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ChrisBTY posted:RIght now, Progressives don't have power. Power belongs to evil people. Power makes them evil. No, It doesn't make them evil, it burns away the socializing instincts ingrained in us to assure we don't literally eat each other. The wealthy and the powerful are only hindered by empathy, loyalty, honesty and all the other instincts that makes a person 'good'. This works backwards too, I'm afraid. The society we live in which produces the rulers we have also eats away at the people within it, and they retreat into bunkers of property and perhaps family. As long as they have enough to feel safe in those, they'll vote for anyone who feeds that worldview, and will reject any notion of a social world, and security through society.
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Dec 13, 2019 15:48
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Lose, mostly.
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Dec 13, 2019 17:01
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I guess that's the issue that if you're trying to stop british imperialists you're gonna run out of bullets before you run out of brits.
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Dec 16, 2019 02:43
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Alternatively social media is a tool which allows people of like mind to form communities and keep in touch with each other and if all the leftists leave it that's not going to do anything to stop the right from using it but is going to severely limit our access to information and other people to potentially convert...
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Dec 16, 2019 19:22
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Personal/private distinction. The idea that people can posess personal effects and the idea that people can claim exclusive posession of the means of human prosperity are not the same thing.
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Dec 16, 2019 23:49
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Whatever you call it, the way society currently runs is resulting in a large amount of productive capability being wasted, both in terms of wealth accumulating at the top as it is extracted from all the levels below by the way private ownership works, and also with private ownership and the wealth extraction motive being the driver for what productive capacity is applied towards. Which is to say we're all making stupid poo poo because what matters is that any poo poo is made and sold to facilitate the wealth extraction process. Being as this process is literally killing the planet it's very, very soon going to be absolutely necessary to change it, because if the people at the bottom start dying in droves then there's no capacity for growth left. If you can't extract raw resources from the global south any more then that collapses a large amount of the economy above it. And if you can't start directing industry towards less profitable but loving survivable methods of production, it's literally gonna collapse in on itself. So I don't see how the private ownership model can continue to function? Everything about it is unsuited to the world we will soon live in. It's not a moral argument any more, it's a practical one. The question is how effectively society can get ahead of the need to change to something else, thus far it's been "not at all" because the same ownership model also drives information availability and determines electoral outcomes. I can't tell you the perfect path forward or the destination but I don't see any desirable destinations that don't involve the elimination of private control of the means of production because that, ultimately, is the problem. I hope that somewhere the stars can align and someone can get a head start on the problem, and I hope that anywhere that can't will start to turn on the concept once it starts to fail, but society as it stands is structured around the perpetuation of that model of organization even to the point of its own self destruction, which it does in small scale every 10-15 years. I've suggested in UKMT that you can start by picking at current, visible failures of the private model. The US of course has its healthcare stuff, but there are countless small ways where private ownership fucks over people's lives, in housing, in job closures, in all sorts of little places. They don't have to be national policies but the more people you can get on board with the idea that we can, as a society, at least on a small scale, say no to the predation of private interests and make things that work for us, that opens doors for people to think about doing it on a bigger scale. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Dec 17, 2019 |
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Dec 17, 2019 01:28
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UnknownTarget posted:So I still don't agree that private ownership will go away, but we're talking about degrees of agreement here rather than total misalignment. With your last paragraph, are you suggesting that you pick these visible failures of the private model and lobby against them? What's a specific action here that you're thinking of or would like to see happen, even if a perfect world? Imagine a movie and play your idea out, I'd like to see what you're thinking. Housing sucks, rents too high, quality terrible, tenancy agreements not secure, take housing into state ownership, run as a service, not as a profit making model, offer secure tenancies, low rates, subsidize with tax revenue from a second house tax or something. Basically how it used to work in the UK before they privatized everything. The state ownership model works and solves a lot of the problems with private enterprise. Because the private problems are that it works only to maximise profit.
