Well, I covered the rest of the spectrum and gave my own take, now to look at what the "leftists" have to say. This is gonna be one of those "quote paragraphs and respond" articles.
I have been told by liberals and progressives that the nation’s leading strikebreaker Joe Biden “knocked it out of the park” with his State of the Union Address last night. It was “Joe’s FDR moment,” marked by populist attacks on the under-taxed super-rich, a defense of Social Security and Medicare, a call-out of the Republicans for their abjectly partisan debt-ceiling hypocrisy, a call for police reform, and more to pull at the heart strings of decent people who still believe in democracy and the common good.
I assume that the Republi-fascists are calling the speech socialist and “radical Left,” “Marxist” and the like. Of course they are. That’s one of the many terrible things fascists do: tar liberals and centrists with the supposed evil of socialism so as better to eliminate them. (Never mind that human beings here in the US and across the world desperately require the radical replacement of eco-exterminist capitalism-imperialism by, well, umm …socialism).
Well, I, an actual radical socialist — unlike Joe (see point 3 below) — read the speech and watched a video of it this morning.
Here below is a response from a real-life Marxist after going through the oration.
Five things stood out to me.
Yeah. It baffled me to see liberals hooting and hollering over what was an extremely milquetoast SOTU. And of course the far right screamed Biden was a communist while basically being radicals themselves. Already covered all of this.
1. Some High Points. There were some decent moments for sure. “The defense of Social Security was a high point, without question,” a perceptive correspondent from Brooklyn writes, “getting nearly the entire Republican delegation to stand up, as was the presence of Tyre Nichols’s parents, and getting broad standing ovation support for police reform.” I concur.
Yeah, as I said, Biden's social security response WAS the high point I recall. But again, I kinda felt like that should be the bare minimum.
2. Silence on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was a deafening void on what the nation’s leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky recently called the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” in the nation and world today: the heightened risk of thermonuclear war, ecocide, pandemicide, and fascism. Biden never frontally confronted any of these four existential threats to a decent and livable future. Maybe that’s because he’s actively advancing each one of them by: waging an ever more menacing proxy war with imperialist Russian in Ukraine (a war that has lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock to the most perilous point in its history); signing off on more oil and gas release and drilling than his openly eco-cidal and tangerine-tinted redecessor; shutting down public health protections for a still globally rampant and mutating pandemic; failing to seriously confront and counter the not-so “semi”-fascism of the Republicans, who he repeatedly called “my friends.”
Consistent with the last silence (on fascism), Biden naturally said nothing about the elementary need to indict, convict, and imprison Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump for…you know, …um… trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law (with some help from the openly fascist Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters).
I’ll mention some other silences under points 4 and 5
Im gonna be honest, this sounds stupid to me. Like leftists just get so obsessed with certain talking points and purity test them when most people just don't think that way. I'm not saying these aren't important, but only the far left emphasize them.
I will agree that I would have liked to have seen biden talk more about climate change or taking down trump but let's face it, dude got beaten down on climate change to the point he was just celebrating the passage of the inflation reduction act and on trump, he wouldn't do something so incendiary as call for his arrest. I have no doubt they'll be dealing with that one behind the scenes. I mean, january 6thers are going to jail. A lot of them have been convicted recently, and I'm loving every minute of that.
3. Loving Capitalism/Competition. Biden sadly proclaimed yet again his love for he soulless, anarchic, authoritarian, and eco-exterminist class rule system of capitalism, which just happens to be the domestic and world systemic taproot of each of Chomsky’s apocalyptic horsemen. “Look, I’m a capitalist. I’m a capitalist,” Biden said, adding this: “Look, capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It’s extortion. It’s exploitation.”
This is where I diverge from the left but I agree with biden. I've also been distancing myself from leftism and trying to push for my ideas within the confines of capitalism. Hell, I'd like to say my form of capitalism is what capitalism should really be. I don't want socialism and any of that crap (well at least not beyond market socialism, which is still "capitalism" to me).
Like my whole ideology kind of expands on this idea. Capitalism as it exists is exploitation, but capitalism with people being free to say no actually works. That's my pitch. I know "leftists" would never agree, but that's where I start saying "screw lefties". I dont want these weirdo communist dystopias with a centrally planned economy and giving in kind aid to people rather than a UBI and healthcare. These guys' models for the world sound a little to soviet for my tastes.
