Do you think that the rich will allow their power to be voted away? Do you think that a country that has done regime change on literally dozens of other countries will simply allow a socialist to be elected? Do you really believe that the FBI or the CIA won’t put a bullet in someone’s head if they believe it is necessary for maintaining the neoliberal order?
Your horseshoe theory is exactly why people hate dem-aligned liberals, because they tell themselves that they are the real progressives (see the coping below from @DarraignTheSane@lemmy.ml, perfect username for that mindset btw) by just gesticulating away any leftist critiques of their position, even extremely obvious ones like “Biden is an unrepentant segregationist” or "There is zero mention of ‘American imperialism’ at any Presidential debate and that’s for a fucking reason ". No, the Adults in the Room know that the way to stop the imperial war machine that has gone unabated since the late '40s is with some policy wonkery and voting harder for leftwing candidates who aren’t allowed by the system to make it to their respective General Election.
The owning class owns not just most of what is in this country, but also the country itself through its politicians. This should not be an insight, let alone a point of contention.
Alright then, what’s your answer? March on the capital, gun down anyone who stands in your way? Read Marx to people in public until they all vote for an effectively nonexistent communist party?
There’s what I wish for society, and then there’s reality. Until something changes, I choose to continue to live in reality.
I’ll refer you to my comment below as to what I have to say on the subject. If you have anything in specific that you’d like to pose a rebuttal to I’d like to hear it, but my guess is that all I’ll hear from you is spouting more idealistic nonsense.
(edit) - To boil it down to a single point: Until we get rid of our first past the post, winner take all voting system, nothing changes and no 3rd party can take hold in this country. The only option for those of us who have to live here is to vote for the party that has at least some progressive politicians in its ranks. With FPTP voting, doing otherwise is the exact same result as voting for the fascist GOP.
I can’t help but notice that you never engage with any argument I put forward. You either nebulously wave it off as “idealist” or you represent it more concretely with positions that anyone who read my comment could tell you is completely contrary to my view.
Half the reason I mentioned you is because you’re such a lovely encapsulation of a certain neoliberal trend, where you are the one “living in reality” and you are the one who is “Sane”, not like those others who aren’t living in reality, who are insane. You have no ability or no inclination to explain why someone might hold contrary positions or what those positions actually are, they must merely be the product of psychotic delusion.
I know your positions and your mindset very well – I used to hold them! I can explain it and why a sane person would believe it, though that sane person would still be incorrect. You cannot do that for me.
That is no mere presumption, you demonstrate my point immediately in your comment:
Alright then, what’s your answer? March on the capital, gun down anyone who stands in your way?
No, I am not in fact a horseshoe theory capitol rioter. There is nothing to be won from occupying a single patch of land because that is fundamentally not how power works.
Read Marx to people in public until they all vote for an effectively nonexistent communist party?
You know, my entire comment was about the futility of staking your hopes on voting and this was your takeaway. No, voting for communists won’t save us (though, since voting is trivially easy for many of us, one might as well also do that as well).
Instead of pontificating about Marxists reading Marx aloud to others, have you considered reading Marx yourself? It might help you to understand beyond crass caricature why people are so interested in him. In this specific case, I would recommend the German Ideology, since it opens by explaining the Marxian version of idealism via the Young Hegelians, who spoke as though mere words and academic debate represented revolutions and fundamental alterations to the world. Merely reading Hegel or Marx to people is not going to change very much because, among other things, mere words rarely ever change someone’s opinion unless they were looking to have their opinion be changed! Someone’s ideology is a much less intellectual matter than we like to imagine, and that includes both yours and mine. Ideology is more akin to a coping mechanism, a way that we interpret and relate to the world in such a way that we believe will ultimately be the easiest or have the best returns. If neoliberalism is working just fine for some boat dealer, no amount of exposition on political-economy will – on its own – change his view, though it’s likely that he won’t submit to very much exposition in the first place, and why would he?
