Biden rides to the rescue!

So it looks like Biden has won. Even if Trump tries to hold on by his fingernails, no one appears to be taking him seriously. We haven't quite lost what passes for "democracy" in America, but that's not the most important point.

Trump is not the real problem. The Republican party is not the real problem. I mean, they're terrible, sure, but they're not the problem in the sense that the the shark in Jaws was not the problem. The shark just is; the real problem Mayor Vaughn.

We've known since the 1980s that the Republican party is evil. And you can't really blame them: sharks gonna shark, amirite? The question is, what are we going to do about it?

And what has the Democratic party done about the Republicans? As little as possible. For nearly a half a century.

All right, fine, it took me more than twenty years to figure it out myself. I even voted for Bill Clinton. Twice. Sorry, I'm a little slow on the uptake. But I figured it out eventually.

Joe Biden and the Democratic party has indeed come to the rescue. But they are not there to rescue us.

They're here to rescue the Republican party. That's been the Democrats' job since 1991.

Biden and the Democrats will make zero real changes. Their job is to do just enough to stabilize the country so the Republicans have time to regroup, get their shit together, and continue their project to turn the U.S. into an authoritarian plutocracy. Don't worry: the Democratic party insiders will get their 30 pieces of silver.

Look for someone in 2024 who makes us yearn for Trump's childlike antics.

I guess that's what we want. That's what we keep voting for.

Breakup sex?

In Breakup sex, Steve Randy Waldman makes a curious argument with a colorful metaphor. Progressives' and socialists' "current relationship with the Democratic Party is intolerable." But what choice do we have? Vote for a presumably intolerable Joe Biden, or allow Trump to win. Waldman thinks he as a way out of this terrible dilemma. His answer: vote for Biden and hope things someday improve.

Waldman's first idea is instead of individually deciding whether or not to vote for a Democratic party candidate, we create a social democratic political party which could collectively make the decision to support or withhold votes from a Democratic candidate.

Well, duh. The problem is that we already have several of these organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America, the Green party, and the Working Families party. These alternative parties are not working now, and there's no reason to believe they will have any effect on the Democratic party in the future.

Of course a big element is that if progressives were to make a collective decision to withhold votes from a Democratic party candidate, Joe Biden is pretty near the top of the list. (Bloomberg might take the number one spot, but not even the Democratic party elite could stand him.) And the Democratic candidates just keep getting worse. Still, even collectively, the argument against dividing the anti-fascist vote still holds. Either the DSA/GP/WFP etc. endorse fascist-lite Biden, or they allow full-on fascist Trump to win. And why will the argument be any different in four or eight years?

Waldman's better idea is to get rid of plurality voting. No shit, Sherlock. Of course, the only reason the Democratic party wins any elections at all is precisely because plurality voting forces progressives to vote for shitty Democrats instead of even shittier Republicans. I don't think the Democratic party or any of its elected representatives will put plurality voting on the table.

We can't escape the death spiral anymore; just voting is not going to change that. We're either going to end up with a fascist state or complete collapse. Both are scary.

Oh, and literal breakup sex is almost always a Bad Idea.

Blame the Democrats

In There Is No Plan (For You), Hamilton Nolan gets the antecedent right: The U.S. federal government at best just doesn't care about the economic suffering the working class (an a fair fraction of the middle class) is experiencing now and will only get worse as the initial responses expire. At worst, the government, firmly in the control of the billionaire class, sees this suffering as beneficial, increasing the power of the billionaire class and eliminating the power of the working class to resist its descent into near-slavery.

But he misses the conclusion. Nolan claims we should blame the Republican party. Yes, we should blame the Republicans, but only in the trivial sense that the shark does indeed deserve blame for eating swimmers. The Republican party since the 1980s has been fairly upfront that it serves the interests of the billionaire class, and why shouldn't they? The billionaire class pays their salaries.

The real blame should go to the Democratic party, for failing to protect the country, and the working class, from the openly predatory Republicans. In just the same sense, the real villain in Jaws (1975) is not the shark, who is just acting according to its nature, but Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) who not only fails but actively interferes with the effort to protect the citizens of Amity.

The Pandemic and the Democratic Party

The Democratic party should be screaming at the TOP OF THEIR LUNGS against Trump's and Republican governors' mismanagement of the pandemic response. They should be proposing bills, even if the Republican legislators block them and executives veto them. They should be filing lawsuits in every available court. They should be aggressively organizing whatever protests can be safely conducted during the pandemic. They should be in the news media EVERY DAY with op-eds and articles saying that this or that must be done and must be done right fucking NOW to control the pandemic.

