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There's already a leftism thread, but I think a key question you need to answer in this one is: what is "progressivism" as you have defined it? Leftists as I define them are generally in favor of a total reordering of our economic political landscape along socialist lines (ie, abolition of capitalism). "Progressive" can mean almost anything, but basically never socialism as an academic would understand it. One of the most common errors I see well-intentioned liberals making is that they there's some kind of ideological basis for political cohesion between people who want to end the immiseration of humans inflicted by capitalism and people who are fundamentally OK with the capitalist system but would like some foam edges put on the pointy bits (ie, we should have labor laws to prevent "abuse" but the concept of wage labor is not inherently abusive to them.) In reality, "left liberals" are just helping prop up a fundamentally exploitative system by trying to do enough to take the sting out of it to keep people from rising up against it, but no more. The most extreme version of the dichotomy is UBI. Left liberals/progressives look at UBI as a sort of holy grail by which everyone can gain enough benefit from capitalism that no one has to suffer utter deprivation. From the perspective of a leftist, UBI is a rat trap because it leaves the owning class in political control and forever holds the workers in bondage to them; UBI can be reduced at the whim of the political class, it can be cancelled, it can be means tested or otherwise sabotaged, revoked from enemies of the state, and otherwise continue to be used as a method by which the owning class holds the material survival of everyone else hostage for their own ends. It would be better than current state, but not good. So I think that "progressives" who don't want socialism, that is, the expropriation of capital from the owning class and its transfer to everyone either directly or by common trust, need to answer the question of what exactly are they for in an ideologically coherent way such that any rear end in a top hat can't cloak any form of liberal charlatanism in progressive language. Otherwise progressives will continue to suffer smackdown after smackdown where they are told that nothing is possible for years, and when enough pent up anger is released and demand for change is unleashed, yet another conservative liberal will easily seize control of the narrative and use "progressivism" to push through yet another handout to the owning class and call it a win.
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Nov 11, 2020 20:44
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Pussy Cartel posted:At this point, as far as I can tell "progressivism" is just a shifting of goalposts that's happened now that "liberalism" has gradually lost its former cachet in the anglosphere. People have finally started to realize that "liberalism" is too broad an umbrella to just cover everything left of "conservative," but even this new category completely obscures the serious rifts between people who are ultimately reformists that accept or even embrace capitalism on the one hand, and staunch anti-capitalists of various stripes on the other. This is a huge distinction that a lot of commentators and activists try to paper over by sticking with the word "progressive," but you can't ignore the serious differences between the two camps, and as long as people try to use "progressive" the way people used to use "liberal" there's going to be a lot of ideological confusion, and a lot of instances of infighting and arguments that won't make sense if everyone involved is just painted as being "progressive." One of the traps of progressivism and its ideological incoherence is that its proponents are very, very easily co-opted, bought off, and otherwise neutralized by the liberal consensus. Progressives have no ideological foundation on which to fall back to test a proposed policy or compromise, no sniff test to give a consistent yes or no to the questions, "is this good enough? is this really aligned with my values? will accepting this compromise move the polity closer to my goals, or will it expend whatever leverage I have for nothing and take me off the board?" So "progressivism," meaning "trying to improve peoples' lot in our society without fundamentally changing it" is a position without ideological grounding and thus literally anything can be spun as an acceptable compromise for the sake of harm reduction or incrementalist advancement of the agenda. When this type of floppy thinking encounters entrenched resistance, it generally falls over itself to give up the fight instantly since getting anything is at least better than getting nothing, right? So progressives will take what amounts to a pat on the head and go home at the first opportunity. This applies all the way from Elizabeth Warren stabbing Bernie in the back for what turned out to be nothing but some kind words down to the progressive Ferguson organizers getting quiet party and NGO apparatchik jobs where they may take meaningless corporate speaking gigs in peace and never bother the establishment again. The leftist Ferguson organizers ended up dead, of course, but
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Nov 12, 2020 00:01
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nah posted:To me it’s pretty simple. The expropriation of capital from the owning class isn’t going to happen. Running on that as a platform is foolish because it will be laughed off and brushed away. It’s equivalent to running on a platform of “world peace,” which may be the ultimate goal but what is even the point of talking about something that will just get you dismissed as an unserious political actor I'm not in this thread to debate you about whether seizing the means of production is or isn't ever going to happen, I was using it as a contrasting example of how you can pretty clearly identify who is and is not a socialist using some simple yes or no questions and no such clear lines exist around progressivism. If your goal is to spread the brand names and get any shambling corpse who can say the holy words elected, sure, I suppose that's a definition of success. If your goal is to actually get policy done, having content-free "labels" that mean literally anything and nothing is less than ideal. That said though, I'm really curious how you would even know what who is and isn't a charlatan? That's the point of what I posted above, that an ungrounded movement or political affiliation without any ideological basis is just going to float with the breeze and be appropriated by anyone who thinks they can profit by it to support any program that suits them. The progressive label can be applied to a giant insurance industry handjob as easily as M4A. Similarly with prosecuting killer cops for murder and defunding police vs paying killer cops extra to wear bodycams and go to bias training that does nothing. You can market anything as progressive.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:00
