Sorry for the late reply… things have been rather busy here.
The “working class owning the means to production” is a catch all phrase
I wouldn’t say that. If society cannot control the means of production democratically, this…
The dismantling of peaceful socialism
…becomes a foregone conclusion. It’s not a catch-all phrase - merely the absolute minimum necessary to render the owner-class powerless to execute the very thing you describe in your first paragraph. If they are allowed the power to do so, they will do so - it matters not what legalese a state produces to pretend that it is, or has ever been, on the side of the working class.
The benefits of classical liberalism are mainly in it’s concepts of minority protections.
I find that hard to believe. Even inside the imperial core (where liberalism is essentially de facto state religions) minorites had to wage long and arduous campaigns for even the most meagre inclusion. And then we aren’t even talking about the billions of people on the imperial peripheries (or - as I like to call them - global extraction zones) which liberal elites has always treated, at best, as expendable externalities. In fact, liberalsm’s historical tolerance for the violent subjugation and exploitation of the “other” will fill several libraries - it’s acceptance of said “other” won’t even fill one book.
I do agree that there is one type of minority that liberalism has always sought to protect - the minority that already owns all the wealth and power.
My personal issue with Communism is it is overly idealistic.
Whenever accusations of “idealism” is hurled at the left, I can’t help but think of the way we treated environmentalists back in the 80s - they were painted with the “idealism” brush so hard that the media literally portrayed them as intellectually dysfunctional caricatures (I remember because I was there) Turns out they weren’t actually being all that idealistic, were they? A lot less idealistic than the people who taught us that everything would be okay as long as “red arrow goes up,” in any case.
It’s amazing how quickly yesterday’s (supposed) “too idealistic” can become tomorrow’s “only sane option left.”
It is very good at pointing out the issues with power inequity and the current models of ownership but it overlooks that human cupidity is always present.
Certainly… but I fail to see how liberalism fixes this. In fact, liberalism’s fetishization of law has proven perfectly useful to the needs of the wealthy and powerful - as Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.”
A fair number of people, to their detriment at times, desire heirachy.
Certainly - the formation of hierarchies to concentrate power is something that will always have to be actively managed by any society that wishes to call itself egalitarian. But there is no rule that states that the formation and dismantling of such hierarchies cannot be done efficiently through democratic means. I’d say that the lengths liberalism will go to to prevent the democratic dismantling of hierarchies - including, but not limited to, handing power to the fascist element - is proof enough of liberalism’s fundamentally anti-democratic character.
you effectively trap your citizens inside the borders of your defacto new state unable to move freely outside because of a lack of liquidity
I’d say that the poverty liberalism cannot exist without traps plenty of people inside borders anyway. I don’t see no taxpayer-funded fascist goon squads on horseback waiting to whip Bill Gates when he crosses the southern US border, but that sure does seem to be the lot of those people liberalism treats as disposable externalities.
A currency free state is great on paper
The debate on currency and even markets is still an ongoing one on the left - it is far from settled. Besides… you’re not talking to a communist - you’re talking to a socialist.
Liberal democratic structures are very successful (mind you not good just efficient and difficult to topple) because of a balance of deferred responsibility,
There is a very big difference between “deferred responsibility” and deferred institutionalized power - the former implies consequences for the failure to meet those responsibilities (something absent from practiced liberalism essentially since the Enlightenment) while the latter absolutely does not.
redundancy,
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
structures of checks and balances and the ideals of personal freedoms and protections baked into their foundation.
These are all things that have proven easy to subvert - and that is even assuming that they were doing what they purported to be doing in the first place.
Getting even a corrupt one to fall into the conditions nessisary for communism to take hold is a job and a half.
Well… not really. The problem is that the liberal order essentially does this all by itself. The post-WW1 period is a text-book case. It’s not so much a question of “if” but more a question of “when.”
It’s technically a modern hybrid socialism strain - Social Democracy which is sometimes referred to as market socialism, Liberal-Socialism…
They are still perfectly incompatible… liberalism has been forced to appropriate socialist-sounding ideas - though nothing core to socialist thought itself - and shoe-horn them (no matter how poor the fit) into the status quo in order to prevent socialist ideas from spreading. At the end of the day, it is merely a concession designed to protect the liberal order.
