The third worldists were always correct; without the partial or total collapse of America's overseas empire the domestic left will always remain fragmented, co-opted, and overpowered by the dozens of imperial agencies specifically designed to crush any nascent formation
It's a software and hardware problem, the American left's ideological software is still written by liberals (some of which aren't even Keynesians let alone communists) and the hardware of the security state is just too overwhelming when every left org is considered by every authority to be one strike away from being labeled domestic terrorists
Hope exists but its out there among the rest of the world and eventually the dominoes will find their way back to US shores
There is no organized left in the US. Any third parties that try to form are rendered irrelevant by a deliberate lack of media coverage (compare the utter lack of broadcast time given to PSL and the Greens to the free coverage given to Trump and now The Worm). If somehow a third party were able to become successful via some other method, that media silence would turn to non-stop attack ads as we saw with (genocidal maniac and not at all radical left) Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Assuming a party was somehow able to overcome all these hurdles, the party would be infiltrated and torn to pieces by two dozen alphabet agencies, and the leaders assassinated.
This is why I think the American left is not serious.
not only is it not serious, it's less than 1% of the population
I mean, yeah. And all of that is by design and reinforced at all times.
There is no real left anyway. If there is one, I as an individual represent a significant portion of it. Probably tells you enough.
There's a decent amount of what I'd call "left curious" (workshop needed). Basically very nationalistic (they wouldn't like this identification but it's true) socdem types who would absolutely sign off right now on nuking any country on earth if they received healthcare in exchange. A lot of Bernie, AOC, etc. generic supporters fall in here I think. "Salvageable" people who recognize some of the solutions domestically, but their knowledge of foreign affairs and how it all ties together is lacking, to say the least. Non existent. By design, by the way. The Overton window allows juuuuust a small room for discussion of things like nationalized healthcare, maybe abolishing private insurance and stuff. But divestment from Israel or ending NATO- absolutely off the table for actual political discussion. And bringing it up a bit too much might result in jack booted thugs stomping your face at some protest.
But anyway, as for the struggle part, communists in China and Russia and elsewhere struggled because they had no option. Capital pushed them to the point of actually having nothing to lose. In the US, material conditions are definitely relatively bad (compared to even Canada and definitely many European nations- although the inequality is crazy. Many people are "ok" but the ones who aren't, the working poor and homeless, are very very not ok.) but also good overall. So while it gives an impression at all times, to those of us who pay attention, that "what the fuck? This shit sucks. We should organize and fix this" in reality most people have enough food, have entertainment, lots of it, and while things are absolutely getting worse, it just isn't bad enough yet.
From a purely human or even animalistic standpoint, if someone knows they can get by right now, but it feels bad, or they can risk their life (literally) in a grand struggle to win it all... hard to convince people to gamble. Yes, if you're ideologically there then you're there. But most people aren't, they don't care, and they won't care until things are incredibly far worse than they are now.
This is why I think the American left is not serious.
No the real reason is most first world workers are not exploited by capitalism and benefit from unequal exchange with the global south and therefore have no material incentive to support socialism.
They're not actually. If you read Zak Copes Divided World Divided Class he lays out that no one is legally exploited in the imperial core. All exploitation that happens here illegal/semi-legal.
Legal/semi-legal? What kind of distinction is that and why should it matter? Exploitation is exploitation, laws are just made up bullshit, especially when written by the bourgeoisie
You're missing the point, labor laws as they are in most of the US, if you're working legal hours for legal wages you're not being exploited, you're actually being paid above the value of your labor, capitalists can afford to do this because exploitation in the global south is so great capitalists can afford to throw first world workers a bone. Plus it gives them a class of well off consumers to sell all the cheap shit the workers of the global south produce.
Most of the stories you hear about explorations in the first world actually violate labor laws, or at least come close to it.
It still seems like a very non-materialist distinction.
If you're working legal hours for legal wages
Why do you need to make this caveat? If people are being put in a position where they have to accept extralegal conditions of employment in order to survive, they're being exploited. Hand waving that away because it's not "legal" seems naive at best and intentionally misleading at worst.
I think the point is that if you're working legal hours for legal wages in the empire, you're being paid more than the value of your labor because of superexploitation of the global south. The Marxist definition of exploitation is not keeping the whole value of your labor; given this framing, an imperial subject working legal hours for legal wages is keeping more than the value of their labor, and so cannot be exploited in the Marxist sense.