And, as a major political party, they should have the organizational ability to do all of the above.

The Democratic Party should do all of the above because it is their patriotic duty to do so. I'm not a big fan of patriotism, but if anyone has a patriotic obligation, a major political party that (supposedly) wants to govern is at the top of the list.

More importantly, the Democratic Party should do all of the above because it would be incredibly politically successful. They could, if they chose, completely destroy the Republican Party, and secure decades of Democratic Party governance. Machiavelli is spinning in his grave at the Democrats' basic political ineffectuality.

(All of the above applies also to the mounting protests against egregious police violence.)

It's not like I'm some great political genius, and it's not like the Democratic Party employs only exceptionally stupid people to enact its political agenda. This is not rocket science or brain surgery.

Instead, the Democratic party has decided to just let Trump and the Republicans do their thing and kibbutz from the sidelines, letting the Republicans twist in the wind. Unfortunately, it leaves hundreds of millions of Americans twisting in the wind.

This strategy might just win them the Presidency in 2020, even with all of Biden's handicaps. But it won't win them a veto- or filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and it won't destroy the Republican party. Instead, it will leave the Republicans strong enough to resist the Democratic party agenda in the 20s.

It might be that the Democratic party really is that incompetent or stupid: Hanlon's razor, n'est ce pas? Or it might be that part of the Democratic party's goals is the preservation of the Republican party, because the Democrats' ideology and policy considerably overlaps the Republicans: the Democrats cannot destroy the Republican party without abandoning the overlap. Either way, stupidity or malice, the Democratic party refuses to aggressively further the interests of the majority of the American people.

But I think it is malice: the Democratic and Republican parties both actively endorse the power of the billionaires.

The billionaires at best do not care about — and at worst approve of — the deaths of millions of working Americans and the permanent damage tens of millions more have and will suffer.

Therefore, the Democratic party does not care about these deaths and suffering, except that they make Trump look bad.

If Biden wins, he will at best have a narrow majority in the Senate. The pandemic will still be raging in the U.S., and the economic effects will start spiraling out of control.

I predict that the Biden administration will undertake a few token and largely ineffectual measures to address both the health and economic effects of the pandemic, not out of any real concern for American workers, but to establish a trivial differentiation from the Republican regime. Otherwise, the Biden administration — like the Obama administration — will continue to transfer wealth and political power to the billionaires. A continuing pandemic helps that effort, so the Biden administration will not take effective measures against it.

Regardless of who wins, the next four years are going to be a real shitshow.

The Democrats love Trump

Why are people still incredulous that the Democratic party does not oppose Trump?

The Democratic party (the real party: the insiders, the pundits, the elected politicians) love them some Donald.

Trump is paying off the billionaire class and their sycophants and fucking the working class. The Democratic party is all about, well, paying off the billionaires and their sycophants and fucking the working class.

It's a match made in heaven.

Our Trump-defeating hero, Joe Biden!

I'm convinced that Joe Biden sexually assaulted Tara Reade.

Noted feminists Amanda Marcotte and Jezebel's Emily Alford have come out swinging to support... Biden.

Nathan J. Robinson lays out the whole sordid story.

Trump is going to win in a fucking landslide.

And the Democratic party will lie down and let him.

The Marching Morons

One of the funniest SF stories, and one that is really scary when you think about it, is The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth.

It's funny because Kornbluth is a great writer. It's chilling because it perfectly captures how our rulers see the ruled. The ending doesn't really make sense, but Kornbluth most probably couln't have sold it (and might not have been able to overcome his own sentimentality) without the comeuppance in the end.

I don't know how the billionaire class, the top 0.01%, feels about the workers. It's likely that they're mostly sociopaths who simply don't see other people (even other billionaires) as people, just as objects.

But I am part of the professional-managerial class, and I know the the PMC in the top 10 or 20%, the ones who do the grunt work of managing the day-to-day operations of society, think that almost everyone not in the PMC are morons, most of whom can be made marginally productive with enough discipline and coercion.

The PMC gets away with feeling this way because workers mostly feel the same way.

The almost in "almost everyone" is the key. Most workers believe that all the other workers — especially workers with trivially lower social or economic status (coughBlack peoplecough)— are morons, but they themselves (and maybe a few of their friends) are the rare exceptions.

Did you lose your job because of the coronavirus quarantine? You don't have any wealth? Well, you must be a moron. Can't get a new job? Then you're not useful: lie down and die get out of my sight, loser.

But I lost my job and have no wealth? Hey, I'm the exception! I'm not a moron! Help me!