Come on, man! Capitalism is exploitation driven in no small part by competition between capitals. It is ecologically exterminist and breeds pandemics and is the taproot of inter-imperialist wars with great potential to end life on Earth.
Where did the covid pandemic come from? China. Who covered it up and let it spread? China. What system is china? Not capitalist mostly.
Also, other economic systems dont engage in wars? These guys really do blame capitalism for all ills in the world and then scream WE NEED SOCIALISM as a response to everything. it's why I stopped dealing with these people in a serious way. They're radical nutjobs with bad opinions not worth taking seriously.
Let me say it like Biden: Listen, folks. Look, it’s like my dad always used to say. He’d lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and say “Pauly, this capitalist system will be the death of us all.” Look it up. Check it out. It’s like Che used to say: it’s not my fault that reality is Marxist!
Except reality isn't marxist. Their ideas are literally worse than capitalists, which is saying a lot given i ain't a fan of capitalism as it exists either.
What does Joe think undermined the stable blue-collar communities he’s always mourning like Bruce Springsteen in his constant references to his working-class origins in Scranton, PA? Global capitalist competition and the endless capitalist pursuit of cheap labor and materials in the quest for a greater share of the total surplus value ripped from proletarianized human labor power and the rest of the Earth, for crying out loud. It’s like Marx and Engels said in 1848 for f*#k’s sake:
“The bourgeoisie…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation….[capitalism] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Amazing how relevant that passage is 175 years after it was written.
With good reasons discussed across ten books and hundreds of essays and commentaries, I have long felt fully justified in saying this to people who repeatedl declatre their love for capitalism: “nothing personal, but f*#k you very much.”
Well, technically capitalism DID destabilize those economies, but as someone who lives in PA and has the same working class roots as Joe Biden, let me just say that communists dont offer real solutions. What would they do? Force me to work some crappy make work job of theirs? Screw that. We have enough "jobs" here at this point. Unemployment is low. it's just that the work sucks and the pay isn't good. And while that is arguably capitalism's fault, I fail to see how *spongebob rainbow* communism will solve my problems.
Just give me a UBI and universal healthcare FFS and be done with it. Not to mention student debt forgiveness.
Seriously, Marx did have good criticisms of capitalism, but his supporters are absolute crap on offering any solutions worth a darn.
4. Easy to Sound Progressive When Constitutionally Checkmated. I am struck by the fact that Biden gave the most populist, rabble-rousing, and angry, progressive-sounding speech of his presidency not in a time when his party held majorities in both chambers of Congress (as in 2021 and 2022) but after his dismal, dollar-drenched party lost the US House to the insurrectionist neo-fascist Christian white nationalist Republikaners. It’s great to sound like “FDR” when you know that none of what you claim to passionately support – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (already shot down by the Senate when the Dems held the House), labor law reform (the Protect the Right to Organize Act, also shot down by the upper chamber when the Dems ran the House), an assault weapons ban (someone can check if that also got shot-down in the Senate after coming out of the Pelosi House), the codification of women’s right to an abortion as a national law, and more – has a snowballs’ chance in Hell of getting past the absurdly powerful, malapportioned, filibusted, and right-tilted Senate, where sixty of a hundred votes are required, or even now out of the newly Republi-fascist-controlled House in the first place. And then there’s the absurdly powerful lifetime-appointed Christian fascist Supreme Court crafted by Trump and the former Senate Majority Leader, Malevolent Mitch McConnell. The Handmaid Court is in place to find liberal and progressive measures “unconstitutional” without the slightest concern for the fact that they are backed by the majority of the populace.
That's kind of the sad thing about the overton window being pushed right. We're so right at this point that even Biden's original milquetoast agenda sounds surprisingly progressive right now. And we've already discussed it on here, it's not. So I will kinda sorta agree with that.