Democrats at least are avid followers of the internal rules. They might have a more reliable fear of pitchforks.
Liberals have always been reliably afraid of the pitchforks. If that was all there was to it, liberalism wouldn’t have lasted very long.
It’s their very fear that makes fascism such a necessity to the liberal nation state.
As a personal request could you not chop up and reply to my posts peicemeal like this? I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with. You seem pretty capable of putting together your own treatise and reply rather than just counterpunching and I really would appreciate the effort. It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
The fact that liberalism has incorperated socialist ideals into it, even in incomplete concessions to save itself I think is just a melding of the push and pull of the two systems interplaying. The two systems are not direct opposites, they are uneasy roomates. A lot of the way people interface with them looks at them as enemies but they are just philosophies. You can admire and engage with incomplete philosophies…but that’s not what’s happening. People are reacting to the name of the philosophy like it’s poison forgetting that it like everything is a work in progress. That in practice it is failing to live up to it’s on paper ideals doesn’t make it any different than any other pure philosophy. Every single system of governance that has ever existed has been corrupted at some point. Nothing gold can stay because ingratitude is generational. Anything we fight to make better unless it is maintained with utmost cultural zeal by those who come after us will collapse due to the siren song of personal individual gains. It doesn’t matter what replaces this, in any society those who have the moat participation get their say and a populace’s contentment is a weak flank. What we are experiencing now is basically just a reiteration of what has happened before again and again throughout time and political structure.
I believe in dismantling the structures of colonialism pushed by nominally liberal governments in favour of more forms of publicly held wealth and support…but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots. They all had blindspots. The founders of these philosophic schools were mostly a bunch of white guys in the 18th and 19th century. They lived in a completely different world than us and were fucked up by being a segregated society that inferred personhood much less readily then the average person of today on virtually all fronts. Progressivism isn’t liberal nor is it strictly socialist. The politics of identity and acceptance of the other is a compounding factor independent of those philosophies that those ideologies can choose to incorporate or just as easily become insular and regressive. Socialist groups used to scorn poc and queer people just as much as liberal in groups. There is no neutral governance. A state has power and no matter how soft they attempt to be to citizens someone will be bound by it. Where many people tap out is basically not wanting to be bound by something or wanting to have a personal say in agreeing with the allocation of funds or resources .
By breaking into teams you are rooting for and against and letting anger at the current state of affairs causes people to pull away to create unreasonable expectations of any government body. My main axe to grind is that a lot of these things people take issue with aren’t core to a specific tphilosophy… Like your example of criminalizing people sleeping under bridges. More often than not that’s some nimby bylaw that you need to fight against local citizen interests at a municipal level. That’s not some grand aspirations of a federal system, that’s people being fucking short sighted dicks and showing up to their local council meetings because they want to create their own personal mini utopias. It’s a personal ethics problem. You could place a Socialist government in charge but you are probably still going to be swimming in NIMBY pricks. We have documented fines from the medieval ages of people being NIMBY pricks to each other and a lot of those councils pre enclosure were largely self governing and long predate liberal ideology.
Treating people of a specific political label as though they have defective moral compasses simply for utilizing that term isn’t going to really help matters I don’t think. As much as people want to establish in and out groups it’s pretty unnessisary. You can basically just run individual interest groups. Like a “Pro decriminalizing human movement” group or a “Tax the everliving hell out of multi millionaires” group and have much healthier conversations than trying to construct “the left” “a Socialist” “a liberal”…because you get ridiculous infighting that serves no one. People are much more amenable to having across line discussions when it’s not structured as a team sport.
There’s also a psychological phenomenon of scapegoating at play on this platform by people who claim variable aspects of “the left” “Socialism” “Marxism” and “Communism” . By transferring all of one’s sins to the liberal goat and claiming that they are not existent in your own ideological constructed tribe is very comforting to believe but not always particularly true. You could participate in this ritual with a bunch of different groups using the same goat and some of them are just angry. They want absolution. To not be associated with the sins they’ve assigned the goat while not really having a good idea of what to reach for. I think it’s a trap that will only lead to incoherent screaming. The way we conduct business as a political community is inherently flawed because our structure of engagement is just… Egotism.
I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with.
