Laissez-faire Politics Thread - Praxis? I didn't play Deus Ex, sorry.

[Kara]

Felix Biederman said gusano on this week's episode of Chapo.

Sure he's the one most plugged in with edge left stuff on Twitter (e.g. making J. Sakai jokes, calling the Osprey a Maoist Third-Worldist weapon because it kills more U.S. troops than opposing forces) but I'm still taking this as further evidence that the Overton window is shifting far left.

[team filler]

https://www.yelp.com/biz/el-gusano-oakland

[Kara]

Felix Biederman said gusano on this week's episode of Chapo.

I might be playing myself but I thought I heard one of the hosts say it in a recent Citations Needed too.

Don't recall that ever happening, but I 100% believe Adam Johnson has said that word multiple times in his life.

[Kara]

READ SETTLERS
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1128656240756887552

[Kara]

The Green New Deal is a solar-powered drone built in a sustainable defense contractor facility by AFL-CIO workers dropping recyclable laser guided munitions with Ginsu knives on kids who have unreliable access to clean drinking water. Elizabeth Warren 2020.

[benjipwns]

Lou Dobbs has entered the building. I just realized they're rotating all their Fox news hosts like tag team wrestling all so they can get a shot in at Richard Wolff.

Fox Business hosts

[Kara]

Just starting these (thanks Dmitri Dmitriyevich) but before I do I want to say that between this, the Bernie town hall, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mania, things are looking bright in the war of ideas, combrehs. Building social fascism together is going to be a lot of fun.

[benjipwns]

skipped around to the end, don't see it said who won, this is just like the Peterson/Zizek debate, when are we going to get a simple answer on which is better?!? did they not even keep track of points?

glad they pulled out Kennedy, get errybody up in there

[Kara]

"Let a thousand flowers bloom . . . and those thousand flowers were capitalist enterprises!"

[Kara]

  Is literally every person on the panel going to dunk on the ancap?

[benjipwns]

usually what happens when people's precious state jackboot is even hypothetically removed from their necks, they lash out and turn violent

see, also: Marx at The Hague

[Kara]

alright all done. on the whole it felt kinda liberal vs. conservative where the conservatives work the crowd with rhetorical theatrics while the other side has a bookish professor trying to win a war with a list of facts.

anyway, here's the dramatis personae review:

bianca "dsa small and medium-sized enterprise caucus" cunningham: you unionized a workplace which is more than i'm ever going to do but at least i've never said, "we need socialism so people can start small businesses" on a fox business debate about socialism

dickie "i didn't create the show law & order" wolff: courageously argued for unpopular things like dengism, the nazi federal republic of germany, or cuba not being a model socialist state by patiently reciting lists of facts

herman "remember when i quoted pokemon" cain: it felt like they stopped letting you talk at a certain point, let the man cook! as dmitri dmitriyevich already mentioned it seems like he literally doesn't believe homeless people exist

the legion of doom:

pom guy: margaret thatcher was a capitalist even though she literally never owned any means of production, welcome to the desert of the real
cavuto: i 100% believe you are very sincere when you argue that regulation of the private sector is actually good / necessary evil
kennedy: go bruins!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fuck $c
lou dobbs: i was with you when you said human rights are a bourgeois conceit and the nazi frg export economy isn't actually replicable but you quickly went off the rails from there. a stopped clock really is right twice a day i guess.

[Kara]

SMB-ianca

Unrelated:

[Kara]

https://features.propublica.org/ransomware/ransomware-attack-data-recovery-firms-paying-hackers/

This story has so many cliches (even down to the sketchy Israeli professing to have intelligence bona fides) that it probably belongs in the late stage capitalism thread but (1) it's longform while that's essentially a very niche outside link thread and (2) we gotta have our vegetables in here to offset all the candy.

Anyway, as someone who cannot board a plane without being flagged and searched by security it's nice to know the *Hans Gruber voice* American FBI can't do cybercrime. Also, it's kind of absurd that this economic activity which has no useful purpose whatsoever is being priced into all manner of goods and services that do. Markets, innit.

