country.

Anyway I'm going to make my linguistic point again: You can have more than one goal.
I'm a social democrat, yes, but I'm also a shitposter. Shitposting doesn't override the social democratic element, it's just another facet.

Similarly say - Corbyn. Or better yet, John McDonnell Now, Corbyn and McDonnell are campaigning to win elections on a social democratic platform - so they're SocDems. HOWEVER They both also hint - more strongly with McDonnell - that they want the abolition of capitalism. So they're socialists, but they're socialists running a social democratic campaign. They're social-democratic-socialists. Just like I'm a shitposting social democrat hermit murderer dog kidnapper.

Since he never said he is "formerly a socialist" or "used to like Debs in the past" there is literally no reason to assume there is an equivalency here. This is just your imagination speaking.

Jesus, you're mad.

Dude, I LIKE Sanders and I wanted him to win. He just objectively isn't a socialist in any meaningful sense.

There's virtually no difference between an electoral social democratic platform and an electoral socialist platform, other than their context they are made in and what that allows for (in global capitalism there's obviously less room for reforms than early 20th century).

The electoral camp of Socialist politics was always limited in scope. This dates back to the 19th Century. This applies to Marx and Engels. What differentiates a Social-Democrat from a Socialist is the belief that these are enough to abolish capitalism, period.

Explain to me in which senses are those.

Wait I'm not sure who's supposed to be the naive one thinking capitalism can be abolished by the ballot box here.

This. Also, I don't know if it's causality or only correlation, but since Mélenchon's first candidacy in 2012 it's easier for us French leftists to ignore our historical divisions. Like if cards were reshuffled : old divisions are slowly forgotten, and new ones arise.

Marx describing anarchists in the era of the International. He could easily be talking about you cunts, who don't read him but assume you already know what he said.

Anarchists were right when they rejected participating in elections.

Of course they were, which is why they've achieved nothing other than the destruction of all Socialist organizations that allowed them.

As opposed to the momumental graveyard of achievements won by participation in bourgeoise elections.

He refused to endorse Macron against LePen.
Centrist called it a betrayal of the holy pact or something and almost tried to portray him as the ultimative bad guy in this entire election.
He had more balls than Sanders, you have to admit that.

Non-existing achievements like the free time you have because you don't have to work 12 hours a day. If only you could use some of that time to read.

Jesus, you are retarded. He needs to admit that he is a bourgeois politician who promotes capitalism with a human face, for it to be true?
And it's not like Debs is a super controversial figure among the centre-left, he can easily be coopted by the bourgeoisie.

I'm starting to hate this cartoon

The left in france was never elected in the 70s, the first left wing president of the French Fifth republic was Mitterand in the 80s.

If you're going to assume he's lying to the entire world that he's a Socialist for some reason, then you need to point out the reasons he's not one. So far, I've only confused kids thinking "bourgeois elections" are counter-revolutionary.

I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. Debs is a reformist? Bourgeois? What?

One of the unmistakable signs of the dumb neophyte

GMIL always makes theorylets mad for some reason.

The 8 hour workday was the result of unions spooking the porky, some terrorism probably commited by anarchists, and even the Soviet Revolution fueling sucdem and new deal reforms. Placing the implementation of the 8 hour work day solely on elections is like saying the 1960s civil rights legislation would have happened on its own without the threat of violence or civil unrest caused by protestors. And to go further, all it will take to undo these reforms is an election, it is not infeasible that once they have cut benefits or raised the retirement age liberals could look into undoing the 8 hour workday.

Yes, agitation on the streets and democratic participation to turn them into law. Literally the formula being discussed here, defended by Marx and defended by Sanders.

Oh and

you're wrong about this. Anarchist terrorism was proven unpopular and political suicide again and again.

He isn't lying, he is using the word for his own ends like all socdem parties do (dude free stuff lmao, I hope the bourgeoisie will be more nice this time).
He doesn't advocate for anything socialist, he is an opportunist SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. And I don't care if he calls himself Marxist-Leninist-Maoist or Posadist, it does not matter at all.
Open a book
Defending or liking Debs doesn't make you a radical and it's not as controversial as wanting proletarian revolution and the abolition of commodity production (what actual socialists do). Historical figures can be easily co-opted by politicians
As long as idiots like you are annoyed, I love it.

Good

Laws which can be overturned and have not seen success at revolution. Since the achievement of the 8 hour workday we've seen the deradicalization of unions and no political will to reduce the workday further, even the fight for $15 was drowned out. But I suppose Marxism-Sandersism will deliver the negation of the value form if we just vote in some liberal apologist that promises free healthcare.