Have you noticed all the liberal absurdity floating around here? Problematizing liberalism and exposing it’s intimate relationship with capitalism and fascism is a pretty damn difficult job (not to mention long overdue)… and it’s no one on the left’s responsibility to make it pleasant for you on top of all that.
Having your worldview collapse from underneath you is most definitely not a pleasant thing… it’s more akin to the withdrawal symptoms one suffers after going cold turkey. I don’t blame people for avoiding it like the plague… but there is no avoiding it unless we wish to continue living in the fantasy world liberalism has tried (and, for far too long, succeeded) to substitute for reality.
And no… I’m not talking about the fake and contrived “liberal-vs-conservative” dichotomy we all see advertised on CNN and Fox, either.
It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
What did you think I’m on here to do? Write theses for your enjoyment?
I’m not a philosopher - I don’t even like philosophy. I didn’t learn my politics in the ivory towers of academia. My background is in propaganda - and not the type of propaganda you study in sterile lecture halls and classrooms, either.
That’s what I do on here - I disrupt propaganda that requires disrupting… and that includes yours.
So if it sounds to you like I’m “counterpunching” your narratives that’s because I am.
The only reason I’m giving you the time of day is because your arguments are rationally sound - which I find (reasonably) indicative of an honest personality - but the assumptions you base them on are terrifically flawed and must therefore be rejected together with the conclusions you reach.
I can just pull a random thing you say and demonstrate this - here’s one.
but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots.
Here is an assumption that can be dismissed with next-to-zero debate - if the problems these institutions pose were merely caused by “blindspots,” why would the status quo react so violently to any attempts to fix said “blindspots” from the bottom up (since, mysteriosuly, these “blindspots” only seem to affect the lives of those who are actually subjected to the actions of all these institutions)? In your framing of the issue it makes no rational sense… unfortunately, it makes perfect rational sense once you admit that the violence doesn’t protect “blindspots” - it protects interests. These institutions don’t have “blindspots” - they serve interests. When they enshrined violent (white) militias into law with the 2nd amendment it was no “blindspot” - it was to protect interests. When they enshrined (black) slavery into law with the 13th amendment, it was no “blindspot” - it was to serve interests. Interests, mind you, which has been very well served right up to the present day - the proof is in the pudding, as they say - and pretending any off this has anything to do with “blindspots” is no less ahistorical than any falsehood peddled by the alt-right.
It seems to me that you are unused to having the assumptions you base your arguments on challenged, and wants to “discuss” things only after the sacrosanctity of the status quo has been established as inviolable - and this I reject out of hand.
If you wish to continue with this discourse, you’re going to have to accept that.
Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
Sorry for the late reply… things have been rather busy here.
I wouldn’t say that. If society cannot control the means of production democratically, this…
…becomes a foregone conclusion. It’s not a catch-all phrase - merely the absolute minimum necessary to render the owner-class powerless to execute the very thing you describe in your first paragraph. If they are allowed the power to do so, they will do so - it matters not what legalese a state produces to pretend that it is, or has ever been, on the side of the working class.
I find that hard to believe. Even inside the imperial core (where liberalism is essentially de facto state religions) minorites had to wage long and arduous campaigns for even the most meagre inclusion. And then we aren’t even talking about the billions of people on the imperial peripheries (or - as I like to call them - global extraction zones) which liberal elites has always treated, at best, as expendable externalities. In fact, liberalsm’s historical tolerance for the violent subjugation and exploitation of the “other” will fill several libraries - it’s acceptance of said “other” won’t even fill one book.
I do agree that there is one type of minority that liberalism has always sought to protect - the minority that already owns all the wealth and power.
Whenever accusations of “idealism” is hurled at the left, I can’t help but think of the way we treated environmentalists back in the 80s - they were painted with the “idealism” brush so hard that the media literally portrayed them as intellectually dysfunctional caricatures (I remember because I was there) Turns out they weren’t actually being all that idealistic, were they? A lot less idealistic than the people who taught us that everything would be okay as long as “red arrow goes up,” in any case.
It’s amazing how quickly yesterday’s (supposed) “too idealistic” can become tomorrow’s “only sane option left.”