[Kara]

Thousands of workers from the University of California waged a one-day strike Thursday and found some unexpected allies out on their picket lines.

In an unusual move for a presidential candidate, the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent out targeted text messages and emails to its supporters in California a day ahead of the strike, urging them to join workers as they rallied against the university system in a labor dispute.

“Tens of thousands of workers in the University of California system are standing up this Thursday to stop the outsourcing and privatization of union jobs,” the email said. “We are hoping you can join these workers tomorrow.”

The note included an RSVP link and an address for a local picket.

Pop-Pop Socdem 

When he doesn't get the nomination it's going to be lit when he gives his list to, uh, that youngster at AFL-CIO Social Media who's obviously an entryist instead of the Democratic nominee.

[Kara]

tbh the more time you spend on the American left the more likely it is that you end up a Trot (unpaid and unaware internship with the U.S. State Department), a Maoist (solving the problem of your chronic under and unemployment by being arrested and imprisoned for many years on federal weapons charges), or thinking the public library is socialism like SMB-ianca (join the DSA).

I've seen it happen so many times over the years, and the arch-yet-irrelevant theoretical argument in the DSA still is... how did The Nation amusingly term it in their article about Turing Police? Soft Maoists versus Diet Trots?

[BisMarckie]

When you‘re saying Trotskyism, are you talking about the fourth international, the fifth international or a post structural Trotskyism?

[Kara]

My favorite thing in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is that Heinlein tried to establish his story as taking place far in the future by having there be a Fifth International when Trots got us there way before line marriage became acceptable.

[Kara]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/health/antibiotics-oranges-florida.html

The anarchy of production trying to kill us all in new and interesting ways.

[Mandark]

Taken from the DC Metro... Red Line.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/hank_mylander/status/1098590490184822790

[Kara]

"Lenin was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party until material conditions allowed for revolution," I say to myself as I stare in the mirror, not recognizing the DSA member before me. I'm growing out my beard in the manner of a Brooklynite. I'm extremely excited to campaign for a candidate in the Democratic Party's presidential primary. I'm extremely excited to participate in my local's brake light clinic soon. I no longer know who I am and I feel like the ghost of a total stranger.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Brake light stuff is a demonstrable material benefit and perfectly fine. Don't mind me.

[close]

[Kara]

Bolsonaro has publically been pro-weapon and police brutality. He signed a decree early May, relaxing rules of carrying weapons for collectors, hunters, and sports shooters, known by the acronym CAC.

The CACs can carry loaded weapons on the streets which were not allowed previously.

 

[Kara]

Linking this jeremiad is #problematic and if you want to cancel me or critically support me for doing so then I understand.

https://medium.com/@stephensrl20/socialism-deferred-how-dsa-failed-in-the-fight-against-sexual-violence-racism-3ca541333d60

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Shout out to SMB-ianca and @turing_police's favorite member of the U.S. Imperialism Caucus Jason Schulmann getting name dropped in here.

[close]

[Crash Dummy]

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1131255892580667392

[benjipwns]

Slate says Socialism is over thanks to Bhaskar Sunkara: https://slate.com/business/2019/05/socialist-manifesto-bhaskar-sunkara-socialism-bernie-sanders.html

Should the U.S. Trash Capitalism?

After reading The Socialist Manifesto, I’d have to say no.

...

What I got instead was a book that mostly dwells on how socialist movements have failed throughout history, either falling short of their goals or descending into nightmarish authoritarianism. Even Sweden, famous for its generous welfare state, is treated as a cautionary tale. “The best we can say about socialism in the twentieth century is that it was a false start,” Sunkara writes. Out of this dismal track record, Sunkara tries to draw lessons about how today’s radical leftists can do better, but the result is not always inspiring. A more fitting title might have been The Socialist Manifesto: Let’s Try to Get It Right This Time.

