|
Centrism is a loving terrible ideology that either rules or enables the right to rule every nation in the western world. It is also a complete and utter lie. It comes from a flawed (and deliberately cultivated) view of the left-right struggle. For centrists this struggle is seen as a fight for money. And if you think left-right is about money it kinda makes sense to hold a middle position in a capitalist system. After all, capitalism is about giving everything to these magical capitalist folk who then create goods and services and grow wealth for the people. So of course you have to balance this, right? I mean the capitalists need lots and lots of stuff to do their thing, but we can't just let everybody else die in the gutter like the right wants. Except it's never been about money. Never ever. It's not about who can afford the biggest of TVs or what kind of car the poors can afford; it's about who gets to control the reigns of power. Liberalism was a leftist ideology back when it existed in a world run by monarchies. It was the ideology that wrested power from the nobility and placed it within the hands of private citizens. It was a huge leap forward and a very good thing. Back then. But not now. Now we know unrestrained liberalism leads to disempowerment of the masses while capital concentrates into the hands of oligarchs who then use this power to essentially take over the government. This most obviously manifests as the lives of regular people becoming much worse as they become poorer and poorer. Centrists see this and some part of them recognises that abject poverty is not right so they go about trying to fix this problem. But poverty is not the problem; poverty is a symptom of the imbalace of power still inherent in liberalism. The right is about concentrating power within a specific group of the worthy. What makes someone worthy depends on the brand of right. It could be by economic class, by birthright, by education, by religion, by adherence to morality, by adherence to law, by race, by gender, by sexual orientation, or by whatever other measure. The left is about dispersing power amongst as many people as is possible. It is about breaking down the barriers of power along every metric mentioned above until we can get as close as possible/sustainable to every single person having exactly the same power as everyone else. The left tends to differ based on how far a person thinks this can sustainably be taken or which method is best to achieve the outcome. The centre? The centre is a lie. It is a lie because it is really just a faction of the right. The centre believes that power should be held by educated, wealthy technocrats. The centre differs from the right not at all on the subject of power, it instead has a lateral disagreement with the right. It believes that the few worthy should have power, but that the rest should not suffer too much because of it. The centre is the politics of rightists who just don't want to face the full and inevitable consequences of their ideological alignment. It wants to throw welfare to the unemployed not because doing so empowers the worker to quit, but because then the worker doesn't have to starve when they're fired. They want health care not because it stops employers from having power over their employees' health, but because it means people don't die in the gutter when their employer cuts them off. They want education not because they want to arm the people with knowledge, but so that people can drag themselves onto the higher rungs of wage slavery. Lets looks at Obama/Clinton vs Bernie Sanders since that's the example that's most visible to people right now. When Obama ran for president he formed a huge movement to get him there. Once he became president, did he use this people power he had assembled to get things done? Nope. He ignored them because he didn't assemble them to empower them. He didn't want to be the figurehead of a powerful movement. He wanted to use them to get himself into power. Once placed within power he wanted to concentrate on working with the other worthy technocrats to get things done. YES WE CAN get me into office because I am worthy and will rule well. Bernie on the other hand said from the very beginning that he did not have the ability to do things as president. That what America needed was a popular movement. And he has continued to champion causes and encourage activism after his bid was ended. This was the quality of Bernie that the left recognised even when some thought his actual policies were not as left as they would like. The centre says "but (to me) his policies are not that different!" not realising the essential ingredient Hillary was missing. Look at Obama/Clinton's reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement. They dismissed and chastised the movement. Oh they agreed with the premise. They agreed that what BLM was protesting against was a problem that needed to be fixed. But they disagreed with the movement. They did not want them protesting, especially not if it inconvenienced people. They wanted the problem to be fixed, but they wanted it fixed the right way: by them or others like them. Bernie on the other hand stepped aside when BLM activists crashed his event so they could speak to his crowd, at his rally, on his stage. He empowered their voices both figuratively and literally through the microphone he yielded to them. Because Bernie understood that you need to work with and empower people to fix their problems, not empower yourself and then fix their problems for them like the powerless peasants they should be. This same dynamic was repeated in the the case of NoDAPL. Bernie spoke on behalf of the NoDAPL movement and visited them to raise their profile. Where were Hillary and Obama? loving nowhere. When pressed Obama said both sides need to be peaceful and that they were going to let it play. Then suddenly the government laid down a judgement a few weeks later. The only acknowledgement of the water protectors was as one of the two sides that needed to be peaceful (and it happened to be the only side that was). Hillary has said nothing as far as I know on