• seahorse [Ohio]
    link
    fedilink
    610 months ago

    This is why I’m glad I joined some leftist communities in my area. We try to expand our community to as many people as we can, through as many organizations as we can, but we can only do so much. The US is most likely the least class conscious place in the world, so we’re in a constant uphill battle with the cold war propaganda brain worms infecting most of the population.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
    link
    English
    410 months ago

    A great read, the point regarding lack of meaningful organization around common goals can’t be stressed enough. Liberal world view convinced majority of the people to view everything from an individualist perspective, and this is at odds with building actual political power.

  • @colin@lemmy.uninsane.org
    link
    fedilink
    310 months ago

    at the end:

    I have an uncomfortable feeling that we are headed for a genuine form of anarchy: no rules, not OK. There is no precedent, so far as I’m aware, for a political system that falls with nothing to replace it, or at least nothing viable. Organised crime, anybody? Islamist militias?

    a little difficult to tease apart what the author meant. “a genuine form of anarchy”, and “a political system that falls with nothing to replace it”: sounds like a prolonged power vacuum. literally, the system falls and isn’t re-unified. but that goes against a certain popular phrase, and something the author said earlier:

    politics does not tolerate a vacuum, and the best-organised (or least disorganised) group will tend to prevail. These groups do not have to be explicitly political: at one extreme, organised crime can often provide a number of surrogate state functions, precisely because it is organised.

    so, then, the political system falls and is replaced by organized crime? taking the U.S.: they’ve AFAICT done a pretty good job of keeping organized crime weak. so… maybe the cartels which have trade routes into the U.S. serve as that organized crime, and expand? problem is that few of their operations are geographically contiguous with the US: it’d be like operating a colony for them, too many weak points.

    come to think of it, U.S. has lots of weaponry. its neighbors have a vested interest in those weapons not falling into unfriendly hands. some of these weapons are ICBMs: at that point nations near and far have a vested interest in its future. if Washington’s rule were to fall without any immediate successor, it’s believable that its long term future would be decided more by external actors than by internal events. i speak of the U.S. because that’s what i’m familiar with: the cartel situation might be different for any land-locked nation but i think the rest applies to most nuclear, secular democracies.