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The threat of consequences needs to be there for left wing ideas to be taken seriously. Nobody gets anyone to give up something valuable without leverage, so the first thing the left needs to do while rebuilding is to acquire some. Specifically, it needs to be able to credibly threaten pain to the people in charge. That means having people who are dedicated enough to do unpleasant things, like manning a picket line when you’re low on money. That’s your core, and it doesn’t really exist at scale right now.
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Dec 14, 2019 04:49
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:56 |
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Bucky Fullminster posted:I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. That’s probably it. Around here, people tend to treat capitalism as a directed conspiracy instead of the organically occurring one that it actually is. There’s also this desire for a violent confrontation, which is dumb as gently caress because the left doesn’t actually win that one if it happens. The road to change probably passes through 20 years of patiently building community structures that work in the current economy (gigs, rapid disruption, shifting of wealth from the west to the emerging world and all the rest of it) so that the left can meaningfully threaten collective action, and simultaneously rebuilding trust with the centre-left while not letting it set the agenda or take over. Even after all that, the likely outcome would be something like the 60s or Scandinavia and not the Bolshevik Revolution. And in that context, it’s likely that climate change or something tech related that nobody’s even imagining yet becomes the main political issue and shifts the political landscape before classic socialism is established.
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Dec 15, 2019 09:50
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The point about a unifying identity is a strong one though. The Left’s unifying identity is that everyone who doesn’t survive purely by owning capital is part of the same class: the working class. The right’s is that class doesn’t matter, what matters is being $yournationalityhere. You’d think that the right was set up to lose this one. After all, there are a lot more people who are in the working class than there are from any particular country, and in any one country there are a lot more working class people than true bourgeois or aristocrats. But IMO the left has two problems getting that message out: 1. It lets the right define “working class” too narrowly. It doesn’t only mean working in t’mines. It means your income comes from work not investments. That’s the 99%; in fact it’s probably the 99.5%. It’s people we tend not to think of as working class: doctors, bankers, lawyers, PR execs. If your income comes from working, you share the interests of the working class. Importantly, it also covers the kind of job or life you might aspire to - even if you “win”, the game is still rigged against you if you sell your labour. 2. It doesn’t do enough to challenge the message that some other aspect of a person’s identity (sex, sexuality, ethnicity, whatever) is their real identity and more important than being part of the working class. This is a killer IMO because the prejudice against minority groups in most countries is so extreme that fixing it has to be a major priority for the left, or what are we even for? But that support needs to be given in a way that doesn’t override people’s identity as part of the working class. If we can do 2, we can handle nationalism as well because a person’s national identity can be recast as part of who they are (while still having class interests defined by being part of the working class), instead of 100% of who they are. This will do a lot to neutralise the right. Fundamentally the left is a mass movement. Division is poison in a way it’s not for the conservative right.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:32
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Yess kinda? National identity is a fiction, sure, but coming from place X is a fact and affects how other people treat you. Other aspects that people can make parts of their identity aren’t inherently anti-oppression either: TERFs are a Thing, and living in China for the past decade I’ve met plenty of American, British or Canadian-born Chinese who came over with their experience of being marginalised overseas and ended up buying into full on Han nationalism (which is directly oppressive of minorities), because they get to be the assholes in charge this time, and who can blame them?
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Dec 23, 2019 06:02
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OwlFancier posted:Ultimately people who have been left behind by the nation for economic reasons and for reasons like race, gender, or sexuality, are all people we can find common, non-nationalist ground with. Yes - I mean if anything that’s our core. But we need to be unified by our common struggle, otherwise we spend all our time bickering about which dimension of oppression is most important and that makes it hard to maintain a unified front. It’s actually quite refreshing seeing USGoons’ contempt for Pete Buttigieg; the focus doesn’t seem to have been on him being from a marginalised group, it’s been on his pure 100% alignment with all the worst parts of the ruling class.
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Dec 23, 2019 06:29
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OwlFancier posted:I would be hesitant to describe the majority of the left as being prone to that sort of bickering to be honest. Generally people actually are concerned about actual problems with getting their needs represented. And while people might discuss or argue about it, I don't think there is a particular problem presenting a united front other than when people actually start getting cut out of the platform. Which, I mean, is a thing to complain about? Yeah fair enough. I may be buying into the propaganda here myself, or being overly influenced by the vitriol that can pop up on social media. Twitter really is toxic tbh.
