May 19, 2016

Bernie Sanders is doing severe damage to Leftist politics.

Expecting to get flamed by the usual suspects but riddle me this, after the shitshow of the past few months, how the hell do you sell a leftist candidate now? How do you push a quasi-socialist or socialist candidate without them being associated with the last "socialist" candidate? How close are we to having left-wing politics associated with chaos and anarchy and misogyny?

Remember when we were saying that "Sanders has rehabilitated the word socialism"? I'm not sure about that anymore, now that the Sanders movement has spent the past few months reenacting the worst stereotypes and smears of the Right. Everything that conservatives have said about left-wingers for years is being acted out by the BernieBros, from immaturity to excuse-making to laziness. How are not just conservatives but moderate Dems (the people we have to move leftwing to even have a shot) gonna look at this and say "See, this is what socialism is really about!"?

This is what happened in 68 where a lot of people looked at the radicals then and said "Nope, not for me" and pulled the lever for Nixon. Now,Trump is no Nixon, Nixon wasn't crazy and he was a very competent politician, evil as he was. But the parallels are there.

Believe it or not, you can't just declare victory just because everyone in your bubble agrees with you, you have to convince people outside said bubble, and that has become that much harder.

May 15, 2016

Even Nader thinks Bernie is terrible at politics

http://images.politico.com/global/2014/03/06/2014_-_3_6_-_letter_to_bernie_sanders.html

Read it.
Read it all.
This is Ralph fucking Nader talking.
Ralph "I helped elect Dubya" Nader.

If only I had known this shit before supporting him in the first place. He's a fraud. All he does is make a lot of noise about saying the right things, but he does nothing about it.

May 11, 2016

Think incrementalism is bad? Try outcrementalism

Where you stay outside the systems where power is distributed and achieve absolutely nothing.

May 8, 2016

I'm way to Obama's left but I appreciate and admire him.

But I've always appreciated even in my more emoprog moments the historic level of opposition and hatred he's faced, and how much he's gotten done in the face of said opposition. There are a few things I could certainly nitpick on, because I'm a far lefty and he's not. There are things I wish he could have done more aggressively or faster but that doesn't stop me from being able to appreciate how great a leader he's been on every level.

Hell, I use his speeches and cadence to improve my public speaking and I try to emulate how he tries to get across complex issues to the public. I'll never be the kind of orator he is and I'll probably never be speaking on the big stages he does, but that's one way he's managed to inspire me.

I am going to miss him. Greatest president in the last 50 years, easily. Top 10 all time at a minimum.

May 8, 2016

What's scary is the lack of empathy in this thread.

Not even a crying child will make people think "gee maybe we need to chill", no it's just the same old excuse-making and whining and abdication of responsibility. "Oh don't bring your child to see your favorite politician" - like what the fuck? I guess if I go to a Trump rally and get my black ass kicked it's my fault right? "Oh you can't prove it was Bernie supporters" (yeah they weren't chanting his name before they attacked that little girl)". I would call these people "childish" but that's an insult, I think "degenerates" is a better word because they have degenerated from what a responsible citizen and a responsible voter should be.

This isn't just about Bernie though; this is the kind of thing that we see with all these angry fringe ideological movements who reject the hard work needed to build consensus and move society to your side (though with the angry fringe right the ideology itself directly hurts too many people to ever build a coalition around).

The Professional Left needs to go back to the drawing-board. Tear the ENTIRE fucking edifice down, start over. Embrace pragmatism, compromise and coalition-building, even if you disagree with a given politician, even if they're too neoliberal for your tastes, with a strong enough coalition built by the above, you can move them to where you are. But screaming at people doesn't work. It hasn't worked for 50 fucking years. Screaming at mothers and children DEFINITELY won't work. (and this isn't just Bernie supporters but the campus activist set, even though I agree with both of their ideological positions!). The problem is though that a lot of (mostly upper middle class white) people are getting rich off producing the ideological equivalent of clickbait designed to channel outrage and energy into screaming at people and not building movements and characterizing everyone who disagrees as Eurasia or Eastasia depending on the day. This is what leads to a bunch of grown men screaming at a little girl and ripping up her sign and making them cry and not feeling a shade of remorse. Because they have been taught to dehumanize their ideological enemies, even if they're little girls who don't care about the ideological shit and think a woman President would be an amazing thing (which it would be). We know where the dehumanization of your ideological enemies leads. We know where that shit leads. It needs to stop.

