Things are working great and you people need to quit complaining
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.
Better yet, let’s learn from the success of socialist countries and smash the capitalist state, replace it with a socialist one, and gradually collectivize production and distribution with a focus on meeting the needs of the people.
Ok, but how do we get there? How do we keep oligarchs, (like the ones who own Palantir and work with other oligarchs like Netenyahu using remote weapons of mass genocide to fight for them and gain ground in order to control others), from taking advantage of the power vacuum left by destabilization?
Again, taking cues from socialist countries, creating a mass working class party to overthrow and replace the state. We aren’t talking about just attacking with no plan going forward, but organizing directly so as to already have an organization in place. Capitalists only have the power they do because of the state, if we smash and replace it they have no power.
Which socialist country would be the best example?
Capitalists only have the power they do because of the state, if we smash and replace it they have no power.
The state, as well as the public and private military and resources they hoard and control.
The USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and many more serve as valuable lessons for us. We can’t cleanly map their conditions onto ours, as the US is a dying Empire rather than an underdeveloped/agrarian society liberating themselved from colonialism like many of these countries were before socialism, but we can still learn from their methods.
As for the millitary, that’s an aspect of the state. Capitalists only control the resources they do because the state backs them up. Revolutionary history teaches us how this unfolds.
You realize that all of those are a massive failure right? Living in those places was and is a nightmare. You know that right? If not, then you’re not smart enough to be replacing any form of government.
It’s much the opposite, living in those places was and is very good, especially when viewed over time and not as an individual snapshot. The USSR, for example, managed to double life expectancy, provide free, high quality healthcare, education, and low-cost or free housing for all, lowered working hours, and had one of the fastest growing economies in the world while democratizing society. The PRC is on track to become the world’s indusputably most advanced country in the following decades. What’s going on is that socialism and socialist countries have been systemically demonized in the west to prevent the working classes from seeking an alternative.
I’m not a genius by any stretch, but I’ve studied these countries, engaged with theory, organize in real life, and more. I’m smart enough to understand this, which I’d say everyone is if they put in the effort. Intelligence isn’t nearly as striated as liberals would have you believe.
USSR
Uhh…
History should teach you that the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation was traveling around Moscow and Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed, but it never really gets talked about for some reason.
A conservative who essentially birthed Project 2025 and is famously quoted as saying “I don’t want everyone to vote,” was sneaking in computers and other electronics to Soviet dissidents while teaching soviet politicians all about American “democracy” just prior to the collapse.
Then he and several other members of Heritage were ready to fill the power vacuum and help establish the first go between for U.S. and Russian capitalist businesses.
“You capture the Soviet Union --I’m going to capture the states.”-Thomas Roe, Heritage Foundation board member and founder of the State Policy Network to fellow Heritage Foundation board member Robert Krieble.
In 1989, the Krieble Institute was created “to promote democracy and economic freedom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”
1989: A Republican in Moscow (WaPo article about Weyrich holding mock elections)
PBS Documentary about Weyrich and Krieble involvement in Collapse of USSR Playing For Power (2012)
I’m aware of the dissolution of the USSR. It lasted for nearly a full century, and the causes of its dissolution have been studied by every single communist party in existence thoroughly. They didn’t dissolve because a random far-right Statesian whispered evil things, that was a symptom of the dissolution.
Further, without the US Empire, there aren’t going to be nearly as many ways for the remaining capitalists to exert their will or coup.
Trump is normal for America and how America acts around the world, you guys are just upset it is happening at home now and not Iraq.
Folks can’t remember Bush Jr at all, much less Clinton, Bush Sr or Reagan. They can barely remember Obama, except through a haze of nostalgia.
What’s notable about Trump isn’t his fascism - plenty of presidents have been openly fascist. What’s notable is how many middle class white people are getting sucked up into the current dragnet.
I don’t really get how that contradicts needing a 3rd reconstruction that dismantles the government agencies that carry out that kind of shit and didn’t even exist until WWII rather than dismantling a democracy?
you guys are just upset it is happening at home now and not Iraq.
