You’ve tuned out (before hand) what I’ve said and have fallen back on your own memory of what some anticapitalists have said,

No. None of that is accurate. That is not what I said or think. This is an odd conversation because you keep telling me I misread you but in the process are just piling on misreadings yourself. So what’s happening is that the very complications I am trying to avoid keep multiplying. It’s like the Disney sorcerer’s apprentice scene from Fantasia. (That is said with humor.)

I can’t talk now. Therefore trying to correct corrections of corrections feels extra busyish at the moment. It’s a timing thing. (That was said in a rushed but smiling good naturedly way.)

BT, that’s 4 posts on what I said was a “vote” meaning there can’t be wrong and right, just statements of beliefs. I don’t have time to read 4 posts intelligently until probably Weds.

I can just spontaneously express myself without the deeper engagement that comes from reading.

I am approaching this differently than you. (Also I didn’t say I tuned out anti-capitalist arguments–I said I tuned out all arguments that try to rationally calculate some kind of utopia, which of course includes moving on from some kind of “bad situation.” I tune them all out. Why? I absolutely do not believe they are anything BUT beliefs. I don’t believe in their presumed rationality.) (Plus of course I don’t count capitalism as being a late-comer. The UK was an agrarian capitalist nation in the 18th century, and industries did exist such as ship building, and then there were things like the East India Company and so on. So we also see history differently. I see different versions of capitalism rising from at least the 14th century onward. I assume there will be different versions in the future and I also assume that there are different versions globally, for example the Scandinavian versions).

So remember how I see this—this is alliance politics with different people saying where they are coming from (which is what I did). IN that approach there is no “debate” about who is “right.” There’s only different votes.

I can read all this on Weds. (early in the week is always bad for me, in terms of engaging intelligently in extended discussion. Sometimes on Mon/Tues I can’t even tend to the board in normal ways, let alone engage in extended discussion).

But I won’t change. I will vote as I vote, and honor the differences between us. That will be the “we see it differently but have an alliance” approach. I arrived where I am over decades.

Till Weds then.

Billy_T wrote:

We all know they (capitalism) causes cancer

Well, you misread me plus I probably wasn’t clear. What I quote right there is what I am describing as you drawing a very particular conclusion that, in fact, is a belief.

No I don’t believe that capitalism is or always will be one thing or that it’s demise is necessary–not in any rational, logical way.

But where I part company is not the ideas about capitalism. It’s the idea that we arrive at what humans should and will be and ought to be, to thrive, simply with politically oriented beliefs based on reason and the imagining of very particular utopias. I don’t buy into or commit to anything like that, right or left. I don’t believe in rational deductions about political, utopian, social goals—as in this must be this, so we must do that. I distrust those, always.

So know I don’t believe in rationally arriving at “solutions to capitalism” and tend to always tune that stuff out. I think history has more surprises than rationally understandable directions. I don’t think the human mind is capable of understanding those processes well enough to actually try and guide them with specific goals.

I don’t have goals like that (and am always at a distance from those). I have principles. I don’t care what emerges if the principles are realized. And there are probably many many ways to do that. Some that aren’t even visible yet.

Plus I also don’t believe in arguing about it. I just believe in putting in 2 cents in informal polls on things like this and then letting it all splash around in the pool.

So like I said I stand up for principles. That’s where I operate. The rest is me saying some constantly changing version of “yeah well the jacobins thought they could change human beings with rational deductions about society and the economy and of course…they were wrong.”

And like I said this is alliance politics, so the fact that we see these things differently doesn’t (and shouldn’t) mean anything. It’s the alliance that’s meaningful.

That’s all. It’s not a critique. It’s just a different voite.

.

Billy_T wrote:

I guess both of them did. But the sides were drawn, and the battles commenced, and they still sing songs in Middle Earth about the clash of swords and spears.

Billy_T wrote:

There is a great deal of diversity on “the left” and among “leftists.”

In other words, the left always has and of necessity always will be oriented around alliance politics and confederations of views. It can’t function otherwise, not if it aims to do anything. The only question becomes how far to the right are you willing to go in terms of adding alliances. Does it extend to and include party-devoted dem types? To me that depends on the issues.

So maybe the better thing to do is what bt just did…say, well, this in reality is the alliance and it includes these views and those views, though speaking for myself I am from this particular faction of that alliance, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans.

That to me is the productive opposite of standard issue leftist in-fighting.

More Monty Python.

wv wrote:

See, i think ‘what screws over the left’ is that there ISNT one.

There’s Dems and Reps.

Jill got one percent of the vote. One percent.

Where’s ‘the left’ ?

w
v

I’m a lifelong leftist. And I didn’t vote for Stein. It’s a mistake to characterize the left by who they did or did not vote for in THIS election.

There is a left in this country, as you know. And for a ton of reasons it does not reduce to who voted for Stein. That just feels like more of the left purism I am complaining about. It goes like this–to ME the left equals these stances, and these actions, and to me that means voting for Stein, and if you didn’t you aren’t.

See my Monty Python vid a few posts back.

Making it personal, you’re really saying if I didn’t vote for Stein in your eyes I can’t call myself a leftist?

Yet…I am a leftist.

waterfield wrote:

I’m not smart enough to understand the argument over “class” that you two are waging. But I know the people that went with my wife cover the entire political spectrum. The common denominators were they are women and they are smart.

Hard to respond to that.

First, you characterize a difference in analytic emphasis as “war.” That’s just hyperbole W. And if you want to understand what we’re debating, just ask.

Second, you then add the idea that people who went to the rallies were from all over the political spectrum. Not clear how that connects to the issue of “class.” It’s as if you said “I don’t want to get into your debate about condiments, ketchup and mustard. BESIDES, some cars these days are electric.” That is you put 2 completely unrelated ideas together in a way that is just flat confusing.

Third, we weren’t discussing the marches anyway so who went is not relevant. So that’s a third non-sequitur. Now, in addition to the electric cars, you add “and besides the Rams aren’t what they used to be.”

It looks to me like you didn’t follow the discussion at all but needed somehow to refute it in some way.

So it’s as if we said, yes McVay will be implementing a classic WCO offense. And you said, oh yeah well the civil war was fought in the 19th century not the 18th.

nittany ram wrote:

It was a global event…

Not sure what a map revealing where one-eyed extraterrestrial invaders have taken over has to do with what we were discussing.

Billy_T wrote:

But “the left” has been all too willing to sit on the sidelines for decades, and too much of “the left” has abandoned the issue of “class.”

This is just more division.

I don’t know anyone who is genuinely left who “abandoned class.” I think that’s just a divisive slogan that showed up recently.

You can’t separate class and race and gender in the USA and end up with an analysis that is worth a damm. To me that includes trying to act like class has been abandoned. Well, no. It hasn’t. That’s just a thing divisive intercine warfare leftists say to other leftists to prove their “purity.”

Here’s my view. Fuck purity. Listen to everyone who has something to say and forget the litmus tests.

Frankly, if I had a conversation in the real world here where I live with leftists, none of this would ever come up. It’s only here that I get the “the left abandoned class” routines which, frankly, do not apply to any real activist I know personally.

Talking about the real left. Not party-oriented liberal types.

What screws over the left now is what has always screwed over the left. Intercine warfare caused by the “I’m more pure” motif.