Am I the only one that believe the US has to go through some sort of painful transition/civil war/revolution to fix it? Is reforms from Democrats enough?
Democrats have no intention of changing anything meaningful. We learned that when Obama had a supermajority and became a black Dubya, despite his extravagant progressive promises.
Our only power is local now, and they know this, which is why they swift-boated Mamdani and ran a Democratic partisan against him.
Yes, it will take a major disruption to necessitate any meaningful change at the national level.
Correct to answer OP, yes you can't vote your way out of fascism. So we will need a war to get out of this mess.
Then to the Democrats the current Democratic Party is already right of Regan. It's that racket effect. Fuck up part if things keep going as business as usual. Then your next major Democratic candidates will be no different then Trump.
But all that moot. Again we can't vote our way out of this nightmare. And before 2030 we will all be living in hell run by oligarchy tecno bros. With all the AI data center sucking up all our water and they rounded up as much of the population that they can. Then it over.
You think North Korea is bad wait until we are living in just that type of world in America were statues of Trump liter the country and anybody that doesn't worship him is locked in a work camp.
While that's true, I do think that neither of those camps is willing to so much as slide back into a welfare state (even with extra imperialism on the side). The DNC doesn't want any more Mamdanis (even though he's a socdem at best), and if they think this'll prevent that, they'll let it happen, no matter how much they claim to oppose it. If there were any possibility of an actual socialist being elected, we'd see way worse than this.
I think you may be right. I just hope we can get them to move left instead of right. Nate Bear's recent post really gave me pause, because I know a lot of people who want to maintain their treats above all else. I want to have some faith in humanity, but we're definitely going to have our work cut out for us, I think.
We should make room for for third and fourth party candidates wherever we can. There are states that implement nonpartisan elections in some ways. Nebraska has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature.
Blaming the Republican party is wrong. They're evil, but it's the rich continuously stealing more capital and destroying businesses that is the problem. If the South and rural areas had equal access to wealth and education, the identity politics bit wouldn't work on them.
not it isn't, they have much to be blamed for. but there's plenty of blame to go to other groups, too.
If the South and rural areas had equal access to wealth and education
If you think the North and urban areas do have equal access then you need to take another look. The oligarchs are quite fond of living in metropolitan areas and segregating education between public and private schools.
it’s the rich continuously stealing more capital and destroying businesses that is the problem
The rich are rich because they own the businesses. They own the means of production. The problem is capitalism; it’s private ownership of the means of production.
I don't see the connection, personally. There's no problem when wealth is probably managed and distributed. Plenty of societies do that with private ownership, and there's no reason to believe that a communist society would do it better.
Then you're entirely misunderstanding all of human history. Communism has been the source of the most effective poverty alleviation programs in the history of humanity.
I don't really, Dems are pretty useless and bought by the rich as well. Which is why the two party system can't work to solve these issues effectively. I don't blame Trump either, he is more a symptom, than the problem
France's two party system was overturned electorally within the past 10 years, the UK's is currently in the process, but maybe the same thing can't happen in the USA
We need a true populist party in the US, but every mechanism that's currently anchored in place would always work as hard as possible to destroy it. Ngl, it feels kind of bleak.
I agree that it's the rich that are the root of the problem, but also I don't understand what the Republican party is (since the great depression) if not a roundabout way to harness fear of downward social mobility to vote in favor of the rich.
And when I say "I don't understand", I mean I really don't understand, because I also recognize that the rich pulled the same shit back in the civil war on the uneducated southern Democrats. The way I see it, today we have "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires" fighting for the rich in case they ever get rich, but back in the 1800s they had "Temporarily Embarrassed Slave Owners" who were, again, fighting for the rich in case they ever got rich.
I guess I'm supposed to conclude that the "liberalism" of that time was just misguided because it was attempting to justify abridging others' individual freedoms as an individual freedom. And then maybe the "republic" of Republicanism was seen as the elite telling the uneducated, "the masses are too dumb to be trusted with a direct democracy, we need to elect an educated intermediary to represent us". If so, that seems like....not even close to what the Republican party stands for today; Trump was elected on a Populist platform, the opposite of a Republic.
tl;dr I get that despite the corruption in the DNC, liberalism is a valuable philosophy worth refining and progressing toward. But I don't know what the Republican party still has that's worth keeping.
"They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen"
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."
You must be bad at tracing IP addresses because I'm not a Russian bot. And the Democrats have ALREADY made the Republicans win, in case you haven't noticed. I'm pointing out that political parties are a corruption of our politics and should not have direct electoral access. They should be like any other special interest group.
I honestly can't tell if you're joking but Kamala lost because her policies were fascism light instead of anything representing the working class. If the Dems want working people's vote they have to do something for them, not just say "I'm not Trump".
I voted blue but completely get why people wouldn't, lessor of two evils is still evil. If the only thing a system has to offer is evil then it's time for that system to collapse, simple as that
Kamala lost because her policies were fascism light
Okay, but that's better than fascism, right? So stop criticizing fascism lite! It's only hurting the opponents of fascism!
Well... okay, maybe the police and prosecutors that Kamala Harris organized during her time as California AG hurt the opponents of fascism a bit more. But that was before we had a dang Cheeto in the White House. So, let bygones be bygones and focus on the future.
I voted blue but completely get why people wouldn’t
I will be very angry at you anyway. If you upset even a single independent voter on the fence about voting for Kamala, you have committed Word Crime against the cause of the Stopping Trump.
lessor of two evils is still evil
That's exactly what a Russian would say. I've outed you as a nefarious FSB superagent here to bring down American Democracy and turn us into a nightmare hellscape of Soviet Style Communism, which is what Russia is right now.
If the petrodollar fails that's exactly what's going to happen. The rest of the world won't miss the opportunity to hamstring the US during their moment of weakness and ensure they turn into an insular, regional isolationist power. It'll be well deserved too...
I guess that you have to live outside the US to see what a scary man-baby it is. If a country has all the power in the world, and then decides that rules don't apply to them, it quite a short step to wishing that they would fail and leave the rest of us alone. The delusion is that they have adopted the world cop role. The reality is that they are the world bully.
Nothing will change until we group together and stop exploitation. This includes how America has propagandize that all violence is equal. Nothing is going to change unless some bricks go through some windows and I think we are past even that. Not a single person in power is on our side.
Oh, sweet summer child. The Democrats don't even have an interest in reforming the system, which is why nothing changes even when they have a majority in congress. Reformism is dead. Only a revolution can save the working class from the stranglehold of capital.
Now, is a revolution in the US forthcoming? Unless conditions change dramatically, I would say not. But we have entered the weeks where decades happen and left the decades where weeks happen. If you want to be prepared, organize and read theory; having a reality-based perspective will help you regardless of where we're headed.
Not today, not next year. I'm uncertain about the mid-to-long range projection, like 5-10 years or beyond. I think either people will wake up and revolution will be a real possibility as our living conditions deteriorate, or we'll be completely enclosed by the panopticon and the Jakarta method will come home. It all boils down to socialism or barbarism, at the end of the day.
I would vote for a candidate that begins the process of devolving the Union so we can eventually divorce into separate countries. I think we are doomed for civil war either way. As a Californian, when they're doing stuff like systematically disenfranchising us, withholding our Medicaid dollars and attacking our public universities despite us contributing more to the treasury than we take back, it's hard to feel like an American. I'd prefer to be a citizen of California than share a country with these freaks. Winning elections won't make me feel any better after seeing how they despise and want to destroy us.
What's the founding myth of Canada if not Eurocentric settler colonialism intended to displace and exterminate the indigenous peoples of the land they were invading?
I highly recommend you read Blueprint for a Revolution by Sroja Popovic. Dude was involved in the Serbian revolution and has advised movements around the world on what works against fascist regimes and what doesn't. Our hope isn't in a party, it's in the people. And violence not only isn't required for a Revolution, it's not anywhere near as effective as non-violent resistance.
I agree with you, the Democrats aren't going to reform anything, even if they wanted to (and they don't).
A financial collapse seems inevitable at this point, Balkanization may be a very good thing. There's no need for a civil war, we're nicely divided already and have functioning state governments that will quickly replace the Federals. That's best case scenario.
Worst case scenario? Civil War II, but really, "The South" has even less of a chance of winning now. This seems unlikely. Best to just cut them off and stop propping up their miserable states, within a generation or two they will learn that they need us (coastal cities) far more than we need them.
Jesus isn't going to come save the day, no matter what The Christian Broadcasting Network says.
The US needs to be dismantled. There's no such thing as fixing a settler colonial state. Everything about it is very young and paper thin, from its philosophies to its narratives to its borders to its laws to its "culture" to its religions. None of it will withstand the slow and inexorable resistance of the world's people.
I mean, we basically have, in my opinion, the choice of a civil war, some sort of revolution, or complete and total economic collapse, and rebuilding after the collapse to fix America.
The degree of the chaos between current governmental state and a better government is the concern i always wonder about. One thing we know is that the rich dont want it to fundamentally change. Even the dems. When biden was comforting a group of megawealthy donors and assuring them that 'nothing would fundamentally change' with him in charge, he was speaking for the party. And they havent budged from there. They are not friends of the common people but they are somewhat closer to us than the gop.
This attitude is naive. Why do guns build a society of individualism distrust and violence. That's non sensicle. And if demonstrates you haven't thought through any of this.
What makes you say that? Just because someone has a different opinion then you doesn't make them a bot or a troll.
Decent human beings are a myth until proven otherwise. Now, in the era of unprecedented abundance, we mistreat people by withholding the basic necessities of life from them.
There is no place to live happily until we make it happen. If this other person wants to be wrong, let em.
Elections were meant to be bloodless revolution. What about "You are forced to vote for someone who doesn't represent you" screams bloodless revolution?
Usually this is where I would make a long winded comment about replacing First-past-the-post voting with a voting system that allows more then two parties to exist without a spoiler effect… but that time has long since passed us by.
Democrats refused to implement the change Obama promised, Republicans eventually won. GG no RE. Good luck out there yall.
As things stand, unfortunately, the far-right is significantly better armed and better prepared for a breakdown in government.
While I would prefer to peacefully reform the system, it's increasingly clear that there's validity to the saying, "If you want peace, prepare for war." The fact that the right is better positioned for a breakdown in order allows them to push further and further without fear. Civil war or revolution isn't going to be something the left chooses, rather, if current trends continue (and it seems like they will) we may end up in a situation where it's forced upon us and we are left but no choice to defend ourselves.
It's not necessarily an all-or-nothing deal. There are methods of fighting back that are more effective than relying on the Democrats but don't constitute full-on revolution, such as strikes. While strikes are non-violent, history has shown that they have potential to become violent, for example, if a boss hires mercenaries to force people back to work at gunpoint.
Likewise, if masked gunmen started showing up to people's workplaces, demanding some of the workers to be handed over to be taken as hostages, workers need to be prepared to deal with that emergency.
