This whole thing is so fucked, I know y'all Americans could get insulin for pennies on the dollar if it was made in a nationalized pharma company. You could get high speed rail built within a decade, we know it's possible because they did it in China. You could guarantee jobs for at least a generation just re-tooling infrastructure or re-building it. All of it is so easy to imagine how it could happen except for one fucking thing, your political system but especially your democrats. It's just too bad you can't reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not "peace, land, bread" but maybe something like "medicine, trains, jobs, peace." But people just wouldn't believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years. It's all possible if you get rid of your shitty political class.
My partner and I talk about this so much about how easy it would be for the political class to do well and uphold capitalism for the next few decades but instead they'd rather a few more billionaires exist.
I mean that's the problem with Keynesianism, it's a pitch to the wrong people. The actual capitalist ruling class doesn't have a truly ideological commitment to preserving capitalist society, they are only interested in immediate profit and extraction. Instead it appeals to ideological nerds with no real power like economics departments.
But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years.
And this is why any non-duopoly political movement in the US, even a socialist one, is doomed to fail. People in this country intrinsically know, even if they can't artciulate it, that government exists only to hurt them and politicians are all hucksters. Plus protests are scary, disruption is scary, communism is scary. People have absolutely no reason to trust a party promising radical change for the better when that's what every politician's been promising since 1972 with no results. Doubly so for the scary socialists who love mask mandates and antifa and hate everything else.
Mr. Bones' wild ride will not get better, it must crash.
National Politics is a dead end without some kind of material labor activism at the state and local level. Otherwise, you're just sending up your AOCs to argue with their MTGs, while they control gerrymandered districts and voter-disenfranchised swing states that control the balance of power.
There's no harm in voting. And occasionally you get lucky with a Lina Hidalgo or John Fetterman or Bernie Sanders. But until local communities can do a little class warfare to underpin their political position - like the Mexican truckers shutting down traffick on the US/Mexico southbound lanes to protest Greg Abbott's shitty immigrant harassment - elections don't offer any real leverage.
But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years
I think this is what sunk Corbyn and to a lesser extent Bernie. But not only mistrust, but also the totally rational belief that neither would be able to accomplish what they want because the political machine would stop them.
It’s just too bad you can’t reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not “peace, land, bread” but maybe something like “medicine, trains, jobs, peace.”
The problem isn't just that people wouldn't believe us, it's that americans don't even want these good things. Their brains are so warped by propaganda that they think crumbling infrastructure, traffic everywhere, dying of preventable diseases, and endless war are good things. The situation is beyond hopeless, these people are unsalvageable
This whole thing is so fucked, I know y'all Americans could get insulin for pennies on the dollar if it was made in a nationalized pharma company. You could get high speed rail built within a decade, we know it's possible because they did it in China. You could guarantee jobs for at least a generation just re-tooling infrastructure or re-building it. All of it is so easy to imagine how it could happen except for one fucking thing, your political system but especially your democrats. It's just too bad you can't reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not "peace, land, bread" but maybe something like "medicine, trains, jobs, peace." But people just wouldn't believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years. It's all possible if you get rid of your shitty political class.
My partner and I talk about this so much about how easy it would be for the political class to do well and uphold capitalism for the next few decades but instead they'd rather a few more billionaires exist.
this is another of capitalism's contradictions.
I mean that's the problem with Keynesianism, it's a pitch to the wrong people. The actual capitalist ruling class doesn't have a truly ideological commitment to preserving capitalist society, they are only interested in immediate profit and extraction. Instead it appeals to ideological nerds with no real power like economics departments.
And this is why any non-duopoly political movement in the US, even a socialist one, is doomed to fail. People in this country intrinsically know, even if they can't artciulate it, that government exists only to hurt them and politicians are all hucksters. Plus protests are scary, disruption is scary, communism is scary. People have absolutely no reason to trust a party promising radical change for the better when that's what every politician's been promising since 1972 with no results. Doubly so for the scary socialists who love mask mandates and antifa and hate everything else.
Mr. Bones' wild ride will not get better, it must crash.
I think you could launch a successful third party campaign based on exactly this point. but you'd need a lot of money and good execution.
It would be Bernie 3.0, with similar results. I think the electoral route's been thoroughly proven non-viable.
National Politics is a dead end without some kind of material labor activism at the state and local level. Otherwise, you're just sending up your AOCs to argue with their MTGs, while they control gerrymandered districts and voter-disenfranchised swing states that control the balance of power.
There's no harm in voting. And occasionally you get lucky with a Lina Hidalgo or John Fetterman or Bernie Sanders. But until local communities can do a little class warfare to underpin their political position - like the Mexican truckers shutting down traffick on the US/Mexico southbound lanes to protest Greg Abbott's shitty immigrant harassment - elections don't offer any real leverage.
I think this is what sunk Corbyn and to a lesser extent Bernie. But not only mistrust, but also the totally rational belief that neither would be able to accomplish what they want because the political machine would stop them.
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The problem isn't just that people wouldn't believe us, it's that americans don't even want these good things. Their brains are so warped by propaganda that they think crumbling infrastructure, traffic everywhere, dying of preventable diseases, and endless war are good things. The situation is beyond hopeless, these people are unsalvageable
Try weed, debt relief, healthcare and you've got the Bernie campaign.