Unfortunately, the question of revolution is a very complicated one and all the more so for my being something of a pessimist on the subject (when it comes to the first world). Let it suffice to say that I believe that the most basic priority of someone living in the anglosphere should be promoting anti-imperialism by whatever means are available to them, and to build further means the organizing with others and constructing “dual power,” structures of power that operate in parallel to state power to organize people towards various social goods, something which the Black Panther Party was an excellent example of.
(edit) - To boil it down to a single point: Until we get rid of our first past the post, winner take all voting system, nothing changes and no 3rd party can take hold in this country. The only option for those of us who have to live here is to vote for the party that has at least some progressive politicians in its ranks. With FPTP voting, doing otherwise is the exact same result as voting for the fascist GOP.
I appreciate you offering a tl;dr, since I had already read your other comment but it’s a bit lengthy.
The one thing I’d like to specifically point out contrary to that other comment is that the majority of the population is far to the left of the Democrats if we judge the Dems by the actual policy they put forward. For example, the majority of the country supports M4A, but it has no shot in Congress and even if it did, Joseph “Harm Reduction” “Racial Jungle” Robinette Biden openly declared that he would veto it.
This is no accident, and it relates to your final thesis – that we just need to vote to make voting more effective – because it is a basic element of the construction of this country’s government that democracy has limited power and the aristocracy has the ability to prevent popular movements from gaining “too much” power. This ideology can be seen in scaremongering about “populists” and “mob rule” and goes back to the Founders openly explaining that the Senate is a “cooling pan” to slow down popular agendas that took hold in the House, which it accomplishes by representing the interests of the landed class in wild disproportion to the size of their population.
If the key to getting a genuinely popular party was voting reform – and that wouldn’t just produce a shithole like Australia – then it would not be allowed to take hold. We can see how ranked choice has been sabotaged in states where it was popular enough to be put forward, such as in Massachusetts, where even the official materials pertaining to the ballot actively promoted misinformation on the subject. Surely, surely, we can just V O T E harder!
Mind you, we should support such measures, but it’s a mistake to believe that it would ultimately lead to an electoral liberation, one rooted in believing that what is formally possible in the system is practically possible, as well as that the much simpler question of normative change is superior to the complex and messy question of revolutionary change because of that very difference.
In conclusion, I encourage you to read Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other authors who influence leftists you disagree with because you might learn something! I promise it won’t poison you. I certainly learned from Locke, from Madison, and of course from the wonderful Alexander Hamilton, who had such a way with so lucidly explaining what he stood for!
I want to start off saying that I don’t disagree in principle with anything you’ve said. Still examining whether I disagree in practice with anything you’ve said, as well.
I believe that the most basic priority of someone living in the anglosphere should be promoting anti-imperialism by whatever means are available to them…
I don’t support the U.S. playing Team America: World Police as we have done historically and regularly, but I don’t see how (not why) that can be my top priority. After all, I’m the “boat dealer” (I benefit from the system), so other than the fact that politicians for whom that would be their top priority would likely align on my other priority issues, how does making American Imperialism my top priority protect my children’s future from the growing fascist movement? (I’m not being hypothetical here, I worry for what will happen to them if GOP fascism isn’t stopped.)
…and to build further means the organizing with others and constructing “dual power,” structures of power that operate in parallel to state power to organize people towards various social goods
Absolutely. Unions, group activism, etc. is definitely the way and means to bring about change. Unfortunately, and I know you’re going to call this a cop-out on my part, with my life situation I don’t have time to participate in all of that. I have a unique situation at home, I have to work to provide, and so on. Yes, I’m aware that this is what they want in order to keep us all from being able to change the system… but that is how it is for me. I will give my support to any groups who can go out and promote that change, however.
democracy has limited power and the aristocracy has the ability to prevent popular movements from gaining “too much” power
Without a doubt. I don’t know what the answer is to enact RCV (or similar), but I do know that nothing changes without RCV. I really don’t see how we can convince politicians to push for RCV when that’s exactly what will let some measure of power slip from their hands. A few states (Alaska, Maine, & Nevada) have done it now, and North Carolina had it but their legislature “thought better of it” and repealed it.