Practically speaking, even if you wanted a revolution, there's now way that would even be viable while practical steps for community defense have not been made. I'm not sure it's rhetorically necessary to go further than that, particularly on a public forum.
Great point I don't see made enough. The right in the US is better armed, but preparedness involves more than just arms. Obviously creating communities and networks is incredibly important as well.
I think that the Trump Regime has inadvertently created the communities that will resist them in the future: former military staff of good character and skill have been exiled, as have many government workers. These people will form the backbone of future governments.
The Trump Regime has self-selected for corruption, cowardice, and servility, while creating foes that very much lack such qualities.
I think the United States as we knew it is dying. I feel no kinship with the MAGA nor the Epstein Class, my desire to be kind and fair towards that lot has long since evaporated. Odds are, many folks in Tennessee and Minneapolis feel the same.
The rest of the country got complacent about the people that supported the splitoff faction that wanted to own people as backwoods hicks and not as a viable threat despite them infesting many of the states that literally sent men to die to stop them. Laughed when they said "The south will rise again" despite them having an outsized power in politics and when called out were nice when they said "It's heritage, not hate."
They were ready to arrest those who went against the president during Bush Jr era. Nixon welcomed them into the fold after LBJ pissed off the Dixiecrats by signing in the Civil Rights Acts and every Republican since, just as the Democrats did before. The country never finished the job and now the house is infested.
I've always believed that we were living through the collapse of the American Hegemony, but I could never describe the system until I read about the Imperial Boomerang and the Five Phase Lifecycle which captures the US' expansionist policies post WW2. Except we never needed war, we had the petrodollar.
The problem when you have a system that centralized, you have one major factor, and then the inability to grow leads to the empire turning within with its expansionist policies towards its people. Its the perfect system to have an incompetent boob turn cruel. And once that happens, everyone senses something wicked on the horizon. Soft power with allies completely vanishes. New allegiances are forged. A new hyperpower emerges. And the most defensive behavior is to protect your own interests -- which accelerate the inevitable collapse.
The US is a very big country, and any future shape will have it more like a confederation -- either officially in its successor states, or more likely by Balkanization. Whether or not its the New America we want, well, I'm not that clairvoyant.
I hope this makes sense, I'm not a political expert. All I am certain of, in my gut, is that Trump is the final manifestation of the decline phase, and this is the final act. The Roman empire went through many drastic 'collapses' in its span, this doesn't mark the end of America, but of the current post-WW2 hegemony? The one driven by the GI Bill and Technological progress? We aren't coming back from this.
It's not a matter of 'fixing it'. The USA is transforming itself from a liberal democracy to a christian theocracy. Evangelical leaders have been working on this since the 1980's. They want to change the constitution to remove the separation of church and state. This is what Project 2025 is all about. They are about 60% there. The first act of the new Christian Nationalism will be the American Genocide of trans, gays and lesbians. This is what ICE is being groomed for. They must be willing and able to execute women and children in the camps they are setting up. Renee Good was the test case. Get ready, the program has been copied from Nazi Germany, look it up.
Sounds right, but the brand of christianity being pushed is not the usual tension between liberal and conservative brands of the same religion like you see with judiasm and islam. Its more a grifter christianity that hardly ever talks about christianity at all.
You aren't the only one, this has been the rhetoric from the far right for over a decade now. The "Boogaloo Boys" were named for what they forsaw as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo". They gained notoriety during Trump's first term, and later rebranded/forked into the Proud Boys. Now you don't hear about any of them as much because they're all hired as ICE agents, military, or working for Hegseth at the Pentagon.
The thing to recognize is, while we're all flirting with the idea that maybe, if we're not careful, we might see a civil war in the US' future, the Trump administration is talking and behaving like we're already in phase 1: determining allegiances and positioning forces.
The trump administration has a lot of factions involved with a lot of different long-term goals, but right now their common goal is to dismantle the US, and they are currently on track. If at some point one or more states decide the only way to put a stop to unconstitutional federal action is through force, they'll use the military to "keep the peace". But that will be the tipping point, and they've been preparing for a while...
First off, I'm not a fan of the fuzzy term "elite", but I'll assume we both know what that refers to.
People think the rich just like to get richer, that Musk and Bezos are competing to have the biggest number in their bank account. But no, they have no interest in "USD", they don't care about being crowned "richest person on the playground", they want to own the playground. They don't want to be confined by some government's laws. After a certain point, the only reason to keep accruing wealth is to one day become the government and write your own laws. To me, that goal IS what makes someone "elite". Conversely, a wealthy person who welcomes high taxes on the rich because it makes the society around them better is still wealthy, but not "elite".
The elite are always looking for a route to absolute power, and they all see the Trump administration as an opening and are all jumping at it. The only thing they have in common is they want the US govt to be weakened beyond repair, but where they differ is they all want to be the one to take its place (or retain a position of influence like Little Finger).
Got it. We generally agree on the elite motivation. But I think we disagree on government.
For me, bourgeois government is the structure of collaboration between and among the elite, not a separate entity. So I don't think Musk wants to dismantle the US government, he is playing the game between and among other elites and the field of play is the government that represents the collaboration. In so far as the government limits the power of the elite, it generally does so with the consent of the elite. The problem is that the laws remain even though the state of play changes. The system designed by and for the robber barons of the gilded age didn't work for the entrepreneurial 1950s and the system of the 1950s didn't work for the financial transformation of the 1980s and the regulation of the 1980s didn't work for the tech revolution. None of these were dismantlings of the US but reformations of the system from the old state made by the old elites for the old conditions into a new state by the new elites for the new conditions.
They fundamentally want the US to continue. It gives them a military, a way to repress the masses, access to massive natural resources, a reliable money spigot, and dominating power globally. They don't want to dismantle it. They just need to reconfigure the machine collaboratively to maximize their power.
If this means a government "of the people, for the people, by the people" that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.
If this means a puppet state that the "elite" holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt. You could say that because they call it the "US Govt" it's still the US govt, and you could say that because they call it the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it's a democratic republic. But I would disagree on both points.
Yeah obviously they're not going to personally crown themselves as supreme ruler on a towering citadel constructed where the whitehouse once stood like a caricature of a villain. But if the structure of "government" that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it's objectively not the US anymore; it's just the "elite", the govt is whatever they say, they are the govt, wealth only flows wherever they say it's allowed to in order to maintain power.
And that's always their goal, to become the govt, that's what I mean.
The bourgeoisie will not allow their power to be voted away. There's a reason the choices in the voting booth are always so narrow; you're only allowed to vote for a candidate that they've pre-approved and bankrolled. Vote or don't, it doesn't actually matter.
you could say the same of every democracy that has ever existed, and yet they did (and do) exist.
I have a feeling we would disagree as to which countries are actually democracies.
It's always been an oligarchy. At no point were the masses in charge of the US. It was founded by rich, landed gentry from Europe leading the common man to battle under the banner of liberal values, but they formed the entire government to be by of and for the land owners. They even gave MORE power to land owners who also owned people. That's how committed they were to oligarchy from the beginning. It's always been a structure by which the elite manage their affairs including how best to prevent a revolt by the masses.
I don't waste time telling people how to vote. Electoralism is a total waste of time. I vote how I vote, keep it to myself, and spend the rest of my time not thinking about electoralism. None of these politicians deserve my free labor when 100+ Democrats just voted to expand ICE and DHS power to obtain consumer data from retail companies to use in their operation. I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it's doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
Go ahead. Vote in the midterms. The Ds in the house just proved to you that they're onboard with the whole fascist panopticon policing program. They've always been collaborators with the Rs. But vote. It's literally the least you can do. Don't let anyone stop you. And then, forget about elections immediately after and do something about the fact that your neighbors, their kids, and their teachers are all replicating the white supremacy myths of this country into every single generation and glossing over it all with a simple "vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys" narrative.
If this means a government “of the people, for the people, by the people” that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.
Given that the US was never that, obviously that isn't what it means.
If this means a puppet state that the “elite” holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt.
Incredible. No notes.
But if the structure of “government” that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it’s objectively not the US anymore
EDIT: But now I'm finally going to get around to asking this: do any of you, living in the US, vote?
Would you ever consider voting DSA/Socially democratic, even if your views are to the left of them and you are anti-capitalist? What if voting for the PSL is not an option where you are? Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution? Not sure if I will ever vote again at this point...
I'm afraid the rot has spread much farther than that. Yes, without a violent upheaval of some sort, the U.S. is fucked but the problem had long since broken containment...
In the Borderlands in-game universe, there's references to historical "corporate wars", when the corporations seized political power and promptly began to duke it out to see who was going to be on top of the pile. At least that's how I imagine it in my head. But fuck if it doesn't look like that's the most likely future coming our way.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "fixing it". Could things be reformed to meet a status quo similar to pre-1970 without violence? Sure. Reform like that would be difficult, it would take decades, and it would take a lot of political will. Reform like that would be akin to a house of cards, all it would take is a single Republican majority for a single term to knock it back down. I also think reforms like that are completely inadequate to resolving the underlying problem that has put us in these times: capitalism. Assuming reform is successful, we'll be right back in the same spot about 80 years later. For things to be truly fixed, we need to overthrow capitalism. This will be violent and tumultuous.
Is reforms from Democrats enough?
Lol. Lmao. Definitely not. Democrats have no solutions.
Adventurism doesn't generally bring about change, it just justifies further repressions. Organizing is what brings change and enables actual conquest of political power.
How do you organise when the billionaires own the media and the social media platforms? Further, if you're in the US, how do you organise when the sitting pedophile declares anti-fascism as terrorism and you can be locked up or killed for the association?
Walk around your neighbourhood inviting strangers to a Signal chat?
For starters, begin with adopting good OPSEC principles. Privacy is a valuable shield.
Secondly, learn from successful revolutionaries. I made a basic Marxist-Leninist reading list as a helpful introduction, study how revolutionary parties work and function.
Finally, get organized. Join a party like the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Some of your org work may in fact involve walking around your neighborhood and inviting strangers to chats! The primary focus at the present moment is to build a revolutionary party capable of directing the working classes in the case of crisis.
The Democrats so rarely have full control of the executive and legislative branches, and when they do it is by such slim margins that the most right-leaning Democrat has the whole thing by the balls.
Looks at Obama's Presidency: Democrats had a single vote margin in the House for only 41 days. That single vote was an Independent (Joe Lieberman). We would have had single payer health care if not for him. What we got disappointing but it was a lot better than nothing. Outside of those 41 days everything had to be a compromise with the Republicans.
I think we need to stop the "both sides are the same" stuff until we've actually given the Democrats a big margin in both houses for an extended period so that we give the left leaning members an opportunity to get some things moving.
I think we need to stop the “both sides are the same” stuff until we’ve actually given the Democrats a big margin in both houses for an extended period so that we give the left leaning members an opportunity to get some things moving.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH LOLLLLLL XDDDD
"How many times do we gotta teach you this lesson old man?"
