A Real-Time Response: It's Not Pragmatism for a Communist to Push Social Democracy; It's Defeatism, Resignation, Acquiescence, and Radical Acceptance

This is as the title said it is. It is not a bad faith argument but a reflection of the comprehension of people in the movement. This is a sincere statement, so if you cannot handle it, then you are in no place ready to be an influence or leader for a communist movement or revolution.

In the US, the average person, the majority of the population, meaning the majority of voters, have a comprehension level of that of a 15-year-old or less. Medical reports suggest that up to 40% of the population is walking around with some sort of undiagnosed mental illness, condition, or disease. These are not insults; they are observable conditions produced by capitalism itself, by alienation, commodity fetishism, and the ideological apparatus of the bourgeois superstructure. Any serious communist strategy has to account for them. The question is not whether people arrive as ready-made revolutionaries. They do not. The question is whether our political work raises or lowers the ceiling of what people believe is possible. Lenin warned of both.

This assessment of mass consciousness is not born of contempt but of a concrete materialist evaluation. Lenin repeatedly emphasized that the working class under capitalism arrives with trade-union consciousness at best, not socialist consciousness, and that it is the task of the vanguard to bring revolutionary theory from without. Recognizing the depth of bourgeois ideological distortion, alienation, and the effects of imperialism on the proletariat in the heart of empire is not elitism. It is the starting point for serious cadre work. The revolutionary must meet the masses where they are without tailing their current level of understanding.

I am a neurodivergent with college-grade reading level and a pre-algebra level math level. With how I process things, I don’t know if I fall into that “15 years or younger” cognitive function/comprehension range. What I do know is that my neurodivergence trades low patience for sharp pattern recognition. The material conditions I have lived under, along with my lived experiences, have made me what philosopher Ian James Kidd calls an activist-misanthrope, which I’m sure Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois expressed in their own language: someone who systematically condemns the ethical and moral character of humankind as it has come to be under capitalism, while still seeing grounds for revolutionary hope, action, and the evolution of humanity. I say this not to diminish myself, but to make clear that this argument is not coming from a place of arrogance about the masses, but from my material conditions, lived experience, including survival and navigation among my community (all 10 cities and towns) and its members, and neurodivergent cognitive processing that crafted the analytical lens I see everything through. It is coming from a place of materialist honesty about the alienated, distorted conditions we are actually working in. Does not Lenin’s concept of the organic intellectual, and Gramsci’s elaboration of it, specifically elevate the person who develops theoretical understanding through direct immersion in working-class conditions across multiple terrains?

Far from promoting arrogance or withdrawal, this lens demands greater discipline: the willingness to do patient explanatory work even when it is frustrating, while refusing to lower the program to the level of spontaneous consciousness or social-democratic reformism. True vanguard work requires both sharp theoretical clarity and the humility to engage in protracted struggle with workers as they actually exist.

There are cities and towns that have taken utilities public. They kicked out the private companies. The communities now own them. That happened under capitalism, within capitalist electoral structures, run by mayors and city councils. If utilities can be socialized at the municipal level, so can food distribution, healthcare, housing, and education. The mechanism exists. The proof of concept exists.

These measures remain subordinated to the broader laws of motion of capitalism and do not constitute socialism. They cannot by themselves abolish wage labor or imperialist exploitation. But they disprove the claim that elected office is inherently incapable of producing structural change.

The claim that no elected official can do anything substantive is not a sober analysis of material conditions. It is a conclusion reached in advance. It is the ideological alibi of someone who has already surrendered.

Let's name what this is. The position being advanced, that communists should redirect their energy toward social democrats who pursue incremental reforms within the capitalist framework, is not a new insight. It is Bernsteinism.

Eduard Bernstein argued in the 1890s that evolutionary socialism through parliamentary reform made revolutionary rupture unnecessary. That the movement is everything, the goal nothing. Rosa Luxemburg demolished it in "Reform or Revolution". Lenin demolished it in practice through the Bolshevik experience, the split with the Mensheviks, and the October Revolution.

It resurfaces in every generation wearing new clothes: DSA tailism, lesser evil electoralism, “push the Democrats left,” and it is wearing them again now.