Wanted to save this part for last, having said all of the above -
have you considered reading Marx yourself
I’m not saying I won’t, but I don’t know that it would change much. I know Marx is likely fundamentally sound ideology, but ultimately it won’t change the basic, almost animalistic / survivalistic if you will, priorities that I have to focus on as voter in the middle of the U.S. - namely, stopping the growing fascism movement. Until then, I would just be sitting there reading and agreeing with everything, saying “yeah I know that makes sense… yes that’s exactly right, etc.”… and it would inevitably change nothing and most probably just make me more frustrated about the shit situation we’re in. There is absolutely a large portion of the population that needs to have that shit Clockwork-Oranged into their skulls, though.
I appreciate you offering a tl;dr, since I had already read your other comment but it’s a bit lengthy.
And I say this with no ill intent, but “Hello pot, my name’s kettle”. 😁
And I say this with no ill intent, but “Hello pot, my name’s kettle”. 😁
I realized the irony, but I figured it was fine since I was giving you a compliment. By the way, if you thought that comment was long . . .
I’ve grown up around dem-aligned liberals, I know their mindset intimately well even aside from having held it myself. I think if we put things in psychological terms, the core issue is that the Dems are fundamentally deeply dishonest in a way that Republicans typically aren’t. Mind you, Republicans lie about “facts about the world”, which Dems also do, but slightly less. Republicans however tend to be pretty honest about what sort of policy they will advance in office. They might exaggerate and they almost never have a personal investment in it (and they lie about taxes), but they do attempt to follow through. If prospective Governor Eustace Q Racewar says that he will work to ban abortion, he’s probably going to actually try to ban abortion in office. If he says he’s going to fuck over immigrants, he’s going to fuck over immigrants, etc.
If his Democratic opponent, Gregory Balk, says that he’s going to put forward serious healthcare reform or protect the environment or “listen to science”, there’s like a 98% chance that he’s lying through his fucking teeth. The only time they support major policy changes that they advertise are when they find a way to do something reactionary and make it look progressive, like how Obama had essentially carte blanche for two years to do whatever he wanted and then advanced healthcare reform penned originally by Mitt Romney, which functioned as absurd corporate welfare for the health insurance industry through its mandate, in a grotesque parody of the single-payer model. That would be his only accomplishment besides fucking over Grenada, Yemen, and a handful of other countries. It’s no wonder the Dems instantaneously lost the next election when that was the best he could do.
We can see that tragicomic farce played out over and over and over again in California, New York, and other major solid blue states where it doesn’t matter how much power the Dems have, the progressive policy that Dems nominally support does not go through. The Republicans are incredibly useful to the Dems because it gives them a scapegoat for their refusal to help people, but the Republicans are truly just a scapegoat in most cases.
The Republican Party, or the false pretense of holding off the Republican Party, is the true Democratic platform, and it has been since the '70s. Just like Joseph “vote for the other Biden!” Biden said about Israel, if the Democrats did not have a Republican Party, they would need to invent a Republican Party to protect its interests, because they serve overwhelmingly the same corporate masters.
It was often said, as I believe you invoked earlier, “A vote for a third party is a vote for Trump,” but I say to you “A vote for Biden is a vote for Trump” or for DeSantis or whoever you like, just as the KPD said “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler.” Hitler never won an election, but he didn’t need to! Hindenburg, liberal that he was, fundamentally was not hostile to fascist ideology and was happy to appoint Hitler to the next highest office in the land, directly enabling the Nazi takeover. The KPD was decapitated by the time their prediction was verified, because the Freikorps – a fascist precursor to the brownshirts populated mostly by veterans of the last imperialist war – butchered the KPD’s leaders like animals, working in conjunction with the “progressive” liberal SPD to do so!