Problem is that waiting, hoping and praying for a Democrat super majority is the exact fallacy they want you to believe. "Put down those pitchforks and torches, you just gotta wait until the good guys win the presidential election, the house, the Senate, the DOJ, AND they aren't a conservative in disguise that vetos or votes against whatever the Democrats are currently working towards"
"how can you expect us to do anything when we barely even control the entire government. You have to deliver us a permanent one party state and we'll talk about making some changes in a few decades"
The rule for needing 60 votes is set by a vote of 50.
I think we need to stop the “both sides are the same” stuff until we’ve actually given the Democrats a big margin in both houses for an extended period
Are you thinking on the scale of hundreds of years? To get back to FDR..?
This is related to why I'm so nervous about teaching social studies next year. Can anyone help me think about how to teach US history without shoving a bunch of propaganda down middle school throats?
I looked it up a while back so forgive me if I didn't get it right but I believe there have been two cases in history of a peaceful transition from fascism to democracy. Anyway, I'm hoping for that.
You should really rethink the American Revolution. The crown was a restraining force on the colonists' genocidal drive Westward, and legal cases were proceeding that were lying the groundwork to end chattel slavery. Both of these things, coupled with the massive economic potential of North America that was being subordinated to London's financiers and the crowns taxation all led to the American Revolution. It was first and foremost a drive for unfettered greed and unfettered dominance.
The Civil War was not about ideals. It was about economics. The North saw much larger profits in industrializing compared the cash cropping of the South. Cash cropping meant remaining subordinated to London, primarily. The cotton from the plantations were raw materials. It was London that turned them into high fashion. Essentially, what we see today in overexploited nations where the people are employed in the lowest rung of the value chain like cobalt mines and what not, that's what the American South was economically. The Northern financiers wanted to move to industrializatoon and that would require a different labor configuration. You can't use illiterate chattel slaves in factories, you need a different mode of labor. That would inevitably mean changing the nature of ownership of human beings from private property to wage slaves. And that meant the South would lose their investments both in cash cropping and in humans. So the South seceded in order to create a separate nation with a separate economy from the industrializing North. And the war was fought under the command of Lincoln who not only didn't care whether slavery persisted or not but believed that black people should leave the US and go back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the rebelling states and only if they took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment gambit, not an expression of ideals.
As for war, we have consistently seen how guerilla warfare always beats the empire. Hell, the American Revolution was won primarily as a guerilla war and not a direct confrontation. Vietnam. Korea. Afghanistan. It's imminently plausible for the US military to lose to a domestic uprising. And even more important, war is primarily a destruction of economies first, people second. The US is struggling desperately to manage its own economic output and can barely produce war machines and munitions at this point. A civil war would further destroy the economy here, cementing China permanently and the UD elites would have nowhere to go except back to Europe which is also floundering.
Only 1/3 of the voting age population voted against MAGA after having a 10 year preview. The US is unsalvageable. Live your life while you can. There are too few patriots to fight back against this hoard of loyalists.
The US has been a nation no-one should treat as a serious entity since 2024-11-05, and can not be again until they can prove their ability to hold another legitimate election, and concluded the Nuremberg-a-Lago trials.
The US imprisons more of its people than the height of the Soviet GULAG, than anything China has ever done, and has held the top spot for 50 years. Recently Cuba and El Salvador became the top spots, but that's not the whole picture. El Salvador is hosting US deportees in concentration camps at the behest and in collaboration with the US. Cuba's prisons are integrated with the community and are sites of rehabilitation and not slave labor as in the USA . But most damning is that the USA is the only country that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison, and saddles them with that the debt when they leave as a condition of their parole. The parole system in the US is twice as big as the prison system, meaning our criminal justice system is managing and surveilling the lives of 3x as much of our population as literally any other country on the planet and getting some of the absolute worst outcomes.
And in addition to that, this "difference" you speak of is not the difference you think it is.
Prior to the 13th Amendment the US prison system was 90% white. 10 years later it was 90% black. The exception for prison slavery created an incentive to write all new laws that only targeted behaviors of newly freed black folks. Those folks ended up prison and enslaved all over again. The state used them as free labor for a time, but they caught too many of them so they created a leasing program and they leased the slaves to their former masters on the plantations. Does that sound like a difference between being enslaved for the color of your skin versus being enslaved as punishment for a crime?
Many of those laws are still on the books and still inform what we think of as "civil society". Loitering, vagrancy, sleeping on park benches, public intoxication all things you think of as normal all started to catch black folks and turn them into state slaves.
And now? You think the situation is so qualitatively different now? Black folks living in ghettos defined by banks using red lining and states determining where to place industry and dump waste? Black folks overrepresented in prison, poverty, and state violence? Black folks getting lynched by vigilantes every year?
Really? You think it's somehow different now instead of just the same fundamental shaped through adaptation?
There’s a difference between a prisoner and someone who simply just existed with a different skin color. Come on now, I would’ve expected you to have enough intelligence to decipher the difference.
I just skimmed and found nothing worthwhile to respond to.
And this is how people maintain their cognitive dissonance.
As long as Americans think one day peaceful protests will do anything, I don't see a anything happening. That concept is so mind boggling dumb imho. If you're not willing to commit for weeks/months, and say from the start, 'ah tomorrow we will be gone'. Then why wouldn't the government just ignore it? No you put out your demands and sit down in Washington DC or NY or something until the demands are met. Giving it a deadline just doesn't make any sense at all.
Now if this would actually happen, I don't see it stay peaceful for very long, but probably a tiananmen square situation developing. With how little the gov cares about people's well being.
But to be honest, the US probably needs vigilantes/rebels a la the Black Panthers for anything to happen.
The democracy route? Yeah it's way past that point already. As long as people like Bernie Sanders (or anyone more left than Bush) keep getting marked as some kind of 'communist', nothing will happen there. That propaganda has been gobbled up too much already.
Did a hell lot more than King's days protest, at least it was a debate for way longer. But they suffered from too little numbers in the end. But of course you can ignore all other long-term peaceful protests, like the salt march, to dismiss the underlying point
I'm not a fan of this take. Peaceful protests are just one piece of an effective resistance. People complaining that big protests "don't do anything" are sometimes right, but more often they assume that nothing else is being done before/afterwards and don't understand the actual useful effects of protests.
Protests aren't always about (actually pretty much never about) an immediate demand being met. They're about getting people together and building a network of likeminded people. They're about demonstrating to others around you that they might not be alone in thinking things aren't OK. They're a step in the process.
Protests aren’t always about (actually pretty much never about) an immediate demand being met. They’re about getting people together and building a network of likeminded people. They’re about demonstrating to others around you that they might not be alone in thinking things aren’t OK. They’re a step in the process.
I've heard this repeated sooooo many times every time this comes up. So at what point are you actually going to do anything with that "network". Or is it just to find friends to moan with?
I think the people in power will make sure they do everything they can to spin the narrative to make sure that we are divided and more so that Trump's supporters continue believing he has their interests in mind.
::: spoiler More ranting...
They (the rich and complicit) will always make us (working people) out to be the enemy just as how media has continued to make China and Russia the enemy of the world--when clearly, and how it's been made so evidently clear, the US is just as bad. Committing war crimes in Venezuela? Supporting Isreal-led genocide? Really, it's the people in power at each of these "super powers" that are corrupt and deserve to be removed.
Why the hell did the guy from El Salvador kiss Trump's ass for the mega prison? Obviously corrupt/collusion happening there. They're so stuck up their own ass that they can't see beyond their fantasy. They literally have a god complex and actively believe they can rule the world.
It's these people that should be removed, not us. We did nothing wrong, but they insist that we should be deported? Put in jail? Killed by pawns like I.C.E.? Killed on a boat? Killed by racist shitheads?
All we have to do is march across DC and force them to resign. Why can we waste so much time "going on vacation" and doing other mundane things like joining competitions but we can't all just in one fell swoop march at the capitol? The news and politicians painted a bad picture about it but at least the misguided Trump supporters had the balls to DO something about it. Even though they were doing so in bad faith and on the wrong basis, they WENT there.
Based on Trump's actions in his term and the meek inaction of the supposed only other party (that don't want to support ppl like Mamdani), I have no faith that anything significant will change even if somehow Trump is removed. Everything happening now is because people don't want to make change happen. The corrupt 1% like Trump want to keep us enslaved and to keep inequality alive.
Instead of playing chicken, waiting for some miracle to save us from this occupation of corrupt leaders, we the people should be taking action to remove them. Fuck the constitution and the state. History has shown the only real way to take out dumbasses in power but we're all afraid to do anything about it. Even a soft revolt like leaking company secrets, trade secrets, and anything that would actually cause a stir is asking for too much apparently. Can't even fucking hack the US to get Epstein files? Seriously? FFS
:::
There is hope to avoid violent revolution. It's just not coming from the Dems. What is needed is for citizens to band together and start doing things differently. Protest movements (e.g. Indivisible) need to shift from protest to disruption and noncompliance.
The not-Republicans seem less hell-bent on destroying everything for some accelerationist ideology. That's about all I see. I think if we can get a progressive, perhaps AOC in office, and it's possible to save us, she'll not hold back, having seen how Trump used the office. That's my only hope of not having a violent revolution someday, but I think there will be many years, probably decades of disasters to live through first.
The US has to go through the process of fascism only to be conquered or overthrown by socialists, something that didn't happen during the Interbellum or world war II.
Last time they went social democratic to preserve capitalism as US socialists were already drawing their pitchforks.
This time around however, the capitalists want to hold onto power even as their capitalist society is on the brink of collapsing. This time, like last time in Nazi Germany, the US merchants refuse to take any concessions during a crisis, so fascism it has already chosen.
This means the US is already going through a painful transition as fascism is known to be a unstable and (self-)destructive form of governance.
But what is fascism? I have my own take on it and on socialism by the way...
Here you see a table I made that lists all the standard socio-economic forms of governance.
All standard have three sets of people called estates.
The First estate sets the rules, second estate sets the direction of society and the third estate keeps the gears of society running.
This differs I think from the usual socialist picture (correct if I'm wrong) where Marx had in mind that all estates would become one.
It also differs I think from what capitalists think of themselves, because merchants are not mentioned anywhere in the constitution, are not in the government or anywhere in the trias politica and yet they get first row seats in inaugerations and VIP invitations during delegations.
To me, fascism is capitalism, but with a ruling class so powerful that the legitimizer (if that's a word, I make up words) class has become insignificant and with the first estate gone, the ruling class reigns with impunity.
It will collapse and when it does, we will enter a world with a majority of socialist states very soon.
