we're never getting change outside of third worldism bruh
source link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1akcbol/if_the_revolution_comes_people_will_start_eating/
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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The "everything short of my version of True Leftism is useless" part has a point, too. We'll critically support countries that aren't remotely leftist (Russia, Iran), but won't give an inch to American politicians who are anything short of Lenin. That applies to American politicians who have as much to do with imperialism as you or I, too.
I get where it comes from, but it's not internally consistent, which is bad on its own and also makes it harder to communicate these ideas to other people.
You're looking at things in too moralistic a frame. It's not that Russia and Iran have progressive values but that they geopolitically represent historically progressive forces as part of the anti-imperialist bloc. Some shithead in the House who gets elected just to Tweet Kropotkin and get pressured into voting Yes instead of Present on the latest Warcrime Bill before crying about it does not represent historical progress geopolitically or in any other sense.
It's not about who is "good" or "bad", it is about who is beneficial and who is not, and just because that means something else if you cross out the words and replace them with different words does not mean I'm actually saying something very similar to the second thing.
If you mean municipal politicians, you're incorrect as we do support them. If you mean Congresspeople at the federal level, you are smoking crack if you think they aren't significantly involved in the maintenance of imperialism.
Agreed, and I'd say pretty much any prominent politician to the left of the main body of the Democratic Party is beneficial if you're trying to pipeline people left of the Democratic Party.
Take Bernie. Despite his many faults, he helped crank open the valve on the pipeline left. It's far easier to talk to someone about bigger ideas of economic redistribution if they're bought into universal healthcare. It's far easier to talk to someone about the structural limits of the U.S. electoral system if they bought into Bernie and saw him get ratfucked in 2020.
When Bernie was doing something useful, he was worth supporting. Right now he is not, and often is being very actively detrimental.
There's definitely something to be said for a woman who runs and wins on a platform of strong unions and functional public services and a popular green energy revolution relative to the corporate flake she replaced. That she came in spitting fire and got flattened almost immediately by the Pelosi / NYC machine speaks more to the scope and force of opposition than it does about the quality of candidate that got shoved into the political sausage machine.
But the fact that she and a variety of other left-insurgent candidates were able to pop their heads up into Congress rather than being condemned to the political outskirts represents a real shift in the underlying composition of the electorate in those districts. She's a symptom, not a panacea.
If the roof of the House Chamber caved in tomorrow and flattened half of the 118th US Legislature, I do not believe the functions of empire within the US would suffer significantly.
The individual House Reps exist to maintain a flow of commerce out of the periphery and into their respective districts, with the expectation that doing so maintains domestic support for Empire. But no single individual involved in the process can do more to shape it than a single soldier on a battlefield can decide whether or not two countries continue to be at war. The US House is a collection of Middlemen who can, at best, improve or degrade the efficiency of the imperial machinery.
Were the whole Squad to go balls-to-the-wall obstructionist and take steaming shits on the Speaker's desk every time a vote for more war funding or police expansion or whatever came up, I do not think they could collectively be as effective at derailing the mission of the state as a couple of Ron Paul types who divert a few million dollars into their back pockets as a condition for letting a bill out of a subcommittee, then spend the next six months whining about military overspending on ash trays.
But neither Ron nor AOC can defang the federal behemoth, because that's not a power House Reps really have. All they can do is chip away at the edges by being annoying and hope the whole thing caves in eventually. And that's not big sexy revolutionary stuff. Its mostly just corrupt shits sucking excess cum out of the Pentagon's balls for 60 years, until its own weight brings it down.
Take caution along with this; many components of historically progressive forces can end up flipping in just a few years.
Because they're pretty much all bad. It's like trying to pick out the good Nazis
If you use that sort of 10 million foot view then everyone outside of AES states is a different shade of Nazi. This isn't a useful frame of analysis.
I think there's a space between "6,000,000,000 people outside AES states" and "member of top 10,000 people in global imperial hegemon" but whatever helps you justify thinking Bernie or AOC as anything good and not just tools to subvert radicalism
You wouldn't say the only Nazis in Nazi Germany were the leaders, right? Obviously their enthusiastic supporters were Nazis, too, and you might say the libs who went along for the ride were just a moderate type of Nazi. So if you're calling the political leadership of every country outside of AES states different flavors of Nazi, you're calling much of the world Nazis, which is what I mean by "not a useful frame of analysis." We have to go into detail enough to parse out which people can be brought around to our side and which can't.
Those two are useful to the extent they start people down the leftist path, and harmful to the extent people get stuck thinking they're the best possible solution. When we're talking to baby leftists we shouldn't say "this person who brought you left of the Democratic Party is a Nazi," because we'll sound unhinged, and because (as I outlined above) that's not useful analysis anyway. Our take on the Bernies and AOCs of the world should be "they have some good ideas, but here's where their failings are and why you should move past them."