Certainly… but I fail to see how liberalism fixes this. In fact, liberalism’s fetishization of law has proven perfectly useful to the needs of the wealthy and powerful - as Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.”
Certainly - the formation of hierarchies to concentrate power is something that will always have to be actively managed by any society that wishes to call itself egalitarian. But there is no rule that states that the formation and dismantling of such hierarchies cannot be done efficiently through democratic means. I’d say that the lengths liberalism will go to to prevent the democratic dismantling of hierarchies - including, but not limited to, handing power to the fascist element - is proof enough of liberalism’s fundamentally anti-democratic character.
I’d say that the poverty liberalism cannot exist without traps plenty of people inside borders anyway. I don’t see no taxpayer-funded fascist goon squads on horseback waiting to whip Bill Gates when he crosses the southern US border, but that sure does seem to be the lot of those people liberalism treats as disposable externalities.
The debate on currency and even markets is still an ongoing one on the left - it is far from settled. Besides… you’re not talking to a communist - you’re talking to a socialist.
There is a very big difference between “deferred responsibility” and deferred institutionalized power - the former implies consequences for the failure to meet those responsibilities (something absent from practiced liberalism essentially since the Enlightenment) while the latter absolutely does not.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
These are all things that have proven easy to subvert - and that is even assuming that they were doing what they purported to be doing in the first place.
Well… not really. The problem is that the liberal order essentially does this all by itself. The post-WW1 period is a text-book case. It’s not so much a question of “if” but more a question of “when.”
They are still perfectly incompatible… liberalism has been forced to appropriate socialist-sounding ideas - though nothing core to socialist thought itself - and shoe-horn them (no matter how poor the fit) into the status quo in order to prevent socialist ideas from spreading. At the end of the day, it is merely a concession designed to protect the liberal order.
Liberals have always been reliably afraid of the pitchforks. If that was all there was to it, liberalism wouldn’t have lasted very long.
It’s their very fear that makes fascism such a necessity to the liberal nation state.
As a personal request could you not chop up and reply to my posts peicemeal like this? I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with. You seem pretty capable of putting together your own treatise and reply rather than just counterpunching and I really would appreciate the effort. It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
The fact that liberalism has incorperated socialist ideals into it, even in incomplete concessions to save itself I think is just a melding of the push and pull of the two systems interplaying. The two systems are not direct opposites, they are uneasy roomates. A lot of the way people interface with them looks at them as enemies but they are just philosophies. You can admire and engage with incomplete philosophies…but that’s not what’s happening. People are reacting to the name of the philosophy like it’s poison forgetting that it like everything is a work in progress. That in practice it is failing to live up to it’s on paper ideals doesn’t make it any different than any other pure philosophy. Every single system of governance that has ever existed has been corrupted at some point. Nothing gold can stay because ingratitude is generational. Anything we fight to make better unless it is maintained with utmost cultural zeal by those who come after us will collapse due to the siren song of personal individual gains. It doesn’t matter what replaces this, in any society those who have the moat participation get their say and a populace’s contentment is a weak flank. What we are experiencing now is basically just a reiteration of what has happened before again and again throughout time and political structure.
I believe in dismantling the structures of colonialism pushed by nominally liberal governments in favour of more forms of publicly held wealth and support…but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots. They all had blindspots. The founders of these philosophic schools were mostly a bunch of white guys in the 18th and 19th century. They lived in a completely different world than us and were fucked up by being a segregated society that inferred personhood much less readily then the average person of today on virtually all fronts. Progressivism isn’t liberal nor is it strictly socialist. The politics of identity and acceptance of the other is a compounding factor independent of those philosophies that those ideologies can choose to incorporate or just as easily become insular and regressive. Socialist groups used to scorn poc and queer people just as much as liberal in groups. There is no neutral governance. A state has power and no matter how soft they attempt to be to citizens someone will be bound by it. Where many people tap out is basically not wanting to be bound by something or wanting to have a personal say in agreeing with the allocation of funds or resources .
