>>230220>It means that they are making the prudent decision to keep their official organization entirely within legal boundaries.This is where they fucked up. Bourgeois constitutional regimes are inherently structured to protect private property against the will of the people, via the judiciary, executive branch vetoes, bicameral legislature, standing army, etc. This is doubly true for the US constitution, which only became the object of religious worship after the first red scare in the leadup to the Russian Revolution. This is why believing that "it is possible to create and build a fundamentally new economic system using the provisions of the existing U.S. Constitution" is fundamentally wrong. A real revolutionary party should campaign for legislative seats, yes, but at every moment point out that real social reforms can only be achieved if the anti-democratic bourgeois legal regime is abolished. With genuine majority support for your party's aims, and consequently a large base of support in the armed forces, people will realize that the constitutional order stands in the way and transcend it.
Instead of this revolutionary party structure that took power in Russia and nearly did so in Germany in 1917-19, most of the left is stuck between two ineffectual poles: reformist parties, and insurrectionist parties. Reformist parties, like the UK Labour party and the CPUSA here, openly proclaim that they will abide by and not question Porky's legal regime. "Democratic socialism" here is usually code for constitutional loyalism. Reformists won major social reforms from 1920-1970, but that was because they were supported by the bourgeois order as a bulwark against revolutionary change. After that, the reformist left became impotent because the revolutionary left had become impotent, becoming what I like to call insurrectionist parties. This includes open minority terrorism like the Red Army Faction, but also the "mass action left" which boycotts electoralism in favor of street strikes and protests, and Comintern style "Leninist" parties, which uphold an anti-democratic internal regime to give the decades-long leadership room to maneuver. Instead of these, we need to combine reforms
and revolution - to give a Kautsky quote praised by Lenin, "a revolutionary party, not a party that makes revolutions" (insurrectioni
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