Can’t argue with you there, but that’s also part of what makes me question who’s best interest would be dismantling U.S. democracy instead of dismantling specific agencies within the government, with no plan for where we go next?
Because it kinda seems like those agencies would carry on doing whatever they want even after a union fully dissolves. They would just have fewer obstacles in their way.
When you think about how an American agency, for example, the CIA operates this playbook in other countries, what is their intended goal?
Their goal is to destabilize a country in order to remove any obstacles to taking full control. They usually achieve destabilization by undermining public trust in a system and the leaders of that system, so that the public will either dismantle the government for them or be less resistant once it is dismantled (see the Soviet Union in the late 80s). Once that happens, they already hold all the resources and power, and install somebody they already have lined up.
Considering that there seems to currently be a global campaign to spread disinformation and install far right leaders across the globe, it makes me question if this is happening everywhere bc global destabilization is the goal.
Currently, just about anywhere in the world, who holds the majority of the resources? The people or a small group of oligarchs? When destabilization happens and a local government collapses who has the upper hand when it comes to filling the power vacuum?
In socialist countries, the working classes are in control. We can learn from them.
No no no. In socialist countries, the Big Government is in control. There’s no freedom. Everyone lives in fear. You don’t even own your own toothbrush.
Anyone who supports socialism is a Tankie who just wants to kill rich white people for fun and doesn’t understand how awful their lives will be afterwards.
Like which countries specifically? Bc I can almost guarantee there is currently a far right disinformation campaign targeted at undermining that country’s government.
the disinformation campaign has been running since the mid 1930’s and it’s been taught in our schools and disseminated via legacy media since the 1940’s.
a key feature of the campaign is to make americans predisposed to outright reject the alternatives that have already been proven to work in irl and all of those alternatives are aligned with what @Cowbee@lemmy.ml already told you.
anything else is going to be a rinse and repeat of what we already have.
a key feature of the campaign is to make americans predisposed to outright reject the alternatives that have already been proven to work
Not just with socialism. This was the response to the civil rights movement of the 60s/70s, to the environmentalism of the 80s/90s, and to the anti-war movement of the 00s/10s.
Every progressive position is pillared as unworkable, overly expensive, and jobs-killing.
Meanwhile, we sink $1T/year into chat bots that spam your Twitter feed with racist porn and armies of tweaked out sheriffs deputies to crash their cars into anyone they consider illegally brown
those were all socialist aligned movements:
the civil rights movement – the black panthers in particular – was literally socialists and bombed (also literally) because of it. MLK jr.'s cadre took great pains to ensure that their efforts didn’t get labeled as socialist because of it. the environmentalists of the 80’s/90’s – green peace in particular – was also heavily socialist influenced and got labeled as such for not making efforts like MLK jr did.
now-a-days, the campaign misinforms americans that leftists don’t reliably vote despite examples like clinton and obama proving otherwise and there being enough green, psl, dsa, cpusa votes to counter republicans easily. this misinformation is done to cover for the fact that the democrats don’t want to adopt platforms that left leaning voters want and this is most recently self evident in kamala harris’ campaign and its attempt to sway republicans to vote democrat rather than shore up her democratic base.
Cuba, the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, etc. There are far-right disinformation campaigns from western countries trying to undermine them, but these countries have sovereignty over their media, industry, and infrastructure, and thus show no signs of collapse. If the US Empire was overthrown, there’s no chance the EU could meaningfully overturn that, they are far too weak at this point, and couldn’t even overturn the soviets when Europe was stronger and right next door.
I don’t really get how that contradicts needing a 3rd reconstruction that dismantles the government agencies that carry out that kind of shit and didn’t even exist until WWII rather than dismantling a democracy?
- You don’t have a democracy, you live in a dictatorship of capital
- You never completed the second reconstruction, what makes you think you can handle a third
What makes you think oligarchs haven’t been continuing to undermine and dismantle the second reconstruction this entire time, and aren’t using their established global institutions (like banks, corporations, and conservative think tanks) to do exactly what they’ve been projecting and accusing progressives of doing?
Do you honestly think there isn’t a good chance a global cabal of far right conservatives might be ready to use their collective wealth and resources they hoard and pass down for generations to take full global control?