Some will invoke Lenin’s own tactical support for the British Labour Party in 1920 as evidence that supporting reformist candidates in specific conditions is orthodox ML, not Bernsteinism. This conflates two distinct things. The united front tactic, as Lenin applied it, was a specific and conditional maneuver designed to expose the limitations of reformist leadership to the masses who still followed them, not to subordinate the vanguard to reformist political direction or to dissolve communist independence into a broader liberal coalition. The condition was always maintained: independent organization, independent program, and independent criticism. What is being proposed today is not that. What is being proposed is that communists abandon the independent pole entirely and redirect their energy toward social democrats as the primary vehicle of progress. That is not the united front. That is liquidationism. Lenin supported marching with reformists under specific tactical conditions while continuing to fight them politically. He did not support becoming their auxiliary.

The argument being made is this: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin reincarnated today would be Jacobin subscribers voting for Bernie Sanders. This is not a political analysis. It is a category error so severe it borders on ideological incoherence.

Lenin did not build the Bolsheviks by telling Russian workers that the Mensheviks were the realistic option. He built an independent vanguard organization with a clear rupture position, precisely because reformism inside the existing order does not produce socialism.

At best it produces a more humane administration of capitalism that stabilizes the system, integrates the labor aristocracy, and extends its lifespan, especially in the imperialist core. That is not a step toward communism. It is an obstacle to it.

The Claudia De La Cruz campaign demonstrated concretely that an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist platform is articulable, runnable, and distinguishable from liberal incrementalism. You did not need to theorize what a genuine communist candidacy looks like in the American context. You could watch it.

De La Cruz and Kamala Harris stood for different class forces and different programs, visibly, on the same terrain. The argument that no such candidacy is possible collapsed the moment it happened.

Now consider the logical endpoint of the position being challenged. If the ceiling of communist political work is pushing social democrats, if the most we can do is tell people to vote for incremental reformers within the Democratic Party orbit, then there is no functional distinction between that and the historic critique of tailism: liquidating the independent role of the vanguard and channeling left forces back into the party of capital with a softer face.

If the answer to every communist demand is “that’s unrealistic, support the social democrat,” then the communist organization has made itself redundant. You are doing the Democratic Party’s ideological maintenance work for free, and functioning as an unpaid auxiliary for the stabilization of decaying US imperialism.

The electability objection deserves a direct answer. Running genuinely communist candidates is not always a campaign to win office immediately. It is a campaign to shatter the psychological trap of the two-party Overton window, to raise class consciousness, to build independent working-class organization and dual power consciousness, and to demonstrate that a revolutionary vocabulary exists and can be spoken publicly.

Even when such candidates lose, they shift terrain. The social democrats being championed as the “realistic” option exist because there were people to their left pulling the discourse. Remove those people, tell them to be quiet and vote Blue, and the social democrat becomes the new left boundary, then the center, then the acceptable compromise.

This is not speculation. It is the documented history of American electoral politics across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The claim that accepting this framework is pragmatism gets the epistemology backwards. True proletarian pragmatism evaluates tactics by whether they actually advance the strategic goal: the overthrow of bourgeois rule and the transition to socialism. If the goal is socialism, the question is whether pushing social democrats advances socialism or whether it advances social democracy, which is a different and largely incompatible destination.

The historical record from every country where social democrats have held power is consistent: they administer capitalism more gently, they defend the bourgeois state in moments of crisis, often with repression, and they accommodate imperialism. They do not abolish the system.

Calling this pragmatism is using the word to mean its opposite. What it actually is, is resignation dressed in strategic language. It is the radical acceptance of defeat presented as political maturity.

No one is being told to be unrealistic. Municipal public utilities are real. Socialized medicine in other capitalist states is real. These are not fantasies. New York and California know how to implement it but refuse, even though the people want it, 58% to 70% of Americans depending on the poll, and Vermont tried but didn’t budget correctly. These examples show it’s not just a pipe dream.