If you’re wondering how imperialism may threaten your kids, consider that the material basis of fascism is imperialism! It is the decay of imperial states – or the sponsorship of them in the third world – that sets the groundwork for a hypermilitarized popular movement inflicting incredible violence on the domestic population. You understand how cops in military equipment might be a threat, right? Perhaps it’s then worth asking why we have so much military equipment that we nearly give it away to any executors of state violence! The Military Industrial Complex, the linchpin of American imperialism, is the source of this endless supply of weapons that is being increasingly turned on American citizens as they have been turned on those of other nations. If that’s what it takes for you to have solidarity with the countless millions America slaughters abroad decade after decade, then so be it.
Without a doubt. I don’t know what the answer is to enact RCV (or similar), but I do know that nothing changes without RCV. I really don’t see how we can convince politicians to push for RCV when that’s exactly what will let some measure of power slip from their hands. A few states (Alaska, Maine, & Nevada) have done it now, and North Carolina had it but their legislature “thought better of it” and repealed it.
This is cognitive dissonance, though I think you can tell. "Our only option is to vote -> voting doesn’t work very well, we need RCV -> Our only option is RCV -> RCV cannot be voted in for the same reason voting doesn’t work very well -> our only option is to vote harder "
If RCV could fix things, they would never allow you to vote it in. If they allow you to vote it in, it’s because they have set up some other barrier. If you want to force the government to implement RCV, which is the only context in which it could plausibly make a lasting difference, that can only be accomplished by having bargaining power. Bargaining power in not popularity or awareness or compelling arguments or demonstrations that you really care, it is the ability to make threats. What do I mean by threats? Threats are the ability and the promise to do something they really don’t want you to do or to withhold something that they desperately want to have. That is what a strike is, for example. That is also what a riot is.
If you cannot coerce a bourgeois government, you are at its mercy and you will receive only what it wants you to receive, a set of items that never includes the levers of power, and even then only by begging.
I’m not saying I won’t, but I don’t know that it would change much. I know Marx is likely fundamentally sound ideology, but ultimately it won’t change the basic, almost animalistic / survivalistic if you will, priorities that I have to focus on as voter in the middle of the U.S. - namely, stopping the growing fascism movement.
It’s this mindset of treading water that I was complaining about. Treading water is important, but if you are so absorbed in the task that you can’t be bothered to search for the shore, then you are just delaying your drowning. Fascism is not something you can vote out, fascism is the thing that festers unabated while people channel all of their political will into “reducing” harm without even developing a notion of how to “stop” harm or ask why they are getting so invested in the spectator sport of an institution where – by their own admission – either team winning means that they lose.
Since a lot of voting is a form of game theory, perhaps you will appreciate the thesis that you can’t just spend time trying not to lose, you also need to attempt to win – even if that means taking risks – because delaying the descent into fascism will not in itself save you and Dems have been playing the game of “this election is too urgent, let’s worry about actual progress later” for literally more than 50 years running now.
Until then, I would just be sitting there reading and agreeing with everything, saying “yeah I know that makes sense… yes that’s exactly right, etc.”… and it would inevitably change nothing and most probably just make me more frustrated about the shit situation we’re in.
I really shouldn’t go on for much longer as the barest matter of courtesy, but you agreed before that the Panthers are a good and helpful example of dual power, right? So things that they wrote may very well be helpful, right? Have you wondered where they got their ideas from? That’s a complex question, but part of the answer is that they studied Marx, Lenin, and the rest! They learned about the theory for conducting revolutionary struggle and used it to guide their own praxis.
Yeah, lots of people sit around all day driving themselves insane by developing an ever-more elaborate understanding of the monstrosity that they are seated in the belly of, but key to that madness is that they don’t do very much about it! Just as faith without works is dead, theory without praxis is psychosis.