Or Steve Kangas on the Origins of the overclass and the crimes of the CIA
I started to read ultimately skimmed through a lot of flowery language and hot air that seems to toe the center left message of just organize, protest, and vote harder. Did I miss something?
Yep pretty much it seems that’s all we can do, which is why we haven’t been able to affect much change. We need revolutionary uprising and revolting, but that requires every oppressed person to be in solidarity on one united front but many of them are so brainwashed by the media which is genius at dividing people against each other. As long as they can keep the plebeians in-fighting and arguing with each other about stupid inconsequential things, the plebeians cannot rise up to revolution and revolt against the true oppressors.
•to move us from our undemocratic present to a more democratic future, we need to institutionalize our commitments to a more inclusive and responsive democracy in more durable forms. These might encompass everything from alternative economic regulatory institutions and new approaches to anti-discrimination to a more universal safety net that secures the essential guarantees of health, housing, and income that individuals and communities need to thrive.
•A second reconstructionist strategy lies in containing reactionary power and backlash. We should presume that there will always be efforts to roll back egalitarian expansions of democracy. Part of how democracies survive and thrive is through institutions that contain the potential resurgence of anti-democratic policies and forces. The democratic institutions of the future will similarly need to develop ways to contain authoritarian power. This will require laws and institutions that respond to techniques that are emerging in the current moment, such as new forms of state and private surveillance, or the weaponization of presidential control of funding flows.
•The third institutional transformation strategy is to democratize our governing institutions, making policymaking more directly responsive to and shaped by ordinary constituents. One important area is the balance of power between the branches. Even before Trump, the trend has been to centralize power in an imperial presidency. The legislature, by contrast, has been central to past moments of democratization. Any future reconstructionist agenda will need to be built on congressional majorities and a legislature willing to check and permanently shift away from the overreliance on presidential power.
The system is working even more efficiently than ever intended and needs to be dismantled and buried so it can never return
Okay but those glasses actually go so hard.
I want these glasses you’re advertising.
Where did you find this picture lol
Bit of both.
Where’s the 2nd one from
Both from good omens, I think
Yep, top is Aziraphale and bottom is Crowley.
these are not two sides. The system is working as some intend so needs to be dismantled, at least large parts of it, to fix it.
People always forget, nuance exists.
You can’t fix capitalism, though, that’s the point.
we don’t have capitalism. But fuck any ism, just find the broken shit and fix it. People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit. Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement. What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.
Yeah, capitalism is fucked. I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.
The western world absolutely has capitalism. We don’t need to say “fuck -isms,” we need to understand what works and what doesn’t, and what works is socialism. You can’t just fix critical flaws with capitalism like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or the profit motive.
It has a corrupt form of capitalism. It also has corrupt socialism.
So, do the good shit and I personally belive a socialist style system will result. It’s the work against the corruption that is the hard part.
It has a corrupt form of capitalism.
I AGREE! We must return to a more pure form of capitalism by repealing the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788! Boys younger than eight should be allowed to be apprentices! Master sweeps should be allowed to take them on without getting their parents’ consent, a four year old young man is able to make his own decisions!
Capitalism and socialism aren’t like yin and yang, they describe over-arching systems. Capitalism is best described as a mode of production where private ownership is principle and capitalists in control of the state, and socialism where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes in control. Western countries are capitalist, socialist countries include Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, etc.
I’m well aware. I guess good luck instituting socialism then. I bet you get far.
To not be a dick. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We have don’t have a coherent system, we have aspects of many, but the western ‘cult’ worships at the alter of capitalism. But we have a very corrupted version of it, that includes socialist, and authoritarian, and fascist tendencies. Things are far too entrenched to simply say, replace the system we have with this other one.
No system has ever been instituted to its definition, there is always unique challenges and differences and personalities. Spending time instituting a whole scale replacement, is time that will be wasted. Instead, we need a strategy of implementation through attrition. Forget the isms, just work on addressing the problems, and eventually we can build a better system.
I don’t think you’re understanding me. There’s absolutely nothing socialist about western countries. Western countries don’t have a “corrupted” version of capitalism, that’s just capitalism in action.
