It perplexes me that the American left is simply not interested in transforming this into a political movement. Not assassination, but leveraging the public outcry and support for healthcare reform in the wake of the assassination.
I’ve been saying since it happened that if this fails to translate into an actual movement with real political aims and goals, then you can forget about the American left wing movement doing anything of substance.
Bernie first came to national attention in 2015-2016 (many people who turned left in recent years will say it’s the start of their political awareness) and since then we’ve had Covid, Ukraine war, Gaza and now the healthcare insurance CEO incident. None of this has materialized into a real political movement beyond some cosplay protests.
As I said last time, there is no American left, definitely not one organized enough to do more than “cosplay protests.” No left, no political movement. Simple. Imperial core is cooked. Hopefully political and social minorities can make it through the coming crises because there’s no left to protect them
There is a large segment of the American population that is sympathetic to leftist ideas. There is a miniscule portion that is actually doing anything to make them happen. That miniscule portion is the radical inteligentsia and they come primarily from the downwardly mobile children of the middle class who are still getting extensive educations and working in middle class jobs and so they are still completely isolated from the American proletariat, the one class that could actually wield power by withholding labor-power and fucking up production. Because the American proletariat is isolated from the revolutionary intelligentsia they are left disoriented, disorganized, and clueless by the barrage of bourgeois-fascist ideology that surrounds us in our day to day lives. Because the revolutionary intelligentsia doesn’t actually help direct the proletariat, they cannot scientifically analyze struggle and learn the correct ideas and methods of revolution. Thus we live in an endless cycle of radical students waving signs at the protest of the week and achieving nothing all while the world around us burns.
The American working class is also unorganized and isolated themselves OR organized into captive unions with dogshit leadership and unmotivated membership
So the intelligentsia needs to start putting out Tiktok-style videos with subliminal messaging to help lay the groundwork in reaching the proletariat. Then, through an extended and clandestine campaign convince the country that there are only two sides: you’re either with the 99%, or you’re against the 1%. At that point everyone will unwittingly be working toward the same goal.
National healthcare reform is a more dead political possibility than anti-zionism. That’s a reason why the assassination took place in the first place. Trying to funnel this energy back into national reform would be an obvious dead end.
From what I’ve seen DSA chapters have pivoted state level healthcare reform where its feasible. That’s how national reform historically starts.
The US left is in a very sorry state that no org can just declare solidarity with Luigi and just take the heat.
From what I’ve seen DSA chapters have pivoted state level healthcare reform where its feasible. That’s how national reform historically starts.
The problem with healthcare reform is that state government cannot print its own currency, and has to finance these programs with taxes and selling bonds. So, the program is doomed to fail from the start because that means either people paying higher and higher proportion of their income into the state-run healthcare program, or the government cuts public spending from somewhere else to finance the program (austerity).
It has to be done at the federal level because the federal government can simply print the money needed to pay for all healthcare related expenses at zero cost. Yes, you heard that right, the federal government simply prints the money needed to pay for all of your healthcare bills and related expenses spent by the hospitals, without you having to pay a single cent into it.
I’m familiar with MMT, you don’t need to be so condescending when explaining it. The fact is M4A is as dead as Bernie’s and AOC’s political futures. Every reform in the US started with some state adopting it first so they’re falling back to the historically successful methods.
I also don’t think you should assume the DSA chapters in those states are unaware of MMT or the limits of state level funding. I don’t know how they’ve negotiated this though. My state is gerrymandered to shit so its a non-issue.
I would not take that as an actual description of MMT just the net outcome. The shortest way to describe it is: The only real limit to printing a fiat currency is inflation and the primary purpose of taxes is to address inflation.
Imagine all government spending comes straight out of the mint and all taxes go into a furnace. Federal debt therefore is an outdated artifice of when currency was backed by gold.
It has a unique consequence: if the gov spends money in such a way that it destroys more wealth than it spent (eg crashing health insurance stocks) then you should lower taxes.
I was more urging you to assume good faith of comrades rather than assuming the other person was being intentionally condescending towards you, as their explanation was helpful to others in the thread
Please tone police me directly instead of indirectly. The description of MMT extremely lacking and it’s wording was condescending: “Yes you heard that right”.
It perplexes me that the American left is simply not interested in transforming this into a political movement. Not assassination, but leveraging the public outcry and support for healthcare reform in the wake of the assassination.
The problem isn’t lack of interest it’s that we can’t transform anything into a movement. If we could just create movements then we would have had free healthcare before this ever happened.
This is exactly the question that needs to be asked, and unfortunately I don’t see many leftist orgs in America talking about it, if at all. How? What does it take to achieve the political goals? What is the strategy here?