Speaking of silences, it is unthinkable that Biden would have brought up the deeply embedded institutional cancellations of popular sovereignty that lay at the heart of the archaic US constitutional order and party and elections system: the authoritarian veto power of judicial review; the openly undemocratic and right-tilted Electoral College; the extreme power states possess to gerrymander House and state legislative district and to make key policies ( e.g. horrific sexist abortion bans and the white- nationalist outlawing of accurate US history and social studies instruction) that violate majority national public opinion; plutocratic campaign finance rules; the noxious and reactionary granting of two US Senators to all 50 states regardless of their wildly divergent population sizes; the winner-take-all first past-the-post (anti-proportional) elections regime that preempts power for progressive parties outside ruling class control and capture.
To be fair, democrats benefit from the two party system and are wholly interested in allowing a more multiparty system to come along. because it would cost them their existing coalition. Seriously is there anyone but that weirdo 20% of the population that for some reason thinks Biden is the greatest thing ever who actually likes the guy? Most people TOLERATE the dude, and most are just thinking of one election to the next, without thinking of patterns. Which is why most of them are blue no matter whoers despite not liking the dude. Of course Biden isn't gonna offer anything progressive there. He's as milquetoast as milquetoast comes.
Should he? I'd like it. You dont even need to be a leftist to point that crap out. I mean, the dude in politics I typically agree with most started his own party to address these problems. Unfortunately, he also abandoned UBI in the process which disappoints me greatly.
All of that is taboo – beyond the parameters of acceptable Democratic presidential oratory. So is the need for mass and militant social movements in the streets and public squares and for large scale direct popular action beneath and beyond the killing confines of US electoral politics and “parliamentary cretinism” (Lenin’s excellent phrase) if the US populace wants to ever see any more seriously progressive change. Keeping the masses off the streets is one of the top parts of the Democrats’ ruling class job description.
I'm not necessarily going to disagree. Im not gonna call for revolution, but I do wish people on the left would be more willing to use scorched earth electoral tactics to punish the democrats for being a lesser evil that foists themselves on us.
What was all the chest-pounding and progressive-sounding yapp’n about when Biden can’t actually get basic liberal and progressive measures passed (and probably doesn’t even want to since the essence of his political career has always been neoliberal corporate-imperial centrism in the name of bipartisanship)? It was a campaign speech. Biden’s 2023 SOTUA was above all an I think effective and somewhat surprisingly well-performed campaign speech -— a de facto announcement of his candidacy for a second term. Biden, who sincerely promised Wall Street campaign donors in 2019 that “nothing would fundamentally change” when he became president, was showing some fire for the base. He was trying to demonstrate that he’s not too old for another go – that he’s fit and feisty for what a still leftish narcissist rightly called in 1999 “the essence of American politics….the manipulation of populism by elitism.”
Yeah I would agree with this too. Dude is as establishment as he comes and isn't gonna offer any kind of real change, hence why I don't like the guy.
However, I have grown in the past couple years where I'm no longer particularly swayed by "left wing populism". Seriously these leftists love to talk a big game about change, but their ideas for change kinda suck. Freaking socialism? It's not 1848 any more. Marx had some good criticisms of capitalism, but as far as solutions, I prefer a more 21st century model that works. Heck, that's what I seek to advocate for.
The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend. I tried working with leftists in the past, but push comes to shove, they stab me in the back and start being obsessed with their "socialism" bullcrap.
I'm just done both with liberals AND socialists. I might end up voting for one or the other come 2024, but let's be honest, I don't really LIKE leftists at this point either. Maybe if they stopped trying to push dystopian solutions like abolishing markets, "universal basic services", and jobs guarantees (combined with a presumed compulsion to work), but yeah, I'm just so not on the same page as leftists any more I really am starting to wonder if I'm literally better with the neolibs than them.
It's hard to say, both suck tbqh.
5. Imperial Understatement. Did I just say “imperial”? The fifth thing that stood out to me was how relatively silent Biden was on what in polite circles is called “United States foreign policy” and even “American diplomacy” – euphemisms for the mass-murderous imperialism of the world’s leading aggressor state, which possesses more than 800 military bases located in more than 100 countries and accounts for more than a third of global military spending even though it is home to 4 percent of the world’s population. Listening just to Biden last night you’d naturally never know that his administration helped provoke Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine and has subsequently used that invasion to undertake a reckless proxy war that has so far killed as many as 200,000 human beings while exacerbating the deepening climate catastrophe and raising the specter of thermonuclear war. Or that Biden’s military is positioning itself for a major war with the nuclear power China. Joe’s “foreign policy” comments were quite sparse, limited to almost passing reference to “Putin’s unfair and brutal war in Ukraine” and to how our “competition” China supposedly violated US sovereignty with a wayward weather balloon.
