This Is Not a Coup

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cross-posted from Afflict the Comfortable

The Treachery of (Words and) Images

Wednesday’s events were horrible, dangerous, infuriating, and predictable.  People with weapons easily breached the Capitol, gallows were hung (perhaps performative, perhaps not), and people were attacked and some died.  The country was stunned, and both establishment and social media have been deeming this Trump’s “coup” or an “insurrection” from the first.  It’s hard to talk about this. Trump is horrid, detestable, and dangerous, and any time you try to reel the rhetoric back, you can be accused of being an apologist for a cruel, racist, inhuman bigot who happens to be president—which all makes sense. But doing awful things doesn’t mean we have fascism, and vandals and thugs breaking into a sacred public building doesn’t mean we’ve had a coup. There’s no saving grace to any of this, but it needs to be viewed clearheaded and coldblooded.

Swipe Left on the Democrats and Electoral Politics

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cross-posted from Afflict the Comfortable

They’re Just Not That Into You

*****

There are currently two feuds dominating the Left—Jimmy Dore vs. AOC  in “The Brawl Over Medicare-for-All” and various segments of the Left vs. The Squad on its vote to re-elect Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

If you want/need better evidence of the futility of the Left, it would be hard to find.  There’s a huge ongoing dispute over whether “The Squad,” a group of about 6 elected officials (hell, throw Sanders and Markey in there and make it 8) out of 535, should force Congress to have a vote on socialized medicine to put everyone on the record, and another argument over whether to vote against the incumbent (and politically inept) speaker of the house.  Social media is still in in an uproar over these issues with “support AOC” and “The Squad is dead to me” opinions seeming to alternate in frequency and intensity.

Marx on the immiseration of humanity

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Prof. Bob Buzzanco with Karl Marx on “the immiseration of humanity,” from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844.

Video below text of the quote.

“By reducing the worker’s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he declares that this life, too, is human life and existence.

Hope Among the Ruins of 2020

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Happy New Year, Tender Comrades! In our last episode of 2020, we talk about the past year.

Listen in: http://bit.ly/HopeRuins2020GandR

We discuss what we’ve learned, the worsening precarity, the absence of community and a rewarding life, the barriers posed by the Professional Left (NGO Industrial Complex, labor leadership, etc), the often-unhinged, conspiratorial left, but also the inspiring moral courage and bold action we saw in the streets, the role of organizers and activists, and what we can do moving forward.