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The main barrier to progressive politics (probably better to just call them "left-wing/socialist" since "progressive" is extremely vague) is that the wealthy control the vast majority of the media, which shapes how people view the world. I don't think there's any guaranteed way to win, but I think that if the left does manage to take power they should use that power to purge the right-wing elements in their society (namely through eliminating the wealthy and the laws that allow people to passively profit from merely owning things). As long as the wealthy exist, it's impossible to really achieve any sort of meaningful democracy, so there's a necessity to use some level of heavy-handed/"authoritarian" methods just to remove the overwhelming advantage wealthy people/organizations enjoy. The goal of getting rid of the wealthy isn't so much a matter of "getting rid of bad people" as it is needing to eliminate a class of people. Obviously there's no "evil gene" in wealthy people - it's just that the condition of being wealthy makes a person evil by necessity*. So it's not enough to figuratively (or literally) guillotine the wealthy - you need to ensure that no one can take their place. The message shouldn't be "wealthy people are assholes" so much as "wealthy people should not be allowed to exist," and that's an important distinction because if you're motivated by the former then you'll inevitably lose your way when you encounter a nice-sounding or personable wealthy person. Without doing this, the wealthy will always enjoy a huge advantage because they can control political narratives through their control of the media. This is arguably even more the case in the modern world than it was in centuries past, since media is so incredibly pervasive now. If anything, I feel like the current left-wing surge in the US is largely due to the wealthy loving up and getting overconfident and letting a person like Bernie Sanders have a voice during the 2016 primary. * being wealthy is sort of similar to "being a murderer" or something, in the sense that it requires ongoing choices/actions - namely the choice to hold (and usually grow through rent-seeking or exploiting labor) wealthy. So it's basically synonymous with evil in the same way, even though rhetorically it's often treated like race or gender Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Dec 13, 2019 |
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Dec 13, 2019 04:11
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Bucky Fullminster posted:Really I think the most important thing is to eliminate the power of interest groups by eliminating political advertising. Level the playing field by giving all viable candidates a spot on a debate stage and a few pages of a newspaper and a bit of air time on the television over a few weeks. This would not be effective, because all media is effectively "political advertising" (and especially news media). People derive their political opinions from everything they see/hear, so as long as corporations are producing most of this content, people will internalize the messages that content directly or indirectly sends. The only true way to address this is to transform our society/economy such that the organizations that produce media are not owned and/or beholden to the wealthy.
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Dec 13, 2019 04:15
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Bucky Fullminster posted:I mean, yes, to an extent, but you can’t tel me that all those millions of dollars of ad buys don’t mean anything. They might make the difference between a Republican and a Democrat winning, but they aren't what determines the bipartisan status quo that causes most of the harm and suffering in our country and abroad.
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Dec 13, 2019 08:29
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Helsing posted:Historically the goal for the left was not to abolish a specific class but rather to abolish the 'mode of production', understood as a social totality that encompassed both political economy and culture. This goal has become so difficult to envision that people now retreat into talking about eliminating the 1% when in reality it was the social relations of production that were supposed to be the problem. I think that the only way to reliably prevent extreme wealth concentration without it inevitably reverting is to achieve the sort of genuine change you're alluding to here, so you're basically saying the same thing I am. The sort of "upper-middle class exploiting the bottom 50%" thing you describe would probably inevitably lead towards higher wealth concentration, since that's just the natural result of letting people profit off of ownership of assets and the means of production. Basically, currently existing rich people are broken beyond being fixable, but you also need to create a society where no one can ever become rich again, and that would require ending capitalism. Horizon Burning posted:Goons might not believe it, but the path forward begins with getting rid of LARPers like this. I disagree; it's obviously genuinely bothering a lot of the ruling class to see people talking about guillotines and poo poo on twitter. There's an actual useful effect to openly expressing such hatred. And it's also ultimately morally correct venting, which I think is fine. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Dec 14, 2019 |
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Dec 14, 2019 03:34
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Horizon Burning posted:Do you have a single fact to back that up? Like, how many failed elections is it going to take? They're so bothered they've won big victories in the US, UK, and Australia - with the latter they themselves thought was 'unwinnable!' Well, think of it this way - making wealthy people upset is inherently a positive thing, so the burden is on others to prove that it's somehow causing problems. And it seems to be common sense that angry voices contribute to a general sense of unrest that makes the ruling class feel less secure, even if it's impossible to really quantify the impact this has. In the case of this primary, for example, we have anecdotal evidence that the internet basically broke the brains of the younger staff for campaigns like Kamala Harris's, and Twitter specifically seems to have a pretty big impact on political media people. But really, the most important thing is that there's definitely no harm to it (and I'm kind of skeptical about the politics of anyone on the "left" who gets upset about angry language being directed towards the rich). Edit: And in the US specifically the left is unquestionably far stronger than at any point in decades. Granted, that's not saying much, but it at least exists now as something outside of the fringes. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Dec 14, 2019 |
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Dec 14, 2019 09:40
