The only time capitalism is slowed down is when leftists, abolitionists, activists, etc. can make actual inroads into progress. It's happened throughout society in fits and starts, and that's why black people can eat at the same places white people can, women can vote, slavery (at least outright owning people as property) is illegal, we have 40-hour work weeks, etc. That process will get harder with Biden in office because Biden and the Dems will position themselves as the pinnacle of left progress and then move the country to the right while saying they're left.
Under outright Nazis like Trump, yes material conditions may get worse in the short term (although Biden is so bad that who knows), but we're not just electing a president for 2020. All this stuff will have ripples toward the future, and the left will almost completely disappear from the radar under Biden because he and the Dems will be "the left" again (as Republicans and libs both love to paint them).
I think there is a tendency for extremely online people to just assume that everyone (the "regular people") knows what the left is, what they're saying, what they're doing. That isn't the case. To the extent that people do know, it's because committed leftists, and quasi-leftist libs like Bernie Sanders, just shout these things over and over into the mass media void. That power, what little it may be, is going to be completely shut down with Biden and the Dems subsuming the role of "the left" as they did under Obama. A lot of people on here and elsewhere online like to shut that down like it doesn't mean anything, the left will continue and thrive and so forth. But if it's only thriving among the 800 people you read on Twitter, and nobody else ever sees it or covers it, what good is it?
At least under Trump, you have libs sort of united with leftists by necessity, where even if they are going about it the wrong way (OMG RUSSIANS AND THEIR FB MEMEZ!!!), they're forced to take a negative posture toward authoritarianism and the right.
But against President Biden, who's our ally or advocate in mass media? Fucking Glenn Beck? Wheeling out his dipshit blackboard to say how Biden is too much of a radical leftist Marxist Saul Alinsky acolyte? That will be one side of the debate, and the other side will be Joy Ann Reid saying the American Utopia has been achieved under Biden and Republicans are determined to fuck it up because they don't like abortions.
This is a very big, real issue not being addressed in these struggle sessions. We will disappear completely from US discourse under Biden.
Libs have spent the last 4 years shrieking about a faked conspiracy of Russiagate - precisely to avoid doing the introspection needed within the democratic party and continuing Neoliberal ideology
That is why I said "sort of". They're mortal enemies of leftists, I agree, but they're forced to share a common enemy with us in Trump, and even if libs work against us in every single other way, they're still putting it in the water that the authoritarian presence at the top of the food chain, in the White House is a Bad Person™.
Who is going to do that, credibly, if Biden is the president and not Trump? The libs will go back to sleep/brunch, and the right's critiques of Biden and Dems would be delivered as if Biden is a Black Panther. AKA, substance-less and useless.
If you look at the post, I didn't say the left will disappear. I said disappear "from discourse". There will always be those of us doing good work, helping people, trying to improve material conditions on the ground, or even electorally, working at the municipal level, attorneys and judges that are actually compassionate doing good for people within a shit system. Et cetera.
But media is a big deal, the corporate stranglehold on it is a BIG factor in shaping how people and especially Americans think, and our presence there, even in the 0.00001% way it existed from 2016-2020, really gets good ideas out into the ether. No one would be talking about M4A if Bernie Sanders had not become a viable candidate for president and gone on MSNBC and even Fox 150,919,248 times and shouted in his cranky old-man way about M4A.
So my big fear is that if Biden "becomes" the left, it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed "the left" in this country... but worse, because Biden is even worse than Obama, and because the world is coming apart at the seams and in dire need of left ideas injected into the discourse, immediately, in a way that wasn't the case in 2012.
it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed “the left” in this country
Obama credibly ran as a progressive, though. Clinton was the centrist in the 2008 primary. Biden can't subsume a left that was never even lukewarm on him, especially when that left has far more of a media/electoral/online/in-the-streets presence than it did 12 years ago.
The only time capitalism is slowed down is when leftists, abolitionists, activists, etc. can make actual inroads into progress. It's happened throughout society in fits and starts, and that's why black people can eat at the same places white people can, women can vote, slavery (at least outright owning people as property) is illegal, we have 40-hour work weeks, etc. That process will get harder with Biden in office because Biden and the Dems will position themselves as the pinnacle of left progress and then move the country to the right while saying they're left.
Under outright Nazis like Trump, yes material conditions may get worse in the short term (although Biden is so bad that who knows), but we're not just electing a president for 2020. All this stuff will have ripples toward the future, and the left will almost completely disappear from the radar under Biden because he and the Dems will be "the left" again (as Republicans and libs both love to paint them).
I think there is a tendency for extremely online people to just assume that everyone (the "regular people") knows what the left is, what they're saying, what they're doing. That isn't the case. To the extent that people do know, it's because committed leftists, and quasi-leftist libs like Bernie Sanders, just shout these things over and over into the mass media void. That power, what little it may be, is going to be completely shut down with Biden and the Dems subsuming the role of "the left" as they did under Obama. A lot of people on here and elsewhere online like to shut that down like it doesn't mean anything, the left will continue and thrive and so forth. But if it's only thriving among the 800 people you read on Twitter, and nobody else ever sees it or covers it, what good is it?
At least under Trump, you have libs sort of united with leftists by necessity, where even if they are going about it the wrong way (OMG RUSSIANS AND THEIR FB MEMEZ!!!), they're forced to take a negative posture toward authoritarianism and the right.
But against President Biden, who's our ally or advocate in mass media? Fucking Glenn Beck? Wheeling out his dipshit blackboard to say how Biden is too much of a radical leftist Marxist Saul Alinsky acolyte? That will be one side of the debate, and the other side will be Joy Ann Reid saying the American Utopia has been achieved under Biden and Republicans are determined to fuck it up because they don't like abortions.
This is a very big, real issue not being addressed in these struggle sessions. We will disappear completely from US discourse under Biden.
Libs are not 'sort of united with leftists'
Libs have spent the last 4 years shrieking about a faked conspiracy of Russiagate - precisely to avoid doing the introspection needed within the democratic party and continuing Neoliberal ideology
That is why I said "sort of". They're mortal enemies of leftists, I agree, but they're forced to share a common enemy with us in Trump, and even if libs work against us in every single other way, they're still putting it in the water that the authoritarian presence at the top of the food chain, in the White House is a Bad Person™.
Who is going to do that, credibly, if Biden is the president and not Trump? The libs will go back to sleep/brunch, and the right's critiques of Biden and Dems would be delivered as if Biden is a Black Panther. AKA, substance-less and useless.
deleted by creator
If you look at the post, I didn't say the left will disappear. I said disappear "from discourse". There will always be those of us doing good work, helping people, trying to improve material conditions on the ground, or even electorally, working at the municipal level, attorneys and judges that are actually compassionate doing good for people within a shit system. Et cetera.
But media is a big deal, the corporate stranglehold on it is a BIG factor in shaping how people and especially Americans think, and our presence there, even in the 0.00001% way it existed from 2016-2020, really gets good ideas out into the ether. No one would be talking about M4A if Bernie Sanders had not become a viable candidate for president and gone on MSNBC and even Fox 150,919,248 times and shouted in his cranky old-man way about M4A.
So my big fear is that if Biden "becomes" the left, it will have the same chilling effect on left ideas as when Obama subsumed "the left" in this country... but worse, because Biden is even worse than Obama, and because the world is coming apart at the seams and in dire need of left ideas injected into the discourse, immediately, in a way that wasn't the case in 2012.
Obama credibly ran as a progressive, though. Clinton was the centrist in the 2008 primary. Biden can't subsume a left that was never even lukewarm on him, especially when that left has far more of a media/electoral/online/in-the-streets presence than it did 12 years ago.