☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 11.8K Posts
  • 11.1K Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Bernie Sanders, the token socialist 😂
    2·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, this is a conversation we need to have more often. Bernie is basically a modern-day Bernstein. A century apart, but they’re playing the same game, pushing reformism that acts like a political pacifier. It sucks all the energy that should be going toward actually dismantling capitalism and redirects it into these dead-end, “safer” channels.

    Bernstein was a big deal in Germany’s SPD, and he fully rejected the idea of revolutionary change. He argued that we could just slowly, gradually reform capitalism into socialism through voting and parliament. He basically tried to write off class conflict as some outdated concept. And in the end, he totally defanged the SPD. Instead of building real power, the working class got distracted with fights for slightly higher wages or limited welfare programs, all while the core capitalist hierarchy stayed perfectly intact. Rosa Luxemburg called this out perfectly saying that it turns socialism into a mild appendage of liberalism, sapping the working class of its transformative agency.

    And you can see people like Bernie walking the exact same path. Sure, he talks a big game about inequality and corporate power, but his entire platform is just social democracy 101. It’s policies like Medicare for All, free college, a $15 minimum wage. These are bandaids on a bullet wound. They treat the symptoms but leave the underlying disease of capitalist relations totally untouched. Even worse, his whole project was about winning an election, which funneled what could have been a massive, militant grassroots movement straight into the Democratic Party, an institution that exists to manage and preserve capitalism. All that incredible energy got absorbed into phone banking and voter outreach instead of building real, lasting power outside the system, like strong unions, tenant organizations, and community networks.

    Then the moment he conceded to Hillary and then Biden, his base just dissolved into thin air. People got disillusioned or fell back into voting for the “lesser evil.” There was no independent structure to keep the pressure on. It’s a direct parallel to how the SPD got integrated into the capitalist state in Weimar Germany. But even if his entire agenda magically passed, it would still exist within a neoliberal framework. It’s like the New Deal that coexisted along side Jim Crow, imperialism, and violent union-busting. Reforms inside the system are always conditional. They’re only allowed when they’re useful for capital, and their real purpose is to demobilize us.

    A real challenge to capitalism needs a long-term strategy that mixes direct action, mass education, and building our own power bases from the ground up. Imagine if, instead of just telling people to vote for him, Bernie had urged his supporters to unionize their workplaces, organize rent strikes, and create mutual aid networks alongside the electoral stuff. Look at movements like MAS in Bolivia for an example of how you build grassroots power that can actually pressure institutions while raising people’s consciousness. But instead, his campaign became all about him, and when he lost, his followers were left with nothing.

    The really scary part is how the reformist path actively paves the way for fascism. By channeling everything into parliamentary games, the SPD deprioritized mass mobilization. Workers were told to seek concessions instead of challenging capitalist power, which eroded class consciousness and left everyone totally unprepared to fight the Nazis. When the fascists started gaining ground, the SPD clung to their legalistic strategies and even refused to support strikes or armed resistance against Hitler. Their blind faith in bourgeois democracy made them miss the existential threat, and in a final, infamous betrayal, they ended up allying with the Nazis against the communists.

    And now we’re watching the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party follow the same exact playbook. They operate entirely within capitalist constraints, which undermines any chance for radical change and just fuels the right-wing backlash. The Democrats are brilliant at absorbing people’s energy into their campaigns, and their reliance on corporate donors guarantees that they can only pursue watered-down policies that leave people disillusioned. The SPD’s reformism literally enabled fascism by disorganizing the working class and making capitalist violence seem legitimate. In the same way, the Democratic Party’s “pragmatic incrementalism” sustains a system that breeds the reactionary monsters today. Trump is a direct product of these policies. We’re literally just watching history repeat itself as a farce.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•The history of electoralism
    15·
    2 days ago

    I would argue the core issue is more fundamental. Liberalism holds the rights of private property as inviolable, thereby placing them beyond public debate. It’s a system that establishes an economic structure where the critical decisions over resources and labor are made by the few who own the means of production. Such an arrangement is irreconcilable with any meaningful definition of democracy.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Liberal Democracy
    10·
    2 days ago

    The most accurate way to look at the issue is through the lens of class. Liberal democracy functions as a full democracy for the capitalist class, which holds dominant power in society. Societies are not homogeneous entities with shared interests. They are divided between those who own property and the means of production, and those who do not. The former, the business owners, hire the latter as workers. The fundamental interest of owners is to maximize profit, which creates a pressure to lower wages and reduce benefits. Conversely, workers have a direct interest in securing higher wages and better conditions. This creates a fundamental class contradiction. In such a system, the government inevitably represents the interests of the dominant economic class.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoToday I learned@lemmy.ml•Today I learned that the top 10% of earners in the US account for almost 50% of consumption
    3·
    3 days ago

    Back in 2005, Citigroup literally sent a memo to rich clients called Plutonomy explaining this particular phenomenon and why it’s great for business.

    It’s basically a step-by-step guide to how the economy gets split between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else. The craziest part is how openly they talk about it. Far from warning about it, they were telling their wealthy clients how to profit from it.

    The memo starts by saying that plutonomies like the US, UK, and Canada are economies driven by the spending of the rich. They straight up say that in the US, we should stop talking about the American consumer because that’s a myth. There are only rich consumers and the rest. The rich are few in number but they take a gigantic slice of the pie, while the vast majority of us are the non-rich, the multitudinous many, who only get a small bite.

    They break down the numbers, pointing out that the top 1% hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. But the real kicker is that all the stuff economists panic about like low national savings rates, high consumer debt, and massive trade deficits aren’t real problems from their point of view. They’re just a natural side effect of a plutonomy. When the super-rich get a huge chunk of the profits, their personal financial decisions like spending a ton on luxury goods and borrowing against their assets completely distort the entire country’s economic numbers. The memo says that everyone is freaking out about global imbalances, but they aren’t worried. It’s just how it works when you have a plutonomy.

    So how do you build and maintain a plutonomy? The Citigroup analysts lay it out. You need a cooperative government that keeps taxes on capital gains, dividends, and inheritance low. You need a wave of technology and financial innovation that boosts profits. And you need globalization, which is fantastic for global capitalists but bad for regular workers, especially those on the lower end. They even note that the government was playing right into their hands by making dividend tax cuts permanent and changing the estate tax.

    They address the risk of a social backlash. They use this twisted logic saying that as long as enough people believe in the “American Dream” and think they might get a chance to join the club one day, they won’t try to disrupt the system. The threat only becomes real if people give up on that dream and decide to just divide the existing pie more evenly. But their conclusion was that a backlash wasn’t coming anytime soon because the economy was still growing, making people feel better off in absolute terms, even as they fell further behind relative to the rich. That’s starting to change since the pandemic.

    It’s insane to see all the current economic anxieties such as the wealth gap, the feeling that the system is rigged, the political divisiveness, all laid out so coldly and clearly almost 20 years ago in a document meant for the one percent. They were actively encouraging it and explaining how to make money from the whole process. It really makes you think.

Moderates