Serious brainstorming post. How do we bring people here.
Bringing people here so that we have people to talk to isn't radicalizing. Getting people involved in your community is a better use of time.
Yeah ok. Let me rephrase, Im actually working with libs involed in my comunity, who have right now stunned brainworms, how should I introduce them to theory/chapo?
Yes, sorry I understand what you mean now.
For me a strong point is talking about looking at the material benefit with either a Trump of Biden win. Walk through the issue of taxes and public services, healthcare etc pick one, and look at what would materially be different between the two.
For the people you're talking to, there would be almost no difference, I imagine. In fact, under both, their material position would probably be worsened overall. Then talk about the poor, then talk about the rich.
I don't know what the point is, except to get them looking at a real material perspective of politics. That kind of thinking helped me a lot.
I mean start with pointing out how useless the Dem party is, that it offers literally nothing to the working class and poor and that it never can offer anything because it is run by the ruling class.
Instead of waiting for Dems to blame the left, we should blame the democratic party for considering black and Latinx voters a monolithic bloc, and not offering anything to us.
Trump won FL because he targeted the Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan votes with anti-communist rethoric, and it worked because democrats only said "you need to vote blue because the other guy is bad" while not offering anything
This is it. Blame the Democratic party at every chance you get. Their talking point is to blame the American voter for failing Biden, but you've got to flip this on its head. Biden and the Democratic leadership failed the American people and that is why people didn't overwhelmingly vote for them.
If they are neoliberal technocrats then lean into their fears of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Remind them that they've only got two choices: socialism or barbarism, and barbarism has no need for needle-dicked pencil pushers.
significant numbers for me from last night:
- fl managed to pass amendment 2, the minimum wage amendment, despite going red
- fox fucking news themselves polled that 70% of voters supported government healthcare, among other progressive policies
the problem isn't that the people don't believe in progressive policy, the problem is that they dislike the democratic party more than they like progressive policy. when the democrats decided to play the centrist card this year, they lost everyone who gave two shits about class-centrist policy, which includes the leftist community and any republicans who would have hopped over for M4A or GND. (see the cuban support for bernie duing the FL primaries, who voted overwhelmingly for trump last night as an example) the dems need to pick a likeable fucking candidate, but they won't, which is why it's more important than ever to organize and connect with these voters ourselves, instead of waiting for some politician to do it for us.
the problem isn’t that the people don’t believe in progressive policy, the problem is that they dislike the democratic party more than they like progressive policy.
I want to believe this, but how does it square with Biden beating Bernie in the democratic primary?
The media all fawned over Biden as "electable" for months which was incredibly effective propaganda (most black voters in PA for example thought Biden was the best because he was more likely to win). Combine that with every candidate dropping out at once to endorse Biden when Bernie looked viable and you have some pretty significant fuckery.
But also idk I'm a dummy
Straight up electoral fuckery. Voter suppression and media blackouts.
Aside from the fuckery mentioned by others: the people that dislike the democratic party are much less likely to vote in the democratic primary.
Mike Bloomberg spent a billion dollars to stop bernie
Honestly, teach them that the mechanism of the democracy is just as responsible, if not more, for the outcome of the vote as the people voting. It's not a purely transparent system that lets the pure, unrefined people's will through. I always love to repost this little bit of theory:
One of the most remarkable things about such insurrectionary upheavals is how they can seem to burst out of nowhere—and then, often, dissolve away just as quickly. How is it that the same “public” that two months before say, the Paris Commune, or the Spanish Civil War, had voted in a fairly moderate social democratic regime will suddenly find itself willing to risk their lives for the same ultra-radicals who received a fraction of the actual vote? Or, to return to May ’68, how is it that the same public that seemed to support or at least feel strongly sympathetic toward the student/worker uprising could almost immediately afterwards return to the polls and elect a right-wing government? The most common historical explanations—that the revolutionaries didn’t really represent the public or its interests, but that elements of the public perhaps became caught up in some sort of irrational effervescence—seem obviously inadequate. First of all, they assume that “the public” is an entity with opinions, interests, and allegiances that can be treated as relatively consistent over time. In fact what we call “the public” is created, produced through specific institutions that allow specific forms of action—taking polls, watching television, voting, signing petitions or writing letters to elected officials or attending public hearings—and not others. These frames of action imply certain ways of talking, thinking, arguing, deliberating. The same “public” that may widely indulge in the use of recreational chemicals may also consistently vote to make such indulgences illegal; the same collection of citizens is likely to come to completely different decisions on questions affecting their communities if organized into a parliamentary system, a system of computerized plebiscites, or a nested series of public assemblies. In fact the entire anarchist project of reinventing direct democracy is premised on assuming this is the case.
