https://twitter.com/the_vello/status/1321435262023536641
Feels like (the good parts of) old chapo again, drop an AOC post and go grab some lunch… come back and there are over 60 replies :)
I know I pop up on almost every post about AOC but I helped work with her election campaigns here in Queens as well her predecessors and she’s honestly so much better. YES she is a shitlib. YES electoralism is BS.
But she is leaps and bounds better. She WEAKENS the democrats. Yes she works with them, but she regularly voices her grudges and dissent in this otherwise hegemonic party over the American “””“left”””” and that is what starts to radicalize people. Anecdotally, it is what happened to me, who used to be a libertarian, after seeing the old Bernie’s speeches. This huge spotlight has brought the young people who don’t care out in DROVES.
I did a few AOC backed food drives to feed the community in the last couple years. I’ve been participating in these for YEARS. Before AOC, we would get a showing on the strongest of days with the best weather of about 15 people, which is awesome. In the last two years when AOC literally only attached her name to these things, we have had such overwhelming support that we’ve gotten (and our community has gotten) the privilege of adding extra food drive and community organization events just to fit all of the people who want to help into the schedule. We are talking well into the HUNDREDS of people I’ve never met at these events before, we are talking about people I watched these previous events benefit come back to now participate in them.
At the beginning of the pandemic, AOC was out here on the streets directly delivering real door to door aid to her constituents with us while other politicians were hiding away. When I say real aid I mean she was out here for days, hours at a time with no cameras, no press, nothing but the community. She has directly had an effect on this community’s organization. If there are any politicians in the US doing actual praxis right now, she is one of them and whether she means to or not, whether she is a lib or not, our community has organized and gotten several demsoc candidates into local/state elections. Over 10% of the NY state legislature is demsoc and it is trending upward with each cycle. Our city council has seen massively increased representation of grassroots campaigns by actual members of the working class.
It’s not all AOC, but unlike the rest of the Dems, she isn’t actively trying to undermine this movement. That is sometimes all it takes. Don’t get me wrong, I hope one day we remove AOC by primarying her from the left, but for now this is enough to not just keep actual action and organization alive, but to grow.
AOC undermines the socialist movement by encouraging would-be socialists to vote for and therefore compromise with Democrats, which is class-collaborationist because the Democrats are a 100% bourgeois-controlled party with no mass membership or internal democracy. Her and Bernie’s entryism has allowed us to draw important conclusions about the Democrats being ghoulish libs at their core, but this entryism was an avoidable mistake. We should have already learned this lesson from the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988 that eventually turned Black and Rainbow Coalition Dem-entryists (some with even Maoist and Black Panther backgrounds!) into Obama-supporting liberals and Democrats. Even Angela Davis critically endorsed Biden!
If AOC and The Squad remain in the Democratic Party, they will follow the same trajectory and repeatedly betray their working class supporters, misleading the masses into thinking they can have any consistent or meaningful control over Democratic Party policy the whole time.