Read the Zak Cope book he lays it out well. Westerns are being overcompensated for their labor.
in most of the US, if you're working legal hours for legal wages you're not being exploited, you're actually being paid above the value of your labor
lmao
From the perspective of someone outside of America, it really seem to me that the American left (if there is such a thing) is not a serious movement.
That's because there isn't really a "left" in the US. The AFL-CIA is aligned with Democrats and leftist parties are either Ops aligned with Democrats or extremely local parties that aren't focused on national issues outside their respective cities and states.
Everyone is saying "There arent enough of us" is missing the forest for the trees. We would grow rapidly if we actually were actually able to seed in this environment. Small things can grow very rapidly. What prevents us from getting anywhere is an institutional hydra.
First, theres the balloting process, specifically designed to make it difficult for third parties to get on a ballot. You need to collect enough signatures quite far in advance and avoid random, idiosyncratic legal landmines not to be disqualified. The major parties will sue you if you seem lile a threat and it will cost money to beat them.
Money that you do not have. Getting public money is not easy, and if you manage it anyhow, you're getting a tiny fraction of what the major parties have.
The major parties will use this money to spam ads, to bribe, to host dinner parties with powerful people, to host town halls and other events.
Media is owned by corpos that support the two major parties,and they will shun you. You won't get debate time, or if you do, you'll get less time to speak. They'll hire bots to talk shit about you and plant flase narratives that take root through the power of sheer money and institutional support. If youll recall when it was discovered that the DNC colluded with media to counter Sanders, they arrested the guy that leaked it and turned the whole story into "who snitched." The actual wrongdoing was completely fucking erased and replaced with Russiagate.
Trying to go truther on Russiagate or any number of factual things immediately marginalizes you and gets you blacklisted from trad media and even social media sometimes.
If you get too radical, the FBI and Homeland Security might plant an agent in your party to sow seeds of division -- US intelligence services are the best in the world at fucking over leftists. The Black Panthers were on the up and up and Hampton still got murdered.
This is not a fair system of elections. Trying to make gains via that system is like trying to walk through the front door of the white house without permission. Elections are their fortresses and they guard the front gate.
Maybe that’s why the bourgeoisie are not afraid of the left at all.
The bourgeioisie are afraid of the left. Thats why they have to work so hard to suppress it. That's why they're building cop city and driving tanks into college campuses. You don't need all this to fight something you don't fear
An ex BPP/BLA member made this exact same point. He basically read the campaign platforms of West, Stein, and De La Cruz and said that despite being three different candidates, their campaign platforms are almost identical, meaning it makes more sense for them to all pool their resources towards one single campaign or at least form a united front with each other. The fact that even the electoral campaigns aren't forming a united front says a lot. How can you possibly form a united front against fascism if you can't even form a united front with each other?
libs bring this up all the time to dismiss third party, but it's structurally unsuitable. the US literally is a one party (two wings) state, official government correspondence doesn't even acknowledge the possibility for other parties: there's no government/opposition, there's democrat/republican. if every progressive platform got together to put 4-5 people in congress next cycle, they'd a) be called 'independent' and lumped in with democrats rhetorically b) have absolutely no bearing on policy
a scheme like that could have an opportunity to use the theater of bourgeois democracy to agitate like lenin(?) advocated but as a coalition-not a united party-that's not gonna happen
He was making a broader point about the lack of unity among leftists in general and how you can't say that the US is descending towards fascism without making moves towards a united front. It's like how George Jackson said about settling your quarrels and coming together for the sake of fighting fascism.
Uncritical and uncompromising individualism. Pure and simple.
It's my way or the high way. If you disagree with me then I'm splitting to form my perfect revolutionary bookclub where every sycophantic worm will hang off my every word because I'm the perfect revolutionary with the perfect theory and I will make Lenin and Stalin look like liberals with how etherially pure in untouched perfection my theories are.
You won't be able to build a communist movement so as long as the worst elements of ultra-leftism is present in the American left in the same manner as you can't build anything on drifting sand that sinks and scatters whichever way the moment you stand on it. Why would anyone want to associate with you when you can't even tactically put aside your ideological differences to accomplish even the most simplest of goals, hell most self-purpoting revolutionaries are flakier than literal children in only doing what they like then immediately bail when things get tough or they don't like something.
