slowly radicalizing me and I don't like it
:sicko-blur:
Can't wait for all my leftist friends that I managed to convince electoralism works rubberband back into tankies bc moderates are massive bitches
:sicko-beaming:
this is literally half my friend group rn and I'm running out of counters
:sicko-crowd:
Buncha doomers in here bemoaning the progress the left has made as impermanent and unimpactful, but I disagree. In my organizing work I find people more susceptible to leftist positions than ever before. People are really beginning to realize the incrementalist lie is a con, and reality just drives home the point every day. There's no substitute for the educational power of material conditions, and ultimately it was going to take shit getting bad for people to learn. But they are learning.
lol.
*That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
The argument was familiar, I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
Now with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72*
fifty years ago. they're still fuckin learning? they ain't learning shit.
And? Communist sentiment hasn't been this popular here in like a hundred years.
The whole point is that in increasing numbers people aren't believing that lesser evil crap anymore.
Communist sentiment is less popular than it was during the Cold War, knock it off. These are a bunch of kids being trendy and edgy with labels, they don't know and single fucking thing and will immediately be brought back to being good Dems come election time.
I seriously doubt they will run back to the Dems because back in the Cold War they actually were willing to bribe them with stuff. They aren't anymore, so there isn't even any perceived gain from flipping like that.
It's now the popular perception that the Democrat government doesn't do anything but sit around and talk about maybe thinking about doing something eventually, some day. There is no trust they will do even the bare minimum anymore.
They always crawl back. It's on auto-pilot.
the point is that it's not incentive based, it's fear driven. they're just afraid of the little they have being taken away.
Lol, that's not true at all. Hell, the left is more ideologically coherent than it's been in America for a long time. It's not alot still, but compared to the Bush and Obama years, there is a way more active media sphere of people who are all becoming connected and radicalized.
I'd like to echo this sentiment, as well as @TreadOnMe and @furryanarchy. During the time @garbage is discussing, Capitalism still seemed to be on the rise. We laugh at how fucking absurd the quote is now, but Fukayama's "end of history" line was not seen as absurd at the time. People really thought that communism/socialism was demonstrably unworkable, that China would inevitably liberalize, and that capitalism would lift the world out of poverty and solve all our problems. That's clearly not the hegemonic thought anymore, and history has proven those predictions false. We're in very different material conditions than we were when Thompson wrote that. Gotta focus on the material analysis rather than only look at the arguments as the words themselves.
biden got more votes than any fucking candidate in history.
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only a small percentage of people still
Nah. A small percentage of people are radicalizing, a much larger percentage of people are realizing the absurdity of the status quo. They might not see the alternatives yet, but they at least see the failure of business as usual. It's our job to be the educators in increasingly fertile ground.
Whom amongst us in the west was born a principled communist? It was material conditions that gave us the lived experience necessary to become amenable to these ideas, and then sources of education to give us the understanding. For some of us that was independent study and research. For others, someone patient and better read than ourselves helped guide our learning. I'd argue the second is far more effective for the general population than the first, and the more Cadre leftists have the greater we can capitalize on the increasingly harsh material conditions. Between climate disasters, total ineffectual democratic governance, and worsening living conditions, a huge percentage of people are at the very least REACHABLE for the first time in decades. It's on us as revolutionaries to reach them.
"Hard times make great men"
"No, not like that!!!"