Participating in bourgeois democracy

Don't you need both, though? Voting seems like a third- or fourth-order thing. You still do it, but it's all the other stuff that matters.

Where I think I agree is that people spend way too much time on electoral politics. Or they spend so much time blah blah blahing about elections instead of other matters. But voting isn't really a big deal whether you do it or not. Show up and vote and then call it a day and do other things that are more useful and productive.

I will say that electoral campaigns can be useful for learning various skills. Volunteer for a local campaign, local politician – it doesn't really matter who – just to learn how the whole thing functions.

You can go and vote, no one's stopping you. All I'm saying is that it's pretty pointless. How can you look back on the last 70 years of western "democracy" and not conclude that voting is a farce? The fact that I have to state this on a "leftist" board.

They did it through both means. Do you seriously think that every socdem in parliament was a secret porky just playing 4D chess? You can maybe say that about some politicians like FDR or Bismark, but its pretty clear that workers have exercised genuine representation to a degree through voting.
I wouldn't comment as to the exact degree, but its definitely there. France and the UK both have much stronger social democratic parties, which do represent a certain level of consciousness among the workers. They also have much stronger unions.
You're conflating two different issues here. I'm not talking about social democracy versus socialism. I'm talking about whether or not workers are capable of exercising any political power through bourgeois democracy.
That doesn't make any sense. Fascists abolish liberal democracy because its a threat to the complete domination of the bourgeoisie. It is a tool that facilitates worker power.
I'm not shilling for social democracy. I'm saying that electoralism is a tool in the hands of communists, and this isn't an uncommon take. It was supported by Marx, Lenin, and the Commintern. You keep asserting that workers can't exercise power through voting, but you never say precisely why, you just keep re-stating your position. Why is it impossible that workers exercise power through voting? What stops a pro-worker candidate from getting elected and passing reforms that improve their lives? Describe the precise mechanism by which this is prevented. This has happened plenty of times, and yet you are just dismissing literally every instance of it as 4D bourgeois chess without any proof.

Ummm, 99% of socdems are in support of "porkies" and have a vest interest in maintaining the current bourgoies system. Is that a conspiracy now?

I thought you said you were british before? Guess you're whatever is convenient at the time eh. Labor is a bourgoies party that has eviscarated worker rights as hard as the tories. There was no "old labor" and we can't just throw out support behind them because they say nice things WHILE OUT OF POWER. You'll bemoan that this is "besides the point", but the "stronger unions" here operate like they do in the US. They break up strikes and rat out potential threats to respective companies. They have been FULLY co-opted. Look at france with their protests, the unions there tried to coralle them to be more in line with what macron wanted.

I bring up social democracy because that's the system that IS the most "democractic" under capitalism. I'm being charitable to you, and even under social democracy do we still see policies workers voted for NOT going through 99% of the time.

Look this is a complex issue where I'll be reciting Gramsci, yet you'll be deliberately obtuse and disingenious all the same. Capitalism can vacilate between liberal democracy and fascism given the threat of socialism. It's actually quite easy to do so because all the bourgoies still remain, it's just the politicians who get changed out. If by "workers power", you mean crumbs and a pathetic welfare system then yeah, I guess. You should hold yourself to higher standards though.

Look, there is more evidence that voting DOESN'T matter than for. You point out exceptions, they only prove the rule. The last 70 years of bourgoies democracy has PROVEN that the demands of workers are not answered through voting.

The bourgoeis goes to war without the workers permission.
The bourgoies institute autsterity without the workers permission.
The bourgoies can restrict right of movement without the workers permission.
The bourgoies can reduce your ability to spend without workers permission.
The bourgoies can defund public services (austerity) without the workers permission.
The bourgoies can make redundant whole swathes of workers without the workers permission.

All of the above has never been voted upon, or has never had a popular vote overturn.