One among the worse things is the lack of willingness to walk the talk of saying you're fighting for the working class but not even embedding yourself in the working class but instead thinking that passing the same 10 bucks in among hot couch guy collective or running around asking for donations with your elite vanguard clique of podcasters and contributing absolutely nothing to the labor movement other than say revolutionary sweet-nothings, eat hotchip, and lie. How can you say you're running a political or labor organization with serious intent of affecting the status quo when you're financially insolvent and can barely stay afloat yourself.
I'm too tilted to keep writing. I'm going to sleep
I really don't think that dismissing electoralism means we reject that history is in constant motion. We just think that to actually affect change we need to start outside of the electoral system, and the left is too small at the moment to make waves regardless of the strategy we pick.
Yeah like even if the long-term project is, in whole or in part, to affect electoral politics, the organizational apparatus would have to start with more local level positions and roll up. There’s a symbolic importance in what the Greens, PSL, and West are doing with their campaigns, but the idea of president first, mass people’s movement second is putting the cart before the horse.
Right, not to mention that national politics has absolutely no returns for anyone until we can credibly nominate candidates that stand a chance to be elected. Before then, people won't vote for a candidate that doesn't stand a chance, so we'd be wasting our effort and we literally wouldn't even know how many people we're attracting because of strategic voting, so using elections as a measuring stick as Lenin said wouldn't be feasible either.
Every single electoral popular front has had a uniting figurehead. France's uniting figurehead is Melon man.
The US has only one "left" figurehead and it's Bernie. It does not have another figurehead with which to construct a popular front around.
Why is a figurehead necessary? Because the vast majority of people that you want to support this electoral third party need a figurehead they trust to say "yes, let's do this". They aren't party members who will go along with what the parties all do. It doesn't matter how many orgs you get together for a coalition, the problem still lies in how to make that coalition POPULAR. A popular front requires a popular figurehead.
This is also why the US historically murders everyone that might look like they could become a popular leftist figurehead in america. Popular figureheads are shortcut in organising. They allow you to rally large quantities of people together without those people being org members that have been painstakingly brought together over years and years of organising. Without a figurehead, you have to do the slow years and years of organising and building and on and on and on.
Problematically as well is that the US believes that competing liberal popular figureheads are "left" as well. The same people that you want in your left popular front will listen to AOC when she says not to support it.
Maybe Shawn Fain could do? He's still a lib but he's one of the better libs AFAIK. And that's the only person I can think of that already has some national reputation that could be expanded on while showing some willingness to go against the Democratic party, especially on Palestine. And he's already the head of an organization.
Plus his name should lock in the Irish vote. /s
is running candidates and they're pretty cool, we've had endorsements from other leftist groups but at the end of the day it's just due to the (as of now) fragmentary nature of left politics in the US.A point I’ll add to the other barriers mentioned: there’s a lot of left-leaning/optimistically socdem voters that think the Democrats are much farther to the left than they actually are. They buy into the notion that Dems really would want a Berniecrat agenda but it’s just because those gosh darn Republicans just get in the way.
Is there even a left wing movement in America?
No, not even close.
The American left is too small for that to be achievable right now. And the most competent people in the American left are usually uninterested in spending so much effort on campaigns that guarantee failure.
Also most American "lefties" are still very liberal and are easily manipulated by political media and sheepdogging. The media will simply blame them for Trump winning, which will (1) make a pitifully large number of American "leftists" give up early in the campaign over fear they would help Trump or get blamed and (2) actually work on the Biden suppirters. And then what? This strategy requires a coherent follow-up because otherwise your entire story, this action that is basically a PR campaign, will be narrated, exclusively, by your enemies. To be coherent like this requires a proper campaign, discipline, media liaisons, a consistent line. That's a party or a small set of parties. We don't have big enough parties for that.
Third parties effectively don't exist in this country. Because of the conditions of the American electrical system, the only available options for the future are either the rise of the "democratic socialist" Democratic party faction, which has already been watered down to a weak social democratic faction, or the revolutionary overthrow of the electoral system. The chance of a socialist third party rising under the constraints of the current American system is essentially zero.
Because of the conditions of the American electrical system
Actually besides the Eastern and Western Interconnections there exists a third Texas Interconnection.
The people who maintain these interconnections study at the electrical college.
perfect response to this post.