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UnknownTarget posted:Besides, you want to talk about useless? A bunch of people from different geographic areas (heck, different continents) talking about how much they're totally going to fight back, just like, when stuff gets bad enough. There's a difference between making a moral judgement and actually intending to do something yourself. When someone says that they think a terrible criminal deserves to die, that isn't a statement of "I plan to kill that criminal." It's an assertion that the person believes the individual is bad enough to deserve that punishment. This is what people mean when they talk about guillotining the rich and what have you. It isn't (usually, at least) a statement of "I will personally cut the heads off of people" but is instead a value judgement. Helsing posted:The problem is that no one seems to be able to actually articulate a plausible and compelling vision of how we could overcome the current 'mode of production'. In the absence of that unifying vision the left has decomposed into various competing interest groups and factions. The scale of the problem just seems too immense and there aren't any obvious models to emulate or strategies to attempt. Besides, the merger of 'the left' with various counter cultural groups and with students and academics over the last 50 years has produced a situation where many of the left's largest contemporary constituencies are extremely mistrustful of mass action and popular politics so even if a leftist mass movement somehow looked possible I think a lot of current leftist thought leaders and activists would probably be very uncomfortable with it. The majority current left just isn't oriented toward achieving tangible results in the real world and the reality of actually wielding any kind of power or influence would probably make them squeamish. Are you talking about the practicalities of "defeating" the status quo, or are you talking about even constructing a non-capitalist working society? The former is something that might be impossible without some complete societal collapse happening first, but the latter is something that it's at least easy to come up with some basic "rules" for, even if people might disagree on other details. Outlawing the ownership of things like land, buildings, or any other wealth-generating asset would go a long way. Otherwise it's obviously impossible to magically prove that a dramatic restructuring of society will be successful. But you can at least move in that direction and promote core values (like the idea that it's unethical to profit off of another person's labor, or that it's unethical to profit from merely owning things). edit: I feel like one of the core things necessary to have any sort of successful left-wing society is for ownership of land and real estate, or of businesses by anyone who isn't the business's labor, to be thought of in the same way people in our society think of slavery. These things need to become "common sense" ethical things. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Dec 15, 2019 |
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Dec 15, 2019 08:00
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UnknownTarget posted:These are all related and the idea that capitalism is not going to go away is correct. Capitalism is a very natural process. It's literally evolution, but in market form. This is nonsense. The idea that a person can legally own land (or real estate, or shares in a business, etc) is not some inherent property of nature. Those are things that require a government that will enforce them. Like many people, you are likely confusing "capitalism" with the concept of "markets/trade."
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Dec 16, 2019 23:34
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Helsing posted:Having a vague sense of the destination isn't the same as having a path forward and practical arguments aren't as separable from moral ones as we might like to think. It's literally impossible to provide a clear path forward for any goal that isn't accomplishable in the next few years, because to do so would require magically predicting the future (or at least to provide a path forward to the extent people are demanding it). My guess is that truly significant change won't be possible until society faces a greater crisis, simply because the wealthy have an overwhelming amount of power. But it will be necessary at some point, simply because climate change and the nature of capitalism to inevitably increasingly concentrate wealth will force the issue. Also, it's stupid to say "you can't advocate for things unless there's a clear short-term path to them." Someone could make the exact same argument against abolitionists in the US in the early 19th century. There wasn't a legislative path towards accomplishing that at the time, and it ended up requiring armed conflict, but that doesn't mean that abolitionists were somehow wrong. There's value to advocating for things even if current power structures oppose those things, whether the thing in question is slavery or rent seeking.
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Dec 17, 2019 19:34
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Helsing posted:The problem here is how to translate big picture goals into an actionable agenda that motivates people to fight. There has to be some guiding vision or set of principles that inform the left on how to use a victory and that allow it to survive temporary setbacks or defeats. Otherwise you're left with this idea that we should just sit around repeating the same ideas to the same tiny crowds and hoping that after the next crisis people will suddenly see the relevance and urgency of our ideas and that really there's nothing we can do to change anyway, we're already perfect and we just need to wait around for the rest of society to see the innate correctness of our analysis. How are you supposed to answer this, though? It is literally impossible to somehow prove that a particular strategy will be successful. Like I said previously, you could say the same thing about abolitionists - someone in that position wouldn't be able to magically prove that any particular political strategy will result in accomplishing the goal of freeing slaves in the future. When it comes to an idea like eliminating private ownership of capital, there's value to simply spreading the idea. Any individual doesn't somehow have the power to say "and we will reach this point by doing X, Y and Z." Just like some abolitionist in 1820 wouldn't be able to somehow give you an accurate path to freeing slaves in the South. It's enough in cases like this to simply say "the thing in question - whether it's slavery or private ownership of capital - is incompatible with a just society." Someone can try to involve themselves more with activism towards that end if they want, but there's nothing wrong with simply promoting the idea as a moral/ethical thing.
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Dec 19, 2019 22:25
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Also there's the fact that a very large portion of Americans (to use the US as an example) literally have negative net wealth. Maybe they managed to acquire some personal items that would be impossible to acquire in a poorer country, but it's not that clear that they're overall better off, especially if you're comparing them with a country with some sort of functional healthcare system.
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Dec 28, 2019 00:09
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