By breaking into teams you are rooting for and against and letting anger at the current state of affairs causes people to pull away to create unreasonable expectations of any government body. My main axe to grind is that a lot of these things people take issue with aren’t core to a specific tphilosophy… Like your example of criminalizing people sleeping under bridges. More often than not that’s some nimby bylaw that you need to fight against local citizen interests at a municipal level. That’s not some grand aspirations of a federal system, that’s people being fucking short sighted dicks and showing up to their local council meetings because they want to create their own personal mini utopias. It’s a personal ethics problem. You could place a Socialist government in charge but you are probably still going to be swimming in NIMBY pricks. We have documented fines from the medieval ages of people being NIMBY pricks to each other and a lot of those councils pre enclosure were largely self governing and long predate liberal ideology.
Treating people of a specific political label as though they have defective moral compasses simply for utilizing that term isn’t going to really help matters I don’t think. As much as people want to establish in and out groups it’s pretty unnessisary. You can basically just run individual interest groups. Like a “Pro decriminalizing human movement” group or a “Tax the everliving hell out of multi millionaires” group and have much healthier conversations than trying to construct “the left” “a Socialist” “a liberal”…because you get ridiculous infighting that serves no one. People are much more amenable to having across line discussions when it’s not structured as a team sport.
There’s also a psychological phenomenon of scapegoating at play on this platform by people who claim variable aspects of “the left” “Socialism” “Marxism” and “Communism” . By transferring all of one’s sins to the liberal goat and claiming that they are not existent in your own ideological constructed tribe is very comforting to believe but not always particularly true. You could participate in this ritual with a bunch of different groups using the same goat and some of them are just angry. They want absolution. To not be associated with the sins they’ve assigned the goat while not really having a good idea of what to reach for. I think it’s a trap that will only lead to incoherent screaming. The way we conduct business as a political community is inherently flawed because our structure of engagement is just… Egotism.
Have you noticed all the liberal absurdity floating around here? Problematizing liberalism and exposing it’s intimate relationship with capitalism and fascism is a pretty damn difficult job (not to mention long overdue)… and it’s no one on the left’s responsibility to make it pleasant for you on top of all that.
Having your worldview collapse from underneath you is most definitely not a pleasant thing… it’s more akin to the withdrawal symptoms one suffers after going cold turkey. I don’t blame people for avoiding it like the plague… but there is no avoiding it unless we wish to continue living in the fantasy world liberalism has tried (and, for far too long, succeeded) to substitute for reality.
And no… I’m not talking about the fake and contrived “liberal-vs-conservative” dichotomy we all see advertised on CNN and Fox, either.
What did you think I’m on here to do? Write theses for your enjoyment?
I’m not a philosopher - I don’t even like philosophy. I didn’t learn my politics in the ivory towers of academia. My background is in propaganda - and not the type of propaganda you study in sterile lecture halls and classrooms, either.
That’s what I do on here - I disrupt propaganda that requires disrupting… and that includes yours.
So if it sounds to you like I’m “counterpunching” your narratives that’s because I am.
The only reason I’m giving you the time of day is because your arguments are rationally sound - which I find (reasonably) indicative of an honest personality - but the assumptions you base them on are terrifically flawed and must therefore be rejected together with the conclusions you reach.
I can just pull a random thing you say and demonstrate this - here’s one.
Here is an assumption that can be dismissed with next-to-zero debate - if the problems these institutions pose were merely caused by “blindspots,” why would the status quo react so violently to any attempts to fix said “blindspots” from the bottom up (since, mysteriosuly, these “blindspots” only seem to affect the lives of those who are actually subjected to the actions of all these institutions)? In your framing of the issue it makes no rational sense… unfortunately, it makes perfect rational sense once you admit that the violence doesn’t protect “blindspots” - it protects interests. These institutions don’t have “blindspots” - they serve interests. When they enshrined violent (white) militias into law with the 2nd amendment it was no “blindspot” - it was to protect interests. When they enshrined (black) slavery into law with the 13th amendment, it was no “blindspot” - it was to serve interests. Interests, mind you, which has been very well served right up to the present day - the proof is in the pudding, as they say - and pretending any off this has anything to do with “blindspots” is no less ahistorical than any falsehood peddled by the alt-right.
It seems to me that you are unused to having the assumptions you base your arguments on challenged, and wants to “discuss” things only after the sacrosanctity of the status quo has been established as inviolable - and this I reject out of hand.
If you wish to continue with this discourse, you’re going to have to accept that.
Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
You don’t say.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.