First, the definition: From the get-go, Sunkara draws a bright line between social democracy—a capitalist economy where workers have strong legal rights and enjoy a robust welfare state, which is to say, Denmark—and democratic socialism, aka socialism, but with a democratically elected government. Social democracy sands off capitalism’s rough edges; democratic socialism feeds capitalism into the wood chipper, then builds something else in its place. Sunkara very much wants to make mulch from our current system of private enterprise.

But how, exactly, would he do it? Sunkara imagines a world where individual companies are technically owned by the state but collectively controlled by their workers, who get to keep and split the profits, while all lending and startup funding are handled by a government development bank (goodbye, J.P. Morgan). His utopia is not a Soviet-style command economy; businesses would still compete freely with one another. But the labor and financial markets as we know them would no longer exist. (Sunkara handles much of this description in an oddly whimsical chapter involving a pasta sauce factory owned by Jon Bon Jovi’s family and a political movement started by Bruce Springsteen.* The term “pasta proletarian” is deployed.)

pasta proletarian

[Kara]

First, the definition: From the get-go, Sunkara draws a bright line between social democracy—a capitalist economy where workers have strong legal rights and enjoy a robust welfare state, which is to say, Denmark—and democratic socialism, aka socialism

 

[benjipwns]

The virgin Socialist Manifesto:

288 pages

The chad Communist Manifesto:

24 pages

cover blurbs on the virgin Socialist Manifesto:

"Accessible, irreverent and entertaining, Bhaskar Sunkara has delivered a razor-sharp guide to socialism's history, transformative promise, and path to power. This book also serves as an irresistible invitation to join in building that power, and in shaping the radically democratic future that is our best hope in these make-or-break times."―Naomi Klein, New York Times-bestselling author of This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough

"American politics is gripped by the worst kind of debate over socialism: one where everyone has an opinion, but few know what they're talking about. In this book, Bhaskar Sunkara, one of America's leading socialists, shows what socialism is and how it might work. Whether you consider yourself a socialist or just want to argue with socialists, this is the place to start."―Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large of Vox

"In this erudite call to action, Sunkara, publisher of Jacobin magazine, draws lessons from the history of various socialist movements to imagine how socialism could rise in the U.S..... His recommendations for today's socialists are logical and well-informed."―Publishers Weekly

cover blurbs on the chad Communist Manifesto:

BUCH IST VERBOTEN

publisher of the virgin Socialist Manifesto

multinational conglomerate founded by Michael Eisner

publisher of the chad Communist Manifesto

barely anyone until 30 years later and then whoever the fuck wanted to

[Kara]

Despite the frankly hurtful accusations Dmitri Dmitriyevich hurls at me in the bad dragon show thread, I haven't read Girondin with any regularity since my baby leftist days, but I do follow Bhaskar and the gang on social media still because I'm a 9 to 5, lunch pail kind of doxxer (unlike my good friend and ideological enemy benji, the consummate flashy, hip hop doxxer) so I'm usually somewhat plugged in to whatever they're on about at the moment. The self-promotion for the Cooperative Manifesto has been a little odd, rarely talking too much about the content itself, but that's not too unusual for Verso type stuff. Contrast this with Comrade Daddy Furr who goes on long podcasts with humble aspirations to tell you exactly how many of Trotsky's lies are destroyed in his latest book.

This digression (and Kenny outing himself in the late stage capitalism thread) reminds me that I should probably look over my estate planning; I think all of it goes to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation right now if I kick the bucket.