AOC sells out

AOC breaks with Bernie on how to lead the left.

I called it before she was elected

Three Hard Truths

Three Hard Truths About American Collapse by Umair Haque

Seven theses

Seven Theses by Phil Green

Engels proclaimed in the 19th Century that the choice was “Socialism or Barbarism.” The suspense is over. The barbarians are not at the gates, they’re inside.

Read the rest. We are well and truly fucked.

Why the democrats cannot be progressive

Color me unsurprised: Dem campaign chief vows no litmus test on abortion, via PZ Myers, who says,

I have this crazy idea that America really needs a political party that supports labor, women, and minorities, and that is dedicated to helping all people rise up. It should favor causes that improve civil rights and distributes power widely and works on making America better, rather than claiming it is already the best. It ought to have a platform that states clearly that it wants to promote the general welfare and strengthens every level of society, and that encourages greater autonomy of individuals, no matter how poor or wealthy they are. [emphasis added]

Sadly, it really is a crazy idea, mostly because of the emphasized passage above. The fundamental rule of capitalism is don't fuck with rich people's money. Don't take it, don't tax it, don't fine them. Don't enact policies that will substantially transfer income or wealth to the undeserving poor (i.e. not obscenely rich).

We tried this once. In the early 1930s, the rich people lost all their money. The professional-managerial class stepped in, took state power, and fixed the economy by actually giving money to poor people. The PMC made it very difficult for the capitalist class to get their money back and restore their relative economic power. The PMC has made a lot of egregious mistakes, especially the Vietnam war, but it's pretty clear that the capitalist class is utterly incompetent at political rule and cannot manage a national economy more complicated than that of the 1820s, much less a global economy.

But they did not destroy the capitalist class. Both Lenin and Mao discovered that destroying the capitalist class is a very difficult task, which they failed to complete.

It might have been possible to destroy the capitalist class in an already-industrialized country such as the United States, but again, as we saw in mid 19th-century Europe, that too is a difficult task: the capitalist class has a lot of power and no scruples: they're willing to kill hundreds of millions of people not only to keep their power but also just to make an extra buck. How do honest, moral revolutionaries confront such monstrosity without becoming monsters ourselves?

So one cannot really blame the PMC for blinking. They thought they could make a deal with the capitalists: let us run the state, do what needs to be done to keep the economy from failing and the people from revolting, and you get to keep running the businesses, make reasonable money, and live in comfort. Faced with an angry mob whom the capitalists feared might take up torches and pitchforks, the capitalists agreed, but when the mob dispersed, the capitalist class was having none of it. They didn't want to suffer egregious oppression under the boot-heels of the professional-managerial class: they wanted their money back. All of it. And more. And they'll get it.

Both the Democrats and Republicans were caught off-guard by Trump and Sanders. Trump won the Republican nomination because the Republicans knew he wouldn't get in the way of the capitalist agenda; Sanders lost precisely because he would have been a little bit progressive, and the capitalist class would not stand for it. But they didn't take Sanders seriously enough early enough, and he got close to winning the Democratic nomination; he might have defeated Trump. The capitalist class will not make the same mistake twice, and the Democratic party is eagerly helping, pushing the line that socialism is sexist and racist.

The professional-managerial class — and the PMC's Democratic party — still cannot comprehend that the capitalist class wants all the power, no matter and damn the consequences. Fiat justitia ruat cælum. The PMC keeps making concessions to the capitalist class, but the capitalists don't want a bigger piece of the pie, they want to be the ones cutting the pie and handing out slices.

But why should we expect Democrats to comprehend the capitalist class's will to power? There are only two alternatives — give up and commit political suicide or foment revolution — both unthinkable to those who have more than a minimal stake in the system. (It's easy for me to contemplate revolution; I have nothing to lose either way: I'll be dead before the capitalists completely ruin the university system.)

The Democratic party as an organ of the PMC died with the election of Trump. The professional-managerial class will never wield any political or economic power, and the Democratic party will probably be tasked with destroying the intellectual and political legitimacy of socialism. But even the slightly less assholy capitalists are still politically and macroeconomically incompetent, and they are about to crash the global economy so hard that the global financial crisis and lesser depression of 2007 to present, the Long Depression, even the Great Depression look like mild downturns. The capitalist class knows their enemy, and they will not allow the professional-managerial class to save them from themselves.

So everything is about to collapse, the relatively smart and well-educated people in the PMC can neither halt nor help recover from the collapse. Marx's prediction is about to become true: society will become divided between the capitalist class (and their now-subservient minions in the PMC) and the working class.

