BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]

I’d forgotten about the tattoos!!!

this sort of thing always reminds me of how the Warren campaign sloganized the phrase “big structural change.” But it was so hollow even to her supporters that they started chanting “big structural bailey” around a massive inflatable dog using the name of Warren’s campaign show dog

It’s the billionaires, the ultra wealthy who think they can play god that are the problem.

They are a problem. But the deeper problem is the system that creates them. What they are critiquing is the adoption of anti-capitalist messaging without any anti-capitalist substance to back it up. This has been used by others in campaign posturing but led to no action, or worse - directly opposite action like Fetterman.

It’s good that people are responding to vaugely anti-capitalist messaging, but without post-capitalist solutions to back it up, it’s just co-option of the working classes dissatisfaction getting redirected into maintaining the status quo

big 2018 John Fetterman

That’s the vibe I’m getting too. I feel like the word “oligarchy” is just being used for marketing here. None of this “oligarchy is the enemy” messaging says anything beyond that. Its just endlessly finding phrases so they don’t have to say capitalism or talk about it in any meaningful way.

Yeah, what could smol bean president of the united states possibly do

They’ve already been doing that for like a hundred years. We’re ruled by fail children who have no clue how any of this works

wow great list!

Great recommendation. Blackshirts and Reds is a great place to start. I’ll add on Principles of Communism https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm as a great place to go from there.

Thats the only thing I’m really upset about. Fuck that guy

well then its all been worth it

Yeah, that’s a big one. Search engines had been getting worse, but the decline was turbocharged after all the LLM hype. Search engines are practically unusable now

I think the bigger problem is that each answer it gives basically destroys a forest

Stupid tankies. Don’t you see the trolley problem clearly proves that genocide is fine

Cecil Rhodes was a racist piece of shit

I can’t think of a single Rhode Scholar who isn’t a complete neolib ghoul carrying on Rhodes legacy of barbarism and exploitation. Not exactly a group of people i envy or would want to be a part of

It seriously took you 17 days to come up with this banger

I understand why you see things that way because you’re a liberal and not a Marxist. Reform makes sense if you come at these problems from the perspective of liberalism. The problem is that the it really isn’t an issue of systems feeding into each other - it is the system- liberal democracy and who controls and why it exists in the first place that’s the issue.

You bring up good questions about why liberal democracy looks different in Europe than the US. There are a lot of reasons for that, but what matters is that liberal democracy performs exactly the same function in Europe as it does in the US. It doesn’t matter if theres one party or twelve, ranked choice or first past the post. I’m not argueing that one or the other isn’t better, i just don’t think it matters whether the system of bourgeois rule is slightly better or not.

Okay, i can see the logic there. I also agree that its not about individual leaders having personal faults so much as the current political paradigm. I also agree that there would be a voter base for a progressive party. There’s cerainly popular support for every proposed progressive policy in the US. Just M4A we know was widely popular across the country. Theres also been demonstrated that there’s a grassroots donor base for a progressive party as we saw in Bernie’s campaigns.

The real question that i think you should try to answer is given that there’s broad support for these policies, and there’s both a voter and donor base - Why does it not exist?

Liberals look at this question and blame the people. They blames voters. They blame the voting system and the two party stranglehold. Then they advocate for ranked choice and third parties.

Marxists consider the material basis of the system first and surmise that it doesn’t exist because it wouldn’t serve the interest ruling class. That liberal democracy is not democracy for the majority of people- the working class - but a democracy for the ruling class and both parties exist to serve their interests. This is why we can’t get M4A - the most broadly supported policy proposal in the country. It doesn’t matter that most people want it because it does not serve the interests of the ruling class.

the other party should be Progressives

I’m curious who you consider to be a progressive in US politics.

And i do mean curious genuinely. I’m a communist so I don’t have a very high opinion of what counts as “progressive” in the US. I do think there wouod be a voter base for what could be called a Progressive Party in the US but i don’t see any leadership. Most espousing “progressive” positions would turn their backs on them the minute they could actually come true, or whenever they have to put their money where thier mouth is. Kamala Harris and the entire progressives caucus cime to mind.

I’d like to hear your opinion on possible leadership though. And i won’t attack it as we both know I’ll disagree before hand lol - I’m just genuinely curious how a non-communist views it

“Young people say the world is ending. Here’s why it’s actually just a Vibepocslypse caused by those millenials on their Tiktok” - opion writer failchild in make work job making millions while the world burns