this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Revolution does not follow the electoral cycle. PSL is constantly doing work. This is just a vehicle for reaching those who do not understand politics beyond electoralism and to raise the correct position that both capitalist parties create and maintain our oppression.
There is not going to be a revolutionary movement that begins work during a primary and then has completed the revolution at its end. Revolutionary work requires building organizations over years and decades.
The party will never allow that lmao. Every attempt to work within the most viable party for this, the Democrats, has resulted in them changing their own rules. Just see how it worked out for the members of the DSA who took over in Nevada.
Biden and Harris are just as fascistic as Trump. They are nationalists committing genocide scapegoating immigrants and people overseas and pumping huge sums of money into cops' funds in response to uprisings over racial policing and racial oppression. They are just polite about it and use the right euphemisms.
Their policies are, in fact, the main driver of an ascendant right. Their policies degrade conditions and the response to them and fail to address the scapegoating that marginalization provides.
Of course it is necessary. You think the capitalists will just let you vote them out of power?
Please do less bullshit guessing and actually learn about this topic.
Yes. That my cognitive dissonance was so loud I could clearly see the evermore rightward march of the Democratic party, be horrified by ever-shifting rhetoric and policy but failed to recognize it until one of our brothers here pointed out to me in direct yet civil terms, i was embarrassed. Not ashamed, because I think shame wouldn't have allowed me to admit to myself, let alone others, that this is exactly correct.
No matter our nationality, political ideals, deep, honest, fearless introspection is necessary.
Yes, it's horrifying what a small change in perspective - a new angle of criticism, for example - can reveal about our world. There's no need to feel embarrassment, we are all embedded in a milieu of PR campaigns and a handful of political memes recycled indefinitely and it is so pervasive that it is not something that poli sci professors usually escape, either. Usually it's the exact opposite. They repeat and entrench lines of thought handed down to them without ever critically engaging with it. Universities across the West teach collective action problems as if they are laws and not constantly openly contradicted by example or that politucs is a one-dimensional axis from liberal to conservative. The latter truly reveals how little they have questioned or learned and opens up its own interesting questions about how academia functions. But anyways, point is, even the people nominally tasked with becoming experts on these sorts of things don't just automatically recognize this predominant myopia.
Recognizing such pervasive false perspectives and tropes tends to require a cold splash of reality that contradicts the narrative or extensive reading to discover new thought patterns. Or like in your case, talking to someone that has already done so. All we can do is be open to the constructive self-criticism like you make note of and to do our best to be personally morally consistent and empathetic.
Thank you for your generous and insightful reply. I'm definitely not a political scientist, and I guess the embarrassment was for myself, realizing on the one hand that our policies are terrible, and on the other, that hope lies with the Democratic party.
While I don't salivate at the idea of war, and especially civil war, I can not fear it; dread and fear not always being the same thing or of the same source. I'll do what is necessary, while also acknowledging that my opponents are decent, but misguided and just as heavily brainwashed people. I just hope when it comes to that, fascism won't prevail, whether that happens in whatever years I have left, or follows the generations behind me.
Nothing inherently good about being a political scientist! They are wrong or naive so often it is ridiculous. I think it is just an interesting example of how the people paid to think about such topics are still embedded in propaganda milieu and spectacle. You can very much become far more educated and insightful than one, it just takes healthy criticism and reading.
I dread and fear all war but also understand that the violence comes for us regardless, we just get to choose how to organize, become resilient, and strategically protect ourselves while also engaging in meaningful action. The ruling class will never let us vote them out. We may succeed at voting out their preferred sects of the political class, and thus agitate and build against them, but they will bring violence in response - violence that, per the dominant thought patterns, won't be called violence. It will be joblessness, deprivation, essential services shut down. Capital strikes, etc. And such crises can then be leveraged to restore their preferred sects. Civil war is not likely to spring up early, but as a downstream outcome of repeated struggles like this, of preventing eventual popular will. We will also probably lose at least one round, assuming we cannot organize quickly enough. What that kind of thing looks like can be real horror, which is why we must organize. We need our losses to look like 1905 Russia not 1965 Indonesia. We should also be realistic in that these kinds if fights will happen earlier and more successfully in the third world and one of our duties is to support them, particularly as our governments and media apparatuses will be leading the charge to demonize them.
Some will be decent and misguided. Others will be misguided but not at all decent, having cruelty and racism and a desire for domination deeply embedded in their psyche. It will be virtually impossible to sympathize when they do overy violence to us. They already do "civilly", like with cops that harass and murder, particularly against black and brown people. Or like ICE. Or the soldiers that dehumanize the people in a country they invaded. Historically, those most targeted by them will rightfully want justice.
On the bright side, the world is rebuilding structures and relationships that can rein in empire. And in the US, the nascent left is relearning all of the old lessons of the last 300 years. The opposing forces are escalating and organizations are building, which is better than the unipolar malaise of the prior 40 years.
Interestingly, I view this as violence, too. But that's because maybe 25 years ago, a philosophical Taoist introduced me to the idea that some construction techniques are violence to nature, some aren't, so having that understanding naturally led to understanding certain control techniques, inside intimate family or larger social structures, as violence, and that's a whole other controversial topic.