[benjipwns]

actually, some of the cover/review blurbs for this book read like what BA (or his cult) puts on his own books

"Thanks to the dysfunctionality of contemporary capitalism, 'socialism' has reentered the American political vocabulary, especially among the young. In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara gives us a lively account of socialism's history and current meanings, and makes the case for a genuine alternative to our deeply unequal social and political order."―Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, emeritus, Columbia University

"A brilliantly compelling vision of why the US is ripe for socialism in the twenty-first century, from one of the brightest stars of the American left. Essential reading for anyone who wants to build a new society based on people's needs, not profit for the elite."―Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and the author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

[benjipwns]

i just realized that if BA died it could be weeks before i found out

this is a very sobering thought

[Kara]

[Kara]

Speaking if Bob, did you get any exposure to the BEB meme benji? It eventually returned into a riff on Jeb! so I thought of you as it was ongoing.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[benjipwns]

what ARE Bernie Sanders views on the lies about the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution and famine in the Ukraine?

[Kara]

what ARE Bernie Sanders views on the lies about the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution and famine in the Ukraine?

*Bernie Sanders voice* the millionaires and the billionaires are not the only ones who should have access to the truth about kulaks. Thank you.

[team filler]

 

[Kara]

Intuit, welcome to the revolutionary vanguard.

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-military-discount-trick-troops-paying-to-file-taxes/

[Kara]

Checking your posts for likes and seeing people hate 😡

Bhaskar didn't let the staff of Girondin unionize until 2016, I'd say he knows a lot about being an employer.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Insert "Jacobin doesn't pay for articles" joke here.

[close]

Unrelated:
 https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/1131502985933144064

[Kara]

Peeps say I'm a clown for being hopepunk but this is what we're up against now.

[curly]

Despite the frankly hurtful accusations Dmitri Dmitriyevich hurls at me in the bad dragon show thread, I haven't read Girondin with any regularity since my baby leftist days, but I do follow Bhaskar and the gang on social media still because I'm a 9 to 5, lunch pail kind of doxxer (unlike my good friend and ideological enemy benji, the consummate flashy, hip hop doxxer) so I'm usually somewhat plugged in to whatever they're on about at the moment. The self-promotion for the Cooperative Manifesto has been a little odd, rarely talking too much about the content itself, but that's not too unusual for Verso type stuff. Contrast this with Comrade Daddy Furr who goes on long podcasts with humble aspirations to tell you exactly how many of Trotsky's lies are destroyed in his latest book.

This digression (and Kenny outing himself in the late stage capitalism thread) reminds me that I should probably look over my estate planning; I think all of it goes to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation right now if I kick the bucket.

This post confuses me because I assumed Kara was born an Old Bolshevik

[jakefromstatefarm]

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/mayor_pete_is_antonio_gramscis_perfect_socialist_vehicle_for_cultural_destruction.html

I can’t find the gramsci umad smiley

[toku]

https://twitter.com/AshKSkeet/status/1132362333936865281

[Kara]

This post confuses me because I assumed Kara was born an Old Bolshevik

At the time I thought it was amusing that I could leave money to an ostensible policy institute of the SED's descendant. Since they have a U.S. office I also assumed it would be easier for whatever poor soul was left with the task to distribute the money; it's probably a little harder to get money to Cuba.

This was also a bit before before Die Linke leaned in hard on the anti-immigrant drivel and it became apparent that the New York office of the foundation was obviously in the orbit of Jacobin / NYC DSA instead of bringing us piping hot (subnational) governing party praxis.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

There were three in the family--a papa, a mama, and a son. Papa was an Old Bolsehvik, Mama was an old housewife, and the son was an old Pioneer with close-cropped hair and twelve years of life experience.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Not in 'class', but in the 'group'", the son answered. "How many times do I have to tell you, Papa, that 'class' is a reactionary-feudal concept?"

[close]

[close]

[Kara]

That video Esch posted reminded me of something that happened in grade school.

One year we had to do something similar to Young AmeriTowne that was called "Town." Each classroom in the grade would split up into teams and develop a "business." All the other students in the other grades would visit our classrooms on designated days, be given a fixed amount of scrip, and then permitted to shop at our respective "businesses." I forget what we could use the scrip on... in my classroom it was probably privileges and what not. (We had a bizarre system of credit that you spent to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, pay for a demerit, or go on a special lunch trip to Carl's Jr--this was where I learned about debt financing btw but as always I digress.)

