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Cake day: September 9th, 2024

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  • I think that can often be a problem in political structures, but I don’t think this is the main issue. It might explain how their messaging is so terrible, but the republicans have clearly managed just fine and the average is almost exactly the same in both.

    I think it’s primarily that they see support for Israel as an absolute necessity because it would (1) be another massive loss of support and political funding, and (2) a very difficult pill to swallow. Admitting to having supported a horrible genocide in full conscience and trying to convince that they have now learned their way might still look like a steeper hill to climb than the time-tested tradition of genocide denial.

    It’d be great if it was the main issue though, I think you’re right in that at least they would have better messaging, unfortunately I don’t think the actual policies would be much different. In Europe for example fascist parties tend to be pretty young 🤷‍♂️


  • Happy International Worker’s Day. Every single leader of emancipatory movements in the history of labor rights would disagree with you, having fought and been very vocal against the different flavors of oppression in order to get the liberal concessions that you seem to cherish today. Hopefully if you participate, you might find some leftists celebrating in the crowd. Please don’t get too angry at them for not defending genociders, I’m sure a lot of them ended up voting for Kamala anyway, but at least they got the confirmation that even opposing genocide is too great a hurdle for them.


    I’m tired but I guess I’ll still address some of the traits you identified:

    Claiming to be leftists

    I’m a leftist

    Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left

    Okay that doesn’t sound like leftist behavior, you’re totally right. I just hope you don’t mean that “power possessed by the left” is the democratic party, but sure, that broadly sounds like liberals or feds.

    Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates

    There’s a point to which you can push liberal concessions for damage control or for actually gaining some more concessions. I think criticizing voting is healthy since it’s still playing the capitalist’s game and a liberal “democracy” with almost no wiggle room anymore, but considering how little effort it takes to vote I’ll always advocate to both play their game and also assume that nothing will come out of it without actual pressure.

    I’ve mostly seen people advocate for withholding their vote in the favor of some concession (please don’t do genocide), I’ve never seen someone say “don’t vote and also don’t do anything else”, but I’m sure they exist, you find all kinds of confused people online.

    Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party

    Is genocide disqualifying for a political party or not? I’m asking you, specifically, if you think that a party that commits (funds, arms, protects, justifies, excuses, does constant propaganda for) a genocide in the face of their own atrocities, while actively silencing the voices within their own ranks that speak out, is worth defending? Again, I think the idea was to hopefully change the democratic party to the radical position of “anti genocide”. That failure is on them, not the people who threatened not to vote for them.

    Not highlighting that issue is frankly criminal.

    Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”

    Yeah that’s leftism, that’s always been leftism, but again I hope to god you don’t mean that “leftist political power” here represents the democratic party, so I’m gonna assume you mean more broadly what they call “purity politics” and constant division in the left. I think it’s fair to criticize people to the right of you, I’m to the right of anarchists and I welcome their criticism, even when I don’t agree with it. If I spent my time shitting on them I think they would be completely legitimate in calling me out for someone with ulterior motives, or a reactionary shithead.

    Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system

    I want you to examine your own sentence just for a second. To disempower an attempt at legitimate engagement with the political system. Opposing genocide isn’t used as a moral cudgel against whatever 10 steps removed version of power this is (and I’m not criticizing the way you put it, quite the opposite), it’s used AGAINST GENOCIDE.

    People are out in the streets and criticizing liberal complicity because we talk about GENOCIDE not some vague questionable US foreign policy.

    Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

    So that’s the democratic party, right? That’s why I’m confused because leftists are out in the street, even the most liberal ones with their “fight oligarchy” campaign, while the democrats are still out defending genocide, doing filibusters without a cause, and generally trailing so far behind the average population that it’s mind numbing. So I don’t know what you mean when you say “leftists”, because you seem to refer to two groups at the same time.

    Anyway, voting goes both way, you can’t pretend to vote in a vacuum for the lesser evil without recognizing that you empower them and their genocidal endeavors.

    And I’ll be a little more incisive: If you criticize a leftist of not caring about minorities (which I’ve seen a lot and is deeply ironic considering who did and didn’t vote for the dems) you open yourself to be criticized for having proudly voted and called on everyone else to vote for a party that does genocide, and having attacked the ones that tried to actually make a difference in shifting their position or using that moment to show what their true colors are.


  • No absolutely, I talk about capitalism because that’s the current rule of the world, but this exploitation predates capitalism by millennia, you’re right. The specific aspect of capitalism or feudalism, or any such form of exploitation, is that power doesn’t represent the population’s interest (even though of course we pretend to live in a perfect representative democracy). If the state protects private ownership by law, and that private ownership gives you incredible power itself (being in control of production, but also media and culture more broadly), you end up with the self reaffirming loop of protecting owners, and not the population.

    As an individual, you can have power over me if you hold a gun to my head, but it’s virtually impossible to point a gun at an entire nation when it’s that same nation that must hold the gun. Capitalism today is a massive ouija board, where anyone doubting the mystical forces is shamed, ostracized, or worse (of course this was much more literal under God’s mandated monarchs). But at the end of day, this still requires wide consent, even when enforced militarily.