However, the working class can be dominated, at least for a while. They will go to war and die by the millions, tolerate near-starvation, material deprivation, and disease, they will submit to the most brutal authoritarian rule. Remember that the German people never revolted against the Nazis, and that even after the most brutal deprivation, the Bolsheviks took power only because of Lenin's intellect and will; without Lenin himself, Russia would have devolved into chaos. (Mao is a little more complicated.)

And we probably will. After Trump, le déluge. I am completely convinced that the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic party that is at least condescendingly charitable towards the working class has zero chance of taking state power after Trump (or Pence, if Trump resigns or is impeached and convicted). Regardless of who is president, we will have a capitalist Republican Congress, and a majority of Republican state governments; the president will either be a Republican or an ineffectual Democrat. Just a few more Republican (or Blue Dog Democratic) state governments and the capitalist class can amend the Constitution; they will be sure to do so. (See e.g. Hungary.)

We will have a wave of nationalistic patriotism supporting some big war, perhaps against the Middle East, perhaps against Russia. We will have food rationing, gas rationing, medical rationing, and the working class will tolerate it. At least for a while. No one can predict what will happen then: we could all die, a socialist utopia might emerge, or anything in between.

Smashing the bourgeois state

Smashing the bourgeois state is always a priority of any good communist revolutionary. Fortunately for my tired old ass, The Republicans are doing it for me, and the Democrats seem unable to resist. Oh, Clinton will win, of course, but she won't be able to govern.

This development is doubleplusgood. No Democratic government will ever be legitimate to the Republicans. No Republican government will ever be legitimate to the Democrats. The bourgeoisie is tearing itself apart. And I don't have to lift a finger. Yay!

If any socialists can pull their head out of their ass long enough to pick up the pieces, we might have a chance at progress. However, socialists' heads are pretty firmly wedged (I'm just observing: it took me 40 years to pull my head out of my petty-bourgeois ass, so I'm in no position to criticize), so it'll probably be the fascists who gain.

Advice for Clinton supporters

Corey Robin has some advice for Clinton supporters: if he were truly worried that she might lose, they should actively court leftist voters. They definitely should not attack them.

If . . . I were a big booster of Clinton and if I were at all worried that she wasn’t going to win in November . . . I’d spend every waking or at least spare minute of my life between now and November making sure that every potential Clinton voter that I or my committees could reach was converted into an absolutely solid and reliable vote for Clinton come November. . . .

And here’s what I’d not do: spend my time on social media or in person castigating every member of the left who is a potential Clinton voter but is skeptical or leaning toward Jill Stein or thinking about sitting this one out, castigating them as reckless, irresponsible, childish, purist, fanatical, immature, incompetent, cultish, blinkered fantasists of the revolution, and so on, and then deliver long, sonorous monologues—where I demonstrate zero desire to listen or understand, much less engage, with what the people I’m trying to persuade are thinking—about the need for a popular front that includes the very people I’ve just dismissed as childish and irresponsible.

I get this. Nobody likes being bullied, and those of us sincere commitment to actual progressivism and not just slower regressivism have been being bullied for more than a generation. When does the story stop being give in to keep things from getting worse and start being about making things actually better?

Robin speculates on possible reasons why Clinton and her supporters are not adopting a primarily positive approach to the left, and he nails it with his final possibility: "they don’t think they share any values with the Clinton skeptics on the left; they think those leftists actually believe in very different things."

Clinton is on the right; she's been on the right her whole career. The only reason the left is even considering her is that the Republicans are not only farther to the right, they have moved off the scale and have become officially (instead of informally) batshit crazy. Clinton wants to move to the right, because she sincerely believes that would be best for the country (and her career, but she is at least not a pure opportunist). She can move to the right; there are any number of neoliberal Republicans who see Trump as if not actually fascist then deeply damaging to capitalist class interests and will vote for Clinton.

Why shouldn't she move to the right? Why should she court leftist voters? Even if she had to move left to win, she has her career to worry about: the capitalist class doesn't give six figure speaking fees to socialists.

The only worry she really has on the left is that either a left faction of the Democrats will take the nomination in 2024, or the left will split off from the Democratic party and challenge her in 2020 or 2024. Neither of those outcomes are likely. Enough Sanders leaders will be co-opted and stay within a more explicitly neoliberal Democratic party, the institutional power of the Democratic party is sufficiently large that a third party (or a second party, if the Republicans completely fall apart) on the left will always be marginal.