the subject. It's not necessarily so that they disagree with NoDAPL's goals, but they do disagree with its methods. They don't believe in people power except as a springboard for the right people to get into power. Not for people actually using their people power to get things done. The abandoning of unions is part of the same problem with the centre. Why support organisations that seek to empower workers when you can just skim some money from the people who deserve it and hand it to the workers? As long as they're not starving what's the big deal? Look at how the centre abandons and shits on the rural poor whites. It's because they view those poor whites as not being worthy of power any more, of having their voices heard. They happily hit down just as much as the rest for the right, they just have different views of what is down. Notice how centrists deride the rust belt for wanting jobs instead of welfare? You know why the people want the jobs? It's not because they're stupidly clinging to a past that will never be again and are just too drat proud to take welfare. It's because employment is empowering. Doing a job gives you power over your employer; direct, individual power over the people who decide the money you're given. Granted the employer holds the balance of power, but some power is better than no power, and people have effectively no power over their welfare payments. Oh is the president going to listen to you when you when your vote is a tiny fraction of an electoral vote in the best case scenario when you live in a swing state? Will senators or congress people in your own state, let alone from other states? If you quit your boss suffers. How much depends on what job you do and the type of employment (notice how recent trends of having lots of people on low/0 hour contracts means individual workers have less power to hurt their employer?) but you do have the power to hurt them however small. And if you quit you still theoretically have something of value with which to secure employment with someone else. If welfare goes down what recourse do you have? Does quitting welfare hurt the government? Is there an alternate government you can go get welfare from? No and no. Welfare is disempowering compared to employment. That's why people want jobs. And it's why you the centre doesn't get it. There are so many other ways in which centrism blindly violates core concepts of the left, but that's enough examples from me I think. Seriously guys, centrism is terrible and not at all what it's sold as. If you're a leftist you should stop seeing centrists as allies. If you're centrist you should have a good look at what your ideology is actually about and decide if you're really happy being on the side you picked. The inherent problems with the centre are starting to come to the fore all over the world. Actual sides need to be picked.
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2016 08:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Before the invention of work for pay humans were crippled by a sense of disempowerment and since we invented it everyone's been really happy. Before the invention of work for pay humans were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers and were much more directly in control of their own destiny and that of their community. The purpose of the "jobs are empowering" section was to say that people need to be and feel empowered, and jobs are one of the ways in which that can happen, as opposed to welfare. It's not that it has to be jobs, just that welfare is not the answer to this problem because it's only enough to fulfil the money part of having a job. Ocrassus has the right idea in that if you just can't supply jobs to people you need to change things to give them some control over their lives somehow. The point is to give people ownership over their own lives. Under liberalism in all current governmental models this means the only real way to even get close is with a job and a strong job market. Anything else is going to fail to deliver because an economic system based entirely on giving the fruit of society to those who create it is diametrically opposed to welfare. You can (and should) give people money so they don't starve, but you do so by going against the very fundamentals of the economic system. You can do welfare in a system built from the ground up to revolve around everybody receiving a share of society's wealth, but the current system is nothing like that. In the current system the right is correct in attacking welfare and the capitalists will always attack welfare because the very economic system we use compels them to do so. The answer to the right is not to plug our ears and say no welfare is good and makes sense in a capitalist system, the answer is to change the system so that either welfare makes sense or is unnecessary. Or alternatively/additionally we can try to change the way government works so that people have much more power over the entity that decides their welfare. Talmonis posted:Distributive and executive power absolutely should be held in the hands of educated representatives, that have been voted on by the people. Tyranny of the majority is a monstrous thing, and would absolutely result in horror for those in the minority. Self determination is important, but making decisions that effect others should require education and ethics, rather than a simple majority opinion. But the difference between the educated and the uneducated is merely education. There's no reason why the masses today are uneducated but that the system is set up that way. If we're going to have a huge number of unemployed and underemployed then they have more than enough time for education and having more power and responsibility within the process of running things. I have no problem with the idea that people need to be educated before they can be allowed to rule, but the next part of that idea is not "so the masses can go jump" it's "so we have to educate the masses until 'the masses' ceases to be a relevant distinction". Also increasing education just by itself increases employment, especially if we moved away from the model of hundreds of students to a lecture you get in popular/first year courses. KaiserSchnitzel posted:You say "centre" a lot. This leads me to believe that you are not a US citizen. