this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Gee, I wonder why - -
Oh, it's because in this analogy, you're literally too stupid to survive.
You bale water to prevent a ship from sinking. If your baling doesn't overcome the amount of water coming into the ship, then you're just spending your time buying more time with diminishing returns. Even that would be beneficial if there was something we were waiting for, but there's not. Our politics keep getting worse even when we win elections. The longer we wait, the harder it becomes for us to do anything about it. What we need now isn't time, it's the courage to swim to one of the corporate overlords' ships and take what's ours. The only way we avoid drowning is to get a better ship, and the longer we spend baling, the more invested we get in the idea that it's helping. As I've said, I'm still voting. I believe voting is good, but I don't believe it's the equivalent to baling water, and the more we think of it as being something akin to a real solution, the less we focus on real solutions that might actually save us.
To use a particularly apt phrase, that ship has sailed. There will be no revolution. I don't know how anyone sane could look at the state of the world and think they a) there's some revolution on the horizon, and b) it would result in a better world order if it happened.
It's the leftist version of "it's okay to poison the planet because the Rapture is coming soon so it doesn't matter what we do now". It's an excuse for apathy and laziness.
There is no revolution coming to save you. We have to save ourselves the difficult way, through voting and incremental steps. Belief in a sudden revolution that will make everything better is childish.
Saving ourselves the difficult way you say pushing the quite dangerous status quo thinking that is leading us into the very catastrophe that you somehow don't see coming. Both climate change and late stage capitalism are real problems and potentially apocalyptic in size.
That is going to cause revolution (with revolution being the fundamental change of culture and social relations) wether we are prepared for it or not. Not because of some vague march of history or whatever but because changes in environment impact our thinking and the viability and security of systems that are currently running the world, and because large changes in environment are coming for all of us.
Trying to just work within the structure to change the superstructure is similarly naive as just waiting idly for revolution. The neoliberal revolution for example was able to change the superstructure in a lasting way fairly recently and fairly quickly, because they were positioning themselves in anticipation of crisis, and not because they were playing only by the rules in the structure.
Yes voting for the "correct" candidates is important in some ways but it completely misses the importance and scale of problems to come and what is needed to protect ourselves as best as we can from their impact. Americans can trust the Democrats fully and be disappointed again and again, but they can also decide to build and change their political landscape in other ways while still voting dem as long as that's the appropriate harm reduction vote.
Voting and incremental change are the "easy" parts, building and protecting for yourself and your community, so that you and your loved ones are able to "not let a good crisis go to waste" is the kind of revolutionary pre figuration that we need right now. There will be violence either way we might as well try to use it to change things for the better for more people afterwards and during.
To a.) giving myself the presumably 60+ years until my death there is certainly a (couple of) revolution(s) before the horizon To b.) yes the worst people and institutions you can probably imagine will use everything in their power to make everything worse which is exactly why there needs to be real resistance which the Democrats aren't because they are part of the structure and largely don't have your interests at heart. They could be changed for the better until then, but while they are moving slowly something else needs to be built as well.
Well you're still just as wrong and naive as the fundamentalists but at least in the mean time you're doing the right thing. In 30 years when there's still no revolution you'll thank yourself for supporting incremental progress.