To date myself horribly here, my group decided to sell sports trading cards. This wasn't the best idea but it also wasn't the worst idea given that it was 199X; I think we were all mainly concerned about getting rid of a lot of excess inventory we'd all accumulated over the years more than anything.

Our teacher at the time was dating a guy who would often come around our classroom and unbeknownst to us he was extremely into sports trading cards. When he found out what our wares were for Town he arranged to purchase all manner of cards at whatever price we named because he had access to the scrip bank through his personal relationship. Since we were little shits we named (what I recall as) absurd prices for our cards, or at least prices that could never be supported by the vulgar market in which we operated. Since these sums were utterly irrelevant to our buyer he gladly paid and we more or less crushed our classmates in this exercise of bourgeois propaganda.

Not only did I buy myself out of using the bathroom credit hell with this endeavor but I learned a valuable lesson about the ethics (or lack thereof) in for-profit markets.

[curly]

[Kara]

^based on its early Twitter follows that account is a probable (non-state) infiltration; no idea why everyone felt the need to quote tweet / screen cap and dunk on it this weekend.

BUT SPEAKING OF MELTDOWN MAY, the other day George Ciccariello-Maher posted a photo of him and a much younger woman unprompted--like "I just graduated from university so my relationship with George Ciccariello-Maher is no longer #problematic" young--and he got ratioed for looking like a groomer / creep professor so he promptly melted the fuck down, accused people of being racist for assuming that they could tell a woman of color's age, then deactivated his account. He probably did more to set back Chavismo in a single meltdown than every buffoonish speech given by Mike Piss or comical op-ed published in the elite tiers of bourgeois press.

Also there's a lot of amusing whispers about the woman too, one of which is that she forgot to turn off locations while tweeting and ended up tweeting from a U.S. military base.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

A couple of years ago I was reading Building the Commune in an airport bar. The bartender asked me what I was reading and I lifted up the cover to show her without saying anything because I'm even less personable when I have to fly. Then she asked me if I was learning how to build a commune and all I could do was give a wry, knowing smile.

[close]

[benjipwns]

this BernardBro I know told me that The Conquest of Bread is "really really good, very interesting"

send help asap

[benjipwns]

no solo-winging allowed, only collective labor

[Crash Dummy]

How about, The Conquest of Head, and it's an anarcho-PUA guide to having sex in communes

i want this written by someone like irvine welsh from the pov of those guys who go undercover investigating cults but by the end have joined the cult and are fully indoctrinated. the twist would be he's a deep state agent with a vd

[Kara]

#NotAllCommunes obviously but mine has been pretty tame in matters of the flesh over the years with the only real outlier being a comical caricature of a lumpenproletariat that even a middle class values guy like Marx would have found hard to believe. The weeb who stopped wearing pants even acts embarrassed about not wearing pants half the time our paths cross.

[Kara]

There's a lot of chatter lately about corn planting being way behind schedule this year. Don't know if that's a climate change thing, a tariff thing, or a cosmic horror thing so I'm talking about it here instead of the climate change thread.

Anyway, there's a running gag on Trash Future where they remark that we live in the Soviet Union except everything costs too much so here's to Khrushchev and thinking widespread meat consumption is a development milestone.

Example:

https://twitter.com/kannbwx/status/1133465061559865344

Speaking of Trash Future, they had a pretty black pill climate change episode the other week and they read Jeff "Fidel took my stepdad's slaves :'(" Bezos' solution to the problem... doing Gundam (i.e. themed space colonies). The mythology of the brilliant bourgeois is more far-fetched than any ancient society could dream up.

[Kara]

New episode of RevLeft is entertaining. They brought on Alyson Escalante so it's almost like an episode of Red Menace in debate form. And it's everyones favorite subject "is Marxism a science?" Some bits on historical and dialectical materialism, lysenkoism, older and newer definitions of science, etc.

https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio/status/1132522051804155905

I listened to this (thanks for posting).

