What does leftypol think of the worker's party of belgium?
It might very well be the best possible avenue for communism in the western world. It's one of the largest partie's in Belgium and has very good polling for the next federal election, the only problem is that if they don't get a very clear majority (and thats rare for belgium) they will probably have to come into a coalition with some socdem or moderate party.
The party was also originially maoist but to not die out it just instead became a communist party.
I always thought belgium was gonna cease to exist at some point because of how divivded it is along language lines but i think finally, after however long, class struggle is uniting them together.
Lol if you think a small european backwater can be any base for socialism. You have to be a continental civilization state or next to a friendly one for any of these experiments to work. Look what happened the last time a communist won elections in the EU, it was Cyprus in 2008 and it didn’t go well.
I like their rhetoric and they are at least nominally Marxist, but at the end of the day they have a social democratic program. They call for more progressive taxation, higher wages and more social programs. I hope they at the very least stay their current course and don't end up like the Socialist Party in the Netherlands where they purged the Marxists for the sake of electability.
>>2859010They also support the nationalization of banking and thats based
>>2859010>>2859332>rhetoric>they are at least nominally Marxistamazing standards we got here
absolutely nothing youve mentioned is part of a proletarian programme, its literally just interclassist reform that helps everyone indistinguishable from your average political party lol
>>2859336wtf do you mean nationalization of banking literally is seizing the most major finiacial centre of the bourgesisie away from the bourgesisie!
>>2859340It’s the bourgeois state seizing from the bourgeois, that’s like a parent taking a toy away from a child, they’ll just get it back after time out
>>2859336You think I meant that a social democratic program is good? Of course not. I like the fact that they talk about real issues that average Belgians actually face like their social programs being eroded or public transport being made less accessible, but that's about it. If they were more explicit about an actual radical transformation of society rather than just taxing the top 1% by 2% that would be much better. They are big on anti-Zionism and solidarity with Cuba, which is good.
We used to have a Walloon dude on here that was a member of PvdA/PTB who might actually be able to provide some insight, but that was years ago when the board was more active so he's probably doing more useful shit.
Suppose a worker's party sets out the Leninist/Kautskyite goal of building a popular movement, encompassing a tight professional revolutionary core. Since they are not left-communists, a tactic wholly valid is engagement in legal and illegal activity.
Recall that Belgium is an anti-communist country, since the time of Marx and Engels, even earlier. Suppose further that the party member's are Marxists, and acutely aware that a program of socialist construction and proletarian dictatorship is unpopular (for now) but it also gives the bourgeois state ample reason to crack down on you at a time where you can still legally build a network of workers (not every party is the RSDLP working illegally that has nothing to lose when calling for proletarian dictatorship).
Suppose then, for the sake of argument, this party engages in one legal practice, parliamentary politics and elections. Neither Lenin or Marx were against this (the RSDLP always held the worker curia in the tsarist duma).
What kind of program would this party have? A social-democratic program, of course. What is the merit of this? If you are a keen agitator, you are going to be very quickly make the leap from honest social-democracy to a proletarian dictatorship. This is not hard, and you are going to see that this is how it usually goes. The inability of the state to perform a rudimentary social-democratic program when there is so much wealth, radicalizes people. Notice I didn't say radicalizes them to communists. It just radicalizes them. The party's propagandist/agitator makes them a communist.
Does this party have some kind of internal understanding that social-democracy is not enough? I am sure of it. Even Mamdani is aware of this and speaks of this at length in some obscure interviews.
What is my point? People confuse revolutionary social-democracy (communism) and social-democracy.
>>2859371 (me)
I will immediately add this. A split between a minimal social-democratic and maximal communist program can possibly lead to the maximal program becoming a sermon and the minimal program the actual practical program leading the party. There's also a bunch of schizophrenia coming about when trying to bridge this minimal/maximal gap. The solution is, of course, a
transitional program between the social-democratic welfare state and proletarian dictatorship. This doesn’t preclude legal work or even parliamentary participation. But the party’s program itself points beyond reform, and the “internal understanding” is articulated as a consistent public line.
>>2859371I'm still of the view that the best path forward for Western socialists is to take things as far as they can through reformist means. The aim however would be reach a point where the deep state begins to regard the liberal democratic framework as an intolerable threat to bourgeois rule, so much so that they move to abolish it. In other words, keep pushing the ruling class until they move to dismantle their own institutions Pinochet-style, but be ready to fight and win that confrontation.
>>2859380What the fuck makes belgium capable of this?
>>2859371Suppose now that this party garners more and more members of the exact flavor of politics it is selling: reformism. Suppose, if you will, that these reformist elements stop seeing parliamentarism as a mere tactic, but rather as an end unto itself. Suppose that this reformist element now gains such power within the party that it is even able to use its very structure to expel actual Marxists from it, as they are seen as a left-wing deviation that endangers the electability of said party.