Actually, your comment reminds me very acutely of a remote conference I attended where a labor organizer recounted her then-boyfriend teasing her “How can you be a labor organizer and not read Marx?” to which she replied “How could reading Marx help me?” Here’s a link to the segment that contained that story. Though theoretically the subject is broader than Marxism but also somewhat narrowed to philosophy and climate activism (hopefully you can see how your kids’ future has a stake in that too!), I think you might find a lot of it interesting. Since you are busy, I’d recommend skipping to 22 minutes in, because that presentation and the one after it (with the facilitator’s discussion after each) are really the most compelling parts.
Lastly, since I fully sympathize with finding study a bit onerous, I would like to let you know that most major marxist works have audiobooks that have been made in recent years for them! One of my very favorite is Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which I cannot recommend strongly enough for beginning to develop a historical perspective on the issues of labor, class struggle, and political theory. Just listen to it while you’re on a walk or driving somewhere, and rewind as needed.
“violent revolution”
Do you think that the rich will allow their power to be voted away? Do you think that a country that has done regime change on literally dozens of other countries will simply allow a socialist to be elected? Do you really believe that the FBI or the CIA won’t put a bullet in someone’s head if they believe it is necessary for maintaining the neoliberal order?
Your horseshoe theory is exactly why people hate dem-aligned liberals, because they tell themselves that they are the real progressives (see the coping below from @DarraignTheSane@lemmy.ml, perfect username for that mindset btw) by just gesticulating away any leftist critiques of their position, even extremely obvious ones like “Biden is an unrepentant segregationist” or "There is zero mention of ‘American imperialism’ at any Presidential debate and that’s for a fucking reason ". No, the Adults in the Room know that the way to stop the imperial war machine that has gone unabated since the late '40s is with some policy wonkery and voting harder for leftwing candidates who aren’t allowed by the system to make it to their respective General Election.
The owning class owns not just most of what is in this country, but also the country itself through its politicians. This should not be an insight, let alone a point of contention.
Alright then, what’s your answer? March on the capital, gun down anyone who stands in your way? Read Marx to people in public until they all vote for an effectively nonexistent communist party?
There’s what I wish for society, and then there’s reality. Until something changes, I choose to continue to live in reality.
I’ll refer you to my comment below as to what I have to say on the subject. If you have anything in specific that you’d like to pose a rebuttal to I’d like to hear it, but my guess is that all I’ll hear from you is spouting more idealistic nonsense.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/461546
(edit) - To boil it down to a single point: Until we get rid of our first past the post, winner take all voting system, nothing changes and no 3rd party can take hold in this country. The only option for those of us who have to live here is to vote for the party that has at least some progressive politicians in its ranks. With FPTP voting, doing otherwise is the exact same result as voting for the fascist GOP.
I can’t help but notice that you never engage with any argument I put forward. You either nebulously wave it off as “idealist” or you represent it more concretely with positions that anyone who read my comment could tell you is completely contrary to my view.
Half the reason I mentioned you is because you’re such a lovely encapsulation of a certain neoliberal trend, where you are the one “living in reality” and you are the one who is “Sane”, not like those others who aren’t living in reality, who are insane. You have no ability or no inclination to explain why someone might hold contrary positions or what those positions actually are, they must merely be the product of psychotic delusion.
I know your positions and your mindset very well – I used to hold them! I can explain it and why a sane person would believe it, though that sane person would still be incorrect. You cannot do that for me.
That is no mere presumption, you demonstrate my point immediately in your comment:
No, I am not in fact a horseshoe theory capitol rioter. There is nothing to be won from occupying a single patch of land because that is fundamentally not how power works.
You know, my entire comment was about the futility of staking your hopes on voting and this was your takeaway. No, voting for communists won’t save us (though, since voting is trivially easy for many of us, one might as well also do that as well).