I am not going to pretend to be an expert (non-burgerlander here), but I think the first step has to revolve around debt. Without addressing the debt problem, there is no workers movement in America. Everyone is saddled in medical debt, student debt, mortgages, credit card debt etc. If you lose your job, you‘re fucked. And there won’t be many people who’d be willing to risk getting fired to participate in labor movement. This is perhaps the principal contradiction that needs to be addressed head on.
PS. I read the entire PSL program from their website and the word “debt” did not come up even once. Not sure about DSA though.
First move of an organized movement would be to refuse paying debt collectively until there has been debt forgiveness and better terms for debtors. The system/establishment would not be able to deal with that much cash flow suddenly drying up, would it?
Saying “First move of an organized movement” is circular and contradictory. You need to do things to get organized. You need to do a lot of things to get to the point where mass debt refusal is anything but a pipe dream.
First move of an organized movement is to call a meeting, probably a very small one.
As to the tactical value of stopping the flow of cash, idk about that. I think debt is a lot about discipline and control vs providing needed income to the ruling class. Who after all, own literally everything.
If debt refusal was done the primary value would be a) its impact on the day to day lives of people keeping their money (effectively getting a raise), and b) the building and flexing the muscles of an organized working class.
I agree about getting organized first. I’m speaking more towards how an organized movement could challenge these structures whether they are there to control the populace or whether that system actually plays into how the ruling class can own everything in the first place. Corporations need cash flow in order to maintain their own operations and they have their own creditors/debt that is based on this concept of ‘future cash flow’ and a drying up of that cash flow would make things a bit precarious for them.
Well there is the Debt Collective. A project they are involved in is the Rolling Jubilee which buys mass debt in the same way a collection agency would, then forgives it all. They just send everyone on the list a letter to let them know.
Obviously that’s a cool thing to do, but it’s a token. To change the attitude of the class, you’d need to be operating at a much more massive scale, not just paying off debt, but preventing it from accruing. How do you affect change like that without some real power to begin with?
I can’t really think how this org, or a different one, could do out of the Luigi situation to get a victory about the debt situation.
Like what are you generally thinking? Meetings? Posting? Create new orgs? Recruit to existing orgs? Fundraising? Workshops? Riots? Militias?
So far we have a lot of posting energy going on, but how to direct/collect that? I agree with the sentiment of “there must be a way to use this!” but I can’t zoom in on any details… it’s all hazy.
It perplexes me that the American left is simply not interested in transforming this into a political movement. Not assassination, but leveraging the public outcry and support for healthcare reform in the wake of the assassination.
I’ve been saying since it happened that if this fails to translate into an actual movement with real political aims and goals, then you can forget about the American left wing movement doing anything of substance.
Bernie first came to national attention in 2015-2016 (many people who turned left in recent years will say it’s the start of their political awareness) and since then we’ve had Covid, Ukraine war, Gaza and now the healthcare insurance CEO incident. None of this has materialized into a real political movement beyond some cosplay protests.
How are these people serious?
As I said last time, there is no American left, definitely not one organized enough to do more than “cosplay protests.” No left, no political movement. Simple. Imperial core is cooked. Hopefully political and social minorities can make it through the coming crises because there’s no left to protect them
There is a large segment of the American population that is sympathetic to leftist ideas. There is a miniscule portion that is actually doing anything to make them happen. That miniscule portion is the radical inteligentsia and they come primarily from the downwardly mobile children of the middle class who are still getting extensive educations and working in middle class jobs and so they are still completely isolated from the American proletariat, the one class that could actually wield power by withholding labor-power and fucking up production. Because the American proletariat is isolated from the revolutionary intelligentsia they are left disoriented, disorganized, and clueless by the barrage of bourgeois-fascist ideology that surrounds us in our day to day lives. Because the revolutionary intelligentsia doesn’t actually help direct the proletariat, they cannot scientifically analyze struggle and learn the correct ideas and methods of revolution. Thus we live in an endless cycle of radical students waving signs at the protest of the week and achieving nothing all while the world around us burns.
The American working class is also unorganized and isolated themselves OR organized into captive unions with dogshit leadership and unmotivated membership
So the intelligentsia needs to start putting out Tiktok-style videos with subliminal messaging to help lay the groundwork in reaching the proletariat. Then, through an extended and clandestine campaign convince the country that there are only two sides: you’re either with the 99%, or you’re against the 1%. At that point everyone will unwittingly be working toward the same goal.
National healthcare reform is a more dead political possibility than anti-zionism. That’s a reason why the assassination took place in the first place. Trying to funnel this energy back into national reform would be an obvious dead end.
From what I’ve seen DSA chapters have pivoted state level healthcare reform where its feasible. That’s how national reform historically starts.
The US left is in a very sorry state that no org can just declare solidarity with Luigi and just take the heat.