Yes, we must support private property in its noble struggle against anarchist imperialism because the polls aren't good.

Actually, the sellout social-democrats that people often describe here run away from this term. Sanders embrace despite its unpopularity nowadays (something that he's helping reverse). He can't be using it for "his own ends" because there's no political gain to be made here, he's spent his life fighting against the wave, and helped an entire generation become open to the idea.

And where did you get the idea that fighting for better conditions is un-Socialist?

Are those guys just reformists as well?
marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1865/london-conference-program.htm

Or what about those guys?
"Together with Lenin, Trotsky worked out the tactics of the ‘united front’. The gist of it was this: the Communist parties, still too weak to overthrow the established order, should be the most active participants in the ‘day-to-day’ struggles of the workers for higher wages, shorter hours, and democratic freedoms. They should not change the idea of socialism into the small coin of trade unionism and parliamentary reform, but carry into the struggle for ‘partial demands’ their own revolutionary spirit and purpose. They should make the workers realize how tenuous were all the gains they could win under capitalism and so rally them, even through the fight for such gains, for the last battle. The Social Democrats directed the struggle for ‘partial demands’ in such a way as to contain the workers’ militant energy within the framework of capitalism; and they used reform as the diversion from revolution. The Communists, on the contrary, should use it as the spring-board of revolution."

He was already in politics fighting for an unpopular left-wing platform when you were in your dad's ballsack. He lived through a generation where idiots like you, who don't read anything and repeat clichés about revolution were norm. You don't know anything he doesn't.

I was just explaining his intellectual heritage and influences to you, and you assume that too is a facade. The only way you can sustain your pseudo-revolutionary fantasies is by assuming that the dude has been playing a character for like, half a century.

If you think endgoals conflate with immediate tasks then you haven't read Marx, because you're the definition of Utopian Socialist. Please notice that in any program or platform he supervisioned Marx has called for immediate abolition of any essential feature of capitalism, only strategic re-arrangement of present conditions.

They can also be co-opted by people who want to sell complacency and abstention from politics, and that clearly worked for you.

I'm not annoyed, we all had to start somewhere. You'll move to something better soon.

And speaking of annoying, I'll leave these two passages here to burn your insides a little bit:

You're arguing against a point I haven't made. I never said electoral politics is enough and I've been making that distinction this entire thread.
It's like things just don't get into you people's dumb heads.

"liberal apologist" so cute. I bet you own a beret and you have a Soviet flag on your walls.

...

GMiL is Holla Forums paint comics-tier.

You only need to read Engels The Bakuninists at Work to start having doubts about anarchism's supposed historic achievements. Had the Bakuninists not split and undermined the Spanish republic, then Spain likely would not have been a backwards quasi-feudal shithole with a hardcore tradition of monarchist and Catholic spooks.

The Spanish Civil War really started when various republicans of all types got together in 1930 to complete the work of what should've been done in the 19th century–to transform Spain into a modern capitalist democratic republic. The fact that Spain was so backwards and had long been a bastion of reaction gave the Francoists ample room to maneuver and likewise, Spain's backwardness, fed secessionist sentiment in Catalonia which in its time was known as "little Manchester" because it was more advanced then the rest of the nation.

Had the bourgeois republicans succeeded in 1873 then it would have made a far more lasting effect on the well-being of the Spanish people and the state of the workers movement then whatever fleeting flourish of Bakuninist-inspired anarchism could've done.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/bakunin/

Most of the other supposed achievements of historic anarchism come down

But this is really only a positive in hindsight as this poster pointed out it:

Then there was the fact that there were other militant groups and left-wing groups pushing for change besides anarchists. Some say that one of the effects of anarchist agitation and terrorism was that it sometimes spurred the bourgeoisie to initiate reforms; but then again the Leninism and movements claiming to be Leninist were far more influential and thus can have a better claim to have brought some reforms about by spooking the bourgeoisie. Although tbh I'm not afraid to say that some aspects of the improvement of working class standards of living in the 19th and 20th centuries had to do with the unintentional economic byproducts of the particular capitalist cycles of those eras and therefore the improvement in standards of living was not entirely or likely even largely political in nature.

Fighting for them? Not un-socialist. Going to the polls and voting for a SocDem or bourg politician to pass your better conditions for you, therby cementing the legitimacy and continuation of the wage-labouring condition as much as possible while calling it "socialism"? Marx, in chapter 3, section 2 of the Communist Manifesto. Communists stand for making demands bourgeois society cannot admit, and with this show of hypocrisy taking matters in its own hands.