    Another way to put it is that while we often center the conversation around the “conflict of interest” that accompanies power, we ignore what that interest is. If exploiters or their defenders are systematically put in power, they expectedly defend exploitation. The scary communist motto of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is about recognizing the origin and importance of power in the short-term, and giving it to those whose interests are emancipation. I fully agree with you, personal gain doesn’t automatically go away if you get rid of profit, but thinking about this not in terms of conflicts of individual interests, but conflict of class interests allows us to dispel the misleading scary and brutal image of power wielded in any other way than the liberal democracy. The goal of course is a real democracy, one where workers, instead, defend their interests. The expected outcome is the dissolution of that exploitation through the dissolution of class, and eventually the dissolution of the state itself.

    None of this magically protects you from acts of corruption or abuse, this is why the communist approach is not to flip the table over and bring a new ouija board except this time with “the good spirit” inside, but to create class consciousness, to dispel the lies and manipulations (because we’re not naive and pliable, the manufacturing of consent is a massive global industry), and to continue collectively educating ourselves as we progress so we don’t get fooled when someone brings a tipping table.

    I swear I’m trying to be brief 😭


  • dawnglider@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlChallenge level: impossible
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    5 months ago

    Our economy is organized around exploitation, I understand the point that someone in power might use this power for their own good if unchecked, but in an economy of exploitation like ours, power is organized around said exploitation. The worst of people go to the top not because bad people inherently do (or as you say, because power incentivizes bad action) but because this system is structured around exploitation, being ruthless and clamping down as hard as possible on those below you.

    I don’t believe that power generally incentivizes bad action. Outside of the structure of a company or a capitalist state, it’s merely a factor to account for, like any other conflict or human element (and is usually handled fairly expeditiously). In my experience in non profit organizations, usual “human issues” are of course presents, but corruption and power abuse only ever rear their heads when the rubber hit the profit road.

    This confusion also isn’t a mistake, it’s a misdirection, perpetually maintained to depict the constant corruption of states and companies worldwide as a mere “unfortunate reality” of human organization, while minimizing scrutiny of the structures this corruption exists in. When Trump, Elon and friends are waging a crusade against corruption, you would think this misdirection is at its absolute stretching limit, but somehow it still holds strong even (and especially) in those critical of them.

    Sorry for stupidly long reply, in a word, I think we shouldn’t mistake “profit incentive”, for “power incentive”.


  • I wouldn’t expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren’t really “corrupt”, because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it’s a total inversion of causality. They don’t “betray” because they got in power, they got in power to “betray”.

    On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.


  • Sorry I wasn’t very clear, thanks for pointing that out! I’m referring to the arguments opposing nationalisation in the mainstream discourse and not the actual obstacle to it happening (I wouldn’t accuse the Labour Party of acting in good faith).

    Within the liberal ideology you often here things like “who’s gonna pay for it” or “it’ll be too expensive”, I’m saying that those arguments are surprisingly false even within the frame of liberalism. They pretend that it’s impossible due to some cold accounting reality in order to deflect conversation away from the core idea, but this opposition is actually ideological too (it’s just more of an uphill battle to defend keeping water in private hands than most other commodities).

    As a matter of fact all neoliberal “theories” crumple under their own weight surprisingly fast (EU’s flavor in ordoliberalism with it’s 3% deficit to GDP and 60% debt to GDP ratios being dazzling examples of idiocy) so you might be onto something, perhaps it’s because they’re not the product of rigorous research but instead attempts to justify something that is already there 🤔


  • Is that really the case though?

    Nationalisation would of course be supported by debt (just like any public investment), so it would only be a matter of comparing the interest rates to the cost of renting. Well most private companies are supported by debt (as they should), so part of the cost is directly paying for the companies’ debt. The state will always have lower interest rates (Since the BoE base rate shot up to 5% in the last 2 years you might have to take into account the maturity of different obligations but this would settle as debt gets refinanced), and taking the first company outlined, “Wessex Waters”, their financial report show a cost of debt of 5.2% for 22-23, with a debt-to-equity ratio of about 4 if my maths are good.

    What this means is that for Wessex Waters, even if we completely ignored profit margin in the form of dividends (5.4% yield), overhead cost of private business (extremely high leadership salaries, bonus, lobbying…etc) and the fact that interest rates are only gonna rise, it would still be profitable in the very short term to nationalise the company.

    Don’t be mistaken, what’s opposing nationalisation and public ownership is and always has been purely ideological (market is more efficient, national debt is somehow a problem), there is absolutely no financial argument against it.


    BONUS: Because if I had to skim Wessex Waters strategic report, might aswell chop up some of the Chairman’s foreword:

    The high quality of our customer service was again recognised, […] however, we were extremely disappointed that we failed to maintain our record on environmental performance.

    Our financial health has always been, and remains, robust.

    I thank the Lord Jesus for his constant grace and guidance and pray that we will be able to rise to the challenges we face.