What is even more amazing is that we know where this leads and we don't even try to be sensitive to anything that even hints at that. We've already had a SD threatened by a Bernie supporter. What happens if someone is hurt or killed by a Bernie protester at a Hillary rally? What if some unhinged fanatic actually hurts or kills a SD supporting Hillary? I'll tell you what happens. You better move to Sweden or Canada, because leftism is DEAD in America for another 50 years. Every left-wing populist movement would be compared to it. But I don't think the most fanatic Bernie supporters care, because virtue signaling is more important than winning, because touting "principles" and staying pure to stroke their own ego is what they're really in this for.

May 6, 2016

It depends on the size of the UBI

But it doesn't matter because as long as the UBI is big enough to ensure that every possible worker can have food and shelter, even baseline food and shelter, the UBI is a death warrant for capitalism. Either labor can negotiate every inch of profit away from the capitalist class that isn't used to keep the business running (because every worker can strike indefinitely), or the capitalists can automate, have the productivity of the robots taxed to possibly make the UBI larger (or just provide more and better public services the general population can take advantage of) and still have to pay the few human workers left even MORE money.

Capitalism as we know it can't work without any prisoners of starvation, and the UBI potentially legislates them away.

May 3, 2016

The Dems didn't abandon the white working class

The white working class abandoned them. White workers voted enmasse to sacrifice their children to the Moloch of racism. That came BEFORE, not after the Dems became more corporate and is a primary reason why that happened.

There was a contradiction between the Democratic Party as "the party of the working person" and "the party of white supremacy" and that contradiction was resolved by the exile of the latter, but by getting rid of so many white working class people, it weakened the power of Labor to resist corporate power.

So for white workers, the choice is clear - are they going to get on the intersectional bus to feed their families, knowing that they're not in the driver's seat anymore? Or are they going to whine and pout and vote to be pillaged even more?

April 30, 2016

Hearing more whining about "identity politics" from "progressives".

Thanks for letting us know where your bread is really buttered. Used to be only the angry right-wingers cried about that shit.

April 29, 2016

How is that red baiting?

In any case, what has generally been tried in the 20th century is a violent overthrow of existing capitalist oppressive systems, declaring a new socialist republic, and then trying to implement socialist policy from the top down from the vanguard. This has been a failure every time it's been tried, AND requires the situation to descend to a level of poverty and deprivation that makes overthrowing the existing system almost a matter of life and death, or a major worldwide disruption like the Great War (and even then revolutionary socialism went something like 1 for 10, though it came damn close in Germany). This is not realistic in most developed countries, the very countries that Marx stated need to go socialist first.

So how do you get a socialist revolution in the USA? You're not going to overthrow the USA militarily; that's more or less the same kind of fantasies the birthers/truthers/right-wing survivalists engage in. There just isn't enough deprivation to say, launch a general strike that shuts down the nation's industry. So that means you need to engage in a long march strategy where you build grassroots support among the dispossessed, create intersectional movements that fight for progress on specific issues (if you can't get the marginalized groups on your side, you might as well not even bother), try to translate that power to the ballot box, and win progressive change which creates a different socio-political ecology for further change. This also has the benefit of creating bottom-up, grass roots institutions that can both provide an alternative to capitalist power and step in whenever that critical mass for major change does come.

Is it incremental? Yes. Do you have to make compromises as part of a longer game to get what you want? Yes. But is it more likely to not only establish a true base for socialism, but not hurt the working class in the process (because I notice a lot of "socialists" are really sanguine about hurting the working class through accelerationist bullshit to get to their idea of socialism, never mind that such an approach is more likely to lead to fascism just like it did in Germany in the 30s).

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-capitalism-socialism - This post is in a similar vein.

April 29, 2016

Simple questions regarding UBI:

1: How much should an UBI be?
2: How much of the current social safety net should said UBI replace?