No what you've argued for is a dead end that can be easily reversed. Electoral politics are a waste of time and at best result in a more comfrotable capitalism. It does not foster revolutionary potential, if anything going by the 20th century it causes it to burst and die down after the great quest for the popular reform is over.

That's exactly what Sanders is. If you're into 70 year old men that's your deal.

I'm afraid not. I also do not own an armchair, maosuit, or smashie gear.

You're quoting the wrong post and literally below that I passage have shown Marx's writings saying the exact opposite. Passing reforms only perpetuates capitalism in the imagination of the sort of people who follow Sovietfangirl. And I don't have the Manifesto in hands but you can just quote whatever passage you've misread here, because I'm sure it at best states once again the distinction I've made time and time again in this thread.

Did Sanders actually do the whole equate-Scandinavia-with-socialism thing? I think I would have remembered if he made that fuck up.

Here's the thing, instead of swearing off elections altogether, why not vote or campaign for a candidate who belongs to an actual communist party?

There are going to be bourgeois elections no matter what you do, its going to get hyped hard no matter what you do, people are going to bring it up at meetings, protests, and study groups no matter what you do.

In burgerland, the only thing that mass abstention from electoral politics has done is bring to power decades of republican presidents and center-right democrats. Low-voter turn-out has been a problem for a while and no matter what the apologists of political complacency say almost no one takes the fact of low-voter turnout as proof that the system is illegitimate in practice. The bourgeoisie doesn't conclude that the system is illegitimate because a large mass or a slight majority of people didn't vote–they stage the same spectacle the next two to four years anyway. The vote is just mandating bourgeois political rule in the first place and it has nothing to do with the essential day-to-day reproduction of capitalist life and hegemony.

>To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of “socialism” has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
>We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

Won't deny that Marx and Engels saw utility in using bourgeois democracy to their advantage, but to say that they thought you could just vote in communism is beyond retarded. I mean again, even if they did allude to the possibility, the fact that it's never happened (Mitterand government in France went on a platform of "socialism in 100 days" following the actual definition; never happened), the bourgeoisie would never just let it happen if it was actually in the cards. The bourgeois State apparatus and its members have always rejected it and used cops and the military if necessary to stop this, even in Marx's time (Paris Commune, anyone?), but social democracy stepped up with paramilitary takedowns of communists, even peaceful ones abiding the law, and later fascism.

I'm not particlarly impressed with Bakunin, but that seems very weak. Admidtly I'm not an expert on 19th century Spain, but I highly doubt that the Republic could have stopped Campos regardless of the actions of the Bakunists.

The anarchist terrorism occured decades before Leninism and did have impact on the early labor struggles. That Leninist movements ie USSR and Rosa's failure was effective at spooking the porky proves the point I was trying to make, that signifigant reform is only possible with violence to back it up. Whether this violence comes from an external state or homegrown bombing is ultimatly irrelevant so long as it is present.

Anything can be reversed, even a revolution. And the reversal of any gain is easier when workers abstain from one mechanism or tool completely. (check Engels' description of the events in Spain that the user above posted. Or just read about the stupid anti-parliamentarism of communists under the threat of Fascism in Spain, Germany, etc.)

The idea that wanting a comfortable capitalism is heretic is a late 20th century invention by abstentionists. Here's Marx himself writing the resolutions to one of the First International's Congresses:

This applies more now than ever, and it wasn't the only petty gain for comfortable capitalism he made in his life.

Why don't people read? Why aren't they more engaged? Why aren't they more well-informed? Because when you're busy allowing yourself to be enslaved by lack of legal labour protection, by debt, by bills, by privatization of virtually every service, by a brutal police state and so on, you don't think about reading Kapital.

This bit of common sense, a wisdom that everyone could arrive at with some minor reflection, is completely lost to an entire generation of self-proclaimed socialists who allow a few empty phrases about what Socialism is and isn't to take over their entire imagination. People hear memes about Rosa Luxemburg, they hear the phrase "socialism is when workers control the means of production" again and again, and place the brackets of their demands there. This would get you called a Bakuninist piece of shit by Marxists until 1940. Here's Marx again:

The mechanistic interpretation of Revolution, that they happen when things get bad enough, has been disproved by history time and time again.

