The United States is not trembling on the precipice of a communist revolution.

:heartbreaking:

In fact, the U.S. electorate evinces a strong bias toward the status quo...

read settlers

This fondness for stasis can’t be written off as false consciousness alone. America’s political economy condemns a minority of its population to unremunerative labor and/or penury. And our nation’s exceptionally low life expectancy bespeaks its profound social pathologies. Nevertheless, median real household income in the U.S. is about as high as it has ever been, having risen from $60,313 in 2012 to $70,784 in 2021. That leaves the typical U.S. family more prosperous, at least by one plausible measure, than roughly 90 percent of all humans on the planet today (and 99-plus percent of all who have ever existed).

:pinker:

The most damning feature of the present economic order may be the threat it poses to Earth’s climate and ecosystems. And climate change does inspire public concern. But in a 2022 AP-NORC poll, voters were nearly twice as likely to name “gas prices” as a top priority as they were to name any subject related to climate or the environment

:this-is-fine:

Given these realities, intraleft debates over revolutionary versus “reformist” theories of change always strike me as anachronistic cosplay, a bit like model U.N. for enthusiasts of the late-19th-century Social Democratic Party of Germany. Whether one is a stalwart communist or a squishy social democrat (like myself), the fundamental political task seems the same: to narrow the gap between utopia and reality through legislative reforms. Ideally, these reforms would also ease the path to more thoroughgoing progress by, say, strengthening the labor movement or other left-wing institutions. Extra-electoral political activity — from community organizing to civil disobedience to strikes — may be integral to securing such policy advances.

The basic project, however, is to minimize needless suffering within the constraints imposed by the existing constitutional order and political economy while simultaneously chipping away at those constraints. Any attempt to abruptly circumvent those strictures by challenging the government’s monopoly on violence will run into the buzz saw of the modern security state or the overwhelmingly counterrevolutionary sentiments of a prosperous and propertied American middle-class.

:maybe-later-honey: excuse me we are chipping away rn

But some on the left disagree. Or at least they argue as if they do.

Such leftists disparage efforts to advance progressive goals through incremental reform on the grounds that doing so will not “liberate us from capitalism” or overcome that system’s fundamental logic. Their rhetoric implies that some alternative, easily discerned course of action would meet that Herculean standard. But they rarely bother to specify their program in any detail, let alone subject it to the same scrutiny that they apply to proposals for reform.

what no theory does to a mf

One problem with such ultraleftism is that it is annoying. Another, more significant one is that the compulsion to denigrate the stakes of ordinary politics and the merits of actual reforms tends to blur the analytic vision of otherwise insightful intellectuals. There is value in understanding how our economy’s undergirding logic might circumscribe or subvert particular avenues of reform. Inattention to such dynamics can undermine policy design. Dyspeptic Marxist intellectuals can therefore serve as useful critics even if they wish to keep mundane “bourgeois” politics at arm’s length. If such thinkers allow their antipathy for reformists to distort their comprehension of reality, however, they lose their utility.

:wojak-nooo: Noo these critiques are wrong they cannot be recuperated

this article long af im done