Me, unfortunately

Feels like there is a severe lack of political education around electoralism right now. If electoralism is your strategy, and I understand the argument for using elections tactically , shouldn’t the point be to bring people into a larger movement? To expose and heighten contradictions, organize people, and move them toward a broader anti-imperialist politics? Instead, it feels like the opposite is happening. People with revolutionary anti-imperialist politics are being told to temper those politics in order to defend politicians. Even if your entire strategy is electoral, why wouldn’t you want a strong left flank pushing your politicians and their constituents further left? Why wouldn’t you want people outside electoral politics taking the uncompromising position, especially on Palestine, so that there is constant pressure on the people operating within those institutions? The movement shouldn’t be adjusting its politics to whatever its most progressive elected officials are willing to say or do. They should be getting pushed toward us. Not the other way around. This doesn’t happen in private meetings, this happens publicly. Electoralism can be a tactic within a larger movement. But once the movement starts disciplining its own left flank to protect an electoral project, who is actually absorbing who? Maybe this site is just giving me a distorted picture but it feels like some very basic anti-imperialist positions are treated as unreasonable because they create problems for politicians people are invested in. If this is reflective of a broader shift in the movement, then I think we desperately need political education around electoralism. Electoral politics should be one terrain on which a movement struggles. It should not become the ceiling of the movement’s politics. The direction should be electoral politics moves people towards movement politics, not movement politics requiring electoral loyalty.