Also relevant video to labor:

youtube.com/watch?v=rNfFd1pSIuI

That doesn't contradict what I said. Socdems support a bouregois system yes, but that doesn't mean that workers dont exercise power through them within that system.
I'm a leaf. You must have me confused with another catposter.
Again, you are conflating a lack of radicalism with a lack of power. I never said that bourgeois democracy is a real democracy, just that workers are capable of exercising SOME power under it. Unions and socdem parties absolutely have limits to their effectiveness, and will shut down anything too radical. Even still, they have served as a means of workers exercising power within certain limits.
Not sure where you get that statistic m8, but the fact is if there are policies that workers are voting for, and they are going through, then workers are exercising political power.
Funny, because Gramsci literally describes bourgeois rule as hegemonic, meaning that they occupy a dominant position, but do not rule without opposition, even within their own system.
Of course, but you're missing the reason WHY that happens. Pinochet wouldn't have toppled Allende if his government didn't threaten bourgeois interests. Hitler wouldn't have abolished parliament if it wasn't capable of threatening bourgeois interests. On the flip side, the KPD and Bolsheviks wouldn't have participated in bourgeois parliaments if they weren't capable of seeing to the interests of workers to at least some degree.
Just downplaying the gains workers made through social democracy won't change what they represent. Workers fought for them, both within the legislature and outside of it, and they won. They exercised political power.
I do. I'm not endorsing social democracy or even democratic socialism here. I'm just saying that the position of the bourgeoisie under liberal democracy is hegemonic, not dictatorial. I'm also saying that electoralism is a tool in the communist arsenal, one that can help us make real gains and which we cannot afford to ignore.
Except all of that was undoing gains made by workers. They were successful because the bourgeoisie succeeded in breaking the institutions that allowed workers to exercise power under liberalism. Not because its impossible for workers to exercise power under liberalism.

I don't even know what you mean with the amorphous "some". Could mean literally anything, a worker could have broke into some MPs house and change his decision on some important policy the next morning. That's demonstrating power right? Though in a very round about way. Maybe one politician says he listens to workers and introduces a wage rise of 0.01%, that's SOME power demonstrated by workers right?

Amoprhous nonsense. You can keep voting, just know that you have observable reality working against you and 70 years of a neutered westrn workers movement. Do whatever makes you happy.

Most of your reply is deflecting away from voting however, you're saying that workers exercised political power through demonstrations/protests, not voting.

Yeah because the degree to which they exercise power is impossible to quantify. However the term “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” implies that porkies have a total monopoly on legitimate, legal power, which isn’t the case. That’s why I use the term “bourgeois hegemony” since it’s a more accurate description.
Make a materialist analysis m8. The failure f the workers movement in the west is rooted in the absence of objective revolutionary conditions, not a failure of tactics. Revolutionary organizations fail in the west because the economic conditions necessary for revolution don’t exist, not because socdems exist.
I’m saying they do both, and both are evidence that liberal societies aren’t bourgeois dictatorships, but bourgeois hegemonies. Fascism is an actual bourgeois dictatorship.

Actually it could be argued that revolutionary potential isn't there PRECISELY because socdems exist. Imperialist socdems placate domestic workers so that they don't revolt.

Also I don't know about your country, but porkies do indeed have total monopoly on "legitimate, legal power". If you're pointing to some tiny bit of pushback from the working class, then that exists in outright dictatorships/fascism too. Even in Nazi Germany there was dissent and arguments over policies.

You might as well become an acellerationist then. However I would argue that even without socdems, imperialism does quite a bit to weaken the contradictions of capitalism in the core, and so lowers the objective conditions for revolution. When those conditions exist, socdems are unable to stop revolutionaries. What socdems do is help that process along by weakening the contradictions even further.
You keep saying this but haven’t provided any justification for it. Workers organize themselves, vote for socdem representatives, and those representatives act on their behalf in parliament. You can’t say that this doesn’t happen, and you can’t say that it’s not workers exercising political power legitimately. The fact that social democracy has been in retreat since the 70s doesn’t negate the fact that it was at one time, and is once again becoming, a genuine expression of worker power.

I can't find the quote off the top m head, but Lenin essentially said that it is important to participate and get OUR (communist) members into parliaments/congress/etc. because roles like president or prime minister were both ridiculous notions and unnecessary. the point is not that we can 'reform' the government to be communist (unless it already has high socialist tendencies) But to acquire a higher platform from which one propagandizes our ideology.

I think of it as a question of scarce resources for organizing. You only have so many people, so much time they are free from work, so much money they or a wider group of inactive supporters can donate. People often say in response to questions about electoralism and it’s alternatives “why not both?”, and while that is true it is only to an extent. Within your limitations you have to assess what is the best way to build worker’s power up. I simply think FOCUSING on elections is bad, and if we were to be a little wishy-washy about our criteria for deciding where to spend our time I’d put it something like this:

When you spend time and money campaigning for a politician, especially, the message of the form of your organizing is that we need to get this correct person into office to help us. The message, amplified in particular by the context we are in in which political engagement is often represented as a voting booth, is that the most significant kind of political action begins and ends with election season and your private decision at the ballot. You volunteer at temporary campaign headquarters to bother people over the phone and knock on doors. You basically take on the role that people associate with a solicitation by a sales person, one of the most banal annoying things in modern life.