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enki42 posted:I don't think this is any less valid than approaching everything from a 100% ideological lens. It's perfectly coherent to say what you are for is reducing income inequality, ensuring a decent standard of living for everyone, etc. and utilizing whatever mechanisms help you achieve the actual results you want, regardless of what ideological framework they fit into. Yeah I'm not arguing that "I think we should improve society somewhat" is incoherent as a belief or, like, bad. I'm arguing that it's not sufficient to effect any change because it says nothing about the mechanism and scope of that change and almost anything that isn't obviously regressive psycho poo poo can be marketed as "improve society somewhat" and have some claim to truth, which makes the label useless as a tool for effecting change. OK, let's try a practical example. Is eliminating the SALT cap a progressive policy position?
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Nov 14, 2020 01:59
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Ytlaya posted:
This is why progressives are incapable of effecting change and continuously get Charlie Brown'd by the establishment. Their ideology (liberal capitalism) demands things (wage labor, capital accumulation) that are incompatible and destructive to the ends they believe they are fighting for (reduced income inequality, everyone gets a decent living etc). You can fake it for a while through careful management until a crisis brings the entire house of cards down or simply externalize all the bloodletting as Norway does such that you can pretend for a while that the ends you want are capable of being produced by the means that you are blind to but use anyway, but that will always be a Sisyphean effort.
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Nov 15, 2020 01:25
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KVeezy3 posted:Leftist projects, by their very nature, require people to imagine new possibilities. How do you repackage ideas like Defund the Police or Prison Abolition into 'common sense' branding? You don't, you wage total war on the "common sense" label as being the common sense of the owning class that has shown decisively that it has condemned the rest of us to death. Walling yourself within the norms of a status quo that kills millions without mercy is unsurprisingly just going to result in millions more being killed without mercy. I'm not saying this as an ideologue but as a pragmatist. Is what's possible is defined by what common sense under capitalism is comfortable with, we're truly boned.
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Nov 15, 2020 20:19
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KVeezy3 posted:Well sure, no one's saying people shouldn't need convincing. But the point is that, during this dialogue, eventually you'd have to get to the proposed leftist solution which inherently involves leaving 'common sense' behind to take an ideological stand. The problem of progressivism is that, as you can see in this thread, its adherents want to fight on the grounds of being non-ideological and advancing "common sense reform." It's like trying to build a house on top of sand; the ideology is there, it's just unacknowledged and therefore its destructiveness to what progressives want to build on top of it is unaddressed. When progressives have an electoral victory and the first few bricks of the progressive agenda are laid, they fall apart, whether by lobbyists or conservative democrats intentionally or progressives themselves being insufficiently ambitious as to what's possible during the legislative drafting phase, which sabotages the programs being built by co-opting the "common sense" or "this is what's possible" framings that progressives love, or soon after when the progressive tide ebbs for a moment. Just look at Obamacare; a lot of progressives still point to it as some kind of victory even as medical debt and bankruptcy continues to rise, health outcomes continue to collapse, and the theoretical goal of the bill (to make healthcare affordable to everyone by forcing less risky people into the pool) has totally failed. The only measure of success that actually shows it to be a win (more people who technically have health insurance) was fabricated by insurance industry lobbyists! The problem progressives don't want to acknowledge is that they are fighting on ground from which they cannot win. You can't write a good healthcare program with the help of the insurance industry. You can't end racist, murderous policing with cops at the table. You can't pass a legitimate solution to climate change with input from Shell and Chevron. You can't fight COVID when the Chamber of Commerce gets a say. Our most pressing problems cannot by solved via a compromise with the incumbent players. The solutions are only attainable when the power of those incumbents is utterly broken. And progressivism, by failing to address that the liberal capitalist ideology it silently accepts will always empower those incumbents, implicitly limits itself to that kind of compromise and the resulting failure to achieve the ends that progressives will endlessly pursue but never reach. You might as well talk about ending the injustice of slavery without being willing to accept first that the economic and political power of slavers must be destroyed.
