despite what i said below, i'm now listening.
Firstly, while i'm of the ML persuasion, eh i don't like Virgil dunking on anarchists like this. While it's true people who call themselves anarchists tend to have reactionary takes, i don't think that's a reflection of anarchism other than it having 0 gatekeeping so any old radlib can call themselves an anarchist despite not even reading anarchist theory or studying anarchist history.
edit1: Chomsky's strategy seems to be "we can push biden to the left after we vote" which is... not a materialist analysis of america OR biden's history
edit2: direct quote from Chomsky: "not voting for biden is EQUIVALENT to putting trump one vote ahead". That is not mathematically true, like, at all? You put trump 0 votes ahead and put biden 0 votes ahead. So uhhhh
edit3: just him misrepresenting literally every point brie tries to make now and not actually responding to them
edit4: Brie: "how do we change things so that the status quo doesn't just use us for votes and then do nothing like in the Obama years?" Chomsky: "Well we just gotta pull that lever for not-trump bc he's doing bad stuff"
edit5: Chomsky's whole argument "Will i take ten minutes to cast a vote to keep a monster out of office, OR will i not, in the hopes that someday the democrats change?" Chomsky you fuck-ass lib, people aren't thinking of not voting because they love fascism or want to punish the dems, it's because they literally have nothing to offer most of us. And that's on THEM for not providing a reason, not US for not feeling enthused by their fake promises that are still gonna leave us starving and homeless. Also you fucking liberal piece of shit, i can't fucking believe this old man had the gall to tell a black woman that voting is easy and that biden isn't a monster, when he's literally responsible for writing the crime bill that locked millions of black people up and forcing them into legal fucking slavery.
edit6: virgil: "so when you say push biden to the left... biden's team directly said they are not going to do any of the plans the bernie coalition put together" Chomsky: "well they haven't moved to the left as much as we wanted" No moving to the left at all is apparently an acceptable amount of "moving to left" to chomsky.
edit7: oh my fucking god he is now saying that biden's climate plan is super progressive because it's on his website. So apparently he didn't listen to Brie earlier when i made edit4 and he considers fracking progressive
edit8: virgil: "would you make the same argument if it was bloomberg." Chomsky: "yes." Brie: "Okay but if you were a black person who had been stopped and frisked in NY, you're probably still not gonna want to vote to bloomberg if they're still doing harm to you." (paraphrased) Chomsky: "well that's just bc we haven't overthrown capitalism yet" ??so keep voting for capitalists who literally chose the policies who harmed you to... overthrow capitalism??
edit9: Chomsky talking down to Brie again, implying she's "contemporary left, who is caught up in propaganda of believing voting is the only way to make change" this is despite Brie repeatedly saying over and over again (like probably 5 times now) that she does NOT believe that voting is the only way to make change or influence politicians. NGL it's making me feel uncomfortable, reminds me of all the times men talked down to me when i presented as femme. He's literally just putting words in her mouth and insulting her based on a strawman position she does not hold, and is implying the "youth" are brainwashed and propagandized. Cool!
edit10: he just keeps evading all of their questions and repeating something he said earlier.
edit11: Brie: "Since the dems are rejecting populist ideals, what does it mean for our ability to affect change without doing anything radical?" Chomsky: VOTE.
edit12: Brie pushes back on the "it only takes 10 minutes to vote" thing saying "a lot of people are going to have to spend hours in lines, taking unpaid time off work, risking covid for nothing materially in return" Chomsky: VOTE. Then later says "it takes only 5 minutes" right after. lmao fuck bro are you even listening to her? This is condescending as fuck
edit13: okay Chomsky leaves at around 54:00 and they start dunking on him for 20 min and it's pretty great
what's that meme of chomsky looking flat and a woman saying "honey it's time for you to endorse a democrat".
Chomsky is old and did the tactical thing to hope for high voter turnout in 20 days or so, so that his old idea of democrats can stay in power for a few years. The goal of him is clear, his tactic :pushing voting is clear.
What isn't clear is why we should care. His material analysis seems to differ from ours. As such take his implied goal and see if his behavior makes sense (it does). The think about why his goals are as they are and you have not really enough input to think about it. Could be edge cases of age, could be angst, could be continously liberal thought, could be theory you don't get, could be he is lacking perspectives, could be class position, could be....