Instead of pontificating about Marxists reading Marx aloud to others, have you considered reading Marx yourself? It might help you to understand beyond crass caricature why people are so interested in him. In this specific case, I would recommend the German Ideology, since it opens by explaining the Marxian version of idealism via the Young Hegelians, who spoke as though mere words and academic debate represented revolutions and fundamental alterations to the world. Merely reading Hegel or Marx to people is not going to change very much because, among other things, mere words rarely ever change someone’s opinion unless they were looking to have their opinion be changed! Someone’s ideology is a much less intellectual matter than we like to imagine, and that includes both yours and mine. Ideology is more akin to a coping mechanism, a way that we interpret and relate to the world in such a way that we believe will ultimately be the easiest or have the best returns. If neoliberalism is working just fine for some boat dealer, no amount of exposition on political-economy will – on its own – change his view, though it’s likely that he won’t submit to very much exposition in the first place, and why would he?
Unfortunately, the question of revolution is a very complicated one and all the more so for my being something of a pessimist on the subject (when it comes to the first world). Let it suffice to say that I believe that the most basic priority of someone living in the anglosphere should be promoting anti-imperialism by whatever means are available to them, and to build further means the organizing with others and constructing “dual power,” structures of power that operate in parallel to state power to organize people towards various social goods, something which the Black Panther Party was an excellent example of.
I appreciate you offering a tl;dr, since I had already read your other comment but it’s a bit lengthy.
The one thing I’d like to specifically point out contrary to that other comment is that the majority of the population is far to the left of the Democrats if we judge the Dems by the actual policy they put forward. For example, the majority of the country supports M4A, but it has no shot in Congress and even if it did, Joseph “Harm Reduction” “Racial Jungle” Robinette Biden openly declared that he would veto it.
This is no accident, and it relates to your final thesis – that we just need to vote to make voting more effective – because it is a basic element of the construction of this country’s government that democracy has limited power and the aristocracy has the ability to prevent popular movements from gaining “too much” power. This ideology can be seen in scaremongering about “populists” and “mob rule” and goes back to the Founders openly explaining that the Senate is a “cooling pan” to slow down popular agendas that took hold in the House, which it accomplishes by representing the interests of the landed class in wild disproportion to the size of their population.
If the key to getting a genuinely popular party was voting reform – and that wouldn’t just produce a shithole like Australia – then it would not be allowed to take hold. We can see how ranked choice has been sabotaged in states where it was popular enough to be put forward, such as in Massachusetts, where even the official materials pertaining to the ballot actively promoted misinformation on the subject. Surely, surely, we can just V O T E harder!
Mind you, we should support such measures, but it’s a mistake to believe that it would ultimately lead to an electoral liberation, one rooted in believing that what is formally possible in the system is practically possible, as well as that the much simpler question of normative change is superior to the complex and messy question of revolutionary change because of that very difference.
In conclusion, I encourage you to read Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other authors who influence leftists you disagree with because you might learn something! I promise it won’t poison you. I certainly learned from Locke, from Madison, and of course from the wonderful Alexander Hamilton, who had such a way with so lucidly explaining what he stood for!
I want to start off saying that I don’t disagree in principle with anything you’ve said. Still examining whether I disagree in practice with anything you’ve said, as well.
I don’t support the U.S. playing Team America: World Police as we have done historically and regularly, but I don’t see how (not why) that can be my top priority. After all, I’m the “boat dealer” (I benefit from the system), so other than the fact that politicians for whom that would be their top priority would likely align on my other priority issues, how does making American Imperialism my top priority protect my children’s future from the growing fascist movement? (I’m not being hypothetical here, I worry for what will happen to them if GOP fascism isn’t stopped.)
Absolutely. Unions, group activism, etc. is definitely the way and means to bring about change. Unfortunately, and I know you’re going to call this a cop-out on my part, with my life situation I don’t have time to participate in all of that. I have a unique situation at home, I have to work to provide, and so on. Yes, I’m aware that this is what they want in order to keep us all from being able to change the system… but that is how it is for me. I will give my support to any groups who can go out and promote that change, however.
