this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Post is from Xitter, so I copied it below

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point.

Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.

But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

Link: https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1854107107743682797

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 54 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Liberalism. (noun) a political orientation that favors social progress by reform and by changing laws rather than by revolution.

What they're saying is that revolution is the only option.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (3 children)

And the ability to revolt ended somewhere around WWI when the number and types of mass killing machines increased dramatically. Anyone who attempts it now will be taken out by someone flying a drone from a secure location.

[–] LucidNightmare@lemm.ee 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been saying the same damn thing to all those who said something about a civil war. What are your peashooters to a fucking unmanned drone, controlled from hundreds of miles away, that will bomb your ass????

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

And yet if you say that those people become tankie level angry at you because it’s all symbolic anyway. The sort of person who yells at a minimum wage employee over an inconvenience is too much of a snowflake to actually put their life on the line.

[–] LucidNightmare@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, yes. Those 2nd amendment morons always forget we don't have just muskets and cannons anymore. Your little AR rifle, and realistically, any other weapon you can even conceivably get your hands on, is NOT going to stand up against a military machine gun in the current era. They don't NEED those machine guns though, because they will, as we said, just bomb your stupid ass from however many thousands of feet in the air, while they laugh at you for even thinking you were going to do something.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

When I feel mean, the story I tell involves some dude under a mountain on Colorado shedding a single tear as they drop the bomb in your house.

[–] SoJB@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can tell when the liberals are really frazzled when their arguments are so lost in hyperreality that they don’t even make cursory sense anymore.

Absolutely delicious.

Let me guess, next you’re going to call me a Trump supporter 😂

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

No, more like edgy teen.

[–] AscendantSquid@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

A revolution doesn't have to mean a sort of military coup, what we would have to attack is their sources of capital, the flow of wealth flowing upward. Something like general strikes and mass unionization to put control of capital back into the hands of the working class.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

these weapons mean nothing when we can revolt simply by withholding our labor.

[–] Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago

This is the usual case of Americans using political words differently from the rest of the world (like libertarian instead of ancap).

When Americans say 'liberalism' they really mean 'neoliberalism'.