I agree yea, you can’t fight every battle, but you can strategically find battles worth fighting and trying your hardest to win, even if we think they are bound to be blocked.

My comment wasn’t trying to frame it as “not trying hard enough”, but against nihilism and leftism (in the lenin sense). I see a lot of marxists that understand the futility of bourgeois democracy and end up stuck, they don’t want to participate in it and any discussion around it or organising on the topic receives only sneering lectures, and that’s also a lot of wasted energy at best but more often the people that fall into that thinking just don’t do anything at all. And in a more general sense, most people can absolutely tell if you think they’re idiots, rubes, naive, that they’re wasting their time, etc, and that’s not gonna convince them to trust you. You often can’t afford to stand aside or try to do something else when the mass of people is active in electoralism, we can be as correct as we want but if we’re not where the people are to help them, even if it’s to help to almost certainly lose so they can be educated in practice, then we’re never gonna get what we need: People.

Bourgeois parties and organisations are also not as strong as we think. They don’t have unlimited energy and resources, and once you actually have a large amount of people backing you it takes them a ton more to attack you. It exhausts them too, and can force them to take the mask off or to reveal their hand. That’s not to say this is simple or just “participate in it and that’s it”, it’s very complicated. You need to know what you’re doing, to make very annoying choices, etc. It’s also extremely contextual to the place and time. But every political moment has to be utilized, every crisis, every story.