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Nov 15, 2020 22:05
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Kreeblah posted:Isn't that exactly what the approach was before the Civil War? It failed hard, then, too. No, that was the approach during the Civil War. Also, another "progressive" has shed her mask now that its usefulness as a marketing tool has faded https://twitter.com/queeralamode/status/1333465105556672512
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Nov 30, 2020 23:26
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Sucrose posted:I feel like a major problem with the left is that once you go far enough left all energy for forward movement gets sucked away by people like this assuring you that trying to make things better is hopeless because Capitalism itself isn't being destroyed. Making things better is entirely possible; spreading the labels of a content-free "movement" to as many wreckers and ambitious clout-chasers as possible in order to chase a triangulated electoral win that puts people who believe in nothing into power doesn't make things better. enki42 posted:Doesn't ranked choice tend to favour compromise, centrist parties? (and therefore encourages a very small number of "big-tent" parties that are marginally acceptable to everyone). That's always how it's been viewed in Canada, where most folks advocate for proportional representation instead so that non-centrist viewpoints get a voice and there's fewer opportunities for majority governments with minimal checks on their power. Ranked choice serves the very important job of allowing people to vote their conscience and for the guy who built the concentration camps simultaneously, knowing that the latter guy will get into power but they can proclaim loudly that they didn't put him at rank 1 and that makes them A Good Person.
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Dec 2, 2020 18:12
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Somfin posted:And then realising that enough people did that and now their conscience vote candidate got in and oh no they're building low income housing and lowering my fabrege property values Yeah that's definitely how it's panned out in such leftist paradise states as *checks notes* Australia
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Dec 3, 2020 05:06
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Sucrose posted:Considering that Australia has one of the highest Inequality-Adjusted HDI scores on the planet, I'm not sure what point you were possibly trying to make here. I was making a joke that ranked choice voting has not given Australia the slightest pause in its pursuit of exclusionary policies against migrants and ethnic minorities and the indigenous but go off
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Dec 3, 2020 08:19
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Sucrose posted:Again, you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Racist immigration policies are bad. So is letting thousands of people die without health coverage. In the United States, we have both. And you're attributing UHC to ranked choice voting here? e: Sucrose posted:Unless you can make the argument that adopting ranked choice voting would somehow make the US more racist, it's not an argument against ranked choice voting. I actually think rcv is more or less irrelevant to outcomes but in countries without it, it acts as one of those bug zapper policy ideas for wonky liberals to tilt at that serves to suck air out of the room for anything that might actually make someone's life better. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 08:37
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Ytlaya posted:Posts like that are kind of disturbing, because they're essentially defining the impact of capitalism by the standard of living of the middle class in the world's wealthiest nations, while ignoring the fact that this standard is largely maintained through massive wealth extraction from the global south (and the whole issue of causing climate change). It's basically a view of capitalism that doesn't really account for all the harm it causes, because those things are mostly out of sight and out of mind (or at best viewed in the abstract). Progressives say "this is what's possible," drawing a box around the possible political outcomes to what is achievable by a politician doing nothing but saying "I agree with this," working their way through the political apparatus, and getting advertising funding from the usual entrenched suspects who have money to burn on advancing their political interests. That makes the range of possible outcomes basically, what we're doing now, what we're doing now with more shouted racism, or what we're doing now with less shouted racism. When that box excludes stuff like closing concentration camps, housing or feeding the destitute, protecting minorities from getting murdered by security forces, or constraining the ability to capital to immiserate more and more people every year, I mostly get it. Because to the average white progressive with a membership card for the PMC, those things are totally abstract, so you can negotiate them away and it doesn't really matter to you. Those objectives can be cast as unobtainable and forgotten when you go home at the end of the day. Don't let the enemy be the perfect of the good, right? At least the progressive option is saying they're against Nazis. What's truly baffling to me is how that same way of thinking is just as easily applied to an existential threat like climate change. In this case the perfect, that's the enemy of the good, is your future kids growing up in a world without a global tide of famine- and drought- driven war driving the rise of pseudo-states like ISIS, a never-ending flood of desperate refugees, and "extreme" weather events that seem more normal every year. It's your grand kids growing up without famine here in the US because the midwest and plains have been devastated by drought, an uninhabitable gulf coast, and fires that burned every forest on the west coast to ash before they were born. The Democratic party has implicitly accepted those outcomes with its policy platform and presidential nominee, and no amount of PMC money is going to save you from that poo poo. Progressivism is to accept the domain of possible outcomes to be what is possible and not possible under the current state of American electoralism, and under capitalism more broadly, even though that everything within that domain entails mass death on a scale that's basically unimaginable to a middle class white liberal within the next 50 years or so.
