Socialism

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Beehaw's community for socialists, communists, anarchists, and non-authoritarian leftists (this means anti-capitalists) of all stripes. A place for all leftist and labor news and discussion, as long as you're nice about it.

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Pluralistic: The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 (14 Jul 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

submitted 4 months ago by memfree@beehaw.org to c/socialism@beehaw.org

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I almost posted this to Politics, but since it is a call to "The Left" couched in terms of the people of the U.S. Democratic Party (rather than to its leaders), I thought it might be more suitable to Socialism.

In addition to talking about Project 2025 and the need to fracture the coalition that wants aristocracy, Doctorow writes this:

What's more, there's a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn't an ideology you can change, it's a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker's labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers

The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden's capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats' undemocratic structure.

To limit Biden's harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he's hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump's harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.

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[–] memfree@beehaw.org 5 points 4 months ago

I find it hard to “fix” something that wasn’t designed to be fixed in the first place

I completely understand! The system does not want to change, but I would dearly love it if we could get better people in there to fix it from the inside instead of just letting the bastards get away with whatever they want. I would love to see a system where businesses by LAW had to be at least partially owned by current and past workers, where excessive earnings were automatically taxed away such that you might as well put that money into making a better product, and those taxes were transparently spent for the public good, why then... , then I'd be tickled pink! I'm sure we'd find more stuff to complain about, but what a start it might be!