The problem with healthcare reform is that state government cannot print its own currency, and has to finance these programs with taxes and selling bonds. So, the program is doomed to fail from the start because that means either people paying higher and higher proportion of their income into the state-run healthcare program, or the government cuts public spending from somewhere else to finance the program (austerity).
It has to be done at the federal level because the federal government can simply print the money needed to pay for all healthcare related expenses at zero cost. Yes, you heard that right, the federal government simply prints the money needed to pay for all of your healthcare bills and related expenses spent by the hospitals, without you having to pay a single cent into it.
I’m familiar with MMT, you don’t need to be so condescending when explaining it. The fact is M4A is as dead as Bernie’s and AOC’s political futures. Every reform in the US started with some state adopting it first so they’re falling back to the historically successful methods.
I also don’t think you should assume the DSA chapters in those states are unaware of MMT or the limits of state level funding. I don’t know how they’ve negotiated this though. My state is gerrymandered to shit so its a non-issue.
I’m also reading this thread and not very familiar with MMT, I thought the above user’s description was helpful and did not get a condescending vibe.
I would not take that as an actual description of MMT just the net outcome. The shortest way to describe it is: The only real limit to printing a fiat currency is inflation and the primary purpose of taxes is to address inflation.
Imagine all government spending comes straight out of the mint and all taxes go into a furnace. Federal debt therefore is an outdated artifice of when currency was backed by gold.
It has a unique consequence: if the gov spends money in such a way that it destroys more wealth than it spent (eg crashing health insurance stocks) then you should lower taxes.
I was more urging you to assume good faith of comrades rather than assuming the other person was being intentionally condescending towards you, as their explanation was helpful to others in the thread
Please tone police me directly instead of indirectly. The description of MMT extremely lacking and it’s wording was condescending: “Yes you heard that right”.
The left is so fucking cooked in the states it’s not even funny
The problem isn’t lack of interest it’s that we can’t transform anything into a movement. If we could just create movements then we would have had free healthcare before this ever happened.
we will be subverted by the surveilliance state at every single incremental attempt to build a leftist movement of any specific issue
meanwhile the right is deliberately ignored and allowed to drive their form of populism only hindered by the political leadership infighting
Well like in a more serious reality what form would it take?
This is exactly the question that needs to be asked, and unfortunately I don’t see many leftist orgs in America talking about it, if at all. How? What does it take to achieve the political goals? What is the strategy here?
I am not going to pretend to be an expert (non-burgerlander here), but I think the first step has to revolve around debt. Without addressing the debt problem, there is no workers movement in America. Everyone is saddled in medical debt, student debt, mortgages, credit card debt etc. If you lose your job, you‘re fucked. And there won’t be many people who’d be willing to risk getting fired to participate in labor movement. This is perhaps the principal contradiction that needs to be addressed head on.
PS. I read the entire PSL program from their website and the word “debt” did not come up even once. Not sure about DSA though.
First move of an organized movement would be to refuse paying debt collectively until there has been debt forgiveness and better terms for debtors. The system/establishment would not be able to deal with that much cash flow suddenly drying up, would it?
Saying “First move of an organized movement” is circular and contradictory. You need to do things to get organized. You need to do a lot of things to get to the point where mass debt refusal is anything but a pipe dream.
First move of an organized movement is to call a meeting, probably a very small one.
As to the tactical value of stopping the flow of cash, idk about that. I think debt is a lot about discipline and control vs providing needed income to the ruling class. Who after all, own literally everything.
If debt refusal was done the primary value would be a) its impact on the day to day lives of people keeping their money (effectively getting a raise), and b) the building and flexing the muscles of an organized working class.
I agree about getting organized first. I’m speaking more towards how an organized movement could challenge these structures whether they are there to control the populace or whether that system actually plays into how the ruling class can own everything in the first place. Corporations need cash flow in order to maintain their own operations and they have their own creditors/debt that is based on this concept of ‘future cash flow’ and a drying up of that cash flow would make things a bit precarious for them.
Well there is the Debt Collective. A project they are involved in is the Rolling Jubilee which buys mass debt in the same way a collection agency would, then forgives it all. They just send everyone on the list a letter to let them know.
Obviously that’s a cool thing to do, but it’s a token. To change the attitude of the class, you’d need to be operating at a much more massive scale, not just paying off debt, but preventing it from accruing. How do you affect change like that without some real power to begin with?
I can’t really think how this org, or a different one, could do out of the Luigi situation to get a victory about the debt situation.
Like what are you generally thinking? Meetings? Posting? Create new orgs? Recruit to existing orgs? Fundraising? Workshops? Riots? Militias?
So far we have a lot of posting energy going on, but how to direct/collect that? I agree with the sentiment of “there must be a way to use this!” but I can’t zoom in on any details… it’s all hazy.