His material analysis seems to differ from ours.
That's being nice about it. He didn't even come off as giving a shit about people's current material conditions. He just kept screeching climate change over and over.
Thanks for the summary work. I haven't listened and don't really have time. Hopefully I can soon. But in the meantime, thanks.
I want to take Chomsky's side but for a reason different than what he was saying. Call it a theory of two revolutions.
Like the Russians, who overthrew the Tzar with a bouguois government, then overthrew that for the workers, I think our best path forward is a landslide win for the Democrats to completely drive the Republicans out of power. Then with the Democrats in control, we challenge them from the left. If the Democrats win the Senate and White House, they COULD pack the courts, get rid of whatever filibuster remains, implement universal healthcare, etc etc. But they won't. They will try and cannibalize the Republican party voter base so they can have their support and win again in 2022. If they do that, two things will be in our favor that are not in our favor right now:
- The left won't have the pressure to vote centrist for fear of the GOP winning, as the GOP will be weak.
- The right won't have much energy to challenge the Democrats, as many will be absorbed into it.
In that situation, a third party, from the left would be in a good position, much better than now, or than if the Democrats squeak out a minor victory right now.
tl;dr, I fully support voting Democrat in all the elections this cycle, because it would break the cycle we're in. The Democrats need a chance to succeed before a mass movement will grow from the left against them. Democrats all think Obama had his hands tied by the Republicans, so that doesn't count.
Then with the Democrats in control, we challenge them from the left.
How? No one ever can say how they're going to do this, they just want to put it off till a later date. If we're not doing it now, why are we waiting? What more can we do than nightly protests and tearing down colonizer statues and occasionally lighting up a police station? What is that going to give us under Biden v Trump? Biden is already pro shooting "violent" protesters and hadn't budged an inch on defending the police after months of protests. If this isn't pushing him left, why would it be different when he is in office?
He and every other elected dem who can easily win will do nothing. Now and in the future. They have no incentive. And Biden is just as likely as Obama was during occupy and Ferguson to pull out the tanks on protestors.
So HOW exactly are we going to push the democrats to the left if they're not willing to concede anything when he needs us most? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean here, you mentioned voting in 2022 but that is all you mentioned.
There is an argument that the Democrats need an unmitigated opportunity to fail in order for people to abandon them. In this scenario, the Democrats would sweep the House, Senate, and Oval Office, fail to manage the unmitigated disaster of late stage covid capitalism, and present ripe conditions for agitation. I'm not convinced we have the leisure to wait around for this to happen though, or if will even matter considering the media's ability to whitewash figures like Bush and Obama.
In reality, Obama was the failure. The Democrats had the trifecta and did absolutely nothing aside from bail out their institutional finance friends and further entrench the health insurance industry, and yet we look back on Obama as a saint. Joe Lieberman is the only person who got crucified and the power structure was left completely unscathed. I see no reason why things would work out differently this time. In all likelihood, the Democrats will conveniently fall one vote short of doing anything consequential, blame some old fucks who have reached a dead end in their political careers like Manchin as a convenient scapegoat, and continue to feign as freedom fighters while doing nothing. And the suckers will buy it just how they bought it in 2008-2010.
There is an argument that the Democrats need an unmitigated opportunity to fail in order for people to abandon them.
Obama was the failure. The Democrats had the trifecta and did absolutely nothing
This is why I'm not persuaded by the "put Democrats in so people will abandon them when they fail" argument. Didn't we try that in 2008 and it didn't work? You can make a case that it's different this time, but I don't know how strong it is.
The only sensible pro-Biden argument I can't get away from is that (1) the left is not prepared for fascist accelerationism, and (2) Biden would slow that process and give us additional time to organize.
Yes, but abandon them in which direction. If the Dems fail to contain the current crisis, which they will, are the American people more likely to tack to Socialism or to a competent version of Mike Pence?
And that's before we consider the international perspective, which is Trump has been the least murdery leader of the last 100 years, despite himself.
Or worse still a neo-fascist candidate that can outflank the establishment on the left by offering the economic securities of social democracy only to a white supremacist / 'true American' base.