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Dec 23, 2019 07:10
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sean10mm posted:Charismatic leaders are basically a cheat code to getting whatever Brexit is a symptom, not a cause. Specifically, it’s a symptom of most of the cities in the UK outside London (which is where the traditional Labour base was) coming to believe that the Government and a shadowy cabal of elites in London and lefty do-gooders are privileging minorities and foreigners over them (or, if they’re immigrants or minorities themselves, that the status they worked so hard for is being undermined by letting in the wrong sorts after them). This is, broadly, true, for various reasons. Since the alternative is fascism, people are going full fash. Edit: To elaborate a bit, governments take relatively small actions to improve the lives of some minorities and immigrants as individuals. People see this happening and wrongly assume this means the entire group is privileged over the majority. What’s actually happening is that the majority’s structural advantages over minorities are being eroded. I also think we need to be honest with ourselves - if we’re not national socialists - is that what we are doing is asking the working class of the developed world to continue to elect leaders who are committed to dismantling their privileges over poorer foreign labour. That’s a hard ask when other people are promising to keep the barriers up or reinforce them. I guess we could try the narrative that instead of relying on capitalism to do that as it has done for the past 40 years while skimming off from the top to make a tiny number of people grossly rich, we are going to cushion the blow by expropriating or extorting enough wealth from the upper classes to make the transition less painful. Possibly also that we are fighting for British/American/Wherever workers to lose their privileges slower than other countries’. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 02:36
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Ok so there are two wealth gaps: - Gap between oligarchs (capitalists) and everyone else - Gap between developed and developing world. We know that about half of the world’s wealth is held by a tiny number of disgustingly wealthy individuals. We also know that most of the world’s extreme poverty is in the developing world, primarily Sub-Saharan Africa, but that thanks to neoliberalism pockets of extreme poverty are also springing up even in rich countries. The logical conclusion, I think, is to take the wealth of the obscenely rich and distribute it mostly to the poor of the developing world, plus to the utterly destitute of the developed world. Once you’ve done that then you can distribute the surplus to the poor-but-not-destitute. But unless you let some places get rich first (or stay rich longer), you’re doing that for ~7+bn people at the same time. Since the richest 1% owns about half the world’s wealth, and you’ve already burned some of that alleviating crippling poverty, that probably doesn’t mean increased wealth for the average employed blue collar worker in a developed country for a little while. Or does it? Some numbers (if anyone has more accurate ones then go for it): Total wealth in world: 360 trn Assets of millionaires: 180trn Median net wealth US 69k USD (0.3bn ppl) Median net wealth Europe 24k USD (0.59bn ppl) Median net wealth China 21k USD (1.1bn ppl) Median net wealth ROW: 7k USD (5bn) So we’ve expropriated 180 trillion, and we want to share it fairly. To level up ROW to China: 5bn x $14k = $70trn We have 110 trn left To level up China + ROW to Europe = 6.1 bn x 3 k = 18 trn We have 92 trn left To level up ROW to US = 6.6bn x 45k = 297 trn 92-297 = -205trn So we run out of money and have to start expropriating wealth from workers once we get to the US basically. As a non-American that doesn’t bother me too much of course. Ironically, 40 years of neoliberalism have reduced the scale of the task by narrowing the wealth gap between the west and Asia (mostly China). A lot of socialist policy in the Anglosphere at least is about dismantling free trade and reimposing barriers, which would slow that trend. But that’s the law of unintended consequences for you. E: I was expecting the money to run out a lot earlier but turns out that in addition to China narrowing the gap, our capitalist class right now is REALLY rapacious. Who knew? Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 06:13
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OwlFancier posted:But that's way outside the capability of any national government, though, that'd require like a global government which isn't really an immediate electoral concern. Electorally socialist policies are about redistributing wealth and power away from oligarchs, which would be obviously better for the working class? Yeah, as I was doing those calculations I was realising we were closer to being able to do this than expected. But what gets me is this: the longer we let race-to-the-bottom global capitalism go on, the smaller the gap between west and rest, and the bigger the gap between oligarchs and everyone else. I’m not sure how having a major western country go properly socialist would change that, but my guess is that it would reverse or at least halt that trend within the country itself. This would mean a much better quality of life for the people in that country, but less wealth transfer to the poorer parts of the world. And also very relevant is that China was able to capture so much of the global wealth precisely because it had a strong socialist government, that first made population growth a priority, then opened up but in a controlled way. Overall this doesn’t change the conclusion that we all need to get socialist governments in, but if we don’t find a way to defuse the idea that it will mean a levelling down for the mass working class in the west, it may be hard to get them onside for change.
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Dec 27, 2019 07:34
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OwlFancier posted:I mean again I don't think any western socialist government is about major wealth transfer into the global south or anything, even if it would be the right thing to do, precisely because it's entirely unelectable. They tend to focus instead on stopping wealth transfer up the economic strata. If you stop that it's quite possible people might become more open to international transfers because a lot of the hostility to that is because the right like to pretend that the reason a lot of people are struggling is because of that. If people aren't struggling any more then it's far easier to make the case that we have enough to help others. I think that you’re right that the conclusion is: let some places get rich first (as Deng Xiaoping put it). So level up inside a country first. But I do believe that the likely result of socialism in one country is to stop mass scale wealth transfers from rich to poor countries, because those are a side-product of capitalism as currently practised. And will remain so until something becomes more expensive than labour costs.
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Dec 27, 2019 08:35
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:56 |
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NovemberMike posted:The big issue here is that you've created numbers that are divorced from reality. Most of the wealth of millionaires isn't in food and houses that you can ship off to Nepal, it's ownership in corporations. If a village in Kenya gets their 100 shares of Amazon stock from Bezos, does that actually help them? Is there a market to sell the stock anymore? Do they start taking an active part in the management of the company (and if they do, do they have any ability there)? What about land wealth, how do you transfer that to another continent? Sure, it’s very artificial, although unless anyone has any better numbers then it’s the best way we can understand the rough levels of wealth in different places. I mention it only to illustrate the point that there is some truth behind the instinctive feeling that all the western working class voting fash have that socialism isn’t all upside for them immediately. I believe the UK experience shows us that to beat the right, we need an alliance between the working class who are still leftist, the working class who have defected to fascism but aren’t true believers, and a chunk of the petit-bourgeois. If we’re lucky we can get a few class traitors from the bourgeois as well - there’s always the odd Tony Benn or Zhou Enlai. I agree that realistically we have to do this a country at a time, and gamble that once people’s conditions improve, they will develop empathy for others faster than they get so used to their improved conditions that they take them for granted.
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Dec 27, 2019 09:43
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