2020 Presidential Election

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by Martina

I actually heard a journalist use the phrase "late Capitalism" on the radio the other day. My mouth fell open. The leftist critique of Capitalism is going mainstream. I think because it's hard to deny anymore. The end result of Capitalism is that it consumes itself, destroying everything for short term gain.

I don't think Capitalism is an expression of some inherent human impulse although elements of it are. Early humans wiped out large mammals when we moved into new environments, and we wiped ourselves out in some places due to deforestation. But cooperation is also in our DNA. Think of bonobos. Even chimpanzee troops over time have as many cooperative peacemaker alphas as they do warrior Kings. Evolution makes sure there's always both to choose from. That doesn't mean we won't go extinct. We surely will at some point.

I honestly don't know if we'll survive on this planet. I don't care that much. I do know that the planet will survive anything we do to it. Some life will remain, and there will be a reboot. We'd have to completely burn the atmosphere off and boil the oceans to destroy 99 point whatever percent of life, and while we're fucking with them, we're not yet capable of that. (I googled, and even if all the nuclear weapons were detonated creating a long long nuclear Winter, scientists say only 75% of life on the planet would die. It's gonna take an asteroid to kill the planet until we invent something worse than nuclear weapons.) I think we'll kill ourselves long before we destroy the planet. I am not saying we won't cause a mass extinction. We already are. But life will go on.

I'm wandering. What I think we're seeing is the late stage of Capitalism. But something different will emerge. Even if inequality gets much worse, and the super rich arm themselves, etc., I think that something different and more egalitarian will emerge. There is too much information, there are too many smart people, for the one tenth of one percent to continue in power once our very lives are at risk (water rationing, for example).

But who knows? The Nazis were very successful where they ruled. Eighty percent of Germans supported them. Because the Nazis wiped out entire towns when there was resistance, resistance really was futile. The French resistance was meaningless. All resistance movements were except Tito's in what became Yugoslavia. A really determined Fascist regime, or group of regimes, could create some kind of temporary dystopia.

I agree it's not Republicans versus Democrats because liberals have been destroying our economies and the planet at a furious pace. It's the one tenth of one percent versus the rest of us. People who continue to support mainstream Dems, along with Republicans, remain blind to this and are part of the problem. The lesser of two evils will not save us from a nasty resolution to these global economic and evironmental changes.

As i have mentioned (i always say that lately because i've been on here a loooong time and everything i say is a rerun, i feel) I read A LOT of science fiction.

One of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow has written about "post-scarcity economies" and half-jokingly about "fully automated luxury space communism." He has also written about reputation economies.

Basically the principle is that increasing automation means scarcity will eventually be able to disappear, and won't continue to rule the economy unless we artificially maintain it (likely)

This is in line with AOC's comments the other day about how odd it is that we should have to fear automation.

As far as capitalism goes, i was pretty influenced by Max Weber, who said that the roots of capitalism lie in Judeo-Christian monotheism, and that it's spread was enabled by the Protestant Reformation and Calvinism (i know for a fact i ranted about this in the 2016 thread, as a lot of how Trump won has its roots in Calvinist ideas of wealth.) Definitely not an inherent human impulse.

Unfortunately, the lesser of two evils is the best we can hope for. Humanity has a "long tail." There will always be a broad spectrum of thought and only the middling ground is likely to achieve the critical mass that changes thought into action. We need extreme action, but the mainstream has the numbers.

If we dismiss everyone to the right of Bernie, we die.

We can't reject "the lesser of two evils." We have to colonize it.

This is why figures like Bernie and AOC are so important-- they are mainstreaming what was once an extreme, and making the lesser of two evils marginally less evil.

This is also why the condescension and aggression that leftists have sometimes expressed is so damaging. Every time we sneer at the centrists we shoot ourselves in the foot.

The right wing calls all non-right-wingers baby killers, says we are delusional and that our views are evidence of a mental disorder, and we feel like that makes it ok to police everybody's wokeness and gatekeep "woke" status against anyone of insufficient ideological purity.

AOC was widely quoted by the right-wing press for her comments at SXSW where she said:

“Stop trying to win people over, stop trying to enter a conversation thinking that you’re going to, like, ‘aha’ them into changing their minds. And so, I think, that, you know, we’ve kind of lost the art of conversation. So when I enter a conversation with someone I actually try to learn more about where they’re coming from, like I try — I actually use it as an experience to — like, let’s say, I’m talking to someone who’s saying something really racist and they don’t even realize that they’re saying something really racist, I — I asked some questions because I’m interested, I’m fascinated by that. How does that work, you know?”

“we have to learn to, like, really disarm ourselves in these conversations first of all, because we approach them with so much hostility and, like, they get mad and we get mad and all of these things and — and we have — so, part of it is, like, emotional work. And — and the second part of it is intention, like, what are you trying to get out of this conversation?”

"What are you trying to get out of this conversation?"

Indeed.

We need to remember that we are fighting to survive and the right wing is not. We can't afford the self-indulgence that they can.