The Democrats had the trifecta and did absolutely nothing I didn't get that. I remember them being filibustered by McConnell every step of the way. They just had a auto filibuster, so if the Democrats couldn't muster 60 votes to start something, they couldn't even bring something to the floor. The GOP somehow blocked Al Franken from taking office until late July of 2009, by doing recounts and it was a special election. And Kennedy died in August. There were 3 weeks, during the summer vacation, when the Democrats had the filibuster-proof majority.
Concerning climate change, it is true that going off the cliff at 50 mph is better than 100 mph because delaying the catastrophic extremes, however petty and untimely the efforts are, would save the lives of millions. Buying five or ten years would be a big deal.
Of course, Biden is a 90 mph off-the-cliff candidate who has already shown a readiness to fight tooth and nail against the Green New Deal so Chomsky is just being a useful idiot.
Chomsky is a liberal, no two ways about it.
I've had disagreements with anarchists but no serious anarchist would say the shit he did. Chomsky doesn't even think revolution is possible.
What the fuck has Chomsky's style of socialism got us in the last 40 years? Everything he's done and the "socialists" that worked like him has delivered us to 4, possibly 8, years of Trump and shitty Obama and shitty Biden. Fuck off Chomsky, your input isn't needed.
" Chomsky doesn’t even think revolution is possible." I mean he points positively to the Anarchist revolution in 1930s Spain as an example of a viable anarcho syndicalist society. If you can't even get people to vote for Bernie in sufficient numbers, how do you think the "Revolutionary" left is going to win an armed proletarian insurrection lol?
He pointed to the one that infamously lost as a viable society? And why is his input or analysis valuable?
Yeah the situation isn't ripe for immediate insurrection but doing the vote blue no matter who thing has not worked at all and it's precisely people like Chomsky that has led the left into this no-win scenario between Trump and Biden when the enemy has always been and remains the liberal bourgeois democratic system. Bernie was the last shot and we were defeated on that liberal bourgeois electoralist terrain - no surprise because voting and campaigning for Bernie didn't require mass class consciousness nor did it require militancy nor internal discipline and so when it was faced with an organized opposition it fell as all siloed off individual leftist projects are wont to do.
Chomsky has never argued that elections are the end-all-be-all of politics. He rightly calls them circus events that come around every 4 years and considers extra-electoral politics as infinitely more important. You seem to accuse him of reducing politics to electoralism, which he doesn't do.
If voting has no effect on politics, as you claim bc it doesn't fundamentally alter bourgeois "democracy," then what does it matter if leftists (like Chomsky) advocate for people to vote or not if it supposedly doesn't matter, in the end?
"voting and campaigning for Bernie didn’t require mass class consciousness nor did it require militancy nor internal discipline " WDYM? Salvador Allende's Popular Front won precisely bc of mass class consciousness and political militancy.
then what does it matter if leftists (like Chomsky) advocate for people to vote or not if it supposedly doesn’t matter, in the end?
he literally says in the interview: youre job as activists is to get people to care (about voting for biden)
Yeah he says that bc he rightly recognizes that the rules of the game under Trump are worse for the left than under his opponent. I was responding to TemporalMembrane's argument that voting doesn't matter because it doesn't challenge the bourgeois order. If this is the case then why give a shit one way or the other about Chomsky advocating to vote for the lesser evil given that he clearly supports extra-electoral politics that everyone on the left agrees we ought to pursue. Incidentally, Engels adopted a position quite similar to Chomsky's:
"[The proletariat] cannot require that the bourgeoisie should cease to be a bourgeoisie, but it certainly can require that it practices its own principles consistently. But the proletariat will thereby also acquire all the weapons it needs for its ultimate victory. With freedom of the press and the right of assembly and association it will win universal suffrage, and with universal, direct suffrage, in conjunction with the above tools of agitation, it will win everything else.