In this process of soliciting people for votes, you don’t actually create lasting connections with anybody. At best, you collect massive email lists that pundits and high level party strategists think are gold mines or something (I NEED THOSE GLENNGARY LEADS!) Then when your candidate wins you see images on TV of a man like Obama broadcasting out into space that WE did it. All the average supporter likely did was actually get over the inconvenience of going out and voting after work. MAYBE they donated some money. But overall they probably didn’t do much of anything, still don’t know their neighbors that well, don’t like the people they work with, have little support network outside of their immediate family, maybe their spouse, maybe some old friends from school days. But their candidate won, and he is there saying good job guys, WE did it!

The point of this rambling illustration is to express what I think almost the exact opposite result of organizing should look like. Nobody was truelly brought together in this alienating campaign drive from an unaccountable, distant politician and their institutional fronts and machinery putting up invitations to “volunteer” to do work at their behest. The whole thing is like a temporary summer job at best for the highly engaged people. When the summer’s over you all just go home, literally like a Hollywood movie showing all the shit that happens with the counselors fucking and the kids burning down a cabin or something, but at the end all these strangers just part ways. What organizing resources should be spent on is finding the best way to make these people no longer feel like they are strangers beholden to whatever the temporary interests are of organizations they barely have a part in. The organizations themselves need to be understandable and capable of being truly engaged with, and what they offer to people needs to be something pervasive and continuously relevant to their lives.

So basically I don’t think elections are something that should be outright avoided as though they’re dangerous, but they aren’t platforms for effective organizing. Organizing is everything outside of the direct elevation of individuals to state office. It’s organizing to protect and elevate each other on a day to day basis, and either directly putting someone into a legislative or executive position to represent you, or having somebody observe the landscape and try to appeal to you, follows from the organic movement of people organizing to meet their own needs right now. Having masses of people form tenants unions or try to own their own buildings will give force to the need for legislation around tenants rights, housing development and rent to reflect the organic movement of social power as it really exists. Having people organize to fight for their rights at work or to own their own businesses co-operatively will cause the state to try to catch up (or to slam down on it, but then you’re just heightening contradictions even more.)

I just don’t think elections are an important focus for change for a lot of issues. It is usually the other way around. Some issues I’d say elections are very important because they’re too fucking big and it’s hard to figure what even organized people can do aside from petition the state. Like climate change, this is a totally structural issue. All you can do is basically sabotage fucking power stations or something, people can’t organize to build mass transit without the state.

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Youre a brainlet. Protests and demonstrations are the height of spectacle and powerlessness and in the caee of an effective protest police and military without fail is used. You probably mean striking aka withholding labor but thats not the same as “protesting”

"workers are capable of exercising power under bourgeois democracy"
Technically Hitler never got rid of the Weimar Republic's constitution, he just passed the enabling act which allowed him to unilaterally bypass it. Meaning Nazi Germany actually had one of the most progressive constitutions coexisting with one of the most repressive governments. I would say this is a pretty strong point against the institutions of bourgeois democracy, seeing as they are little more than window dressing, while the real advances/retreats in the class conflict happen outside the realm of the law, with the law constantly playing catch-up as one side does better or worse. It's no coincidence that teachers strikes raged last year in burgerland, the largest union with the largest contract was preceded by a 90+ percent vote last July in favor of a strike, and mysteriously social democracy starts becoming a thing again, at least in the media and a few congressional districts. So I guess I agree with
Should also be pointed out though that there are sectors among the bourgeoisie that are campaigning pretty hard for social democracy/welfare reform so that may have something to do with it. Overdetermination, I suppose

Of course I don't mean protests filled with middle class fags, why fucking would I imply that? The fact that protests/demonstrations only brings the thought of these slacktivists to your thoughts reveals the castrated worker situation in the west perfectly.

I have a very, very low opinion of Bernstein, Kautsky, and the history of social-democracy but I never bought this critique of that tendency. Every single communist movement of the 20th century eventually stopped being revolutionary, social-democracy was merely the first to fall. Even unions stopped being radical eventually. And by God, what could possibly be more radical than the tradition of workers striking and battling cops on the streets?

