There's nothing incorrect about this comment but I get the feeling you're getting something backwards. Dems weren't getting anyone closer to revolution, but Trump is. Under the past few Democratic admins, most of the US were complacent and they just put their faith in the imagined progressive forces of the Democratic Party to make things better. Under the Republicans, way more people get radicalized and start to look for solutions outside of electoralism. That does come with the flipside that the Republicans are more brazen about crushing dissent and arresting protesters, but Democrats also happily use the surveillance state and the militarized police against the left (see: Palestine encampment crackdowns last year).

Do you think we think revolutions just... happen? That we aren't working incredibly hard trying to find allies, build the labor movement, build the indigenous movement, the queer movement, the anti-racist movement? That we're not trying to bring those struggles together under the same revolutionary banner? I understand you might not see much of this as being related to leftists because socialists and communists often put aside their specific political labels when it's time to organize, but I guarantee that if you go and do something real (not voting) you'll immediately start coming across the communists. That's what a communist does, in practice.

So true, bestie, everyone who disagrees with me and cites their sources are irrational. True rational enlightened thinkers just call their interlocutors tankies and log off.

I'm at least glad this one was receptive and open to confronting evidence that contradicts years of moral licensing to bury their head in the sand and pretend we live in a good world.

Bailing out the banks was an actively bad thing. That's what gave the banks the power to barrel through with the rampant foreclosures that annihilated PoC wealth.

This is like saying FDR was great because he saved capitalism from destroying itself. If they had done nothing at all it would've been better in the long run because the crisis would have destroyed capitalism and we could finally move on to a system that puts human need above the acculumation of endless wealth.

Besides, this is completely ignoring the pillaging of Libya that took place under Obama, where Libya went from a forward-looking (yet flawed) democratic country to a failed state ruled by human trafficking operations and various statelets that control oil fields. It's the only place with open air slave trafficking markets. It ignores the occupation of Afghanistan that also took place under his watch. The expansion of the surveillance state, Guantanamo, the US-Mexico border camps, the support of Israel during 2012's Gaza bombings, the drone strikes in Pakistan and several other atrocities.

Hey, that system is pretty cool. I like it. You should keep in mind, though, the social relations of production that undergird political reality are much more impactful over the outcome of elections or any other political process, than which specific voting system we have. If the world switched to proportional approval voting tomorrow, it wouldn't change the relationship between the international imperialist institutions, the workers of the imperial core, and the workers of the periphery. >80% of productive labor would still be done in the periphery, imperialism would still just find ways to quiet dissent and destroy its opponents.

What's the huge difference in outcome? Why is voting the only type of action being considered?

https://jacobin.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality

Also, where's the part about mysterious funding? I don't think I caught that in the article

Here:

One of the Israeli venture capitalists, Joe Raby, oversaw admission to the Sunshine Bronx business incubator, which also provided Ocasio-Cortez space for a company she founded called Brook Avenue Press. This was a publishing company for children’s books, though it is not clear whether the business ever published a book.

If you google the name of the company there's a ton of articles from right wing rags scrutinizing the shady finances. I'd rather not link them, but I think at the very least the fact that this enterprise which was basically a front company operating under an Israeli venture capital firm is extremely suspect and obviously bears resemblance to something like a CIA front (in this case, probably not the CIA, but the DNC working as if it was the CIA).

And I think you might be missing the point a little bit. Yes, of course she's advocated for positive changes. And it's not like working for Ted Kennedy instantly discredits you (that's probably one of the weaker points raised by the article). The point is to show that she didn't enter politics because she was a community organizer, she entered politics as a ladder climber and a creature of the Democratic Party. She was identified by the party as someone who moved a certain base and represented the right people, but that would fall in line; and she does! she didn't have to defend Joe Biden like that, and she constantly punches left because her role is to represent the farthest left the establishment is comfortable with anyone going: further left than AOC and she turns into a cop and will beat you back in line, using her position and credibility to make everyone else believe only she understands how power works.

she still said that she would work to stop what was happening in Gaza and specifically didn't want to provide further arms to Israel

The opposite is true.

I empathize a bit, but it's not like democrats haven't been getting more leftward either.

The furthest left democrat with any sway is Bernie "Israel has a right to defend itself" Sanders.

