/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>Why the party that threatens the bourgeois state perform so poorly in bourgeois democracy?
Why are they not appealing to the populace as whole?
The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, class consciousness doesn't develop instantly.

The premise of the question is false. Many communist parties have had consistently strong showings in bourgeois elections both historically and currently. Just some examples of the top of my head are the French and Italian Communist parties in the 1950s-70s (typically placing 2nd, 3rd, or 4th during that period), the KPD in Weimar Germany (consistently 2nd or 3rd), the CPI in contemporary India (consistently wins state government elections), Sri Lanka (current government), Unidad Populare in Chile (technically a coalition that included communists, won an election but deposed in a coup), the KPRF in Russia (nearly won several elections in the 90s, currently second largest party), etc.

They're too woke

>>2868237
sheer incompetence. people will cope and concoct ideological reasons, but it is in reality simply organisational incompetence. they perform poorly at everything they set their minds to except operating as a minor cult. if you asked the CPC to run an election campaign in a European country then within a decade they would have parliamentary representation despite having to learn the procedures from scratch, because the CPC is basically capable of setting a goal and implementing it. this is not true of the average western communist party.

even if you believe electoralism isn't important, the inability to conduct it effectively is an indictment. a party should have the organisational capacity to do things it would never actually wish to do, or at least the capacity to develop such capacity in the short-medium term. most do not.

>>2868252
most bourgeois parties run on ideas that alienate some people. in a world where pirate parties, beer parties, libertarian parties, far-right parties, environmentalists, animal rights activists, local bin collection activists, and so on. it doesn't take class consciousness to market an electoral product, it just takes baseline competence. christ, random individuals can get themselves elected particularly at lower levels.

no, at worst the problem is one of incentives. all the major bourgeois parties know that they'll be rewarded with spoils if they win the election or at least get some representation, but communists don't see this, or they don't believe they can actually win, so they don't even try. they don't want to put in the hard work of trying to win votes, so they satisfy themselves with an ego-trip and being a big fish in a small pond instead. worthless. the incentives to LARP are massive and the incentives to work hard are small, and since LARPing will make you feel more ideologically pure than actually achieving anything…

the average western marxist org should not be a party. the party form is poison.

>>2868263
while i think this is too triumphalist (disproportionate weight given to historical examples and developing countries with circumstances unfamiliar to the average /leftypol/ user) it reinforces my theory. these parties were not completely incompetent, so they were able to organise successfully. i will add in the government of cyprus was nominally ML in the late 2000s: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/26/cyprus

in a world where most socdem parties abandoned part of their support base by moving to the right in the 1980s/90s, there should've been an opening for further left (or at least staying-in-place) socdem alternatives. this is what the scottish national party achieved, for example. (rather than using nationalism to boost their electoral popularity, they used their electoral popularity to boost support for independence, which wasn't an idea taken very seriously until they held a referendum on it) but you have to be basically competent at organising, getting media attention, door-knocking, and - insofar as you have policies - drawing up practical and implementable policies to show off your basic competence, rather than just writing up a big list of LARPing demands that nobody will take seriously. the left should really account for its failure in this regard.

>>2868322
if this was true britain's communists would do well, they're all prejudiced creeps. admittedly, this is tempered by the main electoralist one, the CPB, being no more radical than labour circa 2017.

AKEL won the presidency in 2008 on a ticket of uniting Cyprus but then the Turkish side fucked it all up

>>2868338
if there is no workers movement communist parties will do bad in elections doesn't matter how many chinese you bring to run the operation

Sri Lanka elected a communist party

>>2868344
you don't need a worker's movement to get votes for a communist party except in the tautological sense that the party itself is the movement. mass politics collapsed everywhere (the UK conservatives once had 2.8 million members!) while the affected parties have remained in a much healthier state. if the loss of the worker's movement was so fatal, you would expect to see socdem parties utterly destroyed rather than merely doing badly, yet socdems outperform communists something like ten thousand to one.

electoralism is fundamentally marketing a product and electoral politics is an arena where most people are not satisfied with their current product. "Fuck 'em all, vote communist" could be a winning message if only the messengers weren't grotesquely incompetent.

>>2868338
This basically western communist orgs are utterly incompetent and so have basically just given up and just hope that society deteriorates and then everyone will magically turn communist. While in reality whats going to happen is facists will take over and kill them all.
They treat marx like a religious dogma.
Marx said communism is inevitable so it will happen even if they do nothing to advance it. They just need to do nothing and wait.

>>2868352
>if the loss of the worker's movement was so fatal, you would expect to see socdem parties utterly destroyed rather than merely doing badly, yet socdems outperform communists something like ten thousand to one.
why would the collapse of the workers movement be fatal for parties of class collaborationist ideologies like social-democracy?

