This whole M4a vote is really just pissing me off. It gets traction than out of the wood work comes people like siorta saying that this is dangerous. And trying to toss water on it.
I'm over wonkery. I'm over committee chairs. This is the talk of political nerd losers.
Pelosi should not be the speaker and the dems should lose control of the house. That honestly would be better for the left and the nation in the long term than just rubber stamping her shit leadership.
This is the direction I'm headed. I'm not saying solidarity and organizing isn't good, but we have never been so on our own in our lives. I feel that psychedelics ground me and take me for ma panicky "we are screwed! We are so alone!" to "we got this man, we are of the earth, and if we just plug back into the natural rhythms, we could really build something"
Any "progressive" throwing water over an M4A vote on any basis other than "this doesn't go far enough", and any Dem, true believer or DSA entryist, is not a leftist. Wonkery is the politics of the PMC, not of the working class (excepting, of course, the immiserated academics stuck in postdoc/adjunct hell and shut out from opportunities to join the managerial/petty-bourgie layer of their hybrid subclass who can overcome their atomization from the rest of the working class).
Picking the brains of technocrats can have its utility - especially those of trustworthy comrades with technical backgrounds - but the political input of technocrats more broadly, especially the financially successful ones, is frequently used to argue against non-incrementalist progress, against demands that either implicitly or explicitly point in a revolutionary direction. Having a master's or doctoral degree in an unrelated field (or even a related field!) doesn't immunize you from consciously or unconsciously operating within the limitations of capitalist realism. The reason why it's often so much easier for an uneducated worker to radicalize than for most of these people is because they have a lot less reactionary bullshit to unlearn (credentialism and meritocracy especially).
These nerds aren't usually the same sort of theory nerds who read a shit ton of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. and argue with each other over which tendency is correct and which is revisionist (if they are, they're frequently reformist succdems and careerists, the most likely to sell out and join the Democrats). These egghead pushover wonk losers whom OP correctly castigates are at best useful idiots for the enemy or unwitting controlled opposition, if they aren't explicitly liberal defenders of capitalism.
With all that said: why give a shit whether Pelosi gets rubber-stamped? The Democrats as they currently exist, as they've existed for at least the past century, are a thoroughly capitalist party, and an increasingly explicitly anticommunist party. The working class can never gain control of the Democrats from the inside. That's the same losing bargaining game that the wonks waste their time with. If AOC and other DSA entryists were real revolutionaries, they would have never run as Democrats to begin with.
This party is never passing a non-shitty version of M4A without sustained external pressure, the sort of pressure that made Nixon co-sign the creation of the EPA, the sort of external pressure that forced the SCOTUS to hand us victories like Brown v. Board of Education (de-jure desegregation), Roe v. Wade (legal abortions), and more recently Oberfell v. Hodges (same-sex marriage). Just this year, fucking Neil Gorsuch and other openly-reactionary judges felt sufficient pressure to rule in favor of LGBT anti-discrimination. Dems absolutely deserve to lose the house majority at this rate, and the US left should fully invest in building and independent working-class party.
Theory is bs wonkery.
Its incredibly boring egg head shit that is also extremely depressing to read.
I hope to god that Biden destroys the Democratic party. It's already beginning to happen. Let them implode and progressives get their shit together and leave that awful party.
Our very own chapo hosts were doing just that today. They've been wealthy long enough for the pundit brain to kick in
Or we can continue the fight in an avenue that doesn't rely on electoral politics. It's not nihilistic, but a recognition of a change of tactics and focus.
Yeah. I just listened to it.
Its just the same shit. We need a movement but no not on this or not this guy. It's too performative. Etc etc. Of we had a real movement under that chuck Sanders.
Like fuck off.
The episode wasn't even wonkery though. Do actual politics, do local labor organizing or tenant organizing or mutual aid or anything that isn't dwelling on what gets what votes in the electoral sphere. Whatever happens there in congress votes for m4a won't have the power to achieve anything at this time, so don't dwell on it so much.
Or dwell on it if you want, but do the other stuff anyways.