This is arguably what happened to the Dutch SP when they expelled their more radical youth wing in 2021, as well as being the origin story for most Bourgeois "worker's" parties throughout the world.
>>2859380>but be ready to fight and win that confrontationHow do we accomplish this? Are there any examples of this succeeding? Hitler successfully eradicated the Communist and Social-Democratic movements after what was essentially the deep state gave him power, even though the left had almost half the electorate behind them. Pinochet was also a success story when we look at it from the perspective of our enemies. In Russia it was not the alteration of the franchise leading to the "black" 3rd and 4th Duma (not quite Pinochet-style and the Russian state was of course already a horrible autocracy, but nonetheless the state putting a brake on the possibility for reform), but the radicalizing effects of the imperialist war that led to revolution.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the view and tactic you guys are expressing, but I just see a lot of problems historically with it. Though maybe there is nothing better to do in our current predicament.
>>2859411>How do we accomplish this? It's a question of anticipating the inevitability of such a conflict, and taking steps to prepare for it. This would include close infiltration and monitoring of the military, and the cultivation of a robust power base outside the state apparatus. More specifically a strong labour movement that could wage a general strike and take to the streets to thwart a coup, or even a paramilitary force.
>Are there any examples of this succeeding?Strictly speaking no, but then again there are no examples of any industrialized capitalist state being turned to socialism. However there are cases which hint at the possibility of such an approach. These include the way in which the Spanish labour movement was able to mobilize workers to thwart Franco's coup (they lost the civil war eventually but this was for other reasons, mainly that the Nationalists were more unified and better equipped/funded). There's also the example of Chile itself, where Allende actually had prior warning of the impending coup but failed to act. He instead could have initiated a purge of the military and used the emergency situation to set about establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. Finally there's the example of Bolivia, where the Añez coup of 2019 was initially successful but then toppled in a general strike. There again the workers and peasants failed to capitalize on their success and like Allende refused to set about constructing a revolutionary state once MAS was returned to power. In the case of Spain it shows that such an approach can successfully force an open confrontation between labour and capital in which the latter retains institutional legitimacy and can easily position themselves as the defenders of democracy and civil freedoms. Bolivia shows that its possible to not only force a confrontation but to win it, they just neglected to keep going once they had defeated the coup.
>>2859421>>2859411>force an open confrontation between labour and capital in which the latter retains institutional legitimacy and can easily position themselves as the defenders of democracy and civil freedoms*the former
>>2858790It’s in Belgium so it’s automatically bad. I will not elaborate.
Socdem with Marxist (rather than Marxist-Leninist) paint.
Completely irrelevant. Marcyites (right-wing Trots, PSL) love them.
PTB-PVDA is actually existing Maoism. I can elaborate but it's funnier if I don't/
>>2859472You can't because you skimmed a Glowiepedia article on the party and missed how they pivoted from Maoism after that chairman was replaced by the Rosa-killer millennial moderniser scum who proceeded to turn it into some shell corporation (the reformist tactic). Great retirement fund for the labor aristocrats involved.
>And it took that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, parliamentary cretinism, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world — it took this parliamentary cretinism for those who had destroyed all the conditions of parliamentary power with their own hands, and were bound to destroy them in their struggle with the other classes, still to regard their parliamentary victories as victories and to believe they hit the President by striking at his ministers. They merely gave him the opportunity to humiliate the National Assembly afresh in the eyes of the nation. On January 20 the Moniteur announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been accepted. On the pretext that no parliamentary party any longer had a majority — as the vote of January 18, this fruit of the coalition between Montagne and royalists, proved — and pending the formation of a new ministry, of which not one member was an Assembly representative, all being absolutely unknown and insignificant individuals; a ministry of mere clerks and copyists.- Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
>>2859492Their current strategy is just applied Maoism. All they did was actually read what Mao wrote and followed it. They went to the people, they formed a programme out of their demands, and they maintain demcent discipline in order to enact it.
>>2859492>muh rosa killersgot an argument or are you just gonna repeat the same shit from nearly 110 years ago as if it matters?
>>2859371You should engage in parliamentary politics and elections but on an honest communist programme rather than a dishonest social democratic one, and uses it the parliamentary tribune to agitate militantly from inside the enemy camp. This transitional method bullshit where you trick the working class into communism by setting a trail of economistic breadcrumbs for them to follow doesn't work and thank god it doesn't because if it ever did it would just lead to a massacre since it relies on infantile spontaneist conceptions of working class organisation. We need a party that put forward a minimum-maximum programme for a workers government and for communism and both inculcates the idea of a communist alternative in the working class and is honest about what it will take to bring it about with a real strategy for taking power on a global scale that people can be organised around.
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