If not, the world will go straight to communism.
programmers perform labor tho, and rely on physical supply chains (computers, data centers, networks, keyboards, chairs, screens) to do their labor.
programmers also cannot operate without collaboration and cannot bring their labor to market for a return without payment processing, publishers, distribution networks and marketing.
outside of this construct from the person you're responding to; programmers are the probably the most modern adaptation of labor aristocracy.
this means that, yes, they're working class and are just and interdependent like everyone else is in the working class; but they don't align themselves with the working class and instead chose to align themselves with the ruling class.
i think that's why the person you're responding to classifies them a "first estate" because the french revolution had these estates and this person is trying to draw a parallel to that revolution.
the blood and sweat of our ancestors who struggled for
genocide. They struggled for genocide. And the enslavement of millions. And mass rape. And overwhelming control of women's bodies. They did not make us thrive. They drowned us in blood.
The story of abolition or the civil rights movement is not the story of America, even though the bourgeois establishment may have tried to tame MLK Jr. posthumously. All concessions given to labor were for the bourgeoisie to maintain its power, not out of any change of heart. If they thought they could get away with maintaining slavery they would - oh wait, they do, it's called the prison system.
The civil rights movement of the 60s you mean? Those aren't our ancestors. They are our oldest contemporaries. Some of them are still alive today. Our ancestors are the the 500 years of European settlers that brought genocide and chattel slavery and systematized rape to this land. The people who fought against those things are the ultra minority. John Brown was hung for treason while the Confederate leaders were given statues and their names were given to university buildings and streets.
Read the history of the bill of rights. Many thought it was a bad idea to enumerate rights because they thought the constitution already protected all of those rights. These same people were raping their slaves and selling the babies
The union did not defeat the slave owners, it defeated the plantation owners. Lincoln famously did not care if slavery was legal or not. The 11 states that seceded from the union were not the only states that had slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was not intended to free the slaves, it only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the 11 states IF those enslaved people took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment tool, pure and simple.
Women got the right to vote because women fought for it and women were an oppressed group, rather proving my point than refuting it. Further, even though they got the right to vote they were still disallowed by law to own property, open bank accounts, etc. In the 1950s doctors were providing husbands with ice pick lobotomies for their wives, literally jamming an ice pick behind the eyeball to destroy specific nerves in the frontal lobe, making the women docile robots without harming their "pretty faces". Literally. This is not an exaggeration.
The US has the resources to invest in r&d because it stole vast amounts of wealth from the rest of the world, including right here from the original inhabitants of the land. The US made native Americans mine radioactive uranium without any safety equipment, literally barefoot in the mud, so they could research the atomic bomb and then drop it on two major population centers of an enemy they already defeated and were negotiating a surrender with. The vast majority of R&D the US invested in was through the military in their ever burning passion to kill more people and dominate more of the world. That's why the Nazi Verner Von Braun was rescued from Germany before he could stand trial and made into a prominent NASA scientist.
The fascists lost WW2 because the Soviets defeated 80% of their forces and marched into and straight through Berlin. There's a reason why West Berlin was inside East Germany. But you didn't realize that either. In East Germany the fascists really did lose, as the Soviets imprisoned or executed anyone that was supportive of the fascists. Meanwhile in West Germany former openly Nazi politicians were elected into office all over the country. It made some people so upset they resisted and the West branded them as terrorists and even invented a whole new psychological disease to explain why hostages would side with the anti-fascist "terrorists" - Stockholm Syndrome.
Jim Crow laws were put in place after the Black Codes. The Black Codes were put in place to imprison the recently freed black slaves. The US prison system went from 90% white to 90% black in under 10 years. The Black folks they imprisoned were leased back to the plantation owners where they lived their lives as slaves AGAIN. The 13th amendment didn't end slavery. It only ended private slavery. Prison slaves are fine. That's why prison slaves make over $11B in profits for the government and private corporations just through the labor, to say nothing of being one of the only countries that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison. The Clintons, when Bill was Governor of Arkansas had black house slaves because the Governor's Mansion was staffed by prisoners who were given labor jobs without pay. The Clinton's did not change this.
And since the 1970s the US has had the largest housed-prison population in the world by percentage of population, worse than the Soviet GULAGs at their peak and always worse by multiples than anything the Chinese have done to their own people. But that's JUST prison population. The parole system, where people are surveilled daily, is twice as large as the prison population. There is nothing in the world like it. The US abolished Jim Crow but didn't stop the imprisonment, enslavement, surveillance, and cold-blooded murder and rape of black people.
Not to mention that we have public records indicating that the end of Jim Crow was accompanied by a deliberate and explicit strategy by US politicians to mask the system behind softer language. The results are the same.
Your definition of "winning out in the end" leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly. Native Americans today are still undergoing a slow motion genocide where their cultures, knowledge, land, and people are all disappearing. Black people are still being murdered by vigilantes. The prison system has only gotten worse, never better.
Stop looking at the lipstick and saying that we have won hard fought victories when the pig is fatter and more bloated than ever.
Define painful. There's nothing stopping us from starting co-ops for nearly everything. But the will has to be there. Too many people are happy with what they have. Violence only breeds more violence. Full stop. All it takes is a viral moment.
Co-ops, unions, small businesses are very beneficial many-fold. The disconnect from those benefits happens when a bigbox entity imparts people with sticker shock, or bargains, or lowest price guarantees. It's not just a peoples' will -- it was will\choice becomes hidden or removed when bigbox puts down too many big roots.
I believe painful will be the transition because it will be long-drawn and painfully slow, to bounce back. Reasoning example- "...too many people are happy with what they have".
I'm not American so I won't claim to know what needs to happen. But from an outside observer, it seems that the majority are complacent and willing to sacrifice those "below" them to keep treading water.
Which isn't uniquely American - complacency and a lack of compassion is an issue in a lot of places. But America is definitely showing us how dangerous it can be when enough people have the "ehh, I'm still surviving so yeah this isn't great but oh well, go with the flow" kind of mindset/action.
It's FAR more-profound than that: humankind's instinct has to be fundamentally-force-recalibrated.
The Great Filter.
Exactly as bootcamp can force-remanufacture someone's unconscious-mind, their instinct, their identity, their ego, their "nature",
exactly as back in the Tribal Mother Village time, before agriculture, it was Nature which did that to .. those-who-survived,
humankind needs to do that, but at th whole-population scale.
All the different "religions" which have "apocalypse" predictions/prophecies, many of them could be dropped into ALL worlds which do what our world's been doing..
< world has ape-nature people, & it reaches its 1st Industrial Revolution, the Roman Empire equivalent stage, the seedling of the future cascade-of-Industrial-Revolutions >
drop prophecies in, about food-security-wars being global, about end-of-Age-corrupt-empire, about end-of-Age-corrupt-empire-corrupt-leader ( Nero at the end of the previous Age, Trump at the end of the Age of Pisces ), about food-chain-collapse, about migration-wars, about rampaging-imperialism, about DarkTriad/DarkTetrad ruling the world, & if there are significant glaciers on the planet, which are about to be melted, throw-in all the earthquakes & volcanoes predictions, due to tectonic-flexing as thousands-of-cubic-km-of-water gets moved from frozen-on-land to liquid-in-ocean, too..
< let the Age go by, so the seedling is ripening, until.. >
suddenly, 15-centuries ( or so ) after the Roman Empire's expiry, the sapling-stage begins: Industrial Age ( coal/steam/steel ) and then Industrial Age ( communications, telegraph, radio, etc ) and then Industrial Age ( information, computing-machines ), etc is happening..
NOW the breaking of the climate's Equilibrium is forced ( all the "clearing of the forests" to "improve" Earth were just making-certain that this would be impossible to recover from ), with the burning of fossil-fuels..
NOW the redistribution-of-tectonic-forces ( melting ) sets-up the increasing of quakes & volcanoes ( happening, now, btw.. quake-swarms on both west & east sides of California, all around the Pacific Plate, volcanoes in Phillipines?Indonesia?, Killuea, & there's 1 which is 1.3km below the ocean-surface which is putting ash 2.7km up into the sky, yesterday.. )..
NOW the technology-multiplying-our-effect means that Nature CANNOT survive our butchery, so the food-chain's being butchered, & sooner-or-later that's going to become .. fatal.
NOW AMOC is shutting-off.
NOW political-rabies-is-highjacking-countries.
NOW religious/ideological-rabies-is-highjacking-countries.
Democrats have no intention of changing anything meaningful. We learned that when Obama had a supermajority and became a black Dubya, despite his extravagant progressive promises.
Our only power is local now, and they know this, which is why they swift-boated Mamdani and ran a Democratic partisan against him.
Yes, it will take a major disruption to necessitate any meaningful change at the national level.
Correct to answer OP, yes you can't vote your way out of fascism. So we will need a war to get out of this mess.
Then to the Democrats the current Democratic Party is already right of Regan. It's that racket effect. Fuck up part if things keep going as business as usual. Then your next major Democratic candidates will be no different then Trump.
But all that moot. Again we can't vote our way out of this nightmare. And before 2030 we will all be living in hell run by oligarchy tecno bros. With all the AI data center sucking up all our water and they rounded up as much of the population that they can. Then it over.
You think North Korea is bad wait until we are living in just that type of world in America were statues of Trump liter the country and anybody that doesn't worship him is locked in a work camp.
Revolution is necessary, because the bourgeois state cannot be dismantled and a proletarian state put in place via peaceful means.
If they thought we could vote our way into socialism, they wouldn't let us vote.
Definitely true!
Hence the supreme court decision and the mad rush to gerrymander the fuck out of every state they can.
The DNC isn't socialist though, it's just two factions of capitalists duking it out.
While that's true, I do think that neither of those camps is willing to so much as slide back into a welfare state (even with extra imperialism on the side). The DNC doesn't want any more Mamdanis (even though he's a socdem at best), and if they think this'll prevent that, they'll let it happen, no matter how much they claim to oppose it. If there were any possibility of an actual socialist being elected, we'd see way worse than this.
Agreed! I actually think the current factional war within the DNC might make room for a third party.
I think you may be right. I just hope we can get them to move left instead of right. Nate Bear's recent post really gave me pause, because I know a lot of people who want to maintain their treats above all else. I want to have some faith in humanity, but we're definitely going to have our work cut out for us, I think.
I won't hold out for the DNC moving left. Entryism doesn't seem to be a valid approach.
We should make room for for third and fourth party candidates wherever we can. There are states that implement nonpartisan elections in some ways. Nebraska has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature.
☭ 🫡
I think you're probably right, but I do worry about any violence that would ensue . . .
Violence is an unfortunate necessity when pacifism ensures loss.
Blaming the Republican party is wrong. They're evil, but it's the rich continuously stealing more capital and destroying businesses that is the problem. If the South and rural areas had equal access to wealth and education, the identity politics bit wouldn't work on them.
not it isn't, they have much to be blamed for. but there's plenty of blame to go to other groups, too.
If you think the North and urban areas do have equal access then you need to take another look. The oligarchs are quite fond of living in metropolitan areas and segregating education between public and private schools.
The rich are rich because they own the businesses. They own the means of production. The problem is capitalism; it’s private ownership of the means of production.