Like, which one? Here at best there's one tankie party and the one time in history it got 8% of the vote it basically did nothing. Even worse than doing nothing, at the height of its popularity it bended over to everything parliament demanded and disolved by entering a literal SocDem faction to secure its survival afterwards (it wasn't going to get any more votes afterwards). You gringos have Trot parties like SAlt or tankie parties like the PSL which might have a shot at winning local elections, but they're gonna go the same way: nail in some of that critical support for bourgeois reform and then play ball or die.

I'm not preaching full abstention from voting if you need to survive. Here I vote for the SocDems because I'd rather not spend two days a week having sleep for dinner, but I'm not dumb enough to think that's revolutionary or suddenly would be if I voted for a nominally "really socialist" party. Reform would be revolutionary if it were coerced by a workers' movement, not through the ballot box.

Are you really that condescending to working people? In the US, 45% of working people have flat-out opted out of political life with how disenfranchised they feel, and that's precisely because voting before that netted them nothing. Instead of blaming this on bogeymen telling them not to vote, look at the actual reality of the nothingness of it all, and see that this has itself spawned actually potentially revolutionary workers' movements that vie for reform in a radical way, like FF15. The more extreme wings in FF15 have outright refused any and all cooperation with the Dems, and there's a reason why they're the loudest and still around. You can't quell that at all.

As I said, you're completely misreading Marx's words, and this doesn't mean what you think it means. That Marx supported electoral initiatives is shown directly in text many times, and I've quoted many passages here (and I have more, if anyone's interested).

Again, you're arguing against a point I didn't make, and this is the distinction I've been making this entire thread.

You guys need to start reading the entire thread before jumping in. Every time I spend hours basically repeating the same shit to different people, smh.

You can't dismiss electoral politics by the absence of a radical party to vote in, because there's no radical anything to be part of.

Get all the radical unions, radical student groups, radical political parties and revolutionaries together and you have a few thousand people in a good day. Every form of organized struggle is dead, the point is to ressurrect it.

And 'playing ball' is not wrong if done intelligently, after all electoral politics is meant to make strategic gains, not transform society fundamentally. Pic related is Engels doing exactly that.

People have opted out of unions and activism as well, should we also reject those? Your entire reasoning here is flawed.

Why did you not quote this part:
>A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
The rest was just examples of how it does this. Marx saw it happen himself with how he saw his naton's leader, Bismarck, voluntarily impose the first welfare State and many labour law reforms. That shit scared him because it showed that the bourgeoisie already knows, before revolutionary activity even starts being remotely threatening, to engage in all the harmless measures that throw the workers a bone and keep them docile.

That's literally just you setting the boundaries for what is and isn't possible and proclaiming that doing the things you believe are good is then necessary.

Sure, how and when? And how is this desirable? All these groups you listed, are they all worth at least a single damn to us? I'm not writing them off but I like to know if something stands with me and most importantly radical workers' demands or doesn't before allying with it.

I just gave you an example of one that isn't, and is growing, and is neither of the things you mentioned.

Show me right here and right now what we ought to do then, oh wise one. Are we not doing it yet because you didn't come along and tell us to?

People have literaly opted out of unions because they fail to be revolutionary today at the most fundamental level, as well as most forms of activism because they no longer work or are coopted by the establishment. FF15 is a prime example of something that doesn't let itself get dissuaded, and there's more movements like it, growing ever more. Now I know about FF15 because I follow that shit from overseas where I am right now, but there's similar things going on right here I'm directly involved with, and I do them not just for their own sake but because they authentically express a discontent and actively work towards their aims outside of dead avenues.

And those tools don't work anymore, and haven't worked since any of us here were born. Elections have shifted from being between socdems and conservatives to between liberals and lolberts who have the same practical conclusions, albiet different rates. The rejection of participation in elections is not because lifestylism or some idealistic nonsense, but a scientific conclusion from the collapse of social democracy and the rise of our current liberals. There is no more USSR to spook porky, there is no mass movement that won't capitulate to supporting the closest liberal to them, there are no more large unions radical enough to push anything but collaboration, there is nothing to push any "radical" reformist far enough or convince a major party to embrace reforms. We have already lost the battle in the polls, engaging in them because it was relevant in the 19th and 20th centuries is idiotic nostalgia.

Because you're once again projecting a wrong meaning to the words he used.

Marx criticized an endless amount of unionists and revolutionaries on grounds not dissimilar. Does that imply a rejection to that form of struggle? Or does it emply a change in tactics? Learn the context of Socialism in the first half of the 19th century. Christian socialists and Chartists are two different entities making use of similar tools, Marx supporting the latter. It's a question of intent.