1. Not a huge fan of its use (and overuse) as a term but uncomradely seems an appropriate description for a debate between reds and blacks (no racist) about Marxism as a science that more or less veers straight into litigating Lysenkoism like it's RationalWiki outchea and drifts into non sequuntur such as the terrors in Revolutionary Catalonia.

2. This is probably demonstrative of having had my brain poisoned by liberalism but this debate really needed an """impartial""" moderator or an audience asking questions to refocus the conversation. Under no circumstances whatsoever should a debate in this space drift to a point where someone says, "social democracy did some good things too," without the very delineating statements "in the economic periphery after the end of the Cold War when few options were available" or "up until 1914 when it decided to self-immolate" appended to the end.

3. At this point in their short history I don't particularly care for Marxist Center as an organization and things like this are a large part of the reason why. Why are we entertaining the Utopian or Scientific debate in 2019? Utopianism lost quite convincingly ages ago and only exists today in RevLeft self-categorizations and the odd vestigial organization. Marxist Center describes itself as a "pre-pre-party" organization "looking to build a base" yet it does the same stuff as the extant Marxist-Leninist groups that never have.

[Great Rumbler]

The corn planting issues are due to once-in-a-lifetime* flooding in the Midwest and Central states.

*More like once-a-year now, amirite

[toku]

The vast majority of that corn is for livestock anyway, hopefully beef prices soar through the roof

They will. Corn crops have suffered but farmers have lost livestock as well.

[curly]

New episode of RevLeft is entertaining. They brought on Alyson Escalante so it's almost like an episode of Red Menace in debate form. And it's everyones favorite subject "is Marxism a science?" Some bits on historical and dialectical materialism, lysenkoism, older and newer definitions of science, etc.

https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio/status/1132522051804155905

I want to send the guy who wiki'd Lysenkoism beforehand and keeps bringing it up to the gulag

[Kara]

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/heshmat-alavi-fake-iran-mek/

imo The Gets Intercepted doesn't make a particularly convincing case here (I believe what they're reporting, to be clear) but it's absurd that a plant who the Daily Caller (!!!) severed ties with can get peddled so widely and easily. Crime may not purportedly pay, but manufacturing political will sure seems to.

@Esch will reply when I got a moment.

[Kara]

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1138211777160892416

What NBA-GAF poster was Bhaskar?

[toku]

If you can't tell from my meme output, I was reading the 18th Brumaire recently and the lumpen sack of potatoes analogy stuck with me strongly. We just exist in these little fragments of social spheres, online and in the real world. We are not only split from each other by our class and the intense blurrings of those classes that distribution of financialization has created but also little isolated social pockets, leftism in the first world is mostly an aesthetic choice ffs and we act so 'uncomradely' as Kara put it behind those choices. At times it makes me think I never really left console wars.

Ed: I need to put the phone down I'm just ranting about nothing

[Mandark]

If you can't tell from my meme output, I was reading the 18th Brumaire recently and the lumpen sack of potatoes analogy stuck with me strongly. We just exist in these little fragments of social spheres, online and in the real world. We are not only split from each other by our class and the intense blurrings of those classes that distribution of financialization has created but also little isolated social pockets, leftism in the first world is mostly an aesthetic choice ffs and we act so 'uncomradely' as Kara put it behind those choices. At times it makes me think I never really left console wars.

Ed: I need to put the phone down I'm just ranting about nothing

After watching leftists with like 2,000 followers on Twitter get into really protracted, bitter feuds with each other I have a new appreciation for the People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front gag.

[curly]

The Left Twitter Cycle:

-Find new account, follow them because they're smart/funny/whatever
-Come across a bunch of other accounts that hate them for some obscure reason
-Laugh at how insular and bitchy these people are
-Slowly begin to hate the original account and yourself for ever liking them