Egregoros

@winterklaus it's very clearly the site of struggle right now. my analysis of the situation has been though that there will likely need to be a point where the contradictions sharpen enough that the DSA is forced into going underground and adopting a more militant/revolutionary stance (sorta like what happened with the Bolsheviks once they became too powerful and were explicitly suppressed with state violence). I think there is also the slim possibility that the DSA could succeed in a peaceful transition to socialism similarly with what happened in Chile when Allende was elected, if only because the US is such a decrepit dying empire that there is literally nowhere else for history to go other than complete collapse and balkanization or socialism (i.e. "socialism or barbarism" but like actually).

but it's hard to say and maybe will be a mix of the two things because the US is very unevenly developed. it's simultaneously the wealthiest country in the world and yet the American people are broadly immiserated in very basic ways yet also have not known the kind of daily fight for survival struggles that people in Russia or China did when they had their communist revolutions. it is truly an unprecedented situation but one thing I know for sure is that there's absolutely no way the status quo is going to be able to continue for much longer.

@winterklaus being something of an ultra communizer whatever who is well-read in extremely niche theory, I've started to find it very tiresome how common it is for the supposedly advanced consciousness types to not understand that if you actually want to *do* anything and not just posture to your friends about having the correct opinions, you need to be able to diagnose what the current conditions and opportunities are and then work within that instead of screeching in the cuck chair of history about how the DSA are social fascists or some other terminally online leftoid shit.

@sun @nyx @winterklaus

Yeah the context is very specific and important, one must keep in mind during the 2nd international up until 1917 all of the marxists were 'social democrats' -- the Bolshevicks were part of the All Russian Social Democratic Party -- and the SPD was truly a mass party that included the majority of the german voting population, WWI comes around the SPD support the war by and large, being bootlicking Germans. When the War is lost the leftwing of the party breaks off, start the German Communist Party, who are then crushed by the Friekorps and betrayed by the SPD establishment. Lenin was talking about the german Komunistes in *Left wing Socialism: a an infantile disorder* for basically jumping the gun trying to go full revolution when the conditions were yet ripe.

So Wiemar is established as an truce between the right of the SPD and the conservatives, and the Stalinist/Comintern line about "social fascism" that's a reference to this state of affairs, that the Social Democrats were at best reformists and liberals at worst. In the late 20's there were calls for a united front between Social Democrats and Komunists against nazis which the Comintern opposed using that "Social Fascist" line.

In retrospect this was clearly, obviously, the wrong line lmao, but interesting to note that the Comintern took the exact opposite line in reference to Spain 36' where they called for a united front with petite bourgeois liberals and denounced the ultras and anarchists for being wreckers. Also the wrong line in retrospect.

What I take from that is that there is no such thing as a trans-historical correct position, sometimes you gotta ally yourself with socdems, other times not so much. You gotta do the whole 'concrete analysis of concrete conditions' and not just repeat cliches by rote, as Lenin was always saying.