I don't see the connection, personally. There's no problem when wealth is probably managed and distributed. Plenty of societies do that with private ownership, and there's no reason to believe that a communist society would do it better.
Then you're entirely misunderstanding all of human history. Communism has been the source of the most effective poverty alleviation programs in the history of humanity.
I don't really, Dems are pretty useless and bought by the rich as well. Which is why the two party system can't work to solve these issues effectively. I don't blame Trump either, he is more a symptom, than the problem
the uniparty is the problem I agree
France's two party system was overturned electorally within the past 10 years, the UK's is currently in the process, but maybe the same thing can't happen in the USA
We need a true populist party in the US, but every mechanism that's currently anchored in place would always work as hard as possible to destroy it. Ngl, it feels kind of bleak.
What if the real controlled opposition was the Republicans we met along the way.
I agree that it's the rich that are the root of the problem, but also I don't understand what the Republican party is (since the great depression) if not a roundabout way to harness fear of downward social mobility to vote in favor of the rich.
And when I say "I don't understand", I mean I really don't understand, because I also recognize that the rich pulled the same shit back in the civil war on the uneducated southern Democrats. The way I see it, today we have "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires" fighting for the rich in case they ever get rich, but back in the 1800s they had "Temporarily Embarrassed Slave Owners" who were, again, fighting for the rich in case they ever got rich.
I guess I'm supposed to conclude that the "liberalism" of that time was just misguided because it was attempting to justify abridging others' individual freedoms as an individual freedom. And then maybe the "republic" of Republicanism was seen as the elite telling the uneducated, "the masses are too dumb to be trusted with a direct democracy, we need to elect an educated intermediary to represent us". If so, that seems like....not even close to what the Republican party stands for today; Trump was elected on a Populist platform, the opposite of a Republic.
tl;dr I get that despite the corruption in the DNC, liberalism is a valuable philosophy worth refining and progressing toward. But I don't know what the Republican party still has that's worth keeping.
"They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen"
Huey Long, campaign speech for the re-election of Senator Hattie Caraway (D-AR), 1932
No, you aren't. I'm sorry you have to go through this hard way
Sorry if my english is bad
They don't make 'em like Huey these days.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."
There won't be real reforms from Democrats because they're complicit and invested in the system staying exactly as it is. Just "nicer."
Noooooooooo! STOP SAYING THIS! YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE THE REPUBLICANS WIN!!!!
STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP! THIS IS WHY KAMALA LOST!
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
I have traced your IP Address and confirmed you are a Russian Bot! MODS! MODS! BAN THIS ACCOUNT!
You must be bad at tracing IP addresses because I'm not a Russian bot. And the Democrats have ALREADY made the Republicans win, in case you haven't noticed. I'm pointing out that political parties are a corruption of our politics and should not have direct electoral access. They should be like any other special interest group.
I honestly can't tell if you're joking but Kamala lost because her policies were fascism light instead of anything representing the working class. If the Dems want working people's vote they have to do something for them, not just say "I'm not Trump".
I voted blue but completely get why people wouldn't, lessor of two evils is still evil. If the only thing a system has to offer is evil then it's time for that system to collapse, simple as that
I couldn't tell either.
We need to work to change the system. Ranked choice voting, nonpartisan elections and legislatures, etc. Oh, and money isn't speech. It's power.
Okay, but that's better than fascism, right? So stop criticizing fascism lite! It's only hurting the opponents of fascism!
Well... okay, maybe the police and prosecutors that Kamala Harris organized during her time as California AG hurt the opponents of fascism a bit more. But that was before we had a dang Cheeto in the White House. So, let bygones be bygones and focus on the future.
I will be very angry at you anyway. If you upset even a single independent voter on the fence about voting for Kamala, you have committed Word Crime against the cause of the Stopping Trump.
That's exactly what a Russian would say. I've outed you as a nefarious FSB superagent here to bring down American Democracy and turn us into a nightmare hellscape of Soviet Style Communism, which is what Russia is right now.
Exactly. The current system of government isn't democracy, it's competitive authoritarianism.
Yes. We need to work to create a democracy.
If the petrodollar fails that's exactly what's going to happen. The rest of the world won't miss the opportunity to hamstring the US during their moment of weakness and ensure they turn into an insular, regional isolationist power. It'll be well deserved too...
when*
Anything else on your wish list? Just curious.
I guess that you have to live outside the US to see what a scary man-baby it is. If a country has all the power in the world, and then decides that rules don't apply to them, it quite a short step to wishing that they would fail and leave the rest of us alone. The delusion is that they have adopted the world cop role. The reality is that they are the world bully.
Nothing will change until we group together and stop exploitation. This includes how America has propagandize that all violence is equal. Nothing is going to change unless some bricks go through some windows and I think we are past even that. Not a single person in power is on our side.
Oh, sweet summer child. The Democrats don't even have an interest in reforming the system, which is why nothing changes even when they have a majority in congress. Reformism is dead. Only a revolution can save the working class from the stranglehold of capital.
Now, is a revolution in the US forthcoming? Unless conditions change dramatically, I would say not. But we have entered the weeks where decades happen and left the decades where weeks happen. If you want to be prepared, organize and read theory; having a reality-based perspective will help you regardless of where we're headed.
If revolution happens right now, it's going to be oops! All reactionaries.
Not today, not next year. I'm uncertain about the mid-to-long range projection, like 5-10 years or beyond. I think either people will wake up and revolution will be a real possibility as our living conditions deteriorate, or we'll be completely enclosed by the panopticon and the Jakarta method will come home. It all boils down to socialism or barbarism, at the end of the day.
Heaven forbid!
I can say it will not be all reactionaries lol
I would vote for a candidate that begins the process of devolving the Union so we can eventually divorce into separate countries. I think we are doomed for civil war either way. As a Californian, when they're doing stuff like systematically disenfranchising us, withholding our Medicaid dollars and attacking our public universities despite us contributing more to the treasury than we take back, it's hard to feel like an American. I'd prefer to be a citizen of California than share a country with these freaks. Winning elections won't make me feel any better after seeing how they despise and want to destroy us.
If reforms from democrats was enough, we wouldn't have Trump right now.
The founding myth of your nation is violence. I think it's like asking if there will be snow in February (I'm Canadian btw)
What's the founding myth of Canada if not Eurocentric settler colonialism intended to displace and exterminate the indigenous peoples of the land they were invading?
Oh hi Freagle! And yeah you're exactly right!
For the most part, I think, yes. However, there was a compromise between the English and the French living there, IIRC, instead of a war.
A distinction without a difference
Climate change might do this phrase in one day.
It’s a class war, now combined with AI sucking up the most basic of living resources, from us to the billionaires’ latest pet project.
Everything else is a distraction. Remember, up to 50% (depending on what study you read) of social media is bots.
I highly recommend you read Blueprint for a Revolution by Sroja Popovic. Dude was involved in the Serbian revolution and has advised movements around the world on what works against fascist regimes and what doesn't. Our hope isn't in a party, it's in the people. And violence not only isn't required for a Revolution, it's not anywhere near as effective as non-violent resistance.
I agree with you, the Democrats aren't going to reform anything, even if they wanted to (and they don't).
A financial collapse seems inevitable at this point, Balkanization may be a very good thing. There's no need for a civil war, we're nicely divided already and have functioning state governments that will quickly replace the Federals. That's best case scenario.
Worst case scenario? Civil War II, but really, "The South" has even less of a chance of winning now. This seems unlikely. Best to just cut them off and stop propping up their miserable states, within a generation or two they will learn that they need us (coastal cities) far more than we need them.
Jesus isn't going to come save the day, no matter what The Christian Broadcasting Network says.
I too thought collapse was imminent until I learned about stablecoins. When nobody is left to purchase the debt... What happens?
This is where stablecoins come in. They are taking dollars, buying debt, keeping the interest as profit and issuing digital dollars.
It's a cycle that can continue as long as the US government can pay for the interest..
The US needs to be dismantled. There's no such thing as fixing a settler colonial state. Everything about it is very young and paper thin, from its philosophies to its narratives to its borders to its laws to its "culture" to its religions. None of it will withstand the slow and inexorable resistance of the world's people.
I mean, we basically have, in my opinion, the choice of a civil war, some sort of revolution, or complete and total economic collapse, and rebuilding after the collapse to fix America.
I don't see any other way than that.
The economic collapse will be part and parcel of the civil war between the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces
The degree of the chaos between current governmental state and a better government is the concern i always wonder about. One thing we know is that the rich dont want it to fundamentally change. Even the dems. When biden was comforting a group of megawealthy donors and assuring them that 'nothing would fundamentally change' with him in charge, he was speaking for the party. And they havent budged from there. They are not friends of the common people but they are somewhat closer to us than the gop.
No, plenty of us believe it. I didn't recently purchase 10+ different guns and a ton of ammo because I think things will work out.
Unfortunately, more people think diplomacy and peaceful protest and waiting until the next time to vote will be enough.
It's fucking dumb.
If my plan to leave the US permanently fails, I'm prepared for literal civil war.
10+ guns sounds pretty dumb ngl, 2-3 is fine. rest is better spent helping build some kind of network of support with your local neighborhood.
Need extras for those around me that didn't buy.
Guns are pretty stupid. You're building a society of individualism, distrust and violence. Not one where a decent human being would live happily.
This attitude is naive. Why do guns build a society of individualism distrust and violence. That's non sensicle. And if demonstrates you haven't thought through any of this.
Ha ha ha. Good one !
Found the bot/troll.
What makes you say that? Just because someone has a different opinion then you doesn't make them a bot or a troll.
Decent human beings are a myth until proven otherwise. Now, in the era of unprecedented abundance, we mistreat people by withholding the basic necessities of life from them.
There is no place to live happily until we make it happen. If this other person wants to be wrong, let em.
Nobody’s going to be wearing uniforms. Who ya gonna shoot?
According to Republicans, that's what skin color is for
No.
No.
Elections were meant to be bloodless revolution. What about "You are forced to vote for someone who doesn't represent you" screams bloodless revolution?
Usually this is where I would make a long winded comment about replacing First-past-the-post voting with a voting system that allows more then two parties to exist without a spoiler effect… but that time has long since passed us by.
Democrats refused to implement the change Obama promised, Republicans eventually won. GG no RE. Good luck out there yall.
As things stand, unfortunately, the far-right is significantly better armed and better prepared for a breakdown in government.
While I would prefer to peacefully reform the system, it's increasingly clear that there's validity to the saying, "If you want peace, prepare for war." The fact that the right is better positioned for a breakdown in order allows them to push further and further without fear. Civil war or revolution isn't going to be something the left chooses, rather, if current trends continue (and it seems like they will) we may end up in a situation where it's forced upon us and we are left but no choice to defend ourselves.
It's not necessarily an all-or-nothing deal. There are methods of fighting back that are more effective than relying on the Democrats but don't constitute full-on revolution, such as strikes. While strikes are non-violent, history has shown that they have potential to become violent, for example, if a boss hires mercenaries to force people back to work at gunpoint.