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Dec 18, 2019 16:33
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And you can look at the trajectory of the obama administration for the society-wide effects of trying to do left/liberal-nationalism. The nation is fundamentally a false concept, it doesn't actually make sense, so if you start trying to hammer out a coherent national identity you're gonna immediately find that a whole bunch of your population isn't on board with it, and they're gonna start fighting back. Especially if you try to do it in a country with a massive amount of latent inequality, because people who may have been soft-nationalist and right wing will interpret it as you trying to take it off them, and become much more nationalist and much more right wing. You can't build a democratic, unified nation full of inequality, you either have to suppress the democratic aspect or not sign on to the nationalist ticket. Because otherwise you'll just alienate everyone who doesn't share your idea of what the nation is or should be, and you make a huge amount of room for your political enemies to say any policies they don't like are an attempt by you to corrupt the nation. Liberal nationalism is easily the least practical option because "we are a nation with coherent ideological values" and "you should be free to have your own values and live how you like" are fundamentally incompatible. And by far the most open to attack from anyone and everyone.
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Dec 18, 2019 21:06
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:This is barely intelligible and it's hard to know what to pin down here, but suffice it to say that "the nation is fundamentally a false concept" is not how this works on the ground. Electoral politics is not like Left Internet Thunderdome and America means a lot to a lot of people – immigrants especially, try talking to them sometime! – it's deeply dumb to stomp on our own dicks by giving up America as a fundamentally broken and nonexistent concept while we're trying to win American elections. I am saying that the nation as a concept is inherently nonsensical, it means whatever you want it to mean to you. Trying to make it mean one thing to everybody means excluding some of the existing concepts of what the nation means, which are going to be extremely varied in a society with massive inequality. Thus, if you try to run on a nationalist ticket you've got to be prepared to exclude people who don't sign up to your idea of what the nation is. Which the right is perfectly willing to do! Because that's what it wants, it wants to drive out or suppress everyone outside of its definition of what the nation means and who it's for. But you can't do that as a liberal, you can't want to run a varied and pluralistic society which also has a definite and prescriptive concept of nationhood, because you aren't willing to stamp out your detractors, because stamping out the detractors is fundamentally incompatible with your platform, and also your supporters do not control enough of the votes and other parts of the power structure, to keep you in power. Whether or not the nation means things to people is irrelevant, it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. And if you try to make it mean that, that's how you get the tea party and the #resistance. Both appeal to their own personal notions of what America means, both would claim exclusive posession of the soul of the nation, neither one commands a compelling majority, though the right is doing better. I would suggest because they're more willing to really go whole hog with the exclusionary nature of coherent nationalism. As a concept it fits the right far better than it does the socially liberal center. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 22:19
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:Yes, defining a nation is inherently exclusionary. No, that doesn't preclude progressives from defining America, because then all we're excluding is committed assholes and we don't need them to win. Progressives should make the definite and prescriptive concept of American nationhood our varied and pluralistic society. You're acting like that's a fundamental contradiction and it's not. In fact, the left's unwillingness to do this is a major reason it has failed to control votes and levers of power. I am saying that it tried that with Obama and what it did was produce a committed right wing reaction, which the center was not truly willing to stamp out, because stamping out all dissenters is not compatible with the permissive attitude of the socially progressive wing. You're not just excluding committed assholes, you're also excluding all the not-so-committed assholes who are more receptive to the committed rear end in a top hat propaganda machine (which liberal society won't, even can't, stamp out) than they are to yours. You're radicalizing them against you because they probably weren't particularly on board with your position to begin with and definitely aren't if you start talking about trying to spread it. They may have been content to leave your position as a problem for the parts of they country they don't have anything to do with, but if you start trying to really push it, they're the kind that works themselves into a frenzy at the prospect of a gender neutral bathroom in their small town or whatever. Because again, the idea of a socially progressive and tolerant government aggressively stamping out regressive social attitudes is nonsense, you don't get something like that, what you get is "well they're entitled to their opinion too we can't be too harsh about it" because that's a massive section of the socially progressive movement. It's full of people who actually really care about "the discourse" and poo poo. If you start talking about doing away with that then you're really gonna start running out of support. I do not believe there is a majority anywhere for mandatory social progressivism. It's like saying why don't LGBT advocacy groups just seize control of the government and implement their desired reforms? That's clearly nonsense, instead those reforms are piggybacked onto a nondescript "tolerant" agenda that is very gentle about telling people everywhere in the country that they have to be A OK with all of it. And this, of course, limits how good the reforms can get, and is also why there is a growing reaction in many cases, because the tolerant center that makes up the majority of the electoral support will allow that to happen in the name of discourse. You can't look at the history of social progress in the USA and think "well clearly there's a huge appetite here for aggressive social reform by the central government" because the whole thing is a history of the most delayed, half assed crawl towards something vaguely decent that tends to stabilize just past the point of staving off armed rebellion. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 22:33
