Maximo Roboto posted:

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1128715768718213120
https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1128712622323458050
https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1128713966467858433

Taintrunner posted:

this populism account sucks so loving much and I’m so loving tired of people posting it earnestly

Scrub-Niggurath posted:

the libertarian debates are gonna be so lit

Taintrunner posted:

this populism account sucks so loving much and I’m so loving tired of people posting it earnestly

Maximo Roboto posted:

then offer another account that talks about Volodymyr Zelensky, José Luis Espert, and European Animal Rights parties

Scrub-Niggurath posted:

the libertarian debates are gonna be so lit

Tommah posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITP93pqtdQ

quote:

On April 14th, a meeting of the Prohibition Party’s national committee was held by conference call. The committee had to select a new presidential ticket following the resignation of its initial presidential candidate, Bill Bayes, on March 30th. The PNC selected Connie (C.L.) Gammon as its new presidential candidate, and Phil Collins as its new vice-presidential candidate.

C.L. Gammon is a writer and historian from Tennessee. He was initially the party’s vice-presidential candidate for 2020, but given the situation stepped to represent the party at the head of the ticket.

Phil Collins is a navy veteran, former township trustee in Illinois, and had come second place in this year’s non-partisan election for mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fuzzy McDoom posted:

IT'S HAPPENING

https://twitter.com/LibertyHerald/status/1216155776584224768?s=20

Fuzzy McDoom posted:

Howie Hawkins is the clear frontrunner.

"Howie hype posted:

Hawkins, who is a co-founder of the Green Party, will be seeking nominations from multiple parties that range from progressive to socialist. In addition to the Green Party and Socialist Party USA nominations, Hawkins will be seeking the nominations of state-level independent progressive parties with ballot lines, including the Peace and Freedom Party of California, the Progressive Party of Oregon, the Citizens and Labor parties of South Carolina, and the Liberty Union and Progressive parties in Vermont. Liberty Union was the first party with whom Senator Bernie Sanders ran for office.

quote:

Hawkins said on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery” that the Green Party may be unable to get on the ballot in as many as 30 states — including Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — due to state laws requiring third parties to collect thousands of signatures on ballots to qualify. Hawkins said it will be impossible to meet these requirements in light of White House guidelines urging citizens to stay at home and avoid social gatherings.

Green Party lawyers are now asking state officials to grant them relief, arguing that depriving voters of the chance to cast ballots for their candidates will be a blow to American democracy.

quote:

The signature-gathering period ends June 22.
The Illinois Green Party said that due to Illinois’ stay-at-home requirements, social distancing and restrictions on public gatherings, “normal petitioning has been rendered impossible.”
[...]
The Green Party has asked Gov. J.B. Pritzker, legislative leaders and state elected officials to “waive or suspend” the current petition signature requirements.

However, there are no provisions that would allow an administrative suspension of the signature rules. Instead, it would require a change in state law, and lawmakers in both parties have shown little interest in relaxing ballot access rules in Illinois amid the uncertainty over when the General Assembly can reconvene in Springfield.

wiki posted:

Jo Jorgensen (born May 1, 1957) is an American academic and libertarian political activist. She was the Libertarian Party nominee for vice-president in the 1996 U.S. presidential election as the running mate of Harry Browne. She was also the Libertarian nominee for South Carolina's 4th congressional district in 1992, receiving 4,286 votes, or 2.2%. She is currently a candidate for the 2020 Libertarian nomination for President of the United States.

Maximo Roboto posted:

I just know Sam Seder as Janeane Garofalo's cohost on the Majority Report back in 2004, when Air America existed, but apparently he's pulling a Mike Gravel and running for the Libertarian Party nominee



he also appears to be beating actual Libertarian candidates in last month's poll


https://twitter.com/majorityfm/status/1108204615122722817

platzapS posted:

Preliminary reports suggest Jo Jorgenson is the Libertarian nominee.



I would cite policy positions but I can't get her website to load.

platzapS posted:

Preliminary reports suggest Jo Jorgenson is the Libertarian nominee.



I would cite policy positions but I can't get her website to load.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

quote:

At this critical hour, every appropriate means of non-violent action must be utilized to remove this regime from power. And if, in spite of mass protest demanding the removal of the Trump/Pence regime, this regime remains in power when it is time for voting, then—without placing fundamental reliance on this—using all appropriate means to work for the removal of this regime must include voting against Trump (assuming the election is actually held). To be clear, this means not a “protest vote” for some candidate who has no chance of winning, but actually voting for the Democratic Party candidate, Biden, in order to effectively vote against Trump.

This is not because Biden (and the Democratic Party in general) have suddenly become something other than what they are: representatives and instruments of this exploitative, oppressive, and literally murderous system of capitalism-imperialism. The electoral process continues to be what we revcoms have called it—BEB (Bourgeois Electoral Bullshit). It remains the case that no fundamental change for the better can come about through this electoral process, and that, in general and overall, voting under this system serves to reinforce this system, especially if voting is seen as a way—and more so if it is seen as the (only) way—to bring about meaningful change.

But this election is different.

quote:

“Libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public”
-Murray Rothbard

“In Reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another.”
-Friedrich Engels


So a Marxist walks into the DMV and joins the Libertarian Party… No, that’s not the set up to an impossibly wonky dad joke, that’s the story of my life, or at least it was last summer. It was a simpler time. A time before COVID, when the cops were only brazenly shooting Black children in the back every other week. That sunny day in July, I put on my best crack-whore-red lipstick and my biggest Jackie-O sunglasses and made my way down to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license with a special side mission motivating me to actually show up before the last possible second this time. After strutting past the usual throngs of sullen teens and sexy foreigners with the riff from “Rebel Rebel” on repeat in my skull, I approached an angry little man in a clip-on tie, took a horrific picture, swallowed a mouth full of stomach acid when the little prick misgendered me, and became the first self-declared Marxist in Pennsylvania history to join the Libertarian Party. I got a bumper sticker and everything, and I have every intention of voting for Jo Jorgensen this November.