Without a doubt. I don’t know what the answer is to enact RCV (or similar), but I do know that nothing changes without RCV. I really don’t see how we can convince politicians to push for RCV when that’s exactly what will let some measure of power slip from their hands. A few states (Alaska, Maine, & Nevada) have done it now, and North Carolina had it but their legislature “thought better of it” and repealed it.
Wanted to save this part for last, having said all of the above -
I’m not saying I won’t, but I don’t know that it would change much. I know Marx is likely fundamentally sound ideology, but ultimately it won’t change the basic, almost animalistic / survivalistic if you will, priorities that I have to focus on as voter in the middle of the U.S. - namely, stopping the growing fascism movement. Until then, I would just be sitting there reading and agreeing with everything, saying “yeah I know that makes sense… yes that’s exactly right, etc.”… and it would inevitably change nothing and most probably just make me more frustrated about the shit situation we’re in. There is absolutely a large portion of the population that needs to have that shit Clockwork-Oranged into their skulls, though.
And I say this with no ill intent, but “Hello pot, my name’s kettle”. 😁
I realized the irony, but I figured it was fine since I was giving you a compliment. By the way, if you thought that comment was long . . .
I’ve grown up around dem-aligned liberals, I know their mindset intimately well even aside from having held it myself. I think if we put things in psychological terms, the core issue is that the Dems are fundamentally deeply dishonest in a way that Republicans typically aren’t. Mind you, Republicans lie about “facts about the world”, which Dems also do, but slightly less. Republicans however tend to be pretty honest about what sort of policy they will advance in office. They might exaggerate and they almost never have a personal investment in it (and they lie about taxes), but they do attempt to follow through. If prospective Governor Eustace Q Racewar says that he will work to ban abortion, he’s probably going to actually try to ban abortion in office. If he says he’s going to fuck over immigrants, he’s going to fuck over immigrants, etc.
If his Democratic opponent, Gregory Balk, says that he’s going to put forward serious healthcare reform or protect the environment or “listen to science”, there’s like a 98% chance that he’s lying through his fucking teeth. The only time they support major policy changes that they advertise are when they find a way to do something reactionary and make it look progressive, like how Obama had essentially carte blanche for two years to do whatever he wanted and then advanced healthcare reform penned originally by Mitt Romney, which functioned as absurd corporate welfare for the health insurance industry through its mandate, in a grotesque parody of the single-payer model. That would be his only accomplishment besides fucking over Grenada, Yemen, and a handful of other countries. It’s no wonder the Dems instantaneously lost the next election when that was the best he could do.
We can see that tragicomic farce played out over and over and over again in California, New York, and other major solid blue states where it doesn’t matter how much power the Dems have, the progressive policy that Dems nominally support does not go through. The Republicans are incredibly useful to the Dems because it gives them a scapegoat for their refusal to help people, but the Republicans are truly just a scapegoat in most cases.
The Republican Party, or the false pretense of holding off the Republican Party, is the true Democratic platform, and it has been since the '70s. Just like Joseph “vote for the other Biden!” Biden said about Israel, if the Democrats did not have a Republican Party, they would need to invent a Republican Party to protect its interests, because they serve overwhelmingly the same corporate masters.
It was often said, as I believe you invoked earlier, “A vote for a third party is a vote for Trump,” but I say to you “A vote for Biden is a vote for Trump” or for DeSantis or whoever you like, just as the KPD said “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler.” Hitler never won an election, but he didn’t need to! Hindenburg, liberal that he was, fundamentally was not hostile to fascist ideology and was happy to appoint Hitler to the next highest office in the land, directly enabling the Nazi takeover. The KPD was decapitated by the time their prediction was verified, because the Freikorps – a fascist precursor to the brownshirts populated mostly by veterans of the last imperialist war – butchered the KPD’s leaders like animals, working in conjunction with the “progressive” liberal SPD to do so!
Foucault’s Boomerang comes at you fast.