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I mean you're not really giving me much to work with? I don't think there is a functional voting majority for radical social progress in the vein of the steps needed to end the majority of forms of racist discrimination in the US, or full LGBT/women's equality. Some economic programs, sure! But then of course you're stuck with the political system which does have a massive amount of entrenched opposition to them. I think you're much more likely to have success with an economic program among voters than a civil rights style one, but whether you can get that past the political system is another question. I'd also question what that has to do with nationalism, because fundamentally you're declaring war on the most powerful elements of the US when you do that. To say nothing about the obvious problems with nationalist conceptions of economics which tend to very quickly devolve into excluding people who don't meet the accepted criteria of whatever nation you're doing it in. The economic argument's strength is that it isn't rooted so much in abstract concepts of nationalism, it's rooted in the fact that everyone has a poo poo job, everyone struggles to afford healthcare. These are unifying, rooting experiences that you can address in a lot of people. If you start muddying it up with nationalist ideas I think you're weakening your argument, not strengthening it. I'm not "absolutely terrified" of "a few racists" I'm telling you that you can look at the state of the political landscape and see that a dangerous number of people are racist or sexist or homo/transphobic to a greater or lesser degree and likely will not support a radical program to improve that situation. And even if there was the majority of the actual politicians you'd be using to try to do it, will not support an "intolerant of intolerance" platform because they're politicians and politicians trend towards being miserable fence sitters, especially "progressive" ones. I do not share your view that there is a secret majority of people who would agree that "diversity makes America great". You can advocate for a radical improvement, and indeed you should, but I think it's a mischaracterisation to suggest that it's secretly very popular and especially to suggest that you can run on a nationalist platform to put that idea across. UnknownTarget posted:Thread right now: "we should fix the country" "lol the concept of country is literally meaningless". This is sure to present a way forward for progressive politics and is in no way bullshit leftist wankery that only serves the poster's egos. The concept of a country is not meaningless, but the concept of the nation is a lot more complex than the legal jurisdiction of the government, and is also entirely ideological. The country is a thing that exists, the nation is a thing that exists in the heads of millions of people and most of the concepts of it do not line up very well outside of vague platitudes. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 23:12
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I don't think, for example, you would win a majority campaigning on reparations, shorter prison sentences, major police reform, self ID, a commitment to closing the wage gap or a proposal to solve the systemic inability of the judicial system to handle cases of sexual assault. Despite all of those things being good and important. You might be able to do some of them incidentally but I would be surprised if they would motivate people to vote, or that they're the kind of thing you could get past politicians. The key problem if you're trying to do this nationalistically, a lot of those things are things the right would, probably successfully, argue against from a christian/american values angle, clearly you hate cops, love perverts and criminals, hate the free market, love big government etc. They're the kind of thing that the right is likely to turn into a successful attack against your position and candidate. You would need to be confident that either there is secretly a lot of support for them (and that that support is going to come out and vote for you) or alternatively that you can control the media conversation to make them not come up too much. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 23:42
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:Or you build support. This is called leadership. I mean I think that in electoral politics the media and poo poo plays a huge part? If you learn absolutely nothing from the corbyn campaign I would strongly suggest that if you cannot control the media they will dogpile you into the dirt no matter how actually good your platform is. If you're suggesting things outside electoral politics then yes, you can do things on smaller scales to build support for positions but that takes a very long time to pay off and is also in many ways incompatible with electoral politics, because electoral politics is, as noted, also a giant jobs machine for centrist wankstains and they don't like the idea of being beholden to a bunch of lefty organizations that operate independently.
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Dec 19, 2019 22:22
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UnknownTarget posted:Ok, how will this directly help to create path forward for progressive politics? You sort of need to have a functional theory of how society operates if you want to suggest how to make changes to it effectively..? It's like asking "how will the haynes manual help me fix my car?"