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Dec 6, 2020 09:26
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Sucrose posted:Progressives are the people out there actually getting poo poo done, while those further to the left sit and wax philosophical like this about how liberals “refuse to take responsibility for a single life doomed in the process” as if the actual alternative to liberalism in the real world was Leftism and not social-service-cutting conservatism. Describing two flavors of neoliberalism as the two halves of the sum total of possibilities in this country is basically the point here. There aren't two halves with a neat red team that wants to do bad things and a blue team that wants to do good things. There is an economic order that requires blood to operate, and two culturally distinct political factions of a neoliberal consensus that take turns seeing that the necessary blood is procured. More practically speaking, Obama also blew kids up with drone strikes, cut social services, increased detention and deportation, gutted the post office, enabled torturers, passed a healthcare bill that fed the entire country to the insurance industry to be cut up for parts, opened new petroleum reserves to exploitation, and lifted the flood gates to finance capital immiserating millions. Because that's what the political economy he defends demanded of him. It's the same one you're defending now.
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Dec 7, 2020 08:42
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OwlFancier posted:What is actually happening in front of our eyes is what makes a lot of us extremely hostile to the idea that liberals are interested in progressing anything. I don't doubt their sincerity in wanting the world to be a nicer place, but defining "what is possible" to mean "what can be achieved via the electoral process in the US" is an absolutely blinkering ideology. The way our system is structured and the incumbent players within it more or less ensures that the range of nationally viable elected politician runs from "far-right chud" to "neoliberal ghoul." And that's where progressives fail - because they would rather sacrifice the outcomes they want than disrupt the system that supports them. Adam Curtis put it this way: quote:And I think that the question liberals and the left have to face at the moment is a really such a difficult question, which is, do you really want change? Do you really want it? Because if you do, many of them might find themselves in a very uncertain world, where they might lose all sorts of things. I mean, what we're talking about, in many cases is people who are sort of at the center of society at the moment; they're not out on the margins, they would have a lot to lose from real political change because it really would change things in the structure of power. To OwlFancier's point about what's happening right in front of us, and to bring this out of the realm of abstract outcomes that liberals don't have to care about because those outcomes don't affect them personally in a material way, look at this map for a moment:  Liberals and progressives need to start seriously asking themselves whether those tens of millions of people are going to give a single hot gently caress about whether "don't let us starve," "don't let us freeze," and "don't shoot us" can win a Democratic primary. Because if there is no electoral channel to actually achieve the material outcomes that ten or twenty percent of the country needs to survive the next year, people may not lay down and die in the gutter to satisfy your standards of reasonableness and decorum.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:32
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Sucrose posted:What else can we realistically do about it? Stop voting for it. I mean, for a start.
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Dec 8, 2020 23:35
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Capitalism has so successfully impoverished such a wide swath of younger generation that they reject it out of necessity. This is also why fascism is rising again. Capitalism is going to turn everyone but capitalists into mulch and the only people who don't see that are the people who are last line to go into the chipper: mostly white mostly affluent people who are protected by the status quo and identify as centrist, liberal, progressive, conservative, or ever-so-slightly different variations on those. The circle around "protected by the status quo" shrinks every year - it has to, because that's how capitalism works. What's changed is that since 2000, in the US, the rate of shrink has started to drastically accelerate. We've gone from "the median standard of living goes up to at least" to "the mean standard of living goes up at least" to "things are getting worse, faster, every year, for most people by any objective measure we can think of" in the span of a generation. Everyone who was just barely keeping their head above water after 2008 is now at risk of getting thrown into the street and under our system, the people being made homeless right now will never recover. People who were comfortable but not affluent are now barely keeping their heads above water, and they too will never recover. And the people who were already affluent - who had a lot of liquid wealth to invest in reaping the capital dividend - are the winners. Stonks go up. Real estate go up. The rich are richer than ever. That's how the machine works. For everybody else, it's obvious the wheels are coming off and they're grasping around for whatever answer comes to hand. For people who can claim membership in some kind of protected/privileged group but feel that protection being threatened, they'll grab at something that preserves all their privileges at any cost.
