politics

https://archive.ph/g1Lvj

Thesis seems sound and the reviews I've read are promising. If anyone's got an ebook HMU

This book argues that American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other. The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6195320

From the Secretariat of the American Party of Labor–

Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States. Although the election results for the U.S. House of Representatives have not yet been fully tabulated, the Republicans now have majorities in the Senate and the Supreme Court, and can be said to control all branches of the federal government.

Trump’s re-election is yet another step towards open barbarism and the institutionalization of a reactionary form of politics representative of the general decline of the American capitalist system. Trump’s victory opens a new period of potential violence against minorities, women, all marginalized peoples, and the working class at large, necessitating the organization of immediate resistance.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Antonio Gramsci

As some seem to have forgotten, Trump’s previous term was marked by policies that served to enrich the capitalist class, caused setbacks in civil liberties, pursued imperialist geopolitical goals which are partially to blame for today’s genocide in Gaza, and racist immigration regulations which ripped apart working-class migrant families. While the American people rejected Trump in 2020, as demonstrated by his loss in the popular vote, progressives have unfortunately failed to address the underlying material conditions which bolster Trump’s popularity by settling for neoliberal candidates and policies which continue to drive increases in economic inequality and social degradation. At a time when many working-class Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, are stuck as permanent renters, and have seen real wage decreases among rising inflation and costs of living, it should be no surprise that they have broadly rejected the neoliberal policies of the Democrats and that so many refused to participate in the electoral process.

Key to fighting against this current iteration of reactionary politics is understanding that it has developed due to the increasing inevitability of crises within both society’s economic base and social superstructure. American capitalism has long supported its continued growth and profit rate through the expansion of its markets globally, however in the current period of resistance to American imperialism, in addition to increased competition with other imperialist forces, American capitalism’s ability to expand has become limited.

American capital simply cannot continue to manage its internal contradictions, as the need to continuously increase its profit margins leaves less surplus time and revenue to be devoted to maintaining the complex ideological apparatuses which previously built a false trust between the working class and the bourgeois system. As a result of this dissipation of its hold over social life, capital is resorting to simpler and more direct modes of repression and control.

Full article

the fucking NYT is ridiculous. if you pay for a subscription you are a scumbag honestly.

you are "disillusioned" because you've noticed the standard of living plummet for the last 50 years. okkkkkkkayyyyyyyyy. lmao.

To take just one example. Pro-crypto appointments to major financial regulators (the SEC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), along with pressure from financial firms eager to enter the lucrative business of holding other people’s cryptocurrency will open the way for banks and other financial institutions to put crypto on their balance sheet—and to make it easier to access for millions of people who’ve never touched crypto before (only 17 percent of Americans have ever touched crypto).

With the deportation machine that Biden left intact, Trump will be in an even better position to fulfill his latest promise: more ICE agents and raids, mass deportations (upwards of a million a year), and giant camps to detain migrants in. On this task, another Thiel-backed venture which thrived under the Biden administration can help: Anduril Industries, founded by Palmer Luckey. It makes sense that Luckey has nabbed contracts with the Pentagon given Anduril is a weapons manufacturer, but you might be surprised that the company is also providing its products to US Customs and Border Patrol in the form of “autonomous surveillance towers” thanks to Biden’s demand for “high-tech capacity” at the border. Luckey’s been keen to cash in on the lucrative contracts available at the border for a while now—Thiel has been an influence here, cultivating a techno-nationalism among his acolytes that encourages close collaboration with US military and government clients for the sake of Western civilization. A Trump administration will see an intensification of the role Anduril already tries to play in the Biden admin: terrorizing migrants at the border, surveilling indigenous reservations, and manufacturing weapons for the military.

It seems that in Russia, life is good for those who know how to please those in power. The ways of pleasing them vary, of course. For example, I watched as Mr. Mikhalkov criticized a certain Bykov. They say Bykov is a writer, though I haven’t read him. This Bykov claims that Putin’s constitutional reform is merely a power grab to become president for life. As Putin himself put it, almost with regret, it is his destiny. Well, of course, you can’t fight destiny.

Defending the Leader

Mikhalkov lashed out at Bykov, accusing him of not understanding how Putin cares for the people. According to him, the pension indexation clause Putin added to the constitution is proof of this. He even wrote God into it. And he added a provision so that future presidents won’t give away Russian land, even 25 years from now. Of course, some land was already given to China, but that was just to “adjust the border.” And why give away the Taiga when the Chinese already easily export millions of cubic meters of timber without any formal agreements? They already see the Taiga as theirs, just as the Finns consider Karelia theirs.

What’s Missing from the Constitution

Many new things have been written into the revised constitution, but nothing about eradicating poverty in the country. Nothing about stopping the need for people to scrape together pennies for treating severely ill children. No mention of providing universal, high-quality healthcare for Russian citizens. Mikhalkov praised the president’s concern for pension indexation, but indexation happened even in the Soviet Union and Russia without being in the constitution.

The Friendship Between Putin and Mikhalkov

Putin seems honored to have a relationship with the noble Mikhalkov family. Mikhalkov’s father was Stalin’s close friend, and now his son is on close terms with Putin, a man few knew about before a certain notorious drunkard propelled him into the political sphere. The Mikhalkovs have lived well in Russia through the tsars, the Bolsheviks, and now under anti-communists. It’s a talent to live like that. So naturally, Mikhalkov will defend Putin. Under Putin, Mikhalkov became one of the country’s wealthiest people, owning an estate as grand as a nobleman’s.