If you’re wondering how imperialism may threaten your kids, consider that the material basis of fascism is imperialism! It is the decay of imperial states – or the sponsorship of them in the third world – that sets the groundwork for a hypermilitarized popular movement inflicting incredible violence on the domestic population. You understand how cops in military equipment might be a threat, right? Perhaps it’s then worth asking why we have so much military equipment that we nearly give it away to any executors of state violence! The Military Industrial Complex, the linchpin of American imperialism, is the source of this endless supply of weapons that is being increasingly turned on American citizens as they have been turned on those of other nations. If that’s what it takes for you to have solidarity with the countless millions America slaughters abroad decade after decade, then so be it.
This is cognitive dissonance, though I think you can tell. "Our only option is to vote -> voting doesn’t work very well, we need RCV -> Our only option is RCV -> RCV cannot be voted in for the same reason voting doesn’t work very well -> our only option is to vote harder "
If RCV could fix things, they would never allow you to vote it in. If they allow you to vote it in, it’s because they have set up some other barrier. If you want to force the government to implement RCV, which is the only context in which it could plausibly make a lasting difference, that can only be accomplished by having bargaining power. Bargaining power in not popularity or awareness or compelling arguments or demonstrations that you really care, it is the ability to make threats. What do I mean by threats? Threats are the ability and the promise to do something they really don’t want you to do or to withhold something that they desperately want to have. That is what a strike is, for example. That is also what a riot is.
If you cannot coerce a bourgeois government, you are at its mercy and you will receive only what it wants you to receive, a set of items that never includes the levers of power, and even then only by begging.
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It’s this mindset of treading water that I was complaining about. Treading water is important, but if you are so absorbed in the task that you can’t be bothered to search for the shore, then you are just delaying your drowning. Fascism is not something you can vote out, fascism is the thing that festers unabated while people channel all of their political will into “reducing” harm without even developing a notion of how to “stop” harm or ask why they are getting so invested in the spectator sport of an institution where – by their own admission – either team winning means that they lose.
Since a lot of voting is a form of game theory, perhaps you will appreciate the thesis that you can’t just spend time trying not to lose, you also need to attempt to win – even if that means taking risks – because delaying the descent into fascism will not in itself save you and Dems have been playing the game of “this election is too urgent, let’s worry about actual progress later” for literally more than 50 years running now.
I really shouldn’t go on for much longer as the barest matter of courtesy, but you agreed before that the Panthers are a good and helpful example of dual power, right? So things that they wrote may very well be helpful, right? Have you wondered where they got their ideas from? That’s a complex question, but part of the answer is that they studied Marx, Lenin, and the rest! They learned about the theory for conducting revolutionary struggle and used it to guide their own praxis.
Yeah, lots of people sit around all day driving themselves insane by developing an ever-more elaborate understanding of the monstrosity that they are seated in the belly of, but key to that madness is that they don’t do very much about it! Just as faith without works is dead, theory without praxis is psychosis.
Actually, your comment reminds me very acutely of a remote conference I attended where a labor organizer recounted her then-boyfriend teasing her “How can you be a labor organizer and not read Marx?” to which she replied “How could reading Marx help me?” Here’s a link to the segment that contained that story. Though theoretically the subject is broader than Marxism but also somewhat narrowed to philosophy and climate activism (hopefully you can see how your kids’ future has a stake in that too!), I think you might find a lot of it interesting. Since you are busy, I’d recommend skipping to 22 minutes in, because that presentation and the one after it (with the facilitator’s discussion after each) are really the most compelling parts.
Lastly, since I fully sympathize with finding study a bit onerous, I would like to let you know that most major marxist works have audiobooks that have been made in recent years for them! One of my very favorite is Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which I cannot recommend strongly enough for beginning to develop a historical perspective on the issues of labor, class struggle, and political theory. Just listen to it while you’re on a walk or driving somewhere, and rewind as needed.
Obligatory mention of the State and Revolution by Lenin audiobook, though the quality is not quite as high.
New information will not hurt you. At worst, it can inform your discussion with Marxists, but it can potentially do much more.