But they are a floor made possible by class struggle, not a ceiling that defines the limit of what is achievable. What must be rejected is the premise that these examples prove how far we can go rather than how far we have not yet gone. The communist job is not to celebrate the floor. It is to tear the ceiling off.

If you are going to tell me what I said is unrealistic or unreasonable, then there is no point in doing anything, and you are essentially killing any activism I have and telling me to accept things as they are.

I will never support what social democracy is, which in the US is now called Democratic Socialism, because what it is, is them making our handcuffs fuzzy and our chains padded, while keeping us wage slaves. If we’re gonna stay wage slaves, there is no point in wasting time trying to disguise it as anything else. Social Democracy is making sure we don’t remove our shackles and that we stay on the plantation and confined to our reservations, our slums, our ghettos.

The Marxist-Leninist path is to build independent organizations, raise consciousness amid distorted conditions, link immediate struggles to the ultimate goal of socialism, and refuse to subordinate the vanguard to the bourgeoisie’s left face.

This is not an attack on any specific organization. It is an analysis of a political tendency that has appeared across organizations and generations. The task is to identify it wherever it surfaces and name it correctly. I say this as someone who has attempted to join and engage with the PSL, APL, PCUSA, and CPUSA, and has been either labeled a friend of the party or ignored entirely. I am not writing from outside the movement by choice. I am writing from the position the movement assigned me. That experience does not invalidate the analysis. If anything, it confirms what I said at the opening about comprehension and organizational capacity, because a movement that cannot identify, incorporate, and utilize people seeking structured revolutionary work has a problem that goes beyond theory. And these parties can provide roles and utilize people while protecting themselves. 

None of this is meant to imply that communist organizations or comrades are irredeemable or beneath engagement. On the contrary, I continue to study their work, share their content where it advances the line, and seek principled unity on the basis of anti-revisionism and independence from the Democratic Party. Criticism of right-opportunist tendencies is not an attack on the movement but an attempt to strengthen it by drawing clear lines against liquidationism. Revolutionary organizations have historically grown stronger through exactly this kind of internal struggle and demarcation.

I want to be clear that I do not know the full history of the CPUSA. I have also been sharing content from the various communist groups, with the asterisk of analyzing what is said to make sure one is not sheep-herded back into supporting the establishment and status quo. I also want to be clear: if pushing Nordic Capitalism and the Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, Squad type is your answer, I am done. I will not waste my time strengthening capitalism because it might make myself or others a little more comfortable.

We are what we tolerate, we are guilty by association, and that argument I am hearing is bourgeois opportunism. It’s social conservatism, just as Marx and Engels described it. Comrades, my understanding is that it leads to social fascism. The modern SPD isn’t limited to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party; it has infiltrated our movement and parties. We have to really look at and analyze everything because we truly do not know who’s a socialist and who’s a social fascist wearing a mask that walks among us.

Otherwise, they’re gonna do to us what they did to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It’s historically documented. The united front with social democrats did contain moderate fascism. It gave social fascists cover inside our movements while the Overton window shifted right and fascism revived. The term and label should never have been abolished; they should never have been accepted among our ranks. They are class fucking traitors.

This does not mean refusing all tactical united fronts or practical cooperation with workers and organizations influenced by social democracy on specific issues (trade union struggles, anti-war work, defense of municipal gains, etc.). It means maintaining strict organizational and political independence, refusing to make support for social-democratic candidates or programs the strategic center of communist work, and always exposing their class role. This is the difference between Leninist tactics and liquidation.

Many criticize Stalin for not going far enough. I say getting rid of the term and uniting with social democrats should be part of the criticism because he did not go far enough in exposing and distancing communists from them.

This is also why the question of where Stalin’s critics say he did not go far enough matters beyond the Third Period debate. The revisionism that followed his death demonstrated exactly what happens when revolutionary rigor is abandoned from within. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was not just a biographical attack. It was a theoretical capitulation that opened the door to the same reformist logic we are debating now, applied at the highest level of a socialist state. The progression from Khrushchev to Brezhnev’s stagnation to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika is not a series of unrelated leadership failures. It is what social democratic thinking looks like when it captures a communist party from the inside. The Soviet Union was not defeated militarily. It was revised into collapse. That is the long-term cost of the argument being made today, not just failed electoral coalitions but the internal decomposition of the revolutionary project itself.