Most politicians are just not online enough to gather the discourse that we would be experiencing,

I think you don't have to be online to understand several incredibly acute contradictions that are mounting at the moment, between the horrible brutality of genocide in Gaza, concentration camps at the border that have been active since the Obama years in addition to CECOT and Guantanamo, the coming climate collapse, erosion of queer rights, and all manner of civil rights. These phenomena signify a movement of the entire capitalist ruling class, who wield empire in their hands, to the most extreme forms of violence. It's a bipartisan affair. They aren't carefully measuring public opinion, Joe Biden deliberately went out and confidently lied about Palestinians beheading Israeli babies while the IDF massacred the children of Gaza. There is no calculation of how to balance public concerns in that action, they only want to control you and brutalize the weakest among the oppressed people of the world, to consolidate power in uncertain times and weather the storm. If the public rejects the carrot, we get the stick and that's Trump. They want you to be a good little peasant and go back to the carrot while they slaughter the people of the oppressed nations and the most marginalized minorities.

Some do forget over the years, but a lot join politics because they genuinely want to make life better

She's only one woman, but she's probably the most visible example of this myth. AOC is not a "bartender and community organizer turned political leader" she's a Democratic Party plant who operated an LLC that received mysterious funding and became a prominent political figure out of nowhere. Obama has a similar legendary backstory as a "community organizer" but his family on his dad's side has intelligence ties. I don't think every single local politician is part of some crazy conspiracy, though, but you're engaging in some level of magical thinking if you think the Democratic Party can somehow be run by well-meaning local leaders, in a world where the establishment can create an AOC to capture and redirect public sentiment very easily.

"Now he is a communist"

What part of that sounds like he's doing nothing? Do you have any clue what communists do? Like, you can go ahead and open What is to be Done and at no point does Lenin say "yes and at this point you wait and do nothing," feel free to investigate the matter and call me out if I'm wrong.

You need to zoom out. Imagine you're looking back at this moment from 100 years in the future. If people said "the Dems won't make it better but at least they won't make it worse" and just kept the system going, do you think it will ever lead to progress? Will the whole system ever improve?

You need to look for a solution outside of that system. Stop looking for lesser evils in the ballot box. First, look to the people immediately around you and try to join local organizations that might be directly working to improve their conditions (soup kitchens, women's shelters, etc). Then, organize labor: figure out how to join a union, if there isn't one read the IWW (or any other big union near you) manual on organizing your workplace and find support to start organizing your workplace. Then from there, your objective should be to take the workers' struggle to the national and international stage. Change doesn't come from the ballot box, it comes from building alternative power structures ourselves.

actually this time it'll be different, we just won't have another crisis of capitalism that requires the stamping out of revolutionaries

Sure, show up and vote in a primary that was already decided by AIPAC money, if not the various other super PACs that have the power to decide elections. Trying to cause radical change through elections, via a party that is structurally designed from the ground up to suffocate radicalism, is like trying to stop the spread of STDs by hoping everyone stops having sex. You need a different approach. Join a union, if you're in the US join the PSL, if you can buy a gun and learn how to use it, and get started on building parallel power structures. You won't elect away climate collapse and fascism, they will be overthrown by force.

More reasoning on this issue from Lenin

When I learned of her, her name started appearing all over the place!

In all seriousness though, the RAF seems like it was unreasonably effective for the extreme amount of resistance they faced from the state. Many of the other "urban guerilla" groups did not achieve anywhere near as much as the RAF. Even with that, though, they failed in their strategic goal of heightening the contradictions via acts of terrorism which they thought would lead to a critical mass of people getting radicalized and organizing a revolution. I think the takeaway from this movement of urban guerillas is similar to what Lenin had to say about adventurism despite the fact that other forms of organizing seem similarly hopeless.

I recommend CCK Philosophy's video on the urban guerilla groups including the RAF, he talks about the COIN efforts by the states who these groups were fighting and particularly how the RAF was destroyed.

Kamala Harris refused to denounce a policy that resulted in immigrant students being deported in sanctuary cities before her 2020 presidential run and the Biden-Harris administration carried out more deportations per unit of time than even Trump in 2025.

So why should anyone have voted for Harris to protect immigrants? And you can't say "because Trump is worse" because by that logic you could argue in favor of voting for Trump 2016 since Trump 2024 is worse.

(read The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State to learn more!

Also more deeply, gender and patriarchy (which includes cishetnormativity) are load-bearing parts of the superstructure. The family, particularly the nuclear family, is a microcosm of capitalist exploitation, reduced to a small private unit in which patriarchs take the role of the ruling class. Queer liberation is an essential part of the struggle against capitalism, all contradictions must be heightened to their breaking point for the system to undergo its transformation.

Political Economy degree from incel university