>>2868364
kinda hard to do class collaboration when you don't have one of the classes on board even nominally.
more seriously: socdem parties still had strong institutional, financial, and activist links with parts of the workers movement (particularly unions) historically. with those groups mostly smashed and with unionisation rates in freefall, socdems were weakened but - crucially - not destroyed. if having a movement behind you was so essential, we would expect to see much greater negative effects than we actually saw.
(we'd also expect scottish nationalists to have done much worse than they actually did, and for environmentalists to have done much better than they've done until recently, to take two examples.)

to give you some scale of the problem: there are a handful of independent left-wingers, random community independents, and even two tribute acts to electoralist parties that've been dead for nearly 40 years (the liberals and the SDP, which merged into the lib-dems but a small number of each decided to go it alone.), but not one communist. "oh, it's because there's no workers movement" is cope. there's no movement for the continuity liberal party! there's no "movement" for the national (not national, one council only) flood prevention party, no movement for "Alderley Edge First", because you don't need the worker's movement to knock on doors and go "vote communist to smash the booj and get better bin collection", you just need to not be useless.
>but anon, there's no point in this
perhaps so, but if that was true communists wouldn't run, but they do. if you're running to spread the message, getting elected lets you spread it more (this is the SNP lesson. scottish independence only became a serious demand after they won power), if you're not running to win or to spread the message, you're just feeding money to the bourgeois state for no reason by losing deposits.

>>2868387
>kinda hard to do class collaboration when you don't have one of the classes on board even nominally.
a weaker workers movement means they are more prone to compromise, this is why so many communist parties turned into social-democrats in everything but name
> if having a movement behind you was so essential, we would expect to see much greater negative effects than we actually saw.
but we saw this effect with communist parties, you can't expect the same effect for parties that are class collaborationist like social-democrats
>there's no movement for the continuity liberal party!
the "movement" that functions as support for liberal parties or of any other capitalist ideology is institutionalized, its a class dictatorship
>because you don't need the worker's movement to knock on doors and go "vote communist to smash the booj and get better bin collection"
without the workers movement who is even knocking the doors?
>you just need to not be useless.
you need lots of people and money regardless how good you are at electoralism
>but if that was true communists wouldn't run, but they do.
yes and the ones that aren't on a socdem platform will never do good in elections in the current conditions, even at the peak of the workers movement they only did fine

>>2868503
under communism people who reply line by line like this instead of hollistically will be shot.

anyway:
you're stringing a just-so story without the subject matter knowledge necessary to understand my examples and how they relate to the wider case. the liberal democrats (UK's 3rd or 4th largest party) can be handwaved as having institutionalised support, but the liberal party certainly does not. the liberal party are basically a gang of LARPers, LARPing a dead bourgeois party. (the liberals before they merged into the lib-dems.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(UK,_1989) they are not flush with cash (they have never spent more than £250,000, and therefore never needed to file accounts with the electoral commission, and most likely their candidates fund their own campaigns) nor members (they don't even list numbers, while the so-called communists boast at least 1200.)

the effect for communist parties is difficult to disentangle from the far more notable effect of the USSR imploding (in the UK for example, communists were fairly marginal and useless throughout the postwar period - although they could win council seats - but it was the collapse of the USSR that disbanded the original CPGB.), you imagine a unique dependence on "the workers movement" to knock doors for communists (which would make them unique amongst all parties unless we invoke the tautology i already identified in >>2868352 that ipso-facto anyone knocking doors for the communists is a member of the workers movement, that organising people to do this basic task successfully is movement-building.)

i mean think, for two minutes just think, about the level of election i am talking about here. you're imagining some big ideological contest where the poor communists have to compete with all the forces of the capitalist state, while the reality is they can't even compete with random old people with nothing better to do than complain on facebook about littering, flood prevention, getting people to NIMBY planning applications, etc. turnout is terrible and a lot of people who do vote would vote for whoever bothered to knock their door. i mean really, go through this list and tell me you seriously think it's evil capitalists and not sheer incompetence that keeps communists from competing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_Kingdom#Local_parties
bonus point: explain why communists had 1 representative, i think in scotland, until like 2016 when he retired due to being old. given that the left has seen a general revival and public opinion on communism has only improved since then, why should campaigning conditions be worse?

because communism was a failed 19th-20th century experiment and its the 21st century now and the world has moved on. marxism had a few interesting and clever ideas which have long since been absorbed and incorporated into the dataset of modern left-wing politics while the rest of it was just a bunch of eurocentric ableist techno-utopianism that has been rightfully rejected and relegated to the wastepaper basket of history along with all the other bad ideas that spawned out of the european empires.

the world is done with europe, done with whitey and the philosophies of whitey. whitey is dead. it's not whitey's world anymore, that era is ending now and the vast majority of the world are glad to be rid of it.