Overwhelming bourgeois legislatures with proletarian delegates could prove to be a potentially fatal blow to their regimes. Evolutionary socialism is a viable strategy we should be seriously considering. It's only when we repeat the mistake of seeing it as THE strategy that we will be doomed.

The primary goal of communists in elections should be political reform anyway, not welfare-state crap. That only comes after we take over. Our most immediate demands should be more democracy, more proletarian control over the state, and the step-by-step erosion of bureaucracy and plutocracy.

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A C C E L E R A T I O N I S M

No. Ignore the circus, let it burn.

So he effectively bypassed it. Actually the Weimar Republic proves my point quite nicely, since it’s politics were dominated by three parties: the KPD, SPD, and NSDAP. You’ll notice that two of those are workers parties, both of which successfully sought legislation to protect the interests of workers.
It was literally the largest political force of organized labour and workers in Germany, it was just less radical than the KPD.
You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because social democracy, despite not being anti capitalist, is still a genuine workers movement, and still a genuine expression of class struggle. You are assuming that working class consciousness emerges fully formed without undergoing development through struggle, but this isn’t the case. Lenin acknowledges that the working class on its own only achieves trade union and social democratic consciousness. As the contradictions heighten, and the vanguard does its work, only then does revolutionary consciousness develop. The fact that some porkies see social democracy as a way to prevent revolution does not preclude it from being an actual movement of the working class. You are assuming that anything less than a fully socialist movement is artificial, without recognizing that the workers in the US and West in general lack that level of class consciousness, but still retain some level. The result is social democracy.

TLDR: the re-emergence of social democracy in the US is the result of a heightening of the class contradictions, not a 4D plot by porkies. Some porkies may be jumping on the bandwagon to save their own skins, but it’s pretty clear that it’s also a genuine movement of the working class.

I understand the point you're trying to make regarding the pragmatist approach to participating in bourgeois politics, but let's clear the air a bit regarding the SPD. The SPD was indeed a vehicle for proletarian consciousness before it was co-opted by bourgeois interest in the years leading up to WW1, but I believe that the best argument you can continue to make is:

1. Proletarians need to see their interests being represented within the bougeois political system
2. We have to use both methods, outside and inside the bourgeois political process to push proletarian agenda.
3. It's a matter of pragmatism and using all tools available to win, rather than arguing the true effectiveness of either.

speaking of, bourgoisie elections, let's adress the elephant in the room: the European Parlaiment elections.
is it worth voting at all? It's possibly the most bourgie shit there is; a supernational government, dominated by right wingers, whose only disctintion is liking/not liking brown people. So reform from inside is completely impossible.
I've heard some socdems argue that "DiEM25 is actually not bad" but they probably won't be able to run reprsesentatives in every constituent, and even if they did, they'd simply not be able to reach a position to have any sort of bargaining power.
So really, are there ANY arguements for participating?

Even after that, it still enjoyed mass support among the working class, had a presence in pretty much every major trade union, etc. The idea that centre left parties aren’t expressions of class struggle or don’t represent the will of the working class is wrong. It basically assumes that anything other than full class consciousness is an artificial, bourgeois controlled movement. I’m not endorsing social democracy at all here though, I’m just pointing out that I don’t buy the narrative of everything other than revolutionary socialism being a bourgeois psyop. I agree with the rest of your post though.

I don't know about that. The far right in a number of countries has successfully used electoral processes in the recent past to boost their own profile even though their chances for victory were very slim. The IRA fielded sympathisers for local elections in Ireland so they can canvass and collect cash for the cause door to door without attracting unwanted attention.

Bourgie elections can be extremely useful for building movements as long as the organisers realise that the goal isn't to elect candidates but to build organisation on the ground, and also have managed to correctly identify a specific issue to press that will land them in the middle of the current political context, and whether it's possible to tackle that issue through bourg parliaments or not is completely inconsequential.

it's ripe for accelerating its own contradictions by letting all the eurosceptics get elected

the only people who actually have changed anything serious for the better in the EU have been the pirate party, and they've only managed to do this because unlike in burgerland and china surveillance capitalism is developing fairly slowly in europe in comparison. if you can vote for one of their candidates that's useful because it throws additional logs under the feet of the people trying to force a silicon valley friendly context onto european governments.

the only reason for participation in eu elections is to try to hinder the whole institution by voting in eurosceptics or pirates. don't expect them to submit meaningful reform, just expect them to attack all manner of porky or eurofederalist shit in parliament for non-socialist reasons.