It is therefore in the interests of the workers to support the bourgeoisie in its struggle against all reactionary elements, as long as it remains true to itself. Every gain which the bourgeoisie extracts from reaction, eventually benefits the working class, if that condition is fulfilled. And the German workers were quite correct in their instinctive appreciation of this. Everywhere, in every German state, they have quite rightly voted for the most radical candidates who had any prospect of getting in."
si, pero en cierto punto esta dirigiendo a los "activistas" a solo hacerle el mandando al DNC, es ridiculo no crees?
esta claro que si la burguesia logra mantener el capitalismo aqui, y el golpe trumpista es derrotado, no sera a través de acumular otras decena de millón de votos para el candidato burgues mas tradicional.. entonces apoyar a la burguesia no implica adoptar su visión politica en este caso, porque claramente es uno erronea, plagada de excepcionalismo (tipicamente gringo) y incapaz de comprender las condiciones materiales cambiantes del capitalismo en crisis como lo que son, creyendo por su septima decada consecutiva que esta es la buena y cayendo vez tras vez tras vez
"está claro que si la burguesía logra mantener el capitalismo aquí, y el golpe trumpista es derrotado, no será acumulando otros diez millones de votos para el candidato burgués más tradicional…"
No estoy de acuerdo. El éxito de un golpe trumpista, lo cual sería difícil de llevar a cabo, no es una conclusión inevitable. Por lo tanto, no sería una pérdida de tiempo votar por el candidato burgués viable de oposición en los "swing states."
Puede ser que no haya entendido tu argumento, pero Chomsky no está diciendo que la izquierda debería castrarse, convirtiéndose en lacayos del DNC. Engels argumentó, como he citado anteriormente, que los trabajadores deben apoyar a la burguesía contra sus elementos más reaccionarios mientras se aseguran de luchar por sus propios intereses ("remain true to itself"). Qué hay de malo en este argumento?
Chomsky is a white anarchist intellectual who is concerned fascist will finally come for him at age 90. When Fascist kills Black, Brown and Indigenous People every fucking day. Natural disasters hit hardest the communities of BIPOC. Black Americans are left drowning or cooking in American prisons already. Noam Chomsky is worried his life of privilege will fall apart in 20 years.
Fuck this bullshit man
I mean in the interview he was just consistently dismissing legitimate issues that BIPOC are facing already cause "trump worse".
The American left have apocalyptic fights over pronouns on a crappy subreddit-in-exile. There aint no revolution coming soon
I mean regardless of whether you jerk off to the idea of revolutionary takeover of the gv't, the material conditions for it are just not there. Why chastize other leftists who don't share the same fantasies as you?
I feel you, shit is bleak. Chomsky's arg, which is sensible imo, is that you're not going to be able to overthrow capitalism in the limited amount of time we need to prevent cataclysm and that it's strategically better to have Biden as an enemy for the left than Trump where shit is even more fucked. The class struggle continues after the election obviously, whatever the results.
Why can't we push trump left? He's equally less likely to budge as biden.
The comment I put on blackfaithfeed pasted here too:
"You've given our listeners a lot to think about, professor." lmao diplomatic bri
he literally said like 3 sentences the entire podcast, he just repeated each one fifteen times, completely ignoring everything they actually said
idk if he was intentionally being a shithead or if he's just too old to engage in a serious political discussion these days, either way it's sad to see
I was basically agreeing with your idea that he's too old for ppl to expect him to be as good an interlocutor as his spry Chomsky vs William F Buckley days.
Brie brought up Biden calling banks to say he won't really make a postal service bank, that was just a way to get Warren people on his side. This sounds vaguely familiar but I can't find a source. Does anyone have one?
It's insane that he's using climate change as a reason to argue that Biden would be less evil just a week after Kamala repeatedly said he's not banning fracking.
I think he was actually about to use that as an example of climate reform Joe is now supporting, but then he realized it and went back to the Nov 3rd bullshit.
THAT'S NOT THE QUESTION THAT ARISES.
When does it arrive then? Is there a schedule I missed?
You could argue from the historical precedents in history, that worst conditions make more likely the greatest change. It was the russians that overthrew the Tsar and enacted a communist government. It was the Chinese. The Vietnamese. The Cubans.
America? they got a couple of taxes passed on them and they created a cringey Roman Weeabo republican system, maintained slavery for a hundred years. At best americans get a couple of shitty cults and communes that end up bankrupt or in disrepair. Lmao. Fuck this shit man.
I haven't listened because the idea of listening to Virgil argue with a 91-y/o Chomsky is extremely depressing.
That said, I don't see how a Biden boycott would be an effective strategy to accomplish much of anything - not, at least, until or unless you have a left formation strong and populous enough to actually extract concessions. Not out to demonize non-voters (I'm canadian lol), just don't see much sense in taking it up as Revolutionary Praxis or whatever.