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Dec 19, 2019 22:26
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There ultimately aren't any elements of the nation that the left can co-opt without diluting its own message because its message is fundamentally anti-nationalist, and if it tries to be nationalist it stops being leftist in the sense that it stops being able to address the problems in people's lives, because many of those are caused by nationalism. Particularly if you're trying to claim previous nationalist efforts as your own, you run into the problem that when you get down to it they weren't really that concerned with people's welfare either. And further if you feed that kind of thinking you set yourself up for the right to do it better, because they really can go all in on nationalism. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 03:55
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It's easy to imagine only if you don't think about it much. Because the reality is national projects which focus on "strength" and "leadership" become, through the filtering effects of the structure of the nation state, simply top down rule by an uncaring elite and pointless and ultimately ineffective warmongering and draconian domestic policy. Because those things already exist, they're already latent in the structure of our countries, either you want to root them out and solve the problems they cause, or you want to appeal to them to win elections, and continue to perpetuate them and their problems. It is, in fact, near impossible for me to imagine what you're describing because I understand that the nation does not care about me or anyone else, I can not imagine a caring or generous nation, such a thing does not exist and never has. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 04:59
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I would probably suggest that national identity is in direct opposition to class identity in a way that many other identities are not. Because alot of identities are formed out of shared disempowerment, nationalism is exactly the opposite of that unless you're like, a former african colony looking to throw off the yoke of europe. But as far as it applies to most of us nationalism is a constructed, fundamentally inconsistent and incoherent identity that exists entirely to make working class people see themselves as part of the same thing as their oppressors. It's perhaps most clearly the case for white nationalism and fascism generally which tries to tell people that the reason your boss would kill you as soon as look at you if it made him richer is because of foreigners/black people/feminism/whatever else is clearly not the problem but which might potentially contribute to anti-nationalist and anti-capitalist sentiment. Because those other forms of identity are quite compatible with leftism, because they represent systems of oppression that intersect with capitalism and you need their input to solve those problems.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:47
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Not all other forms of identity are compatible no, but I think that intersectional politics among the left is a far more coherent concept than is left-nationalism. And a lot of the people who want do left-nationalism make intersectionality the thing they're explicitly campaigning against, because they're easy targets and traditionally also they're groups that other nationalists hate and persecute anyway. And also left-nationalists are generally assholes too. 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.
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Dec 23, 2019 06:06
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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? Don't throw people under the bus and I think the left does quite well on presenting a united front. To the point that the right likes to try extra hard to represent us as being a bunch of effete liberals who don't know about t'real struggles of t'working man in t'factory who only eats racism and dripping.
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Dec 23, 2019 06:41
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I mean yeah there's people who will have yelling matches on twitter, but I think during the election the left presented a very united front, the only wobble I can think of was re: the GRA reform stuff because the leadership did go a bit... suspicious with their takes on the subject. It's a legitimate concern cos that's people's welfare on the line there and if they're giving their time and money to the campaign they deserve to be represented, even absent the moral obligation. Since the loss there's been a lot more arguing but that's what this time is for, people held a lot of it in for the campaign precisely to present a united front when it really mattered, but now is the time to start picking apart the loss and air your grievances, so that they hopefully won't come up the next time.
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Dec 23, 2019 07:15
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I find the idea of suggesting there could be a movement in the US to hold the state to account in a manner similar to the nuremburg trials post WW2 quite funny, given the US's role in paperclipping a whole shedload of nazis out of Germany so that they wouldn't face justice and could help prop up its own military capabilities lol.
