Donald Trump is reportedly backing out of a scheduled September debate.That's according to Sam Stein, of The Bulwark and MSNBC, who wrote on the social media app X on Thursday night that the decision was made, "given the continued political chaos" surrounding Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. The st...
One thing I learned from the Bush II Admin was that you can run on stirring up rhetoric for a while–worked well enough to make him a two term President–but at a certain point, your policies have to align to reality or you will have catastrophic failure. There are also levels of making shit up, and the statement above might be more making shit up than anything Bush II ever pulled.
It’s also just chock full of “watch words” for these people. It’s like a code that lets them feel like they have some kind of secret inside knowledge. They all repeat the same types of sayings, and methods of (attempting to) insult over and over.
For example:
The use of “Democrat party” is meant as a slight to the Democratic party. (https://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/the-democratic-or-democrat-party/)
That’s about as subtle as they ever get, the rest are pretty obvious (using Obama’s middle name, calling center-right politicians, “Marxist” as a completely meaningless insult that they themselves can’t define, etc.)
Turns out that’s all it takes to get 70 million+ Americans to literally worship a real life cartoon villain.
Yeah, I saw the “Democrat Party” thing - which, by the way, wayyyyy too many in the “liberal media” let them get away with. They should be correcting them all the time, or asking them if they don’t even know the name of the party.
I also caught the full use of Obama’s name - another dog whistle for this bunch.
Listen, I may not like the Marxists but I’ll settle for any communist tradition at this point barring MLs and their intellectual descendants
Based
Thanks, it’s what you get when you’re a syndicalist who marries a mutualist. My issues with Marx are intellectual. My issues with Marxist-Leninists are why I’m afraid to come close to starting to win a revolution with them anywhere near behind me.
Frankly I’d rather fight the capitalists than people who disagree on how the workers should control the means of production. Political pluralism shouldn’t be a casualty of the revolution.
As a Trot, albeit a reluctant and undogmatic one (I think), I also am terrified of winning a revolution with MLs in the mix. They love to talk about how no anarchist/trotskyists have ever had a “successful revolution” and its like no shit you killed them all and took power in the name of socialism.
Curious about your intellectual issues with Marx. No one is above critique, not asking to jump all over ya. I have some criticisms of Marx, namely that he spent the end of his life not finishing Capital and instead working on ethnography and trying to chart a path to socialism through Russian peasant society, and like I’d rather he’d have finished one of those instead of not finishing any of it. His work on ethnography would be really useful to anarchists and mutual aid networks: Anarchist Marxists, how cool would that be? But instead we just have his volumes and volumes of notebooks.
My main issues are that he blatantly misrepresented Proudhon. I also think that he largely overestimated the inevitability in a way that’s been harmful to communists.
And there absolutely anarchist Marxists, I just fall more along mutualist lines
Well as someone who couldn’t get through the Poverty of Philosophy, despite having read lots of Marx including Capital: that’s fair. He was really gunning for the Young Hegelians. I thought his critique of Stirner was really good, and his debunking of Bauer was essential. But I didn’t get into PoP. Maybe some other time. He was too optimistic wrt how capitalism would create “gravediggers.” I think its an actual thing that happens, it happened to me for example, but he underestimated ideology, or maybe like over estimated the way capitalism would change people’s consciousness.
You’re right there are individual anarchist Marxists, I study with one, but I guess I was referring to something more like a movement. I guess the Kurdish liberation movement kind of qualifies? Maybe my views are too west-centric.
Any recommended Proudhon I should read? Maybe take on Philosophy of Poverty before trying Marx’s response again?