More importantly, the left can't fight, and they don't have a good story. Today's capitalist left is the residue of professional-managerial class (PMC) rule that was defeated in 1980. Today's left is driven by nostalgia; it is regressive in the literal sense of a return to the past. Moreover, the PMC is fundamentally hostile to the working class (although less so than the bourgeoisie), they demonstrated both their impotence and their loyalty to the bourgeoisie, and the workers don't trust them. "Back to the 1960s!" is not a good rallying cry.

Clinton will move to the right, and the left will let her; what choice do they have? Absent an actual revolution (probably fascist), we'll have eight more years of neoliberalism, eight more years of Middle Eastern wars, eight more years of substandard medical care, eight more years of worker income stagnation, eight more years of global warming, eight more years of mass incarceration and police murders, eight more years of financial parasitism, eight more years of filthy water, filthy air, filthy slums, shitty McJobs.

A rant on Democrats and Republicans

The Democratic party has the power to utterly crush the Republicans. Not just win the presidency in a landslide, but to make the Republicans a fringe party of Klansmen, MRAs, and fundamentalist Christians, with no more hope of electoral success than the Libertarians or Greens.

The Democratic party could, if it chose, take no only the presidency, but also the congress, every governorship and state legislature, and even every mayor, city council, and dog catcher.

For twenty years, I've been hearing that the Democrats cannot enact a progressive agenda because of those darn Republicans. That was perhaps true in the past, but if the primary obstacle to a progressive agenda really were the Republicans, the Democrats have the opportunity to remove that obstacle for a generation.

With no effective opposition from the Republicans, the Democratic party could, if it chose, enact every progressive measure conceivable. Reform police departments, make abortion available to every woman, let everyone vote, enact universal health care, raise the minimum wage, provide a Universal Basic Income, maintain and even expand Social Security, rebuild our infrastructure, break the big banks, end the wars in the Middle East. I'm not even talking about a socialist revolution, just enact every measure that most working people think constitute basic decency.

The Democratic party will not crush the Republicans. The Democrats need the Republicans. The Democrats do not want to enact a progressive agenda; they have been using the Republican party as an excuse for their inaction.

More precisely, the capitalist class does not want to enact a progressive agenda, and the Democratic party no less than the Republican party does what the capitalist class wants.

No ruling class can rule by brute force, every good ruling class needs to con the population into legitimizing their rule. So the capitalists have been playing a good cop/bad cop scam on the United States for 35 years. Note that both roles are necessary: after Ronald Reagan's elections, the Republicans could have utterly crushed the Democrats, but did not do so, because that would not have served capitalist interests.

The capitalists are definitely worried by both Trump and Sanders. Both are populists, and the one thing that both the capitalist class and the professional-managerial class who serve the capitalists agree on is that the people should not have any actual power.

Ideally, the capitalist class would use Trump as an excuse to further limit popular power: "We can't have another Trump, right? So we have to more carefully manage who gets nominated, right? You just can't trust those people to have an effective political voice."

Clinton will win this election because, well, Trump is not just batshit crazy but also stupid, and stupid is bad for business. But this election is not the real issue. The real issue is 2020 or 2024.

Clinton will govern as a good neoliberal. She'll throw a few crumbs to the working class, but will not change anything of substance. We'll still have the police killing black people. We'll still have a minimum wage below any decent standard of living. We'll still have a lot of poor women (and especially poor black women) without access to contraception or abortion. We'll still have tens of millions of people going without needed health care because they can't afford it. We'll still have massive voter suppression. We'll still have globalization, depressed wages, underemployment. We'll still be murdering brown people overseas in industrial quantities.

The Republicans will retain enough power to ensure that the Democrats have some cover for not enacting much actual progressive policy. Both parties will change their nomination procedures to make sure that no one like Trump or Sanders can get as close as they did.

However, because neoliberalism is itself cracking, the global economy is going to go tits up, likely in the next four years, and almost certainly in the next eight.

The capitalist class has for most of the last century crushed socialism, but only minimized fascism. Then they get to tell the story, "Yeah, capitalism and neoliberalism kinda sucks, but y'all need to suck it up and adjust. If you don't, you'll just end up with fascism." This is a good strategy. It's worked for almost a hundred years.

But when neoliberalism finally falls apart, people are going to say, "If the fascists are the only alternative, then better the fascists than the neoliberals."

There are two ways out of that depressing scenario, both of which could work separately or in tandem.

First, the Sanders wing of the Democratic party could make a concerted, dedicated effort to take over the Democratic party and destroy the Republican party. Sure, let Clinton be president, but make it absolutely clear she's a figurehead for a real progressive party. This means that Sanders' supporters focus their energy on congressional and state and local races. Let Clinton and her corporate money take the presidency, but make sure that the actual power of the party lies with the Sanders bloc. This effort will take serious, dedicated, and continuous effort, not just until November, but through at least to the midterm elections. Without the corporate bloc, the Sanders bloc cannot crush the Republicans in November, but they could, if they work hard, seriously weaken them before the economy crashes. If this happens, then when the economy does crash, there is an alternative to fascism.

