Pragmatic Leftist Theory

Crosspost test

I don't want this to just be a place for rants and memes. I do want this to be a place for rants and memes, but not just that. We need serious, respectful, cooperative discussion to figure out the path forward. Actual dialectics, where opposing views are analyzed and synthesized. Not the stubborn factionalism we're all so familiar with.

If we're going to accomplish anything, we need organization and a plan. Effective organization is gonna have to be grassroots. An effective plan cannot be. 10,000 independent coalitions pulling in different directions don't get us anywhere.

So let's make a plan.

I'd like to ask anyone willing to contribute to post their proposed timeline of action for discussion. Please, be respectful. Criticize ideas, not people. Focus on achievable actions. "Everyone takes up arms against their oppressors next Thursday" is not an achievable action.

If you disagree with an approach, suggest an alternative. We're not getting anywhere by telling each other we're wrong. We need to agree on what right looks like, and a good solution that you can actually implement is better than a perfect one that will never see the light of day.

I'll start in the comments.

A stateless, classless, moneyless society based on mutual aid and fulfillment, obviously.

But even Marx knew that was gonna take a while. What do we do in the meantime?

Now I'm no political prodigy, this is a place for discussion and my views are nothing but prototypes. But I am a systems guy. I understand the importance of considering implementation when devising a system. Administration, operations, logistics, supply chain, maintenance, etc. I can't even count the number of cool ideas I've seen that totally fell apart in the boring details of implementation.

People need a government. Anarchism is a great guiding principle, but we all know what happens in total power vacuums. We grant the state a monopoly on force so that we can democratically regulate that force. Ending the state doesn't end oppression through force, it just removes the regulations.

Also modern civilization requires a great deal of coordination. If you've ever tried to get a dozen friends together without any sort of decision-making hierarchy, coordinating the resources of 300M people is even harder than that. You need some kind of administration.

By that principle, the most important function of the state is to concentrate power in an institution with democratic oversight and obstacles to autocracy; checks and balances.

Honestly, I think the bones of the US system aren't all that bad. Most of the problems we have come from voters not being informed citizens, but that would be an issue in any system. And those problems can be fixed. The US system provides the tools to change just about anything you want, with the mandate of the voters, but it's so resilient to corruption that it took decades of concentrated, coordinated effort to get where we are today.

Obviously it's still susceptible to corruption, but so is any system. If you create a position of power, sociopaths will flock to it like a [redacted] to a flame. Humans are crafty creatures, we will figure out a way to exploit any game you put in front of us. Even if it's a Kobayashi Maru, someone will find a way to cheat. You can't create a system immune to tyranny, all you can do is build an adaptive immune system within it.

So I'm a reformist. I think if we don't have the numbers and coordination to dominate the political landscape through voting, we don't have the numbers or coordination to do it by force.

And I think we don't. We could, in like a decade, if we really hustled on raising class consciousness. There are a lot of elections between now and then.

To me, the obvious answer is lesser evil. It's just how FPTP voting works, and greater evil is going full fascist. Now, we can also hit lesser evil from the inside to make it even lesser. Primaries work if everyone actually shows up.

Don't neglect local elections. I'm sure at least one person reading this could run for School Board or City Council or something. We're seeing more and more young leftists running successful local campaigns on peanuts thanks to social media. It's never been cheaper or easier.

You can even do it in podunk red towns if you've got some tact. It's not very hard to make socialism sound damn good to rednecks, you just have to learn to find synonyms for all the scary commie words.

If you can't run yourself, encourage others. If you're active in your local leftist community, you probably know someone who would make a good candidate. Encourage them to run, help with their campaign. The more leftists in positions of power, even minor ones, the more the working class is exposed to their ideas.

No matter what the future looks like, we're going to need more leftists with government experience, and a more class-conscious working class.

https://lemmy.world/post/33270073

Another rant, coming in hot.

I see a lot of people around saying we need a revolution. "Voting will never get us there, the working class can rise up and take power directly!"

And like, hypothetically, yeah. That's not fundamentally false. An organized and unified working class could certainly do something like that, and a big enough coalition could actually succeed.

But look around you. Do you see a unified, organized working class? Because I don't. Spontaneous revolution can work with high class consciousness, or at least an impoverished peasant class with nothing to lose.

Anything left of Reagan is heavily, and successfully, propagandized against in America. The average prole doesn't know the difference between Social Democracy and Anarcho-syndicalism, and calls "It" anything from "liberalism" to "communism". Class-consciousness isn't there yet.

Capitalism does nothing better than providing bread and circuses. I've worked with a lot of low income individuals, and most of them had enough disposable income for fast food and video games. Our peasant class is too fat and entertained to risk the biscuit for some nebulous "dignity".

What does revolution want anyway? A system of democratic representation with obstacles to autocracy? I think the founding fathers did a fairly decent job of constructing a system of checks and balances to represent the people and obstruct tyranny. Obviously that system has been compromised by decades of careful calculation from the right to impose tyranny upon it, but that still took decades, which is pretty resilient so far as governments go. How would an alternative be fundamentally different, besides undoing a lot of specific legislation?

Seriously, look at the structure of the US government and tell me what would be better. That's not a rhetorical question.

Talking about revolution scratches an idealistic itch, but it's just not achievable at this particular point in time. If the economy absolutely nosedives, or a lot of people get really savvy real quick, then sure. But barring that, we're going to have to figure out a less drastic path forward.

I think there are several, but we've gotta abandon this Leninist idealism. Lenin's revolution degraded into state capitalism in like half a century. And they didn't even have to overcome a 250 year old government, starting from scratch was easy.

I don't think starting from scratch is productive.

You know it, you hate it, it's the electoral system of the United States! It's also one of the main reasons I created this instance.

You see a lot of people out there telling you to vote third party in close elections, or show your disdain for all the options by not voting. That's dumb. Like, really dumb.

There is no secret mechanism in first-past-the-post elections that tells a party why you didn't vote for them. All that matters at the end of election night is who got enough votes to win. Sometimes that's abstracted through the mechanism of the electoral college, but the principle is unchanged.

We all know the Democratic party sucks. We've got bigger fish to fry, namely the Republican party. There isn't a single issue that Republicans are better than Democrats on, and there isn't a single issue on which the Democrats are worse than the Republicans. FPTP yields a binary choice.

Even just strategizing about which party would be more convenient to fight against, I'd rather be fighting a Democratic administration for workers rights than a Republican one.

The only argument in favor of long-shot third party voting, the federal campaign financing for parties that meet some minimum threshold, is frankly unnecessary in the information age. A truly popular candidate can drum up support from social media for basically free. Whatever pittance you could possibly get by meeting that threshold is not really significant, and certainly not worth risking a Republican win.

Vote in every election. Support leftists in local elections. Random no-name candidates don't win major elections. Vote left for City Council, School Board, Comptroller, all those boring offices that give candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their policies and generate support for higher office. Campaign for leftists in lower office. If there are no leftists on the ballot, run yourself.

We can't keep complaining about not being represented if we don't put in the work to gain that representation. Also, vote in your damn primaries. Primary turnout is abysmal, and still people complain about their candidates. Organize, get out the vote.

I'm not a Mod guy. I've got shit to do, I don't have time for this. But I think it should exist so I made it.

If you enjoy/excel at mod stuff, if the message of this instance resonates with you, hmu. I don't want this responsibility, I'm aching to give it away.