I was oddly reminded by Biden’s speech of the moment when Dorothy peers behind the curtain to reveal the real Wizard of Oz: an old blustering man pretending to be a great, powerful, and benevolent leader with the help of sound, stage, and spectacle.
The Good Witch that can save us? There’s no magical wizardly involved. It’s us, we the people, shedding dreamy delusions about US electoral politics and bourgeois parliaments saving us, dropping the hopey-changey belief that the common good can be protected and preserved under the imperialist profits system, and taking to the streets and public squares for more than reform — for revolution.
Oh god, give me a freaking break. Seriously, I am so over leftists its ridiculous.
The US is no angel on foreign policy, but let's not forget that Putin is a bloodthirsty dictator who is literally behaving the same way in Ukraine that Stalin did against the Nazis in WWII. He's full on targetting civilians, he's doing a brazen land grab, and the US is just giving ukraine the weapons to defend themselves. I admit, we're doing it on part to weaken russia, but who wouldn't want a weaker russia? Russia is BAD. And I'm not just saying that as a brainwashed american. They are literally an authoritarian autocracy wanting to expand their sphere of influence into eastern Europe. That is bad. I mean, I know leftists probably have such a distorted moral compass that they dont give a crap. Hell, half these people probably think the USSR collapsing was bad too. They're COMMUNISTS after all. I'm gonna be honest, I'm far more aligned with the west than the autocratic powers of the east. Screw Russia, screw China. America all the way. Well, the west. I don't even think the US is the best country in the world, but the countries I would cite as being "better" than us are reformist capitalist democracies in like Europe. Even then they're not PERFECT, but BETTER? Sure.
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That said, how do I feel about this? I mean, leftists do have good points. There's a reason why I previously tried to forge an alignment with these guys in 2016 and 2020. Back then they seemed significantly less crazy, and it seemed to be obvious that "hey we dont want literal communism here, we just want bernie's 2016 agenda", but since then, they've radicalized into calling for LITERAL socialism and coming off like unhinged whackcases the whole time. Some of their talking points are just so out there that it seems like they themselves only bring them up for political points. And honestly, they just aren't effective on me any more. I kinda got sucked into working with left wing populists in previous cycles, but I'm not really sure I'll be doing that this time. I'm ultimately a policy guy, ideas matter, ideology matters, values matter, and worldviews matter. And these guys are just not on the same page. So yeah, sorry, not sorry, I don't think I'll be working with these guys this time.
I think that's one place where I've matured in the past couple years. I've kind of decided to cut ties with the progressives and leftists because I've realized that they're batcrap crazy, and we're not on the same page. Do I want more than Biden and the democrats will offer? Of course. I've made my own own case clear, and will continue to do so. But leftists just dont offer the right solutions to what ails us. Their ideas are a sidegrade at best, in some ways an upgrade and in others a downgrade. And given how crazy literally socialist and communist nations can get, that's a downgrade.
I just ain't feeling it. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it and we have more than enough examples of trying to implement socialism going wrong. We need ideas compatible with what we have. Sure, we need people to be bolder and more populist and fight for things more, but yeah, these guys want literal revolutions and crap which just ain't good.
Again, is it so unreasonable to want more than the democrats offer while also being turned off by the crazy marx worshippers? I feel like there's a middle ground between those two things, and that's where I'm at. Most socdems are that, and I'd still be willing to form coalitions with them despite being jobists. I mean we might disagree on UBI but on other stuff, we agree. Heck that's why i initially wanted to work with the bernie camp in the first place. That's literally what he seemed to want and then his supporters started being radicalized into crazy marx worshippers. ugh, i really wish bernie never called his ideas "socialism." That rhetorical tactic seemed to draw the crazies like moths to a flame.
And again, I would've just worked with forward if they didn't go full stupid and merge with anti trump conservatives. I like their core political reform message, but giving up on UBI and human centered capitalism is a step back I can't forgive.
Ugh, I really ain't feeling 2024.
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