/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

reformism of even a token neoliberal kind is dead which makes the entire line of thought redundant. no center left reformist party today comes to power on a platform of even marginal reform, and those which do almost never carry it out. Look, for example, to New Zealand: Ardern came to power on a platform of moderate reform and left having done essentially nothing. For reformism of a more serious character, look to Britain in the same period.
Jeremy Corbyn was a reformist, not a single Corbyn policy existed which would not have been considered perfectly normal in some other European state, and yet he was hounded from public life. Look now at Labour, which was a reformist party in 2017 and 2019, look to the current UK election. what is labour's platform? it is nothing. what major left-ish reforms does it promise which were not already initiated by the Conservative government? none. what is the capstone slogan of their soon-to-be chancellor? it is, i kid you not: "stability is change". this is not a reformist party, it is a status quo party. they are all too eager to tell the public: you'll get nothing, and that's that.

reformism is dead, dead, dead. you may as well dig up an article about how the social credit movement is fascist, if you're that desperate to pick a fight with ghosts.

>>1882316
You make a good point. Reformism is dead, for now. But if in the future there are ever token reforms, there is a chance that the beaten down and exhausted working class might break formation and accept the token reforms that they fought for. Labor unions have been making a comeback in the United States for example. Will they ever be at the level they were at during the 1960s? Of course not, which means all the lessons that the labor unions had learned back then are essentially forgotten by this generation of organizers, and I see them falling for the same tricks of the bourgeoisie that the labor unions of the 40s, 50s, and 60s knew better than to fall for. Marx, Engels, Lenin, hell, even Eugene Debs criticized the limitations of organizations like labor unions over a century ago and yet, rather than striving for proletarian revolution I see in the imperial core a strong urge to simply resurrect what is already dead. I am not fighting ghosts, I am warning the people hoping to resurrect corpses.

>>1882309
Chapter 3 is a banger. An underrated part of this book is where he goes over the deliberate destruction of the productive forces. It's like if that famous quote from Grapes of Wrath was expanded into theory.

good threads die quick on /leftypol/ because there's no bait, no spectacle, and nothing stupid to argue about

>>1882609
I didn't realize the second thumbnail was a webm so I got the shit scared out of me when the lady started reading lol

>>1882348
> the limitations of organizations like labor unions over a century ago
In what sense? They've barely started rebuilding…

>>1882911
sex work
magacommunism
baristas
lumpens
netflix
there, i helped you

>>1883713
thank you

>These two things are like, the same actually
Yeah Spinoza we get it

>>1885502
That's not what's being said though. Read again.

>>1885520
Anyone can negate difference. It's lazy.

>>1882348
>>1883708
The AFL only organizing trade workers, IWW only organizing hobos, the AFL-CIO accepting the no strike pledge and the wage freeze during the war and setting the stage for taft-hartley later. Then the forced AFLCIO merger

>>1885532
>continuing to lack reading comprehension.
>>1883708
The limitations of trade unions are still inherent to trade unions even if they're rebuilding. Isn't it bleak that the American working class isn't learning from a century of existing theory and is instead simply making all the same mistakes again and learning through experience only, which is a much slower way to get the ball rolling?

>>1885534
> the AFL-CIO accepting the no strike pledge and the wage freeze during the war
patriotism is a disease. imagine being a union and accepting a "no strike pledge" in the name of the "war effort" against an enemy that the capitalists created in the first place. Ford and IBM worked with the nazis well into the war. They wouldn't even accept the Trading With The Enemy Act and yet the bourgeois collaborationist trade unions rolled over for the war effort. And nobody even remembers anything in this country. It's a struggle to get people to remember the bush/cheney years, let alone something that occurred before NATO existed.

>Social Democracy Is The Moderate Wing of Fascism
People say Stalin was wrong for saying this and retracted this statement later on but I think he was wrong to do so for the reasons outlined in OP

>>1892061
Social Democracy is the moderate wing of AES

>>1892063
reactions are spot on lmao

>>1892063
of course the Mises thinktank is going to make Keynes sound cooler than he was

>>1882309
This is basically conspiratorial thinking. Fascists and reformists are quite different groups of people, with quite different values and motivations. Most of you probably remember being a reformist. You remember that you weren't secretly trying to "bait" the working class so that you could "let loose the fascist hounds". You were driven by ideological motivations, exactly as you are now!
>both reformers and fascists are controlled by the bourgeoisie
How? Give any evidence for your claims. This whole post feels like you just decided that it was true because it was convenient to your ideology to be able to handwave away all dissent as being fascistic. Like when you say this:
>That is why the bourgeois governments of western Europe united against Hitler and ᴉuᴉlossnW. Not because they were fundamentally opposed to fascism itself, but because they were done using the fascists
What makes you think that there was no ideological opposition to fascism within the bourgeois governments of Western Europe? The obvious answer for why Western Europe united against Hitler is because he tried to invade and take over their countries and murder them! Many of these governments were run by liberals, who believe in things that are pretty contradictory to what fascists believe. Haven't you ever met a liberal? People have sincere and non-cynical ideological disagreements with each other. One of the most common failure modes of political thought is to assume that all of your political opponents share your worldview, but merely ally themselves with The Enemy rather than The Good Guys. A fascist would say that reformists and communists are the same because they're both on the side of the globalists.

The steelman version of this kind of argument is to say:
"Well, maybe social democrats, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and fascists all have different BELIEFS, and they don't CONSCIOUSLY all serve the bourgeoisie, but there are large-scale material forces which shape ideologies, and these material forces cause ideologies to converge towards the class interest of the bourgeoisie." I've heard this argument before. But it also doesn't convince me. What are these material forces? What is the mechanism that causes these ideologically diverse people towards furthering the class interests of the bourgeoisie? Be specific. Is there no countervailing mechanism that creates other ideologies? No other material force does this? Does not this imply material incentives shaping institutions and ideologies that further the interests of the proletariat?

It seems to me that there are many interest groups with influence on society and ideology, and that the working class is one of them, and they further their interests through organizations like labor unions and social-democratic parties. The world does not look the way you would expect it to look if the bourgeoisie held absolute dominant control over all ideology outside of leftypol. Governments do all sorts of things which are not beneficial to the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie frequently have not always gotten their way in history, although they are more likely to get their way than other groups.

>>1892063
Common Keynes W. But also:
>Mises Wire