With regard to fear, I only meant it's coming so it's kind of pointless to fear it. Most people have fears whether homelessness, hunger, or the horrors of war; and most of us will feel the fear and do what needs doing, anyway. I'd entirely avoid it, were it not necessary.
I believe that for at least some of the J6ers, this was the motivating factor.
I'm looking at aligning with an organization, and volunteering, now; I wish there were more who are. It would be preferable, I'm just not confident most of my fellow compatriots will see it coming (USA, which is why I included that bit out of order in the quote). And most (not all) will take up arms for our oppressors, if the current on- and offline discourse is indicative of that future event, but I'm in the Bible Belt, so there's that consideration.
We do what we can, and a few listen. I'm still so proud of Bolivian indigenous people for having fought and won, against military grade weapons with common gardening tools, their water rights back from Bechtel! What a noble example to have been set for us.
Tbh, and perhaps it's a reflection of my character, it's virtually impossible for me to sympathize in the moment a decent human is doing overt violence to me. Survival instinct is powerful, and sympathy and empathy are usually before and after, during is entirely different.
My apologies for the disjointed reply. I left off this reply to consider it more broadly. Distractions began immediately when I began typing this, and it's a deep topic that could perhaps be better discussed over food and beverages, or at least in person. Or perhaps it's just an uneasy topic, knowing that for all considerations we foresee, there are many we can't. I do very much appreciate your encouragement and well-considered reply.
Get the fuck out. Stop. You are being irresponsible with this bullshit rhetoric and you're actively contributing to harm. Knock off the militant edgelord bullshit.
The Biden-Harris administration is massively pro-cop, providing the largest national infusion into cop budgets in history, has ramped up anti-immigrant policies attempting to outflank Republicans from the right, including working on Trump's border wall, broke a strike, forced the public back to work by normalizing a pandemic, and is now committing a genocide via Israel.
What do you think it means to be fascistic?
Stop being a militant purist, it makes you one of the impediments to actual progress in this country.
What on earth is purist in what I said? Do you have nothing to say in response to my explanations? Am I right in them? Where am I wrong?
Yeah, and I'm the one bullshitting...
The issue here is likely that you aren't familiar with what fascism was.
Trump, Biden, and Harris are all liberals, as in of the popular ideology of capitalism. They are in favor of markets to "solve problems" and tend to try to remove barriers to them. When organized labor threatens this, they try to have it both ways by saying they are pro-union while doing strike breaker things in action. When finance demands blood, they assent, whether this is domestic in the form of raising unemployment or cutting benefits to make workers more desperate or overseas using similar financial tricks or just straight-up war.
Fascism was a political movement that really only existed for a short period as capitalism emerged as fully imperialist and countries that had too small of a piece of the pie but a people that expected a big one had a serious contradiction between liberal policies (which would see their material well-being and status decrease) and the need for imperialism to carve out that inter-country exploitation to offset this. Fascism was born as an anti-liberalism, a faux anticapitalism, that sought a restoration of a semi-imagined past glory, an ascendant nation built on imperial expansion, and various aesthetics and scapegoats serving these ends.
It is currently impossible for a US president to be an actual fascist. The US sits at the throne of international capital and every major candidate seeks to maintain this system, not tear it up for further expansion because it is somehow behind the other powers and faces being imperialized.
What is possible is for candidates to forward policies that are genocidal, xenophobic, racist, warmongering, pro-cop, pro-state surveillance, personally aggrandizing, etc etc. Sometimes people say this is what is fascistic. But these are all common features of liberalism! The main difference between the Nazi (fascist) expansion and genocides of Germany Eastward vs. the US expansion and genocides of indigenous Americans is that the Americans succeeded. They had the power and time and will to carry out the deed. The horrors of fascism are of mainstream liberalism, they were all inspired by liberal imperial conquest, industrialization, and mass murder.
But again, none of the candidates are actually fascist, they uphold the liberal status quo. Trump is just more rude about it. He openly scapegoats immigrants while Biden and Harris simply pretend to care about them while implementing the sane or worse xenophobic policies. Notice how Democrats tried to outflank Republicans with their border bill? How they are projecting a "strong" border? That the Biden admin is completing sections of Trump's wall? The massive ramp up of rejecting and deporting asylum seekers? These are all fascistic things. The difference is largely perception. Democrats don't care about kids in cages when they do it. The topic isn't even covered, there are no PR pushes. It fades into an uncognizant background normalization where the average Dem assumes it is all over without actually checking on the detention centers or listening to the people doing solidarity work for those inside them or the people waiting just across the border in terrible conditions.
And again, the Biden-Harris administration is committing a genocide via full material and diplomatic support for and defense of Israel.
If you oppose the horrors of fascism, you need to begin actually questioning and opposing the forces that create and maintain them. That includes fighting against people like Biden and Harris, who have at least as substantial of a legacy of such material harms, if not more. Again, genocide. Do not support genocids. That is not an okay thing to do.
Or do you disagree?
I have no interest in discussing this topic with someone who lives in a different reality than the rest of us. If you're not able to make an honest assessment of the threats here we aren't going to get anywhere productive. Have a nice day!
I just laid out an honest assessment of the threats, the real and material things, the history and current policies. And you are now bailing rather than look at them squarely and actually respond to the content.
Please engage in good faith or not at all.