DannyL

Wild Horses
.... if you're going to force to me say something positive then I would say I was broadly in favour of the sort of social democracy that was fairly widespread in many Western countries after WWII, with regulated capitalism coexisting with nationalised industry and public services, progressive taxation and a comprehensive welfare state, with energy, transport, farming and land-use policies brought into line with what we now know about climate change and biodiversity. I suspect that something like this, as half-hearted and milquetoast as it may sound to all you would-be revolutionaries, might be about as good as it gets.

Just for the record.

Are you deeply committed to this position? If so, why? Who have you been reading? What experiences have inspired it? Or is it just that you are are smart enough to cobble together a position under a bit of rhetorical pressure but that's about it?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
not that i wanna go 80s class war school student but the era of sensible politics is over isn't it? even from the liberal position. politics is rapidly exposing what it has always been, a dimension of society separated from our social and civil lives that is only a one stop for a certain type of careerist, on both the left and the right. neither the left nor the right actually have mass social bases to push their politics.b hence the prevalence of culture warring between parliamentarians that has zero to negative impact on yer joe bloggs.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the future to me seems technocratic authoritarianism coupled with multiracial embourgeoisement initiatives to buy off that layer of activists and keep the semblance of social peace (and the state) running. the left actually dissolving in this political class bureaucracy is totally unable to see this and is largely fighting irrelevant battles of the 20th C.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The future does seems authoritarian to me for sure. Trends here, in the US, across Europe, all the BRICS now have authoritarians in charge (bar SA). Though there's mass protests going off in Russia (the spiritual home of this shit), be interesting to see how they play out. The cynic/realist in me says crushed with increasing violence but "optimism of the will" and all that. That was why the Syrian revolution has been so important as a holdout against this authoritarian violence and mass reality distortion. I still wouldn't be that surprised at some spectacular, surprising events coming seemingly out of nowhere. One I can foresee is the rapid collapse of the Assad regime, for instance, though seeing a "good" outcome here is much harder, after the systemic murder of a whole generation of activists.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Are you deeply committed to this position? If so, why? Who have you been reading? What experiences have inspired it? Or is it just that you are are smart enough to cobble together a position under a bit of rhetorical pressure but that's about it?

I'm not sure I understand you, Dan. I haven't cribbed this from elsewhere, if that's what you mean. It's not a credo I recite each night before going to bed, either. It's just a pretty basic sort of shopping list of progressive policies that we know work, because they've worked before, along with the necessity of avoiding total environmental collapse and trying to manage the unavoidable changes as best we can.

But maybe those saying that the conditions these policies were predicated on have changed and can't be changed back are correct, I don't know.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
This is what I mean. Life comes at you fast.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-power-vladimir-putin-looks-weaker-than-ever/

The Financial Times notes that the real incomes of Russians have been steadily falling over the past six years, and are now 10 percent lower than they were in 2013 — the year before Putin annexed Crimea and went to war with Ukraine.,,,But “change” is precisely the problem. In two decades, the Putin regime has failed to deliver on urgently needed reforms. It has failed to diversify the economy beyond its natural-resource base. Corruption remains rampant. Business people and citizens can’t rely on courts to deliver impartial justice. Politically well-connected oligarchs stifle competition and innovation.

Meanwhile, Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on, while the nationalist sugar high from his Crimea land-grab has long since faded. Moscow’s military adventure in Syria, often cited by Western pundits as evidence of a new global assertiveness, is deeply unpopular: One recent poll found that 55 percent of Russians want to see it ended. And even though Putin’s approval rating has ticked up slightly in recent weeks, it’s still hovering around historic lows — in a country where the government maintains tight control of what people get to see and hear.

One recent survey found that 44 percent of the country’s young people would choose emigration if they had the chance. Small wonder that some Russians are comparing their president to Leonid Brezhnev.



Would love to believe this is true and the implied consequences come to pass.

I don't think they give enough time to the idea that the Syrian involvement has been a huge resource sink, and a catastrophic failure.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'm not sure I understand you, Dan. I haven't cribbed this from elsewhere, if that's what you mean. It's not a credo I recite each night before going to bed, either. It's just a pretty basic sort of shopping list of progressive policies that we know work, because they've worked before, along with the necessity of avoiding total environmental collapse and trying to manage the unavoidable changes as best we can.

But maybe those saying that the conditions these policies were predicated on have changed and can't be changed back are correct, I don't know.