But why? You may ask. What in the name of god’s green dick could inspire a person to do such an absurd thing? Am I just trying to piss off and confuse people at this point? As if my calamitous gender identity wasn’t enough. How could any sane Marxist join the party of Ayn Rand and the Koch Brothers? Well, maybe that’s just it. I’m not a sane Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. Not literally or figuratively. While I thoroughly believe that history is defined by cycles of class exploitation and that a lack of equality in the distribution of power over the means of production is the source of most if not all human oppression, I am very far from an orthodox Marxist, or an orthodox anything for that matter. I have no time for stagnant dogma and little patience for long-winded theory. I was turned on to Marx in the 7th grade because the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto filled me with the same kind of fire as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The words exploded off the page with such cataclysmic fury and righteous indignation, condemning all the stupid little terrors from my Catholic childhood that my latent genderqueerness proved to be a lie. Jesus didn’t want me for his sunbeam, but roaring fires were made of sparks like me.

But for the most part, like any true lumpenproletariat, I’ve always preferred cliff notes and history books to pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, and with the exception of a brief and painful dalliance with Third World state socialism, my Marxism has always been tempered by a devotion to anarchism, making it downright libertarian in nature. I’ve always preferred the Sorelian and Luxemburgist schools of thought, the ideas championed by Friedrich Engels after Karl’s death with his daughter Eleanor and dear Mr. William Morris of the Socialist League, that crazy notion that the state itself is the loving problem, that working people don’t need wonky professors or vanguard parties or bloated bureaucracies to free themselves from the chains of class oppression. In fact the thing that finally pushed me over the edge from libertarian Marxist to Marxist Libertarian was the sobering realization that the state itself, any state at all, regardless of intention, is simply another class hierarchy in red clothing.

I came to this conclusion after watching the painful implosion of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. In spite of everything he did and everything he sacrificed, in spite of doing everything right and revolutionary and democratic and constitutional, Hugo Chavez couldn’t prevent his nation from becoming another managerial thug state, much like the one he replaced. Once Hugo died under mysteriously abrupt circumstances, it took his Dengist successor, Nicholas Maduro, and and his Yanqui antagonists less than a year to tear the whole thing down in ribbons. Everything that is, but the favela collectives that predated the Bolivarian government and inspired Chavez to embrace democracy in the first place. These councils didn’t require a state to be constructed and they didn’t require a state to survive. They are what Marxism is supposed to be about, and they help expose what I see as the philosophies greatest contradiction.

There is no such thing as a benevolent state. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, at least as it’s commonly interpreted, as a temporary state in place to manage production while the rest of its institutions magically whither away, is an epic oxymoron. A state, any state, is by definition an institution of the ruling class. In fact, it’s an institution that requires a ruling class to exist. A ruling class that serves as a group of people not held to the same standards as the proletariat they supposedly serve. If the poor have no right to steal, then how can the state justify taxation without holding its bureaucracy to a higher authority and a lower moral standard? And once this bureaucratic class tastes the fruits of this awesome power, how can it ever be trusted to give it back? All states ultimately exist largely to justify their own greedy existence. Thus for there ever to be any hope for a classless society, destroying the state must be priority number one, by any means necessary.

Is this going to happen through an election? gently caress no. But that doesn’t mean that the electoral system can’t be used to further a greater revolution. The number one function of the electoral system for true radicals against the state must be to delegitimize the state through its propaganda. This means getting as many votes as possible for the candidate whose platform represents the greatest threat to the state, especially its deadliest and most existential organ, the prison-warfare state. The only party that consistently threatens to gut these institutions at the federal level is the Libertarian Party, and after three cycles of lame-dick ex-Republican poseurs running their presidential tickets, they’ve finally nominated a truly libertarian candidate with Jo Jorgensen. With Ron Paul and Ralph Nader retired and Rand and Tulsi sold out, Jo is the loudest voice left against empire. Howie Hawkins and the Green Party talk a good game on the antiwar front but what they advocate isn’t weakening the state itself but rather shifting its weight elsewhere. I guarantee that if by some miracle a Hawkins White House became a reality, the predators that run the war machine would simply change shape and devote themselves to hacking down Joshua trees and imprisoning the wrong kind of polluters for the Green New Deal. There’s no room for half measures when it comes to reigning in the state or using electoral propaganda to shift the zeitgeist against it.

If the radical left in this country truly wants to retain its lethality at any level, it needs to radically rethink its methods. The priorities are all there; peace, equality, mutual aid. But relying on increased state power to achieve these goals is a fool’s errand. Venezuela tried that. Now the Bolivarian Revolution sicks its troops on the barrio. Egalitarianism can only sustain itself from the ground up. We the proletariat need to build the voluntary communal institutions that can make this utopian dream a reality, through autonomous grass roots communes, syndicates, councils, guilds, and credit unions. The only thing the state can do for us is gently caress off and die. A vote for Jo Jorgensen is a vote for that happy dagger. A vote for Howie Hawkins is just a vote for Bernie Sanders lite. More social democratic FDR progressivism. Another silly costume for the state to wear for Trick or Treat. Only a vote for Jo is a vote for Marx, and if Charles Koch wants to foot the bill for his own suicide then I’ll gladly be Jack Kevorkian for Halloween, or at least Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

Maximo Roboto posted:

CounterPunch: A Marxist Joins the Libertarian Party by Nicky Reid

Maximo Roboto posted:

CounterPunch: A Marxist Joins the Libertarian Party by Nicky Reid