Likewise, if masked gunmen started showing up to people's workplaces, demanding some of the workers to be handed over to be taken as hostages, workers need to be prepared to deal with that emergency.
Practically speaking, even if you wanted a revolution, there's now way that would even be viable while practical steps for community defense have not been made. I'm not sure it's rhetorically necessary to go further than that, particularly on a public forum.
I'm only quibbling with the right is better prepared.
The core issue for them is they are building their preparedness around "rugged individualism" and we prepare with resilient communities.
Great point I don't see made enough. The right in the US is better armed, but preparedness involves more than just arms. Obviously creating communities and networks is incredibly important as well.
I think that the Trump Regime has inadvertently created the communities that will resist them in the future: former military staff of good character and skill have been exiled, as have many government workers. These people will form the backbone of future governments.
The Trump Regime has self-selected for corruption, cowardice, and servility, while creating foes that very much lack such qualities.
I think the United States as we knew it is dying. I feel no kinship with the MAGA nor the Epstein Class, my desire to be kind and fair towards that lot has long since evaporated. Odds are, many folks in Tennessee and Minneapolis feel the same.
I grew up in the US south.
This IS the US as I've known it.
The rest of the country got complacent about the people that supported the splitoff faction that wanted to own people as backwoods hicks and not as a viable threat despite them infesting many of the states that literally sent men to die to stop them. Laughed when they said "The south will rise again" despite them having an outsized power in politics and when called out were nice when they said "It's heritage, not hate."
They were ready to arrest those who went against the president during Bush Jr era. Nixon welcomed them into the fold after LBJ pissed off the Dixiecrats by signing in the Civil Rights Acts and every Republican since, just as the Democrats did before. The country never finished the job and now the house is infested.
The United States as those of us who read books knew:
good post
O7
I've always believed that we were living through the collapse of the American Hegemony, but I could never describe the system until I read about the Imperial Boomerang and the Five Phase Lifecycle which captures the US' expansionist policies post WW2. Except we never needed war, we had the petrodollar.
The problem when you have a system that centralized, you have one major factor, and then the inability to grow leads to the empire turning within with its expansionist policies towards its people. Its the perfect system to have an incompetent boob turn cruel. And once that happens, everyone senses something wicked on the horizon. Soft power with allies completely vanishes. New allegiances are forged. A new hyperpower emerges. And the most defensive behavior is to protect your own interests -- which accelerate the inevitable collapse.
The US is a very big country, and any future shape will have it more like a confederation -- either officially in its successor states, or more likely by Balkanization. Whether or not its the New America we want, well, I'm not that clairvoyant.
I hope this makes sense, I'm not a political expert. All I am certain of, in my gut, is that Trump is the final manifestation of the decline phase, and this is the final act. The Roman empire went through many drastic 'collapses' in its span, this doesn't mark the end of America, but of the current post-WW2 hegemony? The one driven by the GI Bill and Technological progress? We aren't coming back from this.
I think you're right
Nothing will change until the pedophile class lives in fear. We need a revolution
It's not a matter of 'fixing it'. The USA is transforming itself from a liberal democracy to a christian theocracy. Evangelical leaders have been working on this since the 1980's. They want to change the constitution to remove the separation of church and state. This is what Project 2025 is all about. They are about 60% there. The first act of the new Christian Nationalism will be the American Genocide of trans, gays and lesbians. This is what ICE is being groomed for. They must be willing and able to execute women and children in the camps they are setting up. Renee Good was the test case. Get ready, the program has been copied from Nazi Germany, look it up.
Sounds right, but the brand of christianity being pushed is not the usual tension between liberal and conservative brands of the same religion like you see with judiasm and islam. Its more a grifter christianity that hardly ever talks about christianity at all.
You aren't the only one, this has been the rhetoric from the far right for over a decade now. The "Boogaloo Boys" were named for what they forsaw as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo". They gained notoriety during Trump's first term, and later rebranded/forked into the Proud Boys. Now you don't hear about any of them as much because they're all hired as ICE agents, military, or working for Hegseth at the Pentagon.
The thing to recognize is, while we're all flirting with the idea that maybe, if we're not careful, we might see a civil war in the US' future, the Trump administration is talking and behaving like we're already in phase 1: determining allegiances and positioning forces.
The trump administration has a lot of factions involved with a lot of different long-term goals, but right now their common goal is to dismantle the US, and they are currently on track. If at some point one or more states decide the only way to put a stop to unconstitutional federal action is through force, they'll use the military to "keep the peace". But that will be the tipping point, and they've been preparing for a while...
What leads you to the belief that the elite have a common goal of dismantling the US?
First off, I'm not a fan of the fuzzy term "elite", but I'll assume we both know what that refers to.
People think the rich just like to get richer, that Musk and Bezos are competing to have the biggest number in their bank account. But no, they have no interest in "USD", they don't care about being crowned "richest person on the playground", they want to own the playground. They don't want to be confined by some government's laws. After a certain point, the only reason to keep accruing wealth is to one day become the government and write your own laws. To me, that goal IS what makes someone "elite". Conversely, a wealthy person who welcomes high taxes on the rich because it makes the society around them better is still wealthy, but not "elite".
The elite are always looking for a route to absolute power, and they all see the Trump administration as an opening and are all jumping at it. The only thing they have in common is they want the US govt to be weakened beyond repair, but where they differ is they all want to be the one to take its place (or retain a position of influence like Little Finger).
Got it. We generally agree on the elite motivation. But I think we disagree on government.
For me, bourgeois government is the structure of collaboration between and among the elite, not a separate entity. So I don't think Musk wants to dismantle the US government, he is playing the game between and among other elites and the field of play is the government that represents the collaboration. In so far as the government limits the power of the elite, it generally does so with the consent of the elite. The problem is that the laws remain even though the state of play changes. The system designed by and for the robber barons of the gilded age didn't work for the entrepreneurial 1950s and the system of the 1950s didn't work for the financial transformation of the 1980s and the regulation of the 1980s didn't work for the tech revolution. None of these were dismantlings of the US but reformations of the system from the old state made by the old elites for the old conditions into a new state by the new elites for the new conditions.
They fundamentally want the US to continue. It gives them a military, a way to repress the masses, access to massive natural resources, a reliable money spigot, and dominating power globally. They don't want to dismantle it. They just need to reconfigure the machine collaboratively to maximize their power.
The difference in what we're saying is semantic.
If this means a government "of the people, for the people, by the people" that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.
If this means a puppet state that the "elite" holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt. You could say that because they call it the "US Govt" it's still the US govt, and you could say that because they call it the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it's a democratic republic. But I would disagree on both points.
Yeah obviously they're not going to personally crown themselves as supreme ruler on a towering citadel constructed where the whitehouse once stood like a caricature of a villain. But if the structure of "government" that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it's objectively not the US anymore; it's just the "elite", the govt is whatever they say, they are the govt, wealth only flows wherever they say it's allowed to in order to maintain power.
And that's always their goal, to become the govt, that's what I mean.
The US has always been a project of the elite; US democracy was only ever a facade.
The bourgeoisie will not allow their power to be voted away. There's a reason the choices in the voting booth are always so narrow; you're only allowed to vote for a candidate that they've pre-approved and bankrolled. Vote or don't, it doesn't actually matter.
I have a feeling we would disagree as to which countries are actually democracies.
It's always been an oligarchy. At no point were the masses in charge of the US. It was founded by rich, landed gentry from Europe leading the common man to battle under the banner of liberal values, but they formed the entire government to be by of and for the land owners. They even gave MORE power to land owners who also owned people. That's how committed they were to oligarchy from the beginning. It's always been a structure by which the elite manage their affairs including how best to prevent a revolt by the masses.
Tell me not to go vote in midterms, then.
I don't waste time telling people how to vote. Electoralism is a total waste of time. I vote how I vote, keep it to myself, and spend the rest of my time not thinking about electoralism. None of these politicians deserve my free labor when 100+ Democrats just voted to expand ICE and DHS power to obtain consumer data from retail companies to use in their operation. I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it's doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
Go ahead. Vote in the midterms. The Ds in the house just proved to you that they're onboard with the whole fascist panopticon policing program. They've always been collaborators with the Rs. But vote. It's literally the least you can do. Don't let anyone stop you. And then, forget about elections immediately after and do something about the fact that your neighbors, their kids, and their teachers are all replicating the white supremacy myths of this country into every single generation and glossing over it all with a simple "vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys" narrative.
Given that the US was never that, obviously that isn't what it means.
Incredible. No notes.
Fucking incredible
Watch this.
EDIT: But now I'm finally going to get around to asking this: do any of you, living in the US, vote?
Would you ever consider voting DSA/Socially democratic, even if your views are to the left of them and you are anti-capitalist? What if voting for the PSL is not an option where you are? Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution? Not sure if I will ever vote again at this point...
Last time US suffered the pains of war in their land was late 1860's. I believe American politics are stuck in that era.
I'm afraid the rot has spread much farther than that. Yes, without a violent upheaval of some sort, the U.S. is fucked but the problem had long since broken containment...
In the Borderlands in-game universe, there's references to historical "corporate wars", when the corporations seized political power and promptly began to duke it out to see who was going to be on top of the pile. At least that's how I imagine it in my head. But fuck if it doesn't look like that's the most likely future coming our way.
Never forget, it was Taco Bell that won the Franchise Wars.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "fixing it". Could things be reformed to meet a status quo similar to pre-1970 without violence? Sure. Reform like that would be difficult, it would take decades, and it would take a lot of political will. Reform like that would be akin to a house of cards, all it would take is a single Republican majority for a single term to knock it back down. I also think reforms like that are completely inadequate to resolving the underlying problem that has put us in these times: capitalism. Assuming reform is successful, we'll be right back in the same spot about 80 years later. For things to be truly fixed, we need to overthrow capitalism. This will be violent and tumultuous.
Lol. Lmao. Definitely not. Democrats have no solutions.
I hope there is. War is never the answer but these two parties are really pushing everyone to extremes
It'll take a few more
assassinationsLuigi-like incidents before any oligarchs start taking us serfs seriously.Adventurism doesn't generally bring about change, it just justifies further repressions. Organizing is what brings change and enables actual conquest of political power.
How do you organise when the billionaires own the media and the social media platforms? Further, if you're in the US, how do you organise when the sitting pedophile declares anti-fascism as terrorism and you can be locked up or killed for the association?
Walk around your neighbourhood inviting strangers to a Signal chat?
For starters, begin with adopting good OPSEC principles. Privacy is a valuable shield.
Secondly, learn from successful revolutionaries. I made a basic Marxist-Leninist reading list as a helpful introduction, study how revolutionary parties work and function.
Finally, get organized. Join a party like the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Some of your org work may in fact involve walking around your neighborhood and inviting strangers to chats! The primary focus at the present moment is to build a revolutionary party capable of directing the working classes in the case of crisis.