There a couple of strands here that I'll try and tease apart..... Firstly, my sympathy for these ideas largely comes from osmosis, I think I've taken them in just as the ambient background noise from the liberal-left media I tend to read. I haven't engaged with any decent theorists of leftism or liberalism, not in the way I do when engaged with other things I'm interested in. And I feel on shaky foundations because of this, the shallowness of my knowledge isn't leavened by say, working in a related field, academic research or similar. I'm assuming the same about you.

Further, there seems to be a bit of gulf between this position, and say, Jon and Thirdform's engagement with Marx. I see them using Marx's thinking in a way that a lot of people do, as a tool to think and analyse with. Tools for thought. It struck me as a huge reach to connect this usage of Marx with brutal practices of 20th Century Marxist regimes - it just struck me as such an .... ungenerous reading, which was why I found it annoying.

Not sure if this actually makes sense in a coherent way. It's what was going through my head when I wrote the above.

I suppose what I'm always hoping to read is some ideas that advance discussion and get us out of the quagmire, rather than just chucking rhetorical mud at other. Perhaps a bit much to hope for from a message board thread.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's by no means too much to ask for from a messsge board. It is what a message board is ideally situated to achieve. It just involves sidelining people who sabotage and derail and then setting the example yourself. It's possible (likely even) we are simply not not intelligent enough for the job in hand but there's not a lot we can about our hard limits.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Further, there seems to be a bit of gulf between this position, and say, Jon and Thirdform's engagement with Marx. I see them using Marx's thinking in a way that a lot of people do, as a tool to think and analyse with. Tools for thought. It struck me as a huge reach to connect this usage of Marx with brutal practices of 20th Century Marxist regimes - it just struck me as such an .... ungenerous reading, which was why I found it annoying.

I openly admit that I haven't ready any Marx, not even a Dummy's Guide. I'm less interested in what he wrote (and less still in the vast reams that other people have written about what he wrote) than I am in the concrete reality of actual societies and actual economies that have tried, however imperfectly, to put his ideas into practice.

If that seems unfair, then consider: if someone started a thread here about how the solution to all our problems is to get back to 'real' Christianity, would it be 'ungenerous' to mention the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquistadors, the witch hunts and all the rest?

I mean, I appreciate that no-one here is actually a tankie or identifies as a Stalinist or thinks that he was a great guy or anything, but at the same time, several people here have been bending over backwards to defend the USSR and its hegemony over eastern and central Europe, often using arguments that are totally unfalsifiable. Every aspect of economic dysfunction in communist countries can apparently be put down to the nefarious influence of capitalist ones, for example. And while some countries have become developed by trading with rich, ex-imperial countries, other countries are apparently being kept undeveloped by exactly the same mechanism. It just seems like a theory so malleable that it can be applied post-hoc to explain pretty much anything.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
if someone started a thread here about how the solution to all our problems is to get back to 'real' Christianity, would it be 'ungenerous' to mention the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquistadors, the witch hunts and all the rest?


Who has said that here, and where, in relation to Marxism? Can you quote them? Giving the choice between someone saying something that dumb vs you engaging in "creative" misreading, I'd guess the latter.

It seems obvious to me that there are multiple Christianities, multiple Marxisms. Someone employing a Marxist frame to understand the UK in the 21st Century does not equate to the worst excess of Stalinism. Amazed I have to state this.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
And while some countries have become developed by trading with rich, ex-imperial countries, other countries are apparently being kept undeveloped by exactly the same mechanism. It just seems like a theory so malleable that it can be applied post-hoc to explain pretty much anything.

My last contribution to this thread is to ask in wonderment why you wouldn't read a book on the subject before broadcasting your ignorance so widely? Your outlook is so Euro/Western-centric it's painful. We can argue about the relative merits of capitalism and other systems all day, but when you're alleging that the underdevelopment of poorer nations is not happening in such a glib manner, then it really is not worth carrying on the conversation. Especially when you're actually incapable of listening to anyone, and constantly trot out misrepresentations of what has been said.

Argh.
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
WRT “real Christianity” there are of course people doing this already. It would be incredibly ungenerous to mention pogroms or the crusades to the people working in your local food bank or organising a coffee morning I think.

Let alone the swords into ploughshares people who have done time for trying to slow down the war machine.

Or Catholic Worker who have done decent work with deprived people in south Hackney and elsewhere.

And that’s just people I’ve met. We shouldn’t be parochial about it and musn’t forget the liberation theology movements in South America and elsewhere. But perhaps Tea would like to remind them of the Conquistadors...

Perhaps that would be even more ungenerous than bringing Stalinism up with people who happen to be Marxists who put time into their union branches or protesting against austerity.
 
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