Second, the "true" socialists can get together and make a serious effort to provide at least a coherent ideological alternative to both capitalism and fascism. Abandon the jargon, abandon the abstruse theory, abandon the petty century-long grudges, and start talking to, you know, the actual workers. Maybe, just maybe, when neoliberalism falls apart, there will be enough of a power base to resist and defeat the fascists.

I dunno. I don't hold much hope for either alternative. The corporate Democrats will crush Sanders; they want the Republicans to hold a lot of congressional and local power. The Sanders bloc would have to not only fight the Republicans, but fight their own party. Possible, but difficult.

And I have even less hope that socialists can get their shit together and actually appeal to the workers.

But who knows. Weirder shit has happened.

The inevitable rise of fascism

What we currently have is often called "neoliberalism": the second Gilded Age with fiat money instead of a gold standard; government of the bourgeoisie, by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie; as little as possible thrown to the proletariat to keep them from revolting, and always by charity, not by right or merit.

Neoliberalism has given us almost a decade of economic depression, economic insecurity, mass incarceration, police murder, wars of aggression, assassination and torture.

Clinton is not just a neoliberal, she is one of the architects of neoliberalism.

The problem with neoliberalism is that if you're not a tenured professor at Rutgers, it has been "incrementally" sucking harder every year since 1980, and by now it sucks pretty damn hard.

Neoliberalism has managed to alienate the vast majority of the population, and neoliberals no longer seek anything but the barest veneer of popular legitimacy.

The best argument the neoliberals can come up with is that There Is No Alternative.

But of course there are alternatives.

There's socialism and communism, of course. Y'all know how I feel about that. (If you're new, I'm all for it.)

Another alternative is "progressivism." Keep the system of private property and the private ownership of the means of production, but use state power not as an organ of the bourgeoisie, but as a counterpoise to its power.

Progressivism is not logically impossible: the welfare state capitalism of the United States from 1945 to 1980, and of Europe, which has not yet completely unravelled, show that it can happen.

Bernie Sanders is a progressive. Elizabeth Warren is a progressive. I would have counted Paul Krugman as a progressive, but his full-throated support for Clinton shows he's just another neoliberal. Sad. But that's where his paycheck comes from, so whaddya expect?

The problem with progressivism, as Marx could have pointed out in his sleep, is that it does not emerge from capitalist relations of production. Progressivism is unstable, and a few missteps — a war in Vietnam here, stagflation there — and the whole thing collapses like a Jenga tower.

Other than socialism and communism, I have sympathy for and common cause with progressives. As noted above, I think they are mistaken, but I would be happy to be proven wrong. And no only are they just the enemy of my enemy, but they also share substantive goals with socialists like me, the welfare of the people.

Yet another alternative is fascism. The strong man (and it's always a man). The subsumption of the the individual to the Glory of the State. The absolute polarization of Us versus Them. Force as the highest good.

Fascism is popular. It requires no theory, no thought. We are good! We are strong! We will crush our enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women! That is best!

Yes, fascism is worse than neoliberalism, despite the neoliberals' efforts to give the fascists a good fight in the evil department. At least neoliberals have the decency to be hypocritical about their evil.

I don't think the bourgeoisie created fascism, but they certainly have seen its uses. Tolerate a little fascism but brutally suppress even a hint of socialism, and The Only Alternative to neoliberalism is fascism. Thus, when black people exercise their Second Amendment rights — and read Mao, and hang out with Bob Avakian — the neoliberals (and "progressives") murder them, imprison them, and utterly break them. When white supremacists and Christian fascists exercise their Second Amendment rights, the neoliberals keep an eye on them, but mostly leave them alone.

It's a good plan. Millions of people who hate neoliberalism are going to vote for Clinton, because Trump really is worse: at best he's a buffoon; at worst he's a fascist or a harbinger of fascism.

I don't blame them. Progressivism is a nice idea, but it failed almost forty years ago. It's a dead end.

Socialism has been utterly destroyed. There are no functioning, effective socialist institutions left in the world. The Soviet Union fell to the mafia; the People's Republic of China fell to the capitalists. The socialist parties and organizations in the West have devolved into squabbling mutual masturbation societies. Marx remains as relevant as ever, but the bourgeoisie have read Marx too, and will not again be caught napping as they were in 1929.

