PowerLurker [they/them]

not postin anymore

  • 5 Posts
  • 145 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: September 9th, 2025
  • PowerLurker [they/them]@hexbear.nettopolitics@hexbear.net•I can't see a single thing that's bad.English
    7·
    3 days ago

    alright lemme preface this by saying: i think his win is a net good for the US left & working class! i’ve posted my own (pristine, if i may say so myself smuglord ) analysis on this twice elsewhere on the site. the short version is it creates an opening to energize people toward doing more irl organizing shit. that said:

    communists on this site are cynical about the Democrats because either A) they’ve been through this twice with Bernie, been through this with AOC, even been through it with Obama (though he never claimed to be socialist) etc., and have learned lessons about strategy and tactics from these experiences that are backed by history and theory which foreclose Democratic entryism as useful, or B) they’re from countries the capitalist class in the US have immiserated, with the Democratic party serving as a key tool of this immiseration. and you see a large subset of users on hexbear trying to convince others that the most meaningful way forward from this is to elect more Zohran’s through a bourgeois party that has (accurately) been called “the graveyard of social movements.” my investment in posting about this shit is 1) that posting feels good on a hedonistic level and i’m addicted to it but also 2) that i want any hexbears who end up doing shit irl to avoid this dead end entryist trap.

    i mean some of our more grass touching users have even posted about non-electoral shit that people can get involved in recently and they don’t tend to get much engagement vs Zohran stuff. i think that shows something about the thinking of this (niche, ultimately low-impact) forum.

  • PowerLurker [they/them]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Golden Horde - Novo General Megathread for the 5th-9th of November 2025English
    12·
    3 days ago

    i actually have ultimately come to the conclusion that Zohran’s win is a net W for the US left, while maintaining an overall rejection of electoralism as any kind of viable strategy. synthesizing/paraphrasing a comment i made in the PSL statement post in response to another hexbear’s:

    election effortpost

    one of the potential bad futures is that people check out after the election, Zohran’s obstructed to hell, and this is successfully painted as a failure of socialism by the ruling class (outlined by the other user). another bad future is that people just get locked into an endless cycle of trying to get the next dozen or so AOCs elected to congress, which I personally believe is a waste of time at best and a clear way to co-opt radical politics at worst.

    but I do think there’s a difference between those smaller parliamentary races and socdem figures running for executive positions - like Zohran or Bernie - where a mass movement could (at least theoretically) enable them to unilaterally help the working class. and arguably more importantly, these executive races and positions provide a much larger propaganda platform to normalize socialism, which orgs like the PSL or the radical DSA caucuses can use to agitate around, to recruit around, and to move the masses toward more meaningful & radical struggle.

    PSL is (correctly) never going to do dem entryist work, but every now and again dem entryism - which is currently happening whether we like it or not, and is mostly carried out by people who wouldn’t be ready to join PSL or DSA Red Star or whatever anyway, i.e. autonomously from the small-but-growing communist left in the US - provides an opportunity in the form of a Zohran or a Bernard for us to widen the horizon of possibility with our class and to plug them into the struggle. the future isn’t written though, it is genuinely up to us to reach these folks and convince them to struggle with us. without that intervention, the two bad futures discussed are just as likely.

    that said, it is absolutely wild to me how quickly DSA-right democrat entryist types dive into sounding exactly like suburban twitter libs votescolding people who didn’t vote for Kamala when they encounter principled Marxists (or people who are least trying to be principled Marxists). though to my comrades actually struggling to radicalize DSA from within, i’m sure this isn’t news lol.