“Vote harder” don’t even start to work because US have a two party system with two right wing parties. Why there is no sign of a left party gaining traction? DSA is the biggest left organization but is miniscule (and not very left).

There is a way of radicalising, say… one tenth of the population?

  • Preston Maness ☭
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    2 years ago

    First Past The Post voting (FPTP) guarantees a static two-party system. Until we move to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) electoralism is a pointless endeavor. The DSA has expended the majority of its energy over the past seven years opting to “change the democrats from the inside” rather than to form its own party or even to advocate for Ranked Choice Voting, and that strategy has failed miserably. Even as recently as last year, during their 2021 convention (which I attended as a delegate), they both voted down a proposal for a break from the Democrats, and voted down a proposal to enforce RCV for all DSA internal elections.

    Basically, the DSA is hopelessly convinced both that they can change the Democrats from within, and that they don’t need RCV. That is a losing strategy on all fronts.

    • SubversivoOPB
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      -12 years ago

      Well, a majority of Americans are pro choice, immigration and anti guns. (What a weird issues US politics have…)

      Neither party really embraces this issues, so there is conditions to gain support for the left. Why this don’t happens?

    • SubversivoOPB
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      42 years ago

      Not a good comparison. Weimar Republic had a strong left party, so the question them was why the left can’t gain a majority. (And the answer is because the traditional right supported the Nazis)

      The question in US right now is why it’s seems impossible to build a strong left.

      • Soviet Snake
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        102 years ago

        Yeah well, but I’m talking about Nazi Germany, not the Weimar Republic, once the Nazis established power they assassinated any left leaning party in the country, which is what the US government has been doing for the last hundred years basically.

  • SubversivoOPB
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    52 years ago

    Answers like “USA population is Nazi” are essentialist as hell.

    • Muad'Dibber
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      2 years ago

      Labour Aristocracy

      The labour aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.

      The labour aristocracy provides the major vehicle for bourgeois ideological and political influence within the working class. For Lenin, “opportunism” in the labour movement is conditioned by the preponderance of two major economic factors, namely, either “vast colonial possessions or a monopolist position in world markets.” These allow for ever-greater sections of the metropolitan working class to be granted super-wages so that it is not merely the haute bourgeoisie which subsists on profits. Thus, according to Lenin, it is not simply capitalists who benefit from imperialism:

      The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

      For Lenin, superprofits derived from imperialism allow the globally predominant bourgeoisie to pay inflated wages to sections of the (international) proletariat, who thus derive a material stake in preserving the capitalist system:

      In all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting “gain” from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of “their own” country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain super-profits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution.

      There are several pressing reasons why the haute bourgeoisie in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis.

      • Economically, the embourgeoisement of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital’s expanded reproduction.
      • Politically, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government.
      • Militarily, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories.
      • Finally, ideologically, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits imperialism brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.

      In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:

      At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies—the yellow, black, and red colonial people—and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist “fatherland.”

      Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:

      I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread!” “bread!” and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

      • Amicese
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        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

        • Muad'Dibber
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          52 years ago

          When you pay global south proletarians, working with productive facilities and equipment from the 21st century, 18th century wages. Superprofits, IE the massive value captured in global value chains from global south proletarians currently making most consumer products, is the main source of surplus value for capitalists in the modern day.