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Inevitable thread. Inevitable take.
I think the only mistake the Anglo left really made in the past 5 years was too many people allowing themselves to believe that the electoral projects of Corbyn and Sanders could actually succeed as anything more than mobilising tools...
I think the only mistake the Anglo left really made in the past 5 years was too many people allowing themselves to believe that the electoral projects of Corbyn and Sanders could actually succeed as anything more than mobilising tools...
It was always clear that from an objective historical perspective there was simply no way the organised left could come from completely obscurity to forming the most radical governments in the history of their respective countries in half a decade...
Most people old enough or historical enough in their perspectives did know this, and honestly IME we said it as often as was ever appropriate, trying to tread a line between sober analysis and tedious Cassandra-ism...
Once Bernie and Corbyn were actual live candidates, we were never going to abandon them or ignore them, and they succeeded in changing the conversation and changing the stakes in many ways. It was always an error to think they could actually form governments or even complete...
the task of democratising their parties. The neoliberal right had spent 40 years bedding into those institutions (at least). The real achievement was breaking down the firewall between electoral politics and movement activism that had been in place since the early 90s...
That was a breakthrough and the beginning of a process that was always likely to take many years to bear fruit and as such was always going to meet with setbacks and defeats along the way. I get people being all depressed about the fact that we didn't get FDR II in 2020...
But honestly this was never happening. The question now is how to keep engaging in the short term, affectively exhausting cycles of engagement in the electoral sphere, making the gains we can, while retaining enough energy and attention to keep up long-term movement building...
I don't know what the answer to that is, but I know it's something that we are absolutely not the first cohorts of radicals to have to deal with, and that we are in better shape than we were 5 years ago EXCEPT to the extent that of being disappointed we didn't get further.