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Dec 24, 2019 04:23
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And I dispute that you can or should "skip the details" when "skipping the details" leads you to characterise the invasion and forcible regime change of a country by exterior powers who were completely willing to profit off its atrocities while claiming to be ideologically opposed to everything it stood for, as a self-generated grassroots revolution against the power structure in said country. Denazification in Germany was largely imposed from outside. And really only to the degree that it was actually useful to the people doing it. A lot of people who were active in the nazi administration were still in various levels of the government on both sides of the iron curtain for a long time afterwards even if you ignore the efforts made to capture and co-opt various numbers of them to fuel the superpowers. So I don't get your point? It appears to be "well that happened, therefore this other, entirely different thing could happen" because there is virtually nothing in common between the process by which nazi germany became current germany, and the process of a country actually initiating internal transformative justice through the existing process of its own political structure. Note that this is not to say that the nazis wouldn't have likely collapsed to internal pressures in time but specifically claiming that the process of the second world war and what came after is applicable to domestic politics in our countries today is just... I do not understand it at all? The process you are describing is in no way at all "self cleaning" and I don't get what you seem to think efforts to organize for justice are at the moment? I also don't get what you think the effects of turning in on itself whenever it comes into contact with the power structure (which again, I characterise as being inherently "dirty" to use your analogy) would be? Movement gains traction, movement becomes established, movement tries to effect change through the power structure, becomes corrupt, leaders ousted, nothing is done, movement tries same process again? The reason movements become corrupt through contact with the power structure is that the alternative is that they lose the ability to do things through the power structure because they can't engage with it. In which case what you're advocating for is something that doesn't even try to use the existing power structure because it's inherently damaging to the cause. Do you have some mechanism by which this repeating self-purge would actually change the power structure? Because I don't see one. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Dec 24, 2019 |
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Dec 24, 2019 04:57
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I would suggest that the most comprehensive leftist position is that the definition of "the elite" is that they aren't held to the same laws as the rest of us because otherwise they wouldn't be "elite" and the idea that a society can exist in this perpetual stalemate where they exist but have no undue power is farcical, and that society must instead be organized in such a manner that they do not exist. They mustn't be destroyed because that's better, they must be destroyed because that's literally the only way it can possibly work in the long run, you cannot have a society organized so that there are a privileged few with all the power but at the same time they only use it for everyone's benefit. What you're arguing is that philosopher kings are a real and good way to govern. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 02:33
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If you think that you have the capability to fight people with more power than you repeatedly and bend them to the law, it seems weird to me that you think that's preferable to just... making it so they don't keep appearing. Like the idea that you can keep fighting the people in charge and winning and that's good and sensible, but making it so you don't need to keep doing that is not even conceivable, that's pretty silly if you ask me. Because I would suggest the latter is by far the easier option.
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Dec 26, 2019 02:59
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asdf32 posted:Please describe your classless society. Like instead of having this weird class of ultra rich sex weirds in charge, we just... don't? And I don't know how to get there but then I'm not the one claiming that we can keep them as ultra rich sex weirds but use the law to make them... good ultra rich sex weirds?
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Dec 26, 2019 03:08
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UnknownTarget posted:Because human nature dictates they will always appear. In a Marxist system, the elites are the central planners or the well-connected in the government. In a socialist system, they are similar. In a capitalist system, they are the wealthy and well-connected. Maybe the reason the US government works the way it does is actually because it was written up by a bunch of rich slavers who wrote something that would make them happy and they didn't actually know anything about human nature and weren't paragons of philosophy. UnknownTarget posted:Wow, powerful, cutting. Deep. "How about we just don't have rich people ever again?". What does "people of all classes need to be equal before the law" mean? What effect is it going to have, what problems is it going to solve, how do you square it with the effect that money and power has on one's relationship to the law? Because I am assuming your intent is to use the law to make people better components of society because that's the most charitable interpretation I can infer for why you want to do it. I assume you're not just suggesting it for fun? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 03:10
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NovemberMike posted:It's a list that has nothing to do with actual material conditions of the working class. A lot of it's also really nebulous stuff that doesn't a serious policy proposal out there. This sort of thing is a big part of the reason why leftists lose the working class, they create a bunch of divisive pet projects where even if people aren't against the idea they will disagree on implementation details or priority. Uh, buddy I dunno if you know but like, the working class includes a shitload of black people, women, prisoners and would be targets of cops, trans folk, and rape victims... In fact I would suggest all of those groups are disproportionately working class. You must have an interesting definition of the what "the working class" is if you think none of those things have any bearing on us.
