I am trying to understand as much as possible about socialism as well as other leftist ideologies, and looking around i’ve seen many being critical about democratic socialism, but i honestly struggle to understand why that is such a bad idea as some say. I get that it’s incompatible with ML, but it doesn’t sound so unrealistic and unreasonable to me, so… can you explain? Excuse the ignorance, but as i said socialism is a new topic for me, i mean no offense to anybody

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[–] 0 points 4 hours ago

You can't minimize damage from the bourgeoisie if you continue to support them.

Sure you can, by voting for whichever bourgeoisie faction is going to do less damage. It's easy.

To eliminate damage from the bourgeoisie is to completely stop supporting them.

No it isn't, that's silly. As long as 150 million people continue to support them, my lack of support is totally impotent. I talked to dozens of people who said they completely stopped supporting both parties, yet their damage has not been eliminated.

Maybe if we could get 70 million people to support working class candidates in every office, we could succeed. But that's supporting a good candidate, not not supporting bad ones. Not doing things rarely changes the world. It's about what you are doing. And we didn't have 70 million people to vote third party, so that strategy is impotent right now.

The idea of lesser evil does not exist. It only exists in the mind of a liberal that thinks that they can reform the system as it stands.

Yeah, no, that's nonsense. Of course the lesser evil exists, no two things are perfectly identical. Republicans target all the same people and rights as Democrats, while also targeting additional ones. Name one group that suffers more under Democrats than Republicans.

"Lesser evil doesn't exist" is a concept that exists in the minds of Manichean idealists, and those people don't change things, they just argue online because everything isn't perfect The people that change things exist in the world of middle-grounds and messy details.

There are too many safeguards built into the system to prevent reform from happening.

Not really, there's been plenty of reform in history. And if you want to talk safeguards, believe it or not, there are actually even more safeguards to prevent revolution from happening. For the life of me I cannot imagine how someone would think violent revolution against the most powerful military force in the world is somehow the more achievable goal.

Any leftist that's read an even single line from Marx knows that reform is the path to failure.

I've read quite my share, and I disagree, so wrong on that count. Again, more counterproductive division between the "real" Marxists who totally agree with you and all the secret liberals who believe literally anything else. As if the revolution vs. reform question hasn't been one of the most debated topics among socialists for the entire history of socialism.

And secondly, Marx was an intelligent scholar and a powerful thinker, but the man was not omniscient or infallible. No one person is. Not to mention the fact that he died over a century ago. Several revolutions have been attempted since his time, and yet we have not achieved international communism. We need to accept the possibility that a keen eye for economic analysis does not translate to expertise in social change.

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