the only thing “green” about the German party is their love of US greenbacks.

Basically it’s self-professed centrists who support “the gays”, NATO, & Ukraine (PS) plus their right-wing Christian conservative allies (OLa’NO) vs nationalist welfare chauvinists who hate Roma people and “George Soros” (Smer-SD) but are NATO-skeptic and want out of Ukraine, plus their right-wing nationalist allies who like Josef Tiso (SNS). Our good Nazis versus their bad Nazis, am I right?

Slovakia is a socially-conservative country in which since the fall of the socialist bloc, the nominal center-left and center-right have both expressed reactionary cultural attitudes. PS is a relatively new party that has been an exception; given that they would govern in coalition with right-wing Christian conservatives and with a socially-conservative center-left in opposition, I doubt their professed stance would do much other than pinkwash NATO. I’m not going to hold my nose and cheer for Smer, although if they actually pull Slovakia out of NATO it would be extremely funny (albeit unlikely — Smer is a party of the establishment and has governed for most of post-2000 without doing this, not some radical populist party as the media paints it).

he did nat zee this coming.

Objectively, I think that the conditions for socialism exist in the USA. The population is increasingly disenchanted with its constitutional and economic institutions; criticism of capitalism itself has moved from unthinkable to accepted (if not mainstream); and the imperialist state apparatus is a bloated paper tiger that can barely win a war without hiring a suite of incompetent contractors and bribing the enemy’s generals with millions of dollars (and is incapable of reform due to being waist-deep in its own neoliberal dogma). The wannabe-fascists of the Republican Party (and cop-funded mayors like Eric Adams) are a threat to any emergent socialism (and human rights generally), but they have no power base outside of the same haute-and petty- bourgeoisie that would constrain their ability to deal with the crises of capitalism; this is in contrast to 30s-style fascism, in which the national bourgeoisie were content with letting fascist corporatism manage the crises of capitalism their own class leadership couldn’t. If there were a political vanguard that was capable of exploiting these conditions and winning the peoples’ hearts and minds, I would be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for socialism (although via horrific struggles with the previously-mentioned wannabes committing heinous crimes).

Oh yeah, about that last part…

insane that hungary and poland (rigged elections with fascist parties that even the EU distance themselves from) get higher scores than bolivia and mexico (plenty of opposition parties in power at least in state/department level). reads more like a settler colonialism map than a democracy map to me.

A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, “objective” width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity’s past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.

tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.

(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).

Lenin was not a member of a purely vanguard Marxist party either; the RSDLP contained genuinely vanguardist elements, but also thoroughly reformist ones that agitated for better labor conditions but downplayed and even abandoned their struggle against the repressive Tsarist state (i.e. “Legal Marxism”). Organizations such as DSA in the States and Die Linke in Germany are similarly “Legal Socialist” or “Legal Social-Democratic” parties; unlike pure reformist parties (SPD, British Labour) they openly criticize capitalism, but are afraid to openly challenge the liberal constitutional order for (admittedly valid) fears of being criminalized. But there are elements that are worth engaging with, just as Lenin did. There is no shame in splitting to protect the revolutionary faction from revisionists/liberals, but it’s also not ideal.

I would suggest to engage in the party’s associated organizations (youth orgs, student orgs). Look for what interests you, whether it is community/labor organizing, direct action, education, mutual aid, electoral campaigns, or even just showing up at a variety of the above and volunteering/baking cookies or something. If the party’s organizations have an open political culture, there are bound to be activists you have affinity for. Develop your politics with those comrades, participate in readings/campaigns with your circle, and maybe evolve into a revolutionary faction. Only by demonstrating that the revolutionaries of the party are more capable of leading the proletariat than reformists can Marxist-Leninists in a left party gain hegemony over the broader social-democratic movement.

if hogs simply waste their money on bibles instead of building cultural genocide camps missionary schools in the third world i would be for it, but knowing amerikkka it’s probably a right-wing money laundering scheme or a pedophile priest’s slush fund or something.