European parties advocating for these things are not the path to them. Electoral parties dont bring you communism, and parties advocating in Europe is not the example to follow. Also what the fuck does Putin have to do with anything? The German left parties are pro-Ukraine, France has shattered communist parties, Italy collapsed in the 90s, etc etc. At most you have the reformist liberal Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

You cannot even begin to think outside of what established electoral parties advocate for. And in Europe no less. Venezuela, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, India, etc are the examples to look at. Along with African movements for de-colonization. The US doesn’t NEED a realistic opposition to the two parties, because a party opposition merely funnels people back into electoralism. The Bolsheviks didn’t do the October Revolution by voting in the Provisional Government. Mao didn’t beat Chiang in a race. Ho didn’t campaign for votes against Nixon. Even the examples that are electoral like the CPI-M(Marxist) are weaker and on the backfoot, but in the places they have power got there through militant action borne out of literal uprisings in those regions during partition.

Electoral parties do not bring political change, and the fact that you give a shit what european parties think let alone that some of them(?) “work with Putin” shows that you don’t want political change, you want a friendlier bourgeoise system

That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage labour system but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself. -Luxemburg

The Communist Party is the historically determined political party of the revolutionary working classes…

With the creation of the Communist Party, the working class broke away from previous traditions and confirmed its own political maturity. The working class no longer wants to work together with other classes for the development and change of the bureaucratic parliamentary state; it wants to work to successfully ensure the development of its own class. It puts forth its candidacy as a ruling class and shows that it would only be able to carry out this historical role in an institutional framework different from the current, within a new state system and not in the pre-existing context of a bureaucratic parliamentary state.

With the creation of the Communist Party, the working class is able to present itself as the initiator of the political fight, as the driving force; no longer is it a mass movement which is guided by the superior system of another social class. The working class wants to govern the country and shows that it is the only class able to do so, through its own means and its own national and international institutions, to resolve current problems caused by the general historical situation. Who are the working class’ true forces? How many proletarians in Italy have become aware of their class’ historic mission? What kind of following does the Communist Party have in Italian society? In all the confusion, in the current chaos, do we already have the great figures required for a new historical arrangement? When different social forces, classes and sections of Italian society are continually separating then joining together, breaking down but then recomposing themselves, has a basic core already been created? Is there a strong and solid core which is faithful to the ideas and the agenda of the Communist International and the world revolution, around which the working class’ can form their new, but definitive, political and governmental organisation? These are the questions that will be answered through the elections.

So that a conclusive, concrete answer is given; one that can be verified in future because it has been documented, the Communist Party is running in the elections. When social forces are divided up by the elections, the Communist Party too will want to know who its troops are, to count up the figures which stand behind it. This is a necessary step in the historic process which should lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat and to the creation of a working class state. For communists, elections are one of the many forms of political organisation typical of modern society. The party is the best form of organisation; the unions and the councils are intermediary forms of organisation, in which the most aware members of the proletariat position themselves in the struggle against capital and in which recruitment takes place on a union platform. In the elections, the masses declare their overall political aims, their ideas of state, that the working class should be enabled as the ruling class. The Communist Party is in essence the party of the revolutionary proletariat, of the workers resigned to urban industry – yet they won’t be able to reach their goal without the support and consensus of other strands, such as the impoverished peasants and intellectual proletariat.

This is the statement of principle – what is the expansive force of the revolutionary proletariat today? How many individuals in the other working classes recognise the proletariat as the future ruling class and even today, despite the chaotic situation, despite the disappointment suffered, despite the terrorism that the reaction employs, intend to support it in its efforts?

The Communist Party does not hold false hopes about results it won’t obtain, especially since it has shown that it wants to abandon the bold demagogy with which the Socialist Party was able to ‘pull in the crowds’ in the past. Yet the more that the Italian population is plunged into chaos and confusion and the more forces breaking up previous incarnations of revolutionary forces have worked and continue to work, the more it becomes clear that we need to recruit faithful followers; loyal soldiers for the worldwide revolution and for communism. The dynamic and expansive importance of this will become ever more apparent as the situation becomes more tumultuous, and as it becomes clear that the means of the next party to present itself in the field of general Italian politics are insufficient.

-Gramsci

The point is “viability” as an electoral party being a concern means you have already failed to believe in the purpose of a Communist Party. The Socialist Party he refers to gained far more power than Communists ever do electorally, and was far more radical than the democrats ever have been, even under FDR. And yet that party when it held power changed nothing, the Communists did more through agitation pre-Eurocommunism. At best electoral or parliamentary left parties can work not by contesting elections but by refusing to vote or through guerilla tactics as Costello laid out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCldL_qukLQ

I recommend this piece by Rosa as the revolution in Germany began in which she spells out how all their attempts in the national Assembly amounted to NOTHING

What is gained, then, with this cowardly detour called the National Assembly? The bourgeoisie’s position is strengthened; the proletariat is weakened and confused by empty illusions; time and energy are dissipated and lost in ‘discussions’ between the wolf and the lamb; in a word, one plays into the hands of all those elements whose intent is to defraud the proletarian revolution of its socialist goals and to emasculate it into a bourgeois democratic revolution.

But the question of the National Assembly is not a question of opportunity, not a question of the greater ‘convenience’. It is a question of principle, a question of the socialists’ knowledge of themselves and of the limitations of the revolution.

The first decisive step in the great French Revolution was taken in July 1789, when the three separate Estates combined in a joint National Assembly. This decision left its stamp upon the whole future course of events; it was the symbol of the victory of a new bourgeois social order over the medieval-feudal society of Estates.

In the same way, the symbol of the new socialist social order borne by the present proletarian revolution, the symbol of the class character of its true task, and of the class character of the political organ which is meant to execute this task, is: the workers’ council, based on representation of the urban and rural proletariat.

The National Assembly is an outmoded legacy of bourgeois revolutions, an empty shell, a requisite from the time of petit-bourgeois illusions of a ‘united people’ and of the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ of the bourgeois State.

To resort to the National Assembly today is consciously or unconsciously to turn the revolution back to the historical stage of bourgeois revolutions; anyone advocating it is a secret agent of the bourgeoisie or an unconscious spokesman of petit-bourgeois ideology.

The struggle for the National Assembly is carried on under the war-cry of ‘democracy or dictatorship’. Even socialist leaders obediently adopt these slogans of counter-revolutionary demagogues without noticing that this alternative is a demagogic falsification.

Today it is not a question of democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy? For the dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy in a socialist sense. It is not a matter of bombs, coups d’etat, riots or ‘anarchy’, as the agents of capitalist profit dishonestly make out; rather it is the use of all the means of political power to realize socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class – in the interests and through the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat, that is, in the spirit of socialist democracy.

Without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no socialism. In order to intensify this consciousness, to steel this will, to organize this action, a class organ is necessary: a national council of the urban and rural proletarians.

The convocation of such a representative body of labour in place of the traditional National Assembly of thebourgeois revolutions is in itself an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful method of arousing the proletarian masses, a first open and abrupt declaration of war against capitalism.

No evasions, no ambiguities – the die must be cast. Yesterday parliamentary cretinism was a weakness; today it is an ambiguity; tomorrow it will be a betrayal of socialism.

Word. I’m in Colorado and there have been a lot of refugees coming in from Florida and Texas. : |