No, they’d first lock us down hard. They don’t have any humanity in them to take us seriously.
They need more than 2 parties
There are two parties because it’s a first past the post system, but that is a red herring. It’s not the source of the problem. The problem is that the US is a bourgeois democracy, AKA an oligarchy.
Lol how to propaganda the dumb way. Leave me alone with your kindergarten bs.
The Democrats so rarely have full control of the executive and legislative branches, and when they do it is by such slim margins that the most right-leaning Democrat has the whole thing by the balls.
Looks at Obama's Presidency: Democrats had a single vote margin in the House for only 41 days. That single vote was an Independent (Joe Lieberman). We would have had single payer health care if not for him. What we got disappointing but it was a lot better than nothing. Outside of those 41 days everything had to be a compromise with the Republicans.
I think we need to stop the "both sides are the same" stuff until we've actually given the Democrats a big margin in both houses for an extended period so that we give the left leaning members an opportunity to get some things moving.
American politics is kayfabe. If it hadn't been Lieberman, it would've just been someone else.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH LOLLLLLL XDDDD
"How many times do we gotta teach you this lesson old man?"
Problem is that waiting, hoping and praying for a Democrat super majority is the exact fallacy they want you to believe. "Put down those pitchforks and torches, you just gotta wait until the good guys win the presidential election, the house, the Senate, the DOJ, AND they aren't a conservative in disguise that vetos or votes against whatever the Democrats are currently working towards"
"how can you expect us to do anything when we barely even control the entire government. You have to deliver us a permanent one party state and we'll talk about making some changes in a few decades"
Funny how that's never an issue for Republicans
The rule for needing 60 votes is set by a vote of 50.
Are you thinking on the scale of hundreds of years? To get back to FDR..?
this is just an excuse; republicans have no such issues when they have a narrow majority themselves.
This is related to why I'm so nervous about teaching social studies next year. Can anyone help me think about how to teach US history without shoving a bunch of propaganda down middle school throats?
Give out copies of Larry Gonick's textbook?
I looked it up a while back so forgive me if I didn't get it right but I believe there have been two cases in history of a peaceful transition from fascism to democracy. Anyway, I'm hoping for that.
Portugal and Spain in the 1970s?
There are several other examples of a more or less peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy.
You should really rethink the American Revolution. The crown was a restraining force on the colonists' genocidal drive Westward, and legal cases were proceeding that were lying the groundwork to end chattel slavery. Both of these things, coupled with the massive economic potential of North America that was being subordinated to London's financiers and the crowns taxation all led to the American Revolution. It was first and foremost a drive for unfettered greed and unfettered dominance.
The Civil War was not about ideals. It was about economics. The North saw much larger profits in industrializing compared the cash cropping of the South. Cash cropping meant remaining subordinated to London, primarily. The cotton from the plantations were raw materials. It was London that turned them into high fashion. Essentially, what we see today in overexploited nations where the people are employed in the lowest rung of the value chain like cobalt mines and what not, that's what the American South was economically. The Northern financiers wanted to move to industrializatoon and that would require a different labor configuration. You can't use illiterate chattel slaves in factories, you need a different mode of labor. That would inevitably mean changing the nature of ownership of human beings from private property to wage slaves. And that meant the South would lose their investments both in cash cropping and in humans. So the South seceded in order to create a separate nation with a separate economy from the industrializing North. And the war was fought under the command of Lincoln who not only didn't care whether slavery persisted or not but believed that black people should leave the US and go back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the rebelling states and only if they took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment gambit, not an expression of ideals.
As for war, we have consistently seen how guerilla warfare always beats the empire. Hell, the American Revolution was won primarily as a guerilla war and not a direct confrontation. Vietnam. Korea. Afghanistan. It's imminently plausible for the US military to lose to a domestic uprising. And even more important, war is primarily a destruction of economies first, people second. The US is struggling desperately to manage its own economic output and can barely produce war machines and munitions at this point. A civil war would further destroy the economy here, cementing China permanently and the UD elites would have nowhere to go except back to Europe which is also floundering.
FWIW, Karl Marx agreed with you.
Only 1/3 of the voting age population voted against MAGA after having a 10 year preview. The US is unsalvageable. Live your life while you can. There are too few patriots to fight back against this hoard of loyalists.
The US has been a nation no-one should treat as a serious entity since 2024-11-05, and can not be again until they can prove their ability to hold another legitimate election, and concluded the Nuremberg-a-Lago trials.
Bzzt, wrong answer.
July 4, 1776
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
We had, and still have, slaves. Even modern California just can't say no to prison slaves.
We've been torched from day 0.
The US imprisons more of its people than the height of the Soviet GULAG, than anything China has ever done, and has held the top spot for 50 years. Recently Cuba and El Salvador became the top spots, but that's not the whole picture. El Salvador is hosting US deportees in concentration camps at the behest and in collaboration with the US. Cuba's prisons are integrated with the community and are sites of rehabilitation and not slave labor as in the USA . But most damning is that the USA is the only country that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison, and saddles them with that the debt when they leave as a condition of their parole. The parole system in the US is twice as big as the prison system, meaning our criminal justice system is managing and surveilling the lives of 3x as much of our population as literally any other country on the planet and getting some of the absolute worst outcomes.
And in addition to that, this "difference" you speak of is not the difference you think it is.
Prior to the 13th Amendment the US prison system was 90% white. 10 years later it was 90% black. The exception for prison slavery created an incentive to write all new laws that only targeted behaviors of newly freed black folks. Those folks ended up prison and enslaved all over again. The state used them as free labor for a time, but they caught too many of them so they created a leasing program and they leased the slaves to their former masters on the plantations. Does that sound like a difference between being enslaved for the color of your skin versus being enslaved as punishment for a crime?
Many of those laws are still on the books and still inform what we think of as "civil society". Loitering, vagrancy, sleeping on park benches, public intoxication all things you think of as normal all started to catch black folks and turn them into state slaves.
And now? You think the situation is so qualitatively different now? Black folks living in ghettos defined by banks using red lining and states determining where to place industry and dump waste? Black folks overrepresented in prison, poverty, and state violence? Black folks getting lynched by vigilantes every year?
Really? You think it's somehow different now instead of just the same fundamental shaped through adaptation?
And this is how people maintain their cognitive dissonance.
always has been
As long as Americans think one day peaceful protests will do anything, I don't see a anything happening. That concept is so mind boggling dumb imho. If you're not willing to commit for weeks/months, and say from the start, 'ah tomorrow we will be gone'. Then why wouldn't the government just ignore it? No you put out your demands and sit down in Washington DC or NY or something until the demands are met. Giving it a deadline just doesn't make any sense at all.
Now if this would actually happen, I don't see it stay peaceful for very long, but probably a tiananmen square situation developing. With how little the gov cares about people's well being.
But to be honest, the US probably needs vigilantes/rebels a la the Black Panthers for anything to happen.
The democracy route? Yeah it's way past that point already. As long as people like Bernie Sanders (or anyone more left than Bush) keep getting marked as some kind of 'communist', nothing will happen there. That propaganda has been gobbled up too much already.
Almost got it and screwed up in your last sentence.
Bernie the sheepdog works for the same people
Didn't work for the Occupy movements, did it?
Did a hell lot more than King's days protest, at least it was a debate for way longer. But they suffered from too little numbers in the end. But of course you can ignore all other long-term peaceful protests, like the salt march, to dismiss the underlying point
I'm not a fan of this take. Peaceful protests are just one piece of an effective resistance. People complaining that big protests "don't do anything" are sometimes right, but more often they assume that nothing else is being done before/afterwards and don't understand the actual useful effects of protests.
Protests aren't always about (actually pretty much never about) an immediate demand being met. They're about getting people together and building a network of likeminded people. They're about demonstrating to others around you that they might not be alone in thinking things aren't OK. They're a step in the process.
I've heard this repeated sooooo many times every time this comes up. So at what point are you actually going to do anything with that "network". Or is it just to find friends to moan with?
LOL
I think the people in power will make sure they do everything they can to spin the narrative to make sure that we are divided and more so that Trump's supporters continue believing he has their interests in mind.
::: spoiler More ranting... They (the rich and complicit) will always make us (working people) out to be the enemy just as how media has continued to make China and Russia the enemy of the world--when clearly, and how it's been made so evidently clear, the US is just as bad. Committing war crimes in Venezuela? Supporting Isreal-led genocide? Really, it's the people in power at each of these "super powers" that are corrupt and deserve to be removed.
Why the hell did the guy from El Salvador kiss Trump's ass for the mega prison? Obviously corrupt/collusion happening there. They're so stuck up their own ass that they can't see beyond their fantasy. They literally have a god complex and actively believe they can rule the world.
It's these people that should be removed, not us. We did nothing wrong, but they insist that we should be deported? Put in jail? Killed by pawns like I.C.E.? Killed on a boat? Killed by racist shitheads?
All we have to do is march across DC and force them to resign. Why can we waste so much time "going on vacation" and doing other mundane things like joining competitions but we can't all just in one fell swoop march at the capitol? The news and politicians painted a bad picture about it but at least the misguided Trump supporters had the balls to DO something about it. Even though they were doing so in bad faith and on the wrong basis, they WENT there.
Based on Trump's actions in his term and the meek inaction of the supposed only other party (that don't want to support ppl like Mamdani), I have no faith that anything significant will change even if somehow Trump is removed. Everything happening now is because people don't want to make change happen. The corrupt 1% like Trump want to keep us enslaved and to keep inequality alive.
Instead of playing chicken, waiting for some miracle to save us from this occupation of corrupt leaders, we the people should be taking action to remove them. Fuck the constitution and the state. History has shown the only real way to take out dumbasses in power but we're all afraid to do anything about it. Even a soft revolt like leaking company secrets, trade secrets, and anything that would actually cause a stir is asking for too much apparently. Can't even fucking hack the US to get Epstein files? Seriously? FFS :::
*Much worse.
Lol, westerners will only every criticize their own governments with the caveat that obviously nobody could possibly be better than them.
Nope. I am not prescribing a solution here. I am asking if people believe there is any other solution, and if there is hope to avoid it.
There is hope to avoid violent revolution. It's just not coming from the Dems. What is needed is for citizens to band together and start doing things differently. Protest movements (e.g. Indivisible) need to shift from protest to disruption and noncompliance.
The not-Republicans seem less hell-bent on destroying everything for some accelerationist ideology. That's about all I see. I think if we can get a progressive, perhaps AOC in office, and it's possible to save us, she'll not hold back, having seen how Trump used the office. That's my only hope of not having a violent revolution someday, but I think there will be many years, probably decades of disasters to live through first.
Going through civil war?? Who will be casualties?? Normal freaking civilians and none
Maybe if you’re stupid and don’t go directly for the billionaires
Fix what exactly? Hard to answer, when the question isn't clearly defined.