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Dec 10, 2020 22:45
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Eric Cantonese posted:I'm starting to dream about a left-leaning investment fund that engages in some kind of passive or socially responsible investing and then uses the funds to support candidates who want good things and not just capitalist donor pet projects. The problem with trying to do election funding for progressive candidates with investment dividends (which is basically what you're describing) is that a) you need a huge pile of investment capital relative to the good you do with the dividend, which means you're reinforcing the capitalist mode and then using a little bit of the squeezings to "support candidates" which is itself not really a goal that helps people; and b) managing that pile of investment resources under our legal system is going to require a philanthropic foundation or similar organization and Full Yikes to the idea that won't be riddled with PMC types looking to enrich themselves off of the dividend just like every single other organization of this type. Cpt_Obvious posted:You seem to be describing an ideologically driven charity, and I agree 100% with it. It's not that if the purpose of the money is to get people elected. It's just another rube goldberg machine whose wheels and pistons whir and clank but the ultimate outcome is just the same "vote blue" advertising money as we already have.
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Dec 11, 2020 17:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:See, I was more imagining a charity-style political party that also ran political candidates under BOTH party primaries. I think if the goal is to build a political party whose primary means of action is direct mutual aid and secondary means of action is electoralism, that's a very different animal than an investment fund that helps elect progressives.
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Dec 11, 2020 18:00
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This is an excellent point. Without proper definitions, Biden cannot be excluded from the label "progressive", nor can Diane Feinstein and her ilk. Hell, if you really want to push the envelope we could include Donald Trump! Josh Hawley is campaigning for stimulus checks with Bernie Sanders. Sounds pretty progressive to me.
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Dec 11, 2020 20:28
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Couldn’t you just replace progressive with leftist and this satire would be just as valid? No because leftists have an ideology by which you can judge whether a person's positions and actions fit. Like you could call Josh Hawley a communist and go "ha ha same thing" but communism has a pretty specific policy agenda and he's not in favor of any of it. "Progressive," being a factional label without ideological underpinnings, has no such guard rails. Just because there's different flavors of "left" doesn't mean any of them are as content-free as "progressive;" that's more or less what divides leftists from progressives.
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Dec 12, 2020 07:50
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Ytlaya posted:Well, it depends upon what your goal is. If your goal is "to feel good and optimistic about politics," then it suits you pretty well to believe that the Democratic Party is full of progressive politicians. This is actually a timely take for this stupid m4a floor vote drama and all the progressives putting Jimmy Dore on blast because he won't shut up about holding progressive pols accountable via hardline refusal to support the Dems' regular order of business if they don't advance progressive policy positions. If you just want to feel like good things are happening and a warm empty optimism, the exercise of power (that is, holding Nancy Pelosi's speakership hostage to achieve an objective like forcing the Dems on record with an m4a vote) is the opposite of what you want. It's incredibly easy to just sit back, relax, and watch nothing happen for literal decades as society rots out if you don't actually believe in anything other than the nebulous idea that things should be better somehow (but not if that means inconveniencing or annoying the people who are actively working to make them worse).
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Dec 20, 2020 00:44
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HootTheOwl posted:Who are the nine other votes that are defecting with her to make this possible? Time for any of these 94 content free "progressives" to prove that they're worth a drat I guess! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Progressive_Caucus
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Dec 20, 2020 06:58
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HootTheOwl posted:I'm just saying the flowchart missed that step in it's projections. You're mistaking this for a test of Nancy Pelosi or the democrats writ large that requires progressive support as an input, I think. It's not. It's a test of these do-nothing progressives themselves and whether they ought to receive a single finger lifted in their support ever again.
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Dec 20, 2020 22:32
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Pedro De Heredia posted:It's not a test of anything. It's just the typical "trying to win the only battle you can, because you are miles away from the one that matters" nonsense. As far as I can tell the dem progressives are so scared of the idea that they might wield power on behalf of the people who put them in office at the expense of the people burning the world down that they'd rather accuse their base of "betraying the movement."
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Dec 21, 2020 18:57
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