As the neoliberal bourgeoisie becomes more and more divorced from the common good, as the population becomes economically, politically, and socially alienated alienated, people will search for an alternative, any alternative. The only space they have allowed for opposition is fascism, so that's what people will find. Because the fascists are not (yet) in power, they can make no mistakes, and they can attribute every social problem (even in themselves) to the corruption and decadence of the neoliberals. (Meanwhile making common cause with the bourgeoisie behind closed doors for the extirpation of their common enemy, the socialists.)

The fascists are not stupid: unlike the socialists, who really will eliminate (in a political sense) the bourgeoisie, the fascists will allow the bourgeoisie to retain considerable power. Neither are the bourgeoisie stupid: if the fascists allow the bourgeoisie any power, the bourgeoisie will — with the weight of economics on their side — eventually regain absolute power.

For the bourgeoisie, socialism is doom, but fascism is just a strategic retreat.

Clinton will win, Trump will lose. Neoliberalism will limp on for another eight years. The locus of neoliberal power will move to the Democratic party, and the Sanders/Warren "progressives" will be bought off and their supporters suppressed. Any "left" alternative will be fragmented and factionalized into competing identity-politics groups fighting each other for the bourgeoisie's scraps.

The Republican party will continue to move towards fascism. As the neoliberals continue to make the world worse, they will eventually gain power. It's just a matter of time.

Hopefully, I'll be dead by then. As for y'all, good luck.

The Democratic party cannot be reformed

I see a lot of people looking at Bernie Sanders' campaign and thinking that his support shows the Democratic party might be reformed to become a true (or at least better) progressive, pro-worker party.

Ain't gonna happen.

Bernie Sanders won't win the nomination, If Sanders wins the nomination, he won't beat Trump: the neoliberal elite would rather have Trump than Sanders. And even if Sanders were somehow to become President, he wouldn't be able to actually do anything. (None of these arguments are reasons not to vote for Sanders.)

The retribution will be obviously facilitated if Clinton wins, and especially severe if Clinton loses to Trump: Sanders and his supporters will be blamed for the loss.

In 2019 and 2023, no one of Sanders' caliber will run against Trump or Clinton. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party will get its shit together and make damn sure that no Sanders can even run, much less win. Anyone who supports Sanders now will be squeezed out of any meaningful role in the Democratic party. The neoliberal elite has too much power, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.

The only way to defeat neoliberalism is to defeat it all at once worldwide. It is certainly possible to defeat neoliberalism locally, but if a locality makes inroads against neoliberalism, it will be co-opted (Podemos) or brutally crushed (Syriza).

The neoliberal elite will retain its grip until the system fails catastrophically. The question is not how to defeat or even ameliorate neoliberalism politically: that train left the station in 1980. The question is: when neoliberalism fails catastrophically, who will pick up the pieces? The race is on between fascism and communism, and fascism is winning.

Happily, I don't expect to live until 2024.

Killed by police

Ed highlights the most egregious police killings of unarmed black people in 2015, starting with 12 year old Tamir Rice, killed by police Nov. 22, 2014, whose killers will not be prosecuted.

See ?Killed by Police for a list of 1,190 people (as of Dec. 29) killed by police in 2015.

Dark Enlightenment

Quite a good article by Park MacDougald: The Darkness Before the Right. Which gets me thinking... more later...

The lesson of Greece

I won't go into the details: go read the alternative press's account of Greece's abject defeat at the hands of Germany the "troika" (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund). The upshot is that Germany has stripped Greece of its national sovereignty, and, after six years of poverty, unemployment, and general immiseration, has imposed even harsher poverty, unemployment, and immiseration.

Germany, France, and the rest of the Eurozone core countries, by destroying Greece's economy, have no chance of getting their money back. They know they'll never get their money back. They don't want their money back. What they want is what they have achieved: destroying social democracy, the social safety net, welfare capitalism, and what little democracy the democratic republican form of government provides. The European Union and Eurozone is and has always been anti-democratic, explicitly and intentionally. Indeed, neoliberalism itself is anti-democratic. Any suffering the Greek people go through is necessary to destroy its democracy, and make it explicitly a slave colony to the Eurozone core.