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Dec 26, 2019 03:15
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asdf32 posted:All actually functioning societies have people “in charge” of government and institutions and they will always be a form of elite. All modern societies do because they are all built on turning people into productive tools to serve the interests of those who are in charge, often to the detriment of the people being used that way, yes. In no small part because this form of society is particularly adept at killing other forms of society (and at the rate we're going, itself) This does not make it desirable, "natural", or good unless you're some kind of social darwinist. UnknownTarget posted:I think the path forward for progressive politics is to actually engage with concrete action that creates visible results, rather than endless theoretical committee debates. The advantage that conservative politics has over progressives is, I think, that it is easy to ground conservatism in reality. They deal with the real and the actionable. Stop this thing from happening, keep those people out, etc. You appear to be suggesting that action, any action, is all that matters, doesn't matter if it makes any sort of sense or what it achieves, only that you do something. Which, uh, I'm not sure that's any better than theorywanking? Also I find being accused of liberalism quite offensive. NovemberMike posted:How does reparations help trans people get hormone therapy? How does police reform help a starving mother feed her children? You just fragment things until there's no hope for solidarity. Your list isn't things that I'm necessarily against, but if you don't even have one item in there about the primary class struggle then you're part of the problem and you should do some searching. Perhaps all of those things are aspects of the primary class struggle. There would be a reason I listed all of them together because they're all important parts of it. Also I'm arguing with some sort of liberal about electoral politics so like, clearly "destroy the class system" isn't a thing that's on the table through that process right now. But I think that all of those things must be parts of a comprehensive left platform because they're all aspects of class struggle. I do believe though that class action is easier if people have some sort of secure base from which to act, so most things that improve the conditions of the working class help us. If fewer of us were in prison then we might have more people available to organize with, and victory through organizing helps show people that it works. I also was specifically arguing in the context of things that are less popular while still being important because they're problems that affect people who are demonized by the media, but I think that standing in solidarity with people in that position and advocating for their welfare is an important part of building class solidarity. If you ignore those things then they're not going to stand with you when you need them to. Essentially I would characterise racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, nationalism, all sorts of -isms as methods through which class oppression manifests, as weapons for the powerful to use against the powerless, and I don't think that ignoring them or worse, trying to pander to them, is productive? They should be opposed and the struggles against each of them should not be viewed as separate from each other or from class struggle as a whole. I don't think you can punch through to the root of the problem without cutting away the branches first, because if you don't address those problems they're going to function as intended as tools to divide and attack the working class. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 03:46
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I read it but I have trouble extracting meaning from it. Like "stop thinking about goals or methods or how society works we need to act to make things better now" just... doesn't make sense? How do you act without a goal, or without a theory of how society works? Again I ask what does "make everyone equal before the law" mean if you reject the idea that power and wealth disparity inherently makes that impossible? How do you go about it if you reject any sort of thinking about why people aren't equal before the law, what the law even does in society?
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Dec 26, 2019 04:07
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UnknownTarget posted:Like...no, not at all. OwlFancier, if you're having trouble extracting meaning from it but others aren't, maybe re-read the post without such a strong bias? You have skipped over the parts, repeatedly, where I've said that what I'm saying is that the issue is that elites aren't accountable for their actions and we (the people) need to find a way to change that. I do not understand how you propose to change that because as I said, the nature of wealth and power inherently implies control over the law. UnknownTarget posted:So far, if I was to summarize OwlFancier's argument, it's basically: Except that "being a robber" does not inherently imply control over the law. Wealth and power does inherently imply control over the system of law. Like you're saying that we should have wealthy and powerful people but they should just... not... have... power over the law... somehow. Do you see the disconnect? You are saying that the people you're saying should run our society should not have the power to... run our society..? Our entire society is structured to give people with wealth and power the ability to do as they please. Wealth buys you media control, media control buys you votes, votes buy you control over the law, even if you don't shortcut it and just literally buy representatives into office. I do not understand how you are proposing to make this just not happen in a way that is somehow less crazy than actually saying "we shouldn't have rich and powerful people at all" That's what wealth and power is for. That is definitionally what it is, the power to rule others, what power are you suggesting should be higher absent divine intervention? How do you propose to regulate that power? If you bend the powerful before the law they would no longer be the powerful. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 04:36