Not denying, that there's a lot to be fixed. But regarding the means, that depends on what exactly you're talking about.
Unfortunately no you are not and you and all the rest are completely wrong.
The US has to go through the process of fascism only to be conquered or overthrown by socialists, something that didn't happen during the Interbellum or world war II.
Last time they went social democratic to preserve capitalism as US socialists were already drawing their pitchforks.
This time around however, the capitalists want to hold onto power even as their capitalist society is on the brink of collapsing. This time, like last time in Nazi Germany, the US merchants refuse to take any concessions during a crisis, so fascism it has already chosen.
This means the US is already going through a painful transition as fascism is known to be a unstable and (self-)destructive form of governance.
But what is fascism? I have my own take on it and on socialism by the way...
Here you see a table I made that lists all the standard socio-economic forms of governance.
All standard have three sets of people called estates.
The First estate sets the rules, second estate sets the direction of society and the third estate keeps the gears of society running.
This differs I think from the usual socialist picture (correct if I'm wrong) where Marx had in mind that all estates would become one.
It also differs I think from what capitalists think of themselves, because merchants are not mentioned anywhere in the constitution, are not in the government or anywhere in the trias politica and yet they get first row seats in inaugerations and VIP invitations during delegations.
To me, fascism is capitalism, but with a ruling class so powerful that the legitimizer (if that's a word, I make up words) class has become insignificant and with the first estate gone, the ruling class reigns with impunity.
It will collapse and when it does, we will enter a world with a majority of socialist states very soon.
If not, the world will go straight to communism.
programmers perform labor tho, and rely on physical supply chains (computers, data centers, networks, keyboards, chairs, screens) to do their labor.
programmers also cannot operate without collaboration and cannot bring their labor to market for a return without payment processing, publishers, distribution networks and marketing.
outside of this construct from the person you're responding to; programmers are the probably the most modern adaptation of labor aristocracy.
this means that, yes, they're working class and are just and interdependent like everyone else is in the working class; but they don't align themselves with the working class and instead chose to align themselves with the ruling class.
i think that's why the person you're responding to classifies them a "first estate" because the french revolution had these estates and this person is trying to draw a parallel to that revolution.
Please, for the love of god, I am begging you. Read Fanshen
genocide. They struggled for genocide. And the enslavement of millions. And mass rape. And overwhelming control of women's bodies. They did not make us thrive. They drowned us in blood.
The story of abolition or the civil rights movement is not the story of America, even though the bourgeois establishment may have tried to tame MLK Jr. posthumously. All concessions given to labor were for the bourgeoisie to maintain its power, not out of any change of heart. If they thought they could get away with maintaining slavery they would - oh wait, they do, it's called the prison system.
The civil rights movement of the 60s you mean? Those aren't our ancestors. They are our oldest contemporaries. Some of them are still alive today. Our ancestors are the the 500 years of European settlers that brought genocide and chattel slavery and systematized rape to this land. The people who fought against those things are the ultra minority. John Brown was hung for treason while the Confederate leaders were given statues and their names were given to university buildings and streets.
Read the history of the bill of rights. Many thought it was a bad idea to enumerate rights because they thought the constitution already protected all of those rights. These same people were raping their slaves and selling the babies
The union did not defeat the slave owners, it defeated the plantation owners. Lincoln famously did not care if slavery was legal or not. The 11 states that seceded from the union were not the only states that had slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was not intended to free the slaves, it only offered emancipation to enslaved people in the 11 states IF those enslaved people took up arms against the rebels. It was a recruitment tool, pure and simple.
Women got the right to vote because women fought for it and women were an oppressed group, rather proving my point than refuting it. Further, even though they got the right to vote they were still disallowed by law to own property, open bank accounts, etc. In the 1950s doctors were providing husbands with ice pick lobotomies for their wives, literally jamming an ice pick behind the eyeball to destroy specific nerves in the frontal lobe, making the women docile robots without harming their "pretty faces". Literally. This is not an exaggeration.
The US has the resources to invest in r&d because it stole vast amounts of wealth from the rest of the world, including right here from the original inhabitants of the land. The US made native Americans mine radioactive uranium without any safety equipment, literally barefoot in the mud, so they could research the atomic bomb and then drop it on two major population centers of an enemy they already defeated and were negotiating a surrender with. The vast majority of R&D the US invested in was through the military in their ever burning passion to kill more people and dominate more of the world. That's why the Nazi Verner Von Braun was rescued from Germany before he could stand trial and made into a prominent NASA scientist.
The fascists lost WW2 because the Soviets defeated 80% of their forces and marched into and straight through Berlin. There's a reason why West Berlin was inside East Germany. But you didn't realize that either. In East Germany the fascists really did lose, as the Soviets imprisoned or executed anyone that was supportive of the fascists. Meanwhile in West Germany former openly Nazi politicians were elected into office all over the country. It made some people so upset they resisted and the West branded them as terrorists and even invented a whole new psychological disease to explain why hostages would side with the anti-fascist "terrorists" - Stockholm Syndrome.
Jim Crow laws were put in place after the Black Codes. The Black Codes were put in place to imprison the recently freed black slaves. The US prison system went from 90% white to 90% black in under 10 years. The Black folks they imprisoned were leased back to the plantation owners where they lived their lives as slaves AGAIN. The 13th amendment didn't end slavery. It only ended private slavery. Prison slaves are fine. That's why prison slaves make over $11B in profits for the government and private corporations just through the labor, to say nothing of being one of the only countries that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison. The Clintons, when Bill was Governor of Arkansas had black house slaves because the Governor's Mansion was staffed by prisoners who were given labor jobs without pay. The Clinton's did not change this.
And since the 1970s the US has had the largest housed-prison population in the world by percentage of population, worse than the Soviet GULAGs at their peak and always worse by multiples than anything the Chinese have done to their own people. But that's JUST prison population. The parole system, where people are surveilled daily, is twice as large as the prison population. There is nothing in the world like it. The US abolished Jim Crow but didn't stop the imprisonment, enslavement, surveillance, and cold-blooded murder and rape of black people.
Not to mention that we have public records indicating that the end of Jim Crow was accompanied by a deliberate and explicit strategy by US politicians to mask the system behind softer language. The results are the same.
Your definition of "winning out in the end" leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly. Native Americans today are still undergoing a slow motion genocide where their cultures, knowledge, land, and people are all disappearing. Black people are still being murdered by vigilantes. The prison system has only gotten worse, never better.
Stop looking at the lipstick and saying that we have won hard fought victories when the pig is fatter and more bloated than ever.
Define painful. There's nothing stopping us from starting co-ops for nearly everything. But the will has to be there. Too many people are happy with what they have. Violence only breeds more violence. Full stop. All it takes is a viral moment.
Co-ops, unions, small businesses are very beneficial many-fold. The disconnect from those benefits happens when a bigbox entity imparts people with sticker shock, or bargains, or lowest price guarantees. It's not just a peoples' will -- it was will\choice becomes hidden or removed when bigbox puts down too many big roots.
I believe painful will be the transition because it will be long-drawn and painfully slow, to bounce back. Reasoning example- "...too many people are happy with what they have".
I'm not American so I won't claim to know what needs to happen. But from an outside observer, it seems that the majority are complacent and willing to sacrifice those "below" them to keep treading water.
Which isn't uniquely American - complacency and a lack of compassion is an issue in a lot of places. But America is definitely showing us how dangerous it can be when enough people have the "ehh, I'm still surviving so yeah this isn't great but oh well, go with the flow" kind of mindset/action.
There sure as hell is. Economics, wealth distribution, regulation, human needs for shelter food and clothing, law enforcement, lobbyists...
It's FAR more-profound than that: humankind's instinct has to be fundamentally-force-recalibrated.
The Great Filter.
Exactly as bootcamp can force-remanufacture someone's unconscious-mind, their instinct, their identity, their ego, their "nature",
exactly as back in the Tribal Mother Village time, before agriculture, it was Nature which did that to .. those-who-survived,
humankind needs to do that, but at th whole-population scale.
All the different "religions" which have "apocalypse" predictions/prophecies, many of them could be dropped into ALL worlds which do what our world's been doing..
< world has ape-nature people, & it reaches its 1st Industrial Revolution, the Roman Empire equivalent stage, the seedling of the future cascade-of-Industrial-Revolutions >
drop prophecies in, about food-security-wars being global, about end-of-Age-corrupt-empire, about end-of-Age-corrupt-empire-corrupt-leader ( Nero at the end of the previous Age, Trump at the end of the Age of Pisces ), about food-chain-collapse, about migration-wars, about rampaging-imperialism, about DarkTriad/DarkTetrad ruling the world, & if there are significant glaciers on the planet, which are about to be melted, throw-in all the earthquakes & volcanoes predictions, due to tectonic-flexing as thousands-of-cubic-km-of-water gets moved from frozen-on-land to liquid-in-ocean, too..
< let the Age go by, so the seedling is ripening, until.. >
suddenly, 15-centuries ( or so ) after the Roman Empire's expiry, the sapling-stage begins: Industrial Age ( coal/steam/steel ) and then Industrial Age ( communications, telegraph, radio, etc ) and then Industrial Age ( information, computing-machines ), etc is happening..
NOW the breaking of the climate's Equilibrium is forced ( all the "clearing of the forests" to "improve" Earth were just making-certain that this would be impossible to recover from ), with the burning of fossil-fuels..
NOW the redistribution-of-tectonic-forces ( melting ) sets-up the increasing of quakes & volcanoes ( happening, now, btw.. quake-swarms on both west & east sides of California, all around the Pacific Plate, volcanoes in Phillipines?Indonesia?, Killuea, & there's 1 which is 1.3km below the ocean-surface which is putting ash 2.7km up into the sky, yesterday.. )..
NOW the technology-multiplying-our-effect means that Nature CANNOT survive our butchery, so the food-chain's being butchered, & sooner-or-later that's going to become .. fatal.
NOW AMOC is shutting-off.
NOW political-rabies-is-highjacking-countries.
NOW religious/ideological-rabies-is-highjacking-countries.
etc..
So, what's the solution?
Change our unconscious-mind, our ego, our identity, our instinct.
Universe will corner us into either growing-up-or-extinguishing, so it's guaranteed.
We WON'T, grow-up, though, until forced, so .. there won't be many left alive, in 6-decades.
It isn't merely-local: it's racial/whole-species.
The Great Filter.
Either we change-our-nature, XOR we extinguish.
This century.
Which, tbh, is exactly what happened to individuals back in the Tribal Mother Village Time, when they lived among jungle..
No merely-local "fix" is going to change-the-game.
No merely-superficial "fix" is going to change anything meaningful.
Humankind has to change its nature, XOR extinguish.
Just like all worlds do.
Get past species-"puberty" XOR don't.
If not, then .. universe will try elsewhere, eventually.
_ /\ _
It's apparently easier to imagine this kind of bullshit than it is to imagine end of capitalism :S