☭ Sup Marxists? ☭

Well it sure advances the career of Drew Carey anyway.

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In news from the other side, the Tories are trying to create their own version of Momentum.

It hasn’t even been officially launched yet, and it is already turning into a major disaster for them. :laughing:

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Whoa, this thread is still open?

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I often wonder what direction his work would have taken if he were still with us today. Can you imagine Foucault talking about the internet, and especially social media? Oh man, it would be fucking epic.

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Wait, you’re saying he hasn’t reincarnated into a verbose little girl?

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Could be… Not sure if he believed in reincarnation! :wink:

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Not Marxist, but a thread that is probably of interest:

BlackBlocBoi’s twitter is gold. Tons of good radical history memeage.

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Just in time for my lecture on resistance to capitalism! Thanks!

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Of less immediate lecturing relevance, but you might also find this interesting:

I doubt that many Americans are aware of that bit of history.

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Thanks! Probably not. I partially blame the prominence of national histories as a general field. Most Americans probably also don’t know about how Irish Americans “invaded” Canada to try and free Ireland, either.

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Speaking of Irish Americans, have you heard this one?

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Yes, actually. I was just hearing about their anniversary a couple of weeks ago on the radio. Interesting stuff, actually.

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https://twitter.com/sfliberty/status/922931355637366784

https://twitter.com/usdotard/status/922935259037097984

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Consuming politics as a product is definitely a great way to talk about how we got into this mess.

I’ve been thinking of the current state of politics as an outcome of technocracy - that is, the idea that we’ll make decisions by turning to an expert class who will give us objective answers instead of by arriving at a political consensus. Those “experts” were economists who weren’t actually experts at anything, but relying on economics is only part of the issue.

The real issue is that political choices were false choices in ways that people weren’t very aware of. When the 2008 economic collapse happened, western governments all seemed to have the same answer - bail out the banks. Instead of seeing different countries take different approaches (e.g. bail out individuals who would lose money, nationalize bankrupt banks and wind down their operations) we saw everyone on the “left” and the “right” follow the “correct” solution to the problem.

Years ago I observed that everyone was riding the same big tide, and that choice of political party seemed to only be a choice between the pet projects of their leaders (this is from a Canadian perspective). Those “pet projects” make a real difference. If we had a conservative government instead of a liberal one when the Iraq war started we would have sent a lot of troops to Iraq. A pet project might be a $30B no-bid contract for fighter jets that will never be made, or $500M to build a gazebo in the finance minister’s riding, or ruining the validity of census data. Or it might be a national childcare system.

But everything that underpins the economy is going to be the same because everyone is listening to the same experts. Healthcare spending will increase at the same rate with the same cost-cutting measures. Every party will respond the same way to a housing crisis. Everyone will set the same tax rates (maybe a left-wing “populist” party will increase tax on the wealthiest by 2%. No one would dare say we should increase the top marginal rate back to 1970 levels).

Because of that there isn’t really a choice to be made in politics. There is very little to really debate. Politics is just sports and it’s about rooting for our sports team. Lost in that is that politics is life and death decision making. Like that crazy idiot who actually said to a town hall, “No one dies because of lack of access to healthcare.” Everything on the republican healthcare effort and now on “tax reform.” As the twitter thread says, there’s no shadowy cabal planning all this. Actual elected representatives are just as caught up in it as everyone else. Mitch McConnell is a star Defensive Tackle who is being asked to play Quarterback; not a person with a real vision for how to make a better country that he is trying to build a consensus around.

There’s a good reason that politics has collapsed into epistemology. Reality has been lacking from politics for decades.

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It’s funny how KrangTNelson got banned for trolling the neo-Nazis and conservative grandmas on Twitter with the antifa supersoldier stuff. I mean it was 60s comic book silly kind of tweets yet they ate it up like it was legit real stuff.

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