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Yep. This was never simply about America though following the fight within the Democratic party definitely inspired me to write it and is why Obama/Hillary vs Bernie were the examples I went with. When I speak of right/centre/left I'm making an essentialist argument. The right/centre/left in America is not at the same place as those in other places, but the dynamic essentially revolves around the same principle of empowerment. I've been following American politics very closely since the mid 90s to the point that I'd say I was more familiar with American politics than Australian politics until a couple years ago actually. I don't really care about national borders and America has a huge influence on the rest of the world (and our Liberals are unfortunately prone to follow in your footsteps) so American politics are very relevant to me. So I'm not completely ignorant of how things are over there. I've read what you wrote and I wouldn't say anything is fundamentally inaccurate but I still contend Centrism is a big problem. You can think of it as moderates, or careerist Democrats loving things up, or whatever. I think of those things as being under the banner of centrism and contend that it having no real ideological footing by itself leads to this political malaise the west has been suffering under for at least the last couple decades. Because it's not just America. The Democrats are not the only "to the left" mainstream party that has been gutted by centrism. A lot of people who vote for centrists are not politically minded like you say, but they are being mislead by career centrists in politics and the media into thinking it's a good way to vote. Things like wage slavery and welfare being disempowering are not things that centrist voters necessarily think about, but they vote with an ideology that allows these things to perpetuate because the ideology does not critically engage with the systems it's dealing with. Part of the "it's a lie" point I was making. Centrists are not bad people following an evil ideology because they like the consequences of the ideology, but because the ideology itself does not critically examine its own consequences. Kinda like a lot of voters in the right, when you get down to it, don't actually want the consequences of their ideology, they just think that their ideology will deliver better outcomes than it will. Centrism as a movement is basically intellectual laziness given form and then turning around to act like it's the adult in the room. But it's not the adult in the room; it's not in the centre because it's above the fight; it's in the centre because it doesn't understand the fight. And the politicians that follow centrism are incompetent and impotent because they follow a lazy and heavily flawed ideology. Centrism needs to be dismantled so that the left can try and reach the voters in the middle that centrism currently makes very difficult to reach. I'd be willing to say the centre is as or possibly even more responsible than the right for America's extreme rightward shift from the rest of the west. Oh and keep in mind I'm not trying to demonise people who vote centrist. I'm taking aim squarely at the ideology itself and the people in power who peddle it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 02:12
|
|
|
SSNeoman posted:right there i stopped reading cause jfc whenever someone writes that as a beginning to thier screed it doesnt go anywhere good You should keep reading past the hunter-gather point as I drop the point very quickly because I don't give a poo poo about it and only address it because the post I was replying to asks specifically what existed before work for pay. Far left is a bullshit point. From the OP I made it very clear that left-right is a continuum and that leftism comes in many forms. The problem with the "left" in America is that a lot of it is not left at all. This is not a left factional argument like I'm some trot arguing against an anarcho-syndicalism. I very specifically avoided giving specific answers because that is a problem in the left. In fact it's probably a companion problem to centrism; the left is too busy arguing specifics within the struggle while the centre is busy missing the struggle entirely. The problem I'm addressing here is not that the left can't agree on specific answers, but that the centre cannot contain answers. When right-left is a question of people having control over their own lives what the gently caress would an actual middle position look like? How can we restrict power to the few while also giving power to everyone? It doesn't work and it's why the actual centre we have doesn't work along those lines. It believes that power should be in the hands of the elite, just like the right. The centre is essentially the right with a dash of sympathy. It's the mugger that gives your license back to you because they know it's a pain to replace it. The solution is to focus on empowerment. To actually join the left in attacking and dismantling the barriers to power erected by the right. And abandoning the false choice offered by centrism. The left needs to come together and pull to the loving left, actually work together to empower people. We can quibble over specifics when we're no longer under the threat of losing it all to overly-entrenched power. Grab whatever part of the line is closest to you or prettiest to you and pull. I'm not going to give you specifics here because specifics are much less important than the essential argument and also because that's a massive quagmire as anyone who knows anything about leftist politics is well aware. I have specific ideas like anyone else who thinks enough about politics, I'm not just talking out my rear end about solutions that I don't even think exist, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe I have the answers so I don't want the central point of the OP to be derailed by people attacking any and all specifics I provide. Which they would. You know they would. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Dec 13, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 02:56