Ideologies like Marxism-Leninism are useful because they help us better understand the world, and what we need to do to move onto a better world. Destroying the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one, and gradually appropriating and collectivizing all production and distribution is a time-tested method for doing so.
Ok centrist
People always forget, nuance exists.
Amen.
(to noticing and remembering nuance exists)
(ps, Good luck with that other conversational cascade here… recent experience taught, that one’s not at all inclined to nuance, open minded conversation, or entertaining ideas (nuanced or otherwise), or anything other than unreasonably repeating dogma with fallacies galore.)
You dodged my arguments and got a LLM to do your arguing for you. It hallucinated points and continued to dodge every single one of mine.
Lemmy politics i find a bit confusing and maybe i dont understand it very well but all forms of black and white communism /marxism-leninism always seemed to have lead to totalitarian states… like correct me if wrong, its fair and completely normal to say that whatever the west amd especially countries like USA an UK are bullshit and need to dismantled atleast large parts of it… but i dont understand why they jump instantly to models of china and Russia… like i said maybe i dont understand it well enough…
The vast majority of Marxist-Leninists in the west only gradually come to understand and accept existing socialism, like the former USSR and current PRC. It’s usually a years, even decades-long process of studying Marxism-Leninism, existing socialism, and peeling back layers and layers of anti-communism instilled from birth.
AES countries are not “totalitarian,” at least not evenly. They have all been dramatically liberating for the working classes, while being horrfying for capitalists, landlords, fascists, slavers, etc from their prior systems. In the west, we get an exaggerated boogeyman version of these countries beamed into our heads, from the ruling class perspectives, to prevent us from seeing how we could benefit by learning from them.
Marxism-Leninism is by no means black and white. Nuance is build into Marxism, its key philosophical outlook is dialectical materialism.
Thanks for ur perspective, i think they r fair points, but you are giving up a lot of personal liberty and freedom of expression if you are OK with systems of something like PRC, but i suppose that can be classified as a choice However I think that the censorship that goes around such countries also makes it harder for us to know anything other than for example China might want to show us, we dont really have much idea of how internal dynamics work there and if u choose to believe personal testimonies its not pretty…
I’m not a capitalist, the amount of freedom I’d have if I lived in the PRC would increase dramatically. Despite popular misconception, we do have a good idea of what goes on in China. They have english-speaking news like CGTN, their processes are observed and reported on, and if you believe personal testemonies it’s actually fantastic:
The problem is that western media obfuscates or slanders a lot of this reporting. It’s a much more insidious form of censorship, it pretends it doesn’t exist. China controls and censors the speech of capitalists and wreckers, yes, and this is approved by the vast majority.
I dont think even you would agree that china is democratic tho… not to say the west are perfect democracies, and the data u provided reflects people thoughts… the china one raises some questions…
China is democratic, though. Why do you say they aren’t? They elect officials, have large feedback polls and national suggestions for Five Year Plans, and there are local and regional governments with their own autonomy. Popular support in China is well-documented.
Peoples satisfaction isnt a metric of democracy, are a lot of people happy with chinas government? Maybe, minorities certainly arent tho But the reason its undemocratic is that there isnt really anything to challenge the CCP or its policies, and dissent is punished and censored, people have historically been happy under monarchs, but doesnt make them democratic…
posiwid
The system worked like that for a few millennia. We’re just looking at not even a century that’s the exception and assume it’s the new norm. No, it’s just reverting to the old state now that the period of cheap and easy resources is gone.
Capitalism is only a few centuries old, and capitalist imperialism only really solidified around 1900. The era of US Imperialism (not just settler-colonialism) truly came into existence after World War II. It’s not that this is an exception, it’s a rapidly declining system.
Yes, with a short golden age roughly between WWII and the seventies, and going downhill for most people since then.
Not exactly. The “golden era” was financed off the backs of the global south, causing untold misery on Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and much more. Now, the global south is doing more south-south trade, escaping unequal exchange, and China is rising as the world’s most advanced socialist state. The west is dying, but the global south is rising.
The system has always oppressed somewhere and has never been good.