You probably only know this because I used to make this point in every thread a while ago. Scaring the ruling classes into reform is a good tactic, and making use of electoral politics don't reject that (after all they might make more concessions to win elections than to defeat social movements). You should not be surprised to learn that Marx and Engels fought the anti-Socialist laws because they want reentrance on electoral politics.

And Bismarck also made use of other left-leaning tools of manipulation. You want to know one of them? Abstention.

"In virtually all countries, certain members of the International, invoking the mutilated conception of the Statutes adopted at the Geneva Congress, have made propaganda in favor of abstention from politics; and the governments have been quite careful not to impede this restraint. In Germany, Schweitzer and others in the pay of Bismarck even attempted to harness the cart to government policy. In France, this criminal abstention allowed Favre, Picard, and others, to seize power on September 4; this abstention made it possible, on March 18, to set up a dictatorial committee composed largely of Bonapartists and intrigants, who, in the first days, lost the Revolution by inactivity, days which they should have devoted to strengthening the Revolution."

What? That's just me saying that most radical organizations are dead but you can't reject the political language they belong to entirely because of that. I don't get this reply at all.

Again, I'm making a point about the reason user made to dismiss democratic politics. I'm legit not sure what you're talking about.

Which one? FF15? FF15 being popular has nothing to do with what I've just said.

My point is, a form of struggle being dead or inactive doesn't mean we should reject it. For example, if FF15 fails, or doesn't breed any successor, will you give up worker's rights movement as well? Because that's the logic I'm rejecting here.

Your insecurities are showing, man. Just calm down. I may sound like an asshole after 3 hours of repeating the same stuff, but I'm just trying to help us move collectively towards the right strategy.

Cooption by the establishment is as old as class society itself. You don't fight it by deserting that front entirely, my good lord.

Good for you. Keep doing that.

This is why revisionism is bad imho a Leninist party is supposed to combine legal parliamentary work with illegal work. The two reinforce each other, when the bourgeoisie tries to block off the legal path then the party goes underground and redoubles their emphasis on the illegal work.

I'm failing to see the point where we actually disagree, reforms are part of the revolutionary movement as Lenin taught and obtained as a part of the revolutionary process.

I work for slightly more then minimum-wage, part-time and without benefits, including state-benefits because my state is stingy as fuck. I might know a thing about it, and why people opt-out, but I'm telling you the bourgeoisie does not give a fuck that workers choose not to exercise political rights that it wasn't really that enthusiastic about them having in the first place.

I never said this but I've merely told you the reality of how things are here. Real wages in the US have been stagnant and even declining for decades. If you measure the loss of real income in gold terms then the hammering workers have taken is harder then any inflation index will show you and even there there are questions over whether that's accurate.

FF15 is heartening but its merely a bright-spot in a long-lasting era of labor defeats going back decades. If FF15 can form then why can't red unions and proletarian parties make a comeback? You praise FF15 for refusing to work with the dems but you vote soc dem yourself–I'm not saying there's any shame in that. But what we're talking about here is that if there was a real proletarian party you wouldn't have to vote for the lesser-evil but could actually vote for something that represented your interests as a worker.

What has? I was born in 1991, I haven't seen a single successful strategy despite the fact that I've seen left-wing parties, movements, insurgencies and unions.

Everything fails, in my opinion, because these detach from each other. We should want coordination, between armed struggle, unionism, worker's movements, electoral politics, and more importantly, between different socialist movements in different countries.

Honestly, my diagnosis of lack of participation in elections has much more to do with what Marx said above. No time to read and become well-informed, lack of means to properly understand the political system, lack of education, lack of time for grassroots movements, etc. All of which can be solved by improving our conditions to a more comfortable one.

And that degree of abstinence is pretty unique to the US so I don't think you can make a general diagnosis of electoral politics based on that.

In your phrase it's also implicit that we lost the battle of worker's movements (no more large unions), of mass movements, and of revolution itself (the USSR). Are you going to follow that conclusion to all of those, and become a political nihilist who thinks everything is in vain? Or are you reserving that muh privilege to electoral politics?

nope

This guy gets it.

Join worker's movements and institutions, and help develop a revolutionary vanguard. Meanwhile, try to have some legal electoral participation to ensure people will have the time and energy to join you, and that our rights will not be completely infringed by hostile parties. Some minor opposition to a new COINTELPRO can do wonders.

It's not that difficult, people.