|
|
|
I said nothing about democracy. Literally nothing. I don't give a toss about the definition or purpose of democracy beyond that it's a step better than what came before it and I'll defend it from anything that tries to regress from it. Also just want to point out that there's nothing inherently wrong with incremental change. Incrementalism only becomes a problem when it's used to shut down or spit on calls and movements for more ambitious change. If you believe that incrementalism is the best way to help people then go ahead and do that I see nothing wrong with it. Just don't use your belief to belittle the efforts of others. That's when it crosses over to centrism. EDIT: Actually I think that's an important point for people who are still sticking up for centrism. If the centre was properly allied to the left they would do their part pulling left in the ways and to the extent that they think are appropriate. But you see the establishment Democrats and others of their ilk (eg. Labour right in the UK) are doing is fighting against the left. You can say you believe in incremental leftism or getting what you can for the left if you're doing your thing alongside other leftist doing theirs. But you can't say that if what you're doing is saying your way is the only way and blocking the efforts of others and failing to stand with them when they need some support. The way the centre is reacting to the left saying "okay we've stood behind you for decades and you hosed it up let us take the reigns of this partnership" speaks volumes. Also note that both the Labour right in the UK and Labour in Australia have attacked their left counterparts (Labour left in UK, The Greens in Australia) with claims of anti-semitism much like some centrist Democrats are doing with Keith Ellison. The Labour right in the UK in particular is so loving blatant in what they're doing and where their allegiances truly lie it's kinda breathtaking. Take a look into that if you haven't. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Dec 13, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 05:26
|
|
|
Your entire post with the arguable exception of 1 basically describes a "True Leftism" platform in America. It's a perfectly solid plan to serve and empower the American people. A lot wouldn't agree that it goes as far as needed, but nobody would fight against doing those things. If you actually pursued those goals with the added caveat of "support where possible, and absolutely do not undermine, other leftist movements and activists" then I don't think anyone should hit you with a no true leftist stigma (until you at least hit those goals). The problem a lot of leftists have is that we don't think the centrist politicians and journalists will actually pursue those goals with anything approaching conviction because it's not what they actually want. If they had pursued those things rigorously we wouldn't be having this argument. The left can't afford to give the centre the benefit of the doubt any more and needs to say gently caress the centre if it's not going to actually pull to the left. I don't think it will and many other leftists feel the same and we can't afford to wait and see. We need action whether or not the centre will come with. If we're proven wrong and centrists suddenly decided to pursue what you outline in your post, and the equivalent in other countries, we'd all be very happy.
Futuresight fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Dec 13, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 07:54
|
|
|
Aryu Kiddimeh posted:OK but what would you think if someone described themselves as a Radical Centrist? I would think that they believe the systems we have are exactly the systems we need and that all we need to do is double down on what we're doing and at best tweak the very margins. I'd expect them to be someone that thinks that current interventions in the Middle East are ultimately working we just need to keep boots off the ground and stay droning and we'll see the glorious fruits of that effort. That extreme capitalism is the path to utopia and we just need to find the right tax brackets to make it all work, no need to tear down protections and absolutely no need to add new ones, just tweak it, little tweaks here and there. Etc.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 08:29
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure "our side" includes trump voters. I definitely wouldn't have voted for Trump nor do I think it's a good idea to have done so but I don't think it's worth trying to exclude people for having ideas we think are bad. The problem with establishment Democrats and other centre politicians is not that they make bad decisions, it's that they make bad decisions because their hearts are in the wrong place. The whole purity argument the left is going on about is entirely based on where you stand. The left is raging at Clinton and Obama and friends not just because they hosed up but because what we see in them from the particular way they hosed up, the way they responded to their various fuckups, and their rhetoric. You can be with the left if you make bad decisions (just please not in power) but you can't be on the left if you don't have the right intentions. We can work with someone who voted for Trump because they were sick of centrist Democrats and voting for the lesser of 2 evils; we can't work with people who don't actually believe in supporting and empowering the people.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 12:33
|
|
|