From Soviet Kids to Anti-Soviets

I sometimes wonder: both Putin and Mikhalkov are products of the Soviet Union. They grew up as pioneers, joined the Komsomol, and eventually the Communist Party. Yet, at the first chance, they turned against the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, and everything connected to socialism. I believe this attitude toward socialism is no accident in the postwar generation. We, the prewar generation, were raised differently. We were taught from birth that we lived in the greatest country in the world, though we had no idea how others lived.

Disillusionment and New Influences

When the war started, I believed German workers wouldn’t fire on our soldiers—yet they did, with no trace of internationalism. The war generation faced less ideological pressure than we did before it. The postwar generation, represented by people like Mikhalkov and Putin, started learning about the world after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, when Khrushchev criticized Stalin’s personality cult to protect himself, hurting the ideology as a whole.

Impact of Upbringing on Ideology

Putin’s and Mikhalkov’s youth coincided with a wave of anti-Stalinist literature and documentaries. I remember this period well, the so-called “thaw.” A new personality cult emerged to replace the old one. Khrushchev was ultimately removed, yet the ideology remained fractured, and Russophobia began openly in the republics. I was obliged, in my military duty, to explain the policies of the Soviet government. Putin and Mikhalkov came of age in this ideologically fractured time, shaping their worldview. Hence Putin’s reverence for Solzhenitsyn.

Final Reflections

I am 91 years old, and watching Putin, I’m increasingly convinced of the influence one’s early years have. Children naturally absorb the dominant ideology around them. Officers would come to my unit from universities with military training, so I know this mindset well. Listening to Putin’s jokes and remarks, I get the impression he’s a man of limited culture with little understanding of Russian history or classical literature. His speeches lack richness, and his culture seems shallow. Nevertheless, thrust into such a high office, he tries to present himself as an intellectual leader and cultivates relationships with cultured individuals. Yet, what isn’t inborn can’t be acquired.

this legit rules

More like cracker-up, am i right?

Anyway nice summation of dipshittery of the dems, for those seeking storing one single thing instead of screenshots

Question was inspired by this essay: https://whitehotharlots.substack.com/p/the-crisis-of-higher-education-is

IDK if I agree with everything in this article but I found it interesting

The comparison lacks obvious bite on many fronts. Most of all, it suppresses one of the key elements of any far-right threat throughout the twentieth century: the presence of a left on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough. Even in the most conventional analyses offered in the Third Period, fascism had to be understood on a dual timeline: an inability of bourgeois classes to stabilize their rule after the Great War, and an increasingly militant proletariat vying for state power. Caught in this limbo, ruling elites invited the parties of frustrated veterans to step in to solve the deadlock by smashing the anti-capitalist threat; fascism expressed both the resolution and repression of the revolutionary intermezzo. None of these features apply to the contemporary American case. What does the fascist heuristic accomplish, then? Its main consequence is to rally the disaffected left behind their lesser-evil capitalist masters—as if Biden’s crimes paled to nothing beside the not-dissimilar ones of Trump.

Here the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’—a form of politicization without clear political consequences—may prove useful. Post-politics was finished off by the 2010s; the public sphere has been repoliticized and re-enchanted, but on terms which are more individualistic and short-termist, evoking the fluidity and ephemerality of the online world. This is an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics—low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value. It is distinct both from the post-politics of the Clintonite 1990s, in which public and private were radically separate, and the traditional mass politics of the twentieth century, always low in the us. What Americans are left with is a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties.

banger paragraph

The result is a preponderance of social-media ‘wars of movement’ over institution-building ‘wars of position’, with the primary forms of political engagement as fleeting as market transactions. This is more a matter of necessity than of choice: the legislative environment for durable movement-building remains hostile, and American activists must contend with a vitiated social landscape and an unprecedentedly expansive Kulturindustrie.

A morphology of American political culture anno 2024 then appears in contrast: neither the mass politics of the 1890s–1960s, nor the post-politics of the long 1990s. Behind the current conjuncture lurk strategic questions which American left-wing thinkers were keener to tackle in the 2010s, when the question of surrogate parties, dirty breaks, or left-wing caucuses maintained a constant relevance. Today, very few of these still stand on the mental radar of the left-circuit. As Tim Barker has noted, leading figures of the American left have maintained a highly Oedipal relationship to the Democrats. On the one hand, it is the party somehow uniquely responsible for a resolution to Israel’s punishment campaign, while on the other, it has long served as hallowed institutions of elite Zionism and the Cold War security state.footnote16 Ironically, the result of the extra-party assault of the 2010s has been to tighten the hold of the dnc as the horizon of the American left. Heightened political emotions can also be captured by party cartels.footnote17 After a decade of experimentation with semi-independent party activity, a Squad that still sees itself as an anxious battalion for a better Democratic Party is the main remnant of America’s left-populist wave.

The American rendition of hyperpolitics is not necessarily dysfunctional for the country’s ruling order. What it presages for the next four years is mostly more of the same: extra-parliamentary challenges, legal contestation, high political emotion—and, just as under Biden,* promulgation of a bipartisan agenda that can pass a gridlocked Congress. Internationally, this means material support and legal cover for Israeli expansionism and proxy war on Iran, an aggressive stance towards China and proxy war with Russia, waged with a roughly bipartisan degree of ambivalence. *Domestically, it suggests an ongoing aggressive-permissive policy on the southern border, continued tensions around state-governed abortion policies and further tweaks to the tax code. Hysteresis à la Baudrillard may have a long way yet to run.

https://xcancel.com/StreamsCharts/status/1854297717167808867

Why yes, the democrats did kick Hasan Piker out of their convention during a livestream where he was interviewing people for their benefit.