People on Lemmy really don’t like any kind of equivocation between the two parties. Also saying that the Dems are a front for Republican objectives isn’t correct either. Republicans are the party of nationalist industrial old money bourgeois, Dems are the party of nouveau riche, international finance capital, tech, and labor bureaucracy.
Leftists identify Democrat politicians as a class enemy, and it’s true that the bourgeois base of the republicans will join the bourgeois base of the democrats in class solidarity if their class interests are threatened. Liberals also have a nasty habit of defending private property above all else which gives lefties the Heebie jeebies, and creates a lot of inter class strife among workers. The bourgeoisie is one thing, just like the working class is one thing, and as much as I believe that workers should unite to fight against their class enemies, the working class is divided into different striae (lower class reserve army of labor vs. Middle class suburban worker for example) that compete for the scraps, so why wouldn’t the ruling capitalists be divided similarly in a fight for the lion’s share? Capitalism is, among other things, a system of coercive forced competition. This competitiveness takes many different historical forms across many divisions in society. As much as I’d like to unite all races, gender expressions, ethnicities, economic groupings against our shared enemies in this class war, we all know it’s not that simple. Competition is how the system perpetuates, it is the driver of monopolization as well as something like an immune system against worker solidarity, the greatest threat to capitalism.
Often the first step in dialectical thinking, the mode of thought that begins to emerge with class consciousness, is an ability to take two things that seem separate and unite them into a single thing by analyzing the relationships that form them. But dialectics is a process that works forward as well as in reverse. We can use it to identify two things that are one, but we should also be able to use it to identify that one thing is also two. Many people see the synthesis between the two parties and draw a conclusion based on that, and go to the internet to proclaim this discovery, which is often met with lots of people who agree rhetorically with the conclusion, making us believe that we are correct in out new knowledge. But part of this consciousness is an ability to deal with contradictions as part of our analysis, whereas the human, or maybe just modernist, tendency is to discard contradiction for the illusion of surety, another byproduct of competitive mode of capitalist evaluation. We have to realize that each revelation is just a new facet of the truth, which is a lifelong pursuit that is shared among class conscious workers, not arrived at finally by an individual. These truths, as well as the basis for them are all historically contingent. Many things about the class struggle never changes, many of the tendencies identified by Marx for example, but many other things are constantly changing.
I would also be remiss to fail to add that there probably is a concerted effort by bad actors to false equivocate democrats and republicans in order to alter political outcomes, propagandize or maybe just breed suspicion. I don’t know if its Russia or China or the democrats or the republicans, probably all of the above plus many many more to different extents. But all these people on Lemmy who detect such bad actors in their communities, I think we have to trust their ability to tell truth from falsehood. even if we don’t agree completely with their conclusions, doesn’t mean they are completely wrong. When working people tell us something we have to listen. We are all victims of propaganda, so dismissing the sincere fear of other workers as propagandized delusion says more about how we falsely view ourselves as part of the working class, than it does about them.
People on Lemmy really don’t like any kind of equivocation between the two parties. Also saying that the Dems are a front for Republican objectives isn’t correct either. Republicans are the party of nationalist industrial old money bourgeois, Dems are the party of nouveau riche, international finance capital, tech, and labor bureaucracy.
Leftists identify Democrat politicians as a class enemy, and it’s true that the bourgeois base of the republicans will join the bourgeois base of the democrats in class solidarity if their class interests are threatened. Liberals also have a nasty habit of defending private property above all else which gives lefties the Heebie jeebies, and creates a lot of inter class strife among workers. The bourgeoisie is one thing, just like the working class is one thing, and as much as I believe that workers should unite to fight against their class enemies, the working class is divided into different striae (lower class reserve army of labor vs. Middle class suburban worker for example) that compete for the scraps, so why wouldn’t the ruling capitalists be divided similarly in a fight for the lion’s share? Capitalism is, among other things, a system of coercive forced competition. This competitiveness takes many different historical forms across many divisions in society. As much as I’d like to unite all races, gender expressions, ethnicities, economic groupings against our shared enemies in this class war, we all know it’s not that simple. Competition is how the system perpetuates, it is the driver of monopolization as well as something like an immune system against worker solidarity, the greatest threat to capitalism.
Often the first step in dialectical thinking, the mode of thought that begins to emerge with class consciousness, is an ability to take two things that seem separate and unite them into a single thing by analyzing the relationships that form them. But dialectics is a process that works forward as well as in reverse. We can use it to identify two things that are one, but we should also be able to use it to identify that one thing is also two. Many people see the synthesis between the two parties and draw a conclusion based on that, and go to the internet to proclaim this discovery, which is often met with lots of people who agree rhetorically with the conclusion, making us believe that we are correct in out new knowledge. But part of this consciousness is an ability to deal with contradictions as part of our analysis, whereas the human, or maybe just modernist, tendency is to discard contradiction for the illusion of surety, another byproduct of competitive mode of capitalist evaluation. We have to realize that each revelation is just a new facet of the truth, which is a lifelong pursuit that is shared among class conscious workers, not arrived at finally by an individual. These truths, as well as the basis for them are all historically contingent. Many things about the class struggle never changes, many of the tendencies identified by Marx for example, but many other things are constantly changing.
I would also be remiss to fail to add that there probably is a concerted effort by bad actors to false equivocate democrats and republicans in order to alter political outcomes, propagandize or maybe just breed suspicion. I don’t know if its Russia or China or the democrats or the republicans, probably all of the above plus many many more to different extents. But all these people on Lemmy who detect such bad actors in their communities, I think we have to trust their ability to tell truth from falsehood. even if we don’t agree completely with their conclusions, doesn’t mean they are completely wrong. When working people tell us something we have to listen. We are all victims of propaganda, so dismissing the sincere fear of other workers as propagandized delusion says more about how we falsely view ourselves as part of the working class, than it does about them.