I don't think it's terminally stupid to vote Trump and I don't think making a terminally stupid decision would forever paint a person as terminally stupid if it was. It's not like people are uniform in how good they are at making decisions in every decision space. *cough* engineer libertarians *cough* I don't think accelerationism is a good idea but if a person buys into the idea then voting Trump is exactly the kind of thing you'd do when faced with this election. Keep in mind I think people who have repeatedly supported centrist politicians and organisations are responsible for the state of the world in which a vote for Trump is even a possibility let alone a thing that could have consequences like Trump becoming President of the United States of America (and have also collectively thrown the left under the bus for decades). If we can forgive them for their choices as long as they're willing to work to fix it we should be able to look past one vote during an insane election. If you didn't get a little existential and panicky when Trump won the GOP nomination you either bought into the liberal can't lose bullshit or you're crazy.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 14:17
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:And yet you thought that being pro-welfare was a centrist position in the US, so I suspect that you don't know US politics nearly as well as you think you do. Again, centrism is not an ideology or a movement, it's the intended result of the compromises that are supposed to be inherent in all modern systems of representative democracy. Your arguments lose a lot of power because you insist on arguing against a strawman you built yourself for the specific purpose of this argument, one designed in the form of an imaginary enemy that doesn't exist. Welfare is the natural consequence of centrist positions in the US, not a central plank they campaign on. Centrist politicians do not particularly like welfare, but they resort to welfare because the entire philosophy is built around patching capitalism to soften the worst effects of it. But because they don't understanding why it should exist you get welfare that doesn't really act to empower people against their employers and instead just acts as a way for people not to starve. Like every time I've brought up welfare it's been in the context of how the centre doesn't really get it. I never implied that welfare as an idea is the brain child of the centre. You'll also note that I only link welfare and the US when I'm talking about the rust belt. A big argument from centrists on this forum was that the rust belt is never going to recover, that the jobs are never coming back, and the rust belt needs to get over the idea of jobs and accept that welfare is their future. You can't bring the jobs back because free trade and even if we changed change policy it wouldn't work because automation so lets just throw welfare at them and go back to pretending they don't exist instead of learning from Trump's win there. I figured addressing points people had made on this forum might be useful in bringing it home for people. I guess everything looks like a strawman if you're not willing to dig below the surface or draw lines. The whole thesis of the OP was that centrism IS NOT "the intended result of the compromises that are supposed to be inherent in all modern systems of representative democracy" that it claims to be, but is instead a corrupt form of right wing politics formed by people who don't like the natural consequences of the systems and policies they support. Like the whole point is this. Everything is about why the centre is not what it claims or appears to be on the surface. If it is a strawman then this thread would be about building it. You don't have to agree with me just because it's the thesis of course, but I don't know why you think I'd abandon my entire position cause you said what amounts to nuh-uh. Plus if we're talking US politics, and thus centrism is the position of compromising with modern Republicans by your argument, I'm really not certain that would be anything even approaching an improvement. Also the anti-semite thing was never about the entire establishment descending upon Keith Ellison, "like some centrist Democrats" is what I specifically said. The Australian example was also just one politician using it to fight against a Greens candidate for their electorate. Only the UK example was an actual organised movement. The point was to show this strange link between centrists in 3 different countries using anti-semitism to attack the left. It's interesting to see the same arguments come out when some centrists feel pressure on the left, especially when those arguments have nothing to do with centre vs left. Almost like it's not a sincere concern but is used instead of "gently caress this leftist for being left" because that might not go down well with the left voters the centre relies on.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 00:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
Lemme try explain it under those terms. Arriving at the centre is a result of a functioning democracy (another is that one side wins the public favour and gets to run wild for a bit). Centrism is trying to turn this potential result into an ethos itself. It's fine to say that arriving at the centre is the result of two sides pulling in opposite directions, it's not fine to say that therefore we should try to divine the centre and position ourselves there. A real "centre" would be wherever the different power levels of the different factions places it. On any day it could be wildly left or right of where it was yesterday or the day before (days being figurative here of course) so it makes no sense to try to sit in the shifting centre. Centrism is an empty ideology that tries to be above the fray by ignoring what the struggle is actually about and sitting in the centre because apparently that's what it's all about. A lot of the reason establishment Democrats were caught flat footed in the election is because a lot of them don't have any ideological underpinning beyond the centre, so when the centre shifted underneath them they had nothing to offer. And Nancy Pelosi's comments on how one side gains when the other is in power is her basically saying they just need to wait for the centre to shift back under their feet. No need to actually influence the political environment. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Dec 14, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 02:43
|
|