The lesson is that social democracy is doomed. I think social democracy is a Good Idea. I've never been against social democracy and welfare capitalism on its own terms. I just don't think it can work. Not, however, because because I think it's a bad system on its own terms. If we talk about overall standards of living, social democracy improves the lives of not just the working and middle classes, but also the capitalist class. The problem is that the capitalist class does not want to improve its own material standard of living. The very structure of capitalism entails that the majority of people who become very rich capitalists are power-hungry sociopaths. Even the relatively nice people who become very rich capitalists have to act sociopathically in self-defense. Power is a zero-sum game, and social democracy means stripping political power from the rich. Social democracy is possible only if workers and professionals have actual political and economic power either directly, through unions, or indirectly through elections and state power. The capitalist class, however, sees this loss as an intolerable loss of their core identity. The capitalist class would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

I don't fault the capitalists themselves. I have considerable sympathy for Milton's Satan. But, fundamentally, this kind of sociopathic struggle for absolute power is an inherent, ineluctable part of capitalism. No social institutions can for very long moderate this struggle. It might be the case that this sociopathic struggle for absolute power is inherent to humanity itself; if so, all of our political philosophy is not just an illusion but a lie; there is no other option but for each person to struggle for as much military power as possible, with the successful becoming the slave-owners and the rest becoming slaves. Perhaps Orwell is correct: the future of humanity is a boot smashing a face, forever, and the only struggle is who wears the boot.

I am not so pessimistic. I do not believe that sociopathy is the norm and empathy and cooperation is the delusional aberration. I'm not an objectivist: the universe forbids neither the tyranny of the individual nor the collective, nor peaceful cooperation and happiness. I simply believe that human beings can create any kind of society we choose, good or bad. Although we can create any kind of society, the actual implementation is constrained by reality, both objective reality and the historical, contingent social reality of a given time and place.

And it is crystal clear that if we want the things that social democracy provides, and I think we do, we cannot have them and have a capitalist class of any kind. The capitalist class will do anything, and struggle for as long as it takes, to destroy social democracy, to strip all power from any individual, class, or social group that the capitalists do not absolutely control. Not because capitalists are bad people, but capitalism is the struggle for absolute power, and this struggle constructs the social reality of people who become successful capitalists.

Germany The troika has revealed the true heart of capitalism: slavery or death. The only choice now is whether we will accept slavery or struggle for freedom, no matter what it takes.

([ETA] It occurs to me that the arguments against social democracy are almost identical to arguments against "moderate" religion.)

Charlie Hebdo

A couple of interesting responses to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. I don't agree with all of what they say, but they're worth reading, if only as an anodyne to the sanctimonious hand-wringing.

An open letter to 99.99% of American editorial cartoonists:

What is not justified, or rather, what is not earned, is how many of you are comparing yourselves to the slain cartoonists based, it seems, on nothing more than the fact that you are in the same line of work as them.

On Charlie Hebdo:

[T]here is already an enormous pressure, in this context, to defend Charlie Hebdo as a forceful exponent of “Western values,” or in some cases even as a brilliantly radical bastion of left-wing anti-clericalism. . . .

[But] irrespective of whatever else it does, and whatever valid comment it makes — the way in which that publication represents Islam is racist. . . .

No, the offices of Charlie Hebdo should not be raided by gun-wielding murderers. No, journalists are not legitimate targets for killing. But no, we also shouldn’t line up with the inevitable statist backlash against Muslims, or the ideological charge to defend a fetishized, racialized “secularism,” or concede to the blackmail which forces us into solidarity with a racist institution.

In the forward (?) to his book Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut compares writing an anti-war book to writing an anti-glacier book. The comparison is apt: people have been slaughtering each other in retail, wholesale, and industrial quantities since the beginning of recorded history. And it's always at best just "regrettable" or "unfortunate" when people are dishing out the hurt, but everyone gets seriously bent out of shape when they're on the receiving end. We've been dishing out the hurt in the Middle East and South Asia; now we're all shocked that we're getting some back. I suppose that's just how people are. C'est la vie.

I think it's almost always a mistake to assign blame. Whom do we blame, the provocation or the disproportionate response? My training in business and engineering was, "Fix the problem, not the blame." When, for example, someone shoots his or her spouse, I think it's a mistake to blame the shooter; I ask why we have a society where people let resentment build up to murderous intensity rather than just separate. And with Charlie Hebdo, I ask, why do we have a society and international relations such that people think killing cartoonists is a Good Idea?

Almost all social problems are structural. Either they're just people acting economically efficiently, e.g. a social structure where thousands of drug murders really is economically efficient, or they're a structural failure to provide humane medical treatment for people with mental illness. I mean seriously: we can fly thousands of enormous, complicated aircraft five miles up in the sky for a trillion passenger miles for years without killing a single person. Our political problems are not technical.

This is the society that we want, that we ourselves have built. We built it the way we did because we want power more than peace. If we don't like it, only we can fix it.