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Yes you're entirely correct, I believe that power disparity in society is inherently bad and unstable and that the necessary step to fix most of the problems in society has to be to eliminate that disparity, because you can't have power disparity without it breeding privilege. I don't have a comprehensive plan to achieve that because that's like, the whole effort of left politics for the last couple hundred years, but that's the only analysis of the state of the world that makes sense to me. I do not buy this idea that you can have some kind of competing governmental department system, because what would stop the people in charge of all the branches working together to help themselves and not others? They all come from the same echelon of society, they're all mostly rich white dudes, that's by design, that's the expression of wealth and class in society, and I also don't think that's it not working as intended because again, the US was founded by rich white slavers, it's not surprising they'd think that was a good basis for running a country. It works quite well for the rich white slaver class, not very well for anyone else. I can't summarise your argument very well at all because I don't understand it, it does not make internal sense to me and seems to rely on a conception of how society functions that I do not share or understand. If I had to try I guess I'd say "there will always be rich and powerful people and we need to make them fight each other and this will stop any one of them becoming the ultimate rich and powerful person, also this is different from the feudal system" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 04:51
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I disagree with the idea that 1. There will always be rich and powerful people, particularly on the levels we see today, because that is a relatively recent invention and the process by which their power is maintained is also relatively new, the idea that either are sustainable is highly disputable. And 2. That it is possible to meaningfully constrain a class of people if you are going to hand them all of the power. I do not need to be able to posit a comprehensive alternative to say that that argument is nonsensical by its own logic. Like I can say "Instead of having bosses to tell us what to do with our lives we could decide for ourselves what we want to do. Instead of being coerced to produce massive amounts of useless poo poo to satisfy the need of the wealthy to extract profit from the process of production and consumption without regard for the effects of production or consumption, we could instead decide what we want to produce democratically, and limit our production to things we need, and take the rest of our time to ourselves, to not work, to enjoy life, without destroying the planet or our bodies and minds in endless, useless production and consumption." But I think it is more useful to directly disagree with the things you're saying because they do not make sense. The reason you can state my position is because my position is extremely simple, conceptually. I have no idea what your postion is even conceptually, and the bits I do appear to understand don't make any sense. Like I get that you've said "everyone should be equal before the law" but you reject the idea that power and wealth is inherently unconstrainable by law because power and wealth definitionally gives you power over the law. So I disagree that you have proposed a credible suggestion for how the probem of unaccountable power can be fixed. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 05:29
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That may in fact be a necessary component of a just and sustainable society, yes. I would like for it not to be but I do think that the ability of people to cooperate in a humane fashion degrades over large distances and in large numbers. Technology can help with it to a degree but whether or not it's possible to have a large scale society which doesn't degrade into barbarism or not remains to be seen. You'd have to ask a cyberneticist about it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 13:06
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Beefeater1980 posted: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. No, we aren't doing that, the dismantling of worker's rights is capitalist endeavour, you can, and we did, make the case that people have a right to good things and that the state should provide those regardless of what capital wants and regardless of your nationality. The problem was that because people have had nothing but lovely neolibs from all parties for the past 40 odd years, they didn't believe it. Combined with obviously the media assasination campaign against the party and the leadership.
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Dec 27, 2019 02:46
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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? Also "everyone gets an average european quality of life guarnateed" is pretty loving utopian if you ask me, even ignoring the potential for that wealth to do far more without the inefficiency of capitalism creating wastage everywhere.
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Dec 27, 2019 06:21
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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.
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Dec 27, 2019 07:55
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I don't even think we need to get rich, I think the wealth currently in the country needs to be redistributed so that everyone can see how rich the country already is, and whose fault it really is that they spend so much of their time without access to it.
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Dec 27, 2019 08:38
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I sort of want to ask who's going to be keeping society going if everyone's living entirely off investment payments and not working 
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Dec 28, 2019 13:39
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And god knows that jumbo jets are a thing we definitely want to have in the future.
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Dec 28, 2019 20:59
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I think it's slightly funny that you'd view the idea that non-hierarchical modes of organization can't do some things as well as hierarchical ones can, as a bad thing. Because as I already pointed out, what hierarchies are particularly good at is murder, direct, systemic, or via externalities. Aviation is a good example of all three of those So I'm not personally too bothered by the suggestion that non hierarchical structures would be worse at some things because I think most of the things they'd be worse at are things we shouldn't be doing anyway. Not that I actually think aviation is one of those things alas, while generally bad I don't really see it as a thing that couldn't be done collectively. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Dec 28, 2019 |
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Dec 28, 2019 21:09
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