Thought to ask this after a pointless and exhausting argument with liberals who are convinced that Trump being voted out proves that liberal democracy works and that Bernie and AOC are going to fix capitalism.

Surely as capitalism continues to decay and it becomes clear that the only possible futures are socialism or barbarism, there's going to come a point where nobody is going to believe that the Bidens and Pelosis are going to save us. I fully expect most liberals to embrace fascism when that time comes, but I've still gotta wonder... what's it going to take? What will be the tipping point?

  • cilantrofellow [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I am slowly becoming more convinced that Marx was wrong and there is no saving the industrialized nations until they are reduced to roving bands of cannibals.

      • cilantrofellow [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Not that I was completely or really at all serious, but it’s an interesting discussion to have. Surely things have gotten worse in terms of left presence in the US, but at the peak of labor involvement it was still nowhere close to instituting worker control, in America or in any industrialized nation. Taking a no second place trophy mindset here.

        The closest would be Germany and they just had the shit kicked out of them in Versaillles. Perhaps Spain or Paris or some other areas but they were ultimately crushed by reaction within a few months or years. Only in places where the capital class is far away, weak, young, or destroyed, where the masses do not feel reliant on the “factory” for their livelihood, have worker revolutions succeeded. Sometimes I wonder if this is a matter of self-sustaining mechanisms disappearing like growing your own food or making your own clothes. Happy to be proven wrong with examples, I’m not the most comprehensive reader, but nothing occurs to me right now.

        There is a lib book called the great leveler that I’ve been meaning to read. Their thesis essentially is the only way we have seen inequality fall has been due to war, plague, famine or disaster. Otherwise the ruling class will almost always have the upper hand because they have the power and mouthpiece of the state and media, and there will be too much diffusion of responsibility among a workers movement to overcome that. Want to see what value their ideas have - I don’t like being an accelerationist doomer but it has its points.

    • MarxGuns [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah, revolution was stopped in Germany but was successful (or got further) in predominantly peasant Russia and China as well as whatever Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, and the various stabs in Africa and the Central and South Americas, were (settler-colonies that didn't turn into industrial places like the US did maybe?). It really seems that the core is too propagandized, too controlled to allow the room for a revolution to spark.