They falsely abandoned it due to Hitler, when the actual problem was they allowed the SPD to exist, which led to Hitler. The Nazi seizure of power was due to the existence of the SPD, not the labeling and condemnation of social democrats as social fascists. The abandonment did not demonstrably produce better outcomes against fascism, and it did produce the long-term consequence of normalizing social democratic cooperation inside communist movements, which the paragraph above identifies as eventually fatal to the Soviet project itself.

Some may counter with the post-1935 Popular Front shift or invoke Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder to warn against ultra-left rigidity, especially in the imperialist core where the labor aristocracy demands tactical flexibility. These are valid cautions. However, the united front must never become liquidationism. The Popular Front produced short-term defensive gains in some countries but often subordinated communists to bourgeois forces, while the deeper problem remained reformism’s tendency to stabilize capitalism and open the door to fascism when crisis hit. In the US today, rejecting social democracy as the strategic center does not mean rejecting all tactical cooperation on specific issues, patient mass work among backward sections of the class, or using bourgeois institutions for propaganda. It means maintaining independent organization, independent program, and independent criticism at all times. We still have need for protracted struggle and mass-line testing: if conditional engagement with social-democratic forces demonstrably builds vanguard strength faster without leading to tailism, that experience must be summed up and incorporated. The goal is not ideological purity for its own sake, but a line proven in practice to advance the overthrow of bourgeois rule. People are fed up with incremental reforms that take forever and produce nothing of substance or that get reversed because the system is still bourgeois. I don't know how else to say this but bluntly because the data is on my side in this. 75% of Americans are tired of reform, tired of lack of change from reform; people want change, they want results and they’re tired of waiting on crap that makes no impact in their life, or that gets stripped before they can even attempt to feel it. That is our experience of the realities of reform. If reforms are allowed it's because the bourgeoisie benefit and our material conditions get worse.

Lenin warned of the ultra-left and petty-bourgeois, childish, and "left-wing" infantile disorder. He warned of lackeys of the bourgeoisie, social-chauvinists, social-patriots, and working class deceivers but as far as I know of, he never commented or used the social-fascist term from the 1922 newspaper Izvestia. If he had, I'm sure he would've put things in motion to deal with it. From my understandings, Lenin justifies my statement in: What Is To Be Done?, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, State and Revolution, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. So to use any of these to try to dismiss or defeat my statement shows a different interpretation or comprehension of the material, which circles back to what I said earlier about comprehension for somebody.

While I support Stalin, Hoxha, Mao and take from the entire ML tree starting at its roots, because while they all have flaws, they also all have correct thought. I am a 3rd era Communist-internationalist, from my comprehension of theory and history. Our goal should always be a world socialist republic, since the Soviet Union was illegally disassembled and destroyed. That is where my reasoning, understanding, and world view is. And I proudly wear being an immoderately-inordinate communist synth as a badge of honor, as I state my case here.

What I expect from this is an explanation of where people think my comprehension is wrong, while also questioning of theirs is wrong. What I'll probably get is what conditions and experience have shown me to expect: belittlement, avoidance, and to be outcasted either physically or in reputation. Continuing the justification for my activist-misanthropy, while I continue to seek our collective oneness and shared obligatory stewardship for an equitable-egalitarian future where the evolution of the species and well-being of the planet is the priority.

I am under no illusion that revolution will be easy or that the path forward is purely a matter of ideological purity but it must remain principled. Our principles cannot be compromised, sacrificed, or bargained with. Building a genuine vanguard in the United States will require long, patient organizing among workers who have been deeply deformed by capitalism. What I reject is the idea that this necessary patience justifies surrendering the revolutionary goal to social-democratic gradualism. We can, and we must, do both: meet the masses where they are, while refusing to abandon where they must ultimately go. This is the essence of Leninism. It is found in the entire Marxist-Leninist tree, and we must use whatever tools we can to spread that essence. Even if that means turning the tools of the bourgeois against them.