To illustrate what I mean, consider that in English-speaking nations, the same collection of people referred to in one context as “the public” can in another be referred to as “the workforce.” They become a “workforce,” of course, when they are engaged in different sorts of activity. The “public” does not work—a sentence like “most of the American public works in the service industry” would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public—or that if they succeed in raising wage levels, this will be a public benefit. And certainly the “public” does not go out into the streets. Its role is as audience to public spectacles, and consumers of public services. When buying or using goods and services privately supplied, the same collection of individuals become something else (“consumers”), just as in other contexts of action they are relabeled a “nation,” “electorate,” or “population.”
All these entities are the product of bureaucracies and institutional practices that, in turn, define certain horizons of possibility. Hence when voting in parliamentary elections one might feel obliged to make a “realistic” choice; in an insurrectionary situation, on the other hand, suddenly anything seems possible.
Excellent quote, thanks for sharing that. For anyone interested, it's from Revolution in Reverse by David Graeber.
yes this is a good thread.
One thing libs need to recognize is that Trump isn't an outlier. He actually is the best representation of their neighbors with Trump signs. So its not some malfunction when he succeeds. If they are not actively working to connect with the people in their community who don't have the Trump signs, they are everything they think non voters are.
It is 100% substantiated even in the incomplete results that Trump isn't an outlier regardless of win or loss.
One thing libs need to recognize is that Trump isn’t an outlier. He actually is the best representation of their neighbors with Trump signs. So its not some malfunction when he succeeds.
I mean it's right there on all their signage and flags. "Make liberals cry again." They have nothing but hatred and spite and a desire to own the libs. And I'm not gonna lie, I feel the same way. Democrats have nothing to offer, at least Trump acknowledges their raging id.
Since the mass media ignores the left these are the only two options available to a misinformed public. But here we are finally seeing the limits of manufactured consent. You've got to offer the dictatorship of the proletariat something. The choices are between socialism and barbarism. You can manufacture consent for a two party system but you cannot bend reality to conform to a neoliberal agenda. They fucked around and now they're finding out.
The something happened is dems propagandized the shit out of voting for sleepy joe and fucking somehow managed to pull a bunch of leftists to vote for Biden cuz muh fascism or whatever. Could also be due to voter suppression or write in chumpfuckery idk
Facebook was throttling the engagement of even the increasingly liberal Mother Jones for being too leftist. So yes, media blackout was definitely involved. What's surprising is that it kinda exposes the limits of what manufactured consent can do. It turns out reality won't consent to the neoliberal agenda so the election results broke in the weirdest of ways with Trump increasing his turnout with minorities and women.
If Trump takes it, it's easy to just say "we can't wait 4 years, what's your plan?" a bunch. They'll ask you what your plan is, and then you have a good opening to talk about the flaws of the Democratic party, and how corporate donations tie their hands behind their back (use shit like COVID response and police brutality in blue states/cities). Leads up to "we gotta build a workers' party, join up with the DSA for now and I'll give you a call when a real party exists".
keep talking to friends. I remember getting in a huge argument a couple years ago with someone at a party about the police, myself arguing that the police should be abolished. My friends at the time thought it was just my tendency towards extremism, but when the protests set off this year a lot of those same friends came to me in their confusion. Be the only one who is able to explain what is happening to your confused and apolitical friends. These past couple months I got in argument after argument with liberal friends about the election. Election Day came and I’m the only one who accurately predicted what would happen. My friends who were more apathetic and confused than liberal have seen this, they move further and further left. It’s a slow process and material conditions and political events are better for radicalization than talk, but talk can give them the ability to move left when those events occur or they face those material conditions.
It's happened on Chapo too. I started out my journey to the left with more idealistic tendencies (ancom and such), and I thought the "tankie commies" were just trying to be edgy (though I do still think this about some people). Over time though, the Marxists had a tendency to be right all the time, so eventually I had to see what's up.
Great question, and exactly what I want to figure out. I spoke with someone who is in the political consultant industry, and actually had a call with the Biden campaign last night. He is a big time centrist and says "if Bernie would have done better, than he would have gotten more votes in the primaries." This is someone who has the ear of the politicians who we think should move left. They're not being told to go left, because of this attitude. They look at the polls, and historic data and say, "the numbers just aren't there for the progressives. Its so frustrating, because the way I see it, the data shows people get excited about economic left issues, like the minimum wage proposition that passed in Florida. So, whats the difference between voting on the issues and voting for the candidate with that agenda? Its the media slant. This brings me to what it really comes down to: how money affects the mainstream media messages. The centrist candidates get better press coverage. And I don't know how to get past this obstacle.
Cenk Uygur put it well in a tweet last night: "The media hates strong Democrats that fight Republicans with even a fraction of the ferocity with which Republicans fight Democrats. They call them uncivil and bury them in negative media. We need Democrats who are willing to be way more uncivil in how they fight for their side."