>>2868338
>he incentives to LARP are massive and the incentives to work hard are small, and since LARPing will make you feel more ideologically pure than actually achieving anything…
This reminds me from watching "ᴉuᴉlossnW: Son of the Century" how Benito convinced his room of 100 misfits to go vote by making it sound based. They didn't want to do it because they were LARPing about elections being fake and gay, they were too enthusiastic about D'Annunzio marching on Fiume even though the more strategic move in the circumstances was to stand in the elections (D'Annunzio would be defeated militarily). Also ᴉuᴉlossnW was literally doing a LARP here with the outfit, he lied about flying into danger. They didn't want to hear it until it could be rephrased in terms that flattered their own egos. I'm not seriously proposing this but that is what a lot of radical groups are like.

The Communist Party of Austria does well in a specific city, Graz. Kind of interesting. These are the results from the municipal elections last month. (The rest of Austria is going for the FPÖ but still.)

Support went up too. They were already doing well and that added another +7%

Proles are a minority. Petite bourgoisie, professionals, non-produce workers, and lumpens outnumber them.

>>2868237
>communist parties
>>2868355
>utterly incompetent and so have basically just given up
there aren't any workers organizations that are allowed to exist after the last century of counter-revolution against militant organized labor. Did you hear about this:
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/UAW-shawn-fain-neil-barofsky-recording-israel-gaza

>>2868322
>They're too woke
"Israel killed JFK and Charlie Kirk and bought TikTok to silence black women about this" - American workers

>>2868550
>failed experiment
There are no failed experiments, science is a dialectical method
>the world has moved on
"We're modern, we're beyond the contradictions of history" - soulless euphoric young Nazi radlibs
>long since been absorbed and incorporated into the dataset
ChatGPT is of course a creation of the Jeffrey Epstein class, isn't it funny how ever anti-Stalinist Marxist PMC loves using AI? Very funny…..
>eurocentric ableist techno-utopianism
> “Marx made theory… Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization… And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.” ― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life
you reddit leftists sneer at the idea of giving children food and clothes and healthcare. You want woke CIA decolonization to keep Tibet enslaved by their pedo confederacy slave oligarchs
> the wastepaper basket of history along with all the other bad ideas that spawned out of the european empires
<Ho Chi Minh received a French education. Starting in 1911, he worked in various countries overseas, including France where he was a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920. After studying in the Soviet Union, Hồ moved to China where he founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, which became the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930
you will never be proletarian

>Why do communist parties perform so poorly in electoralism?
Most people who vote arnt communists. Those who are, well, they're definitely on a list for one reason or another.

>Why are they not appealing to the populace as a whole?
Have you met people? A lot of them are fucking stupid. Trying to establish basic facts about reality will be difficult on any mass scale; people need to be actively convinced of these positions. And thats hard.

>>2868352
Obviously it's correct to point out issues with the way communists conduct themselves but every single voter has been brainwashed with 'muh gulags, muh famine' etc etc bullshit before you ever speak to them, it should be pretty obvious why liberal parties have an easier time winning elections than communist ones

>>2868550
>it's not whitey's world anymore
Correct, let's see whose world it is now-

>>2868237
>Why are they not appealing to the populace as whole?
Historical baggage and dogmatic retards holding on to this historical baggage.

Because communism became a hoe-scaring ideology when the gulag archipelago became mainstream.

Capitalism propaganda
>if you work hard enough you will have a big house, a car and a boat
Communist propaganda
>if we seize the means of production you will work forever in a farm with other hippies
Wonder which one is more effective

>>2869296
an easier time, sure, but the sheer scale of the gap can't be explained by this. especially when communist performance got worse after the USSR collapsed, despite the USSR and anti-Soviet propaganda (and actual factual implosion of the USSR towards the end) providing the bulk of negative sentiment.
anyone younger than about ~45 years old never knew a world with the USSR in it, and while there's an ambient background radiation of gulags and famines or cliches about being a great system in theory but not working well in practice (something a lot of people will also say about democracy, incidentally), most people are in-fact indifferent and none of this is really relevant at the local authority level. (e.g. even if being an open communist is a handicap to a candidate, some good candidates with good campaigners should still be able to break through.)

again: to not win any MPs as a communist is expected, to not win any MSPs/MSs is also forgivable, but to run for and not win a single local authority seat - seats that are occasionally outright uncontested - is inexplicable.

i should also point to >>2868564 as an example because it shows that it isn't impossible to win under the communist label in a capitalist country, provided there's some baseline level of organisational competence.

>>2870048
if the problem is incompetence. the problem is also, why are competent people not joining or attracted to communist orgs?

>>2870054
Competent people get paid lots by capitalists to do their campaign. Not much money in the communism business.

>>2868322
You never won elections even before the woke "epidemic" (at least not in Germany). Stop blaming those damned transhumanists for your own wretchedness.

>>2869296
>every single voter has been brainwashed with 'muh gulags, muh famine'
Most online lefties want to bring back gulags tho.