if you’re ok with recycling I can link you an old comment.

Yes please

we’ve got a really fucking good chair

I’ve seen nothing but criticism of Ken Martin

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/19/dnc-chair-ken-martin-infighting-00413409

It’s embarrassing how horrifically you have misread this comment thread.

You’re being antagonistic with someone who agrees with you.

Their point is that vote blue no matter who is an empty slogan that is only applied when the centrist is the blue candidate. Now that a socialist is the candidate, the Democratic Party will abandon the vote blue no matter who logic. Because it was always just a pretext to force the left into supporting neoliberals, it was never actually about actual party unity

Within the context of US politics, the center left/Democratic Party is the largest political obstacle for socialists. So antagonism towards the center left seems to be rational within that

Democrats hate progressives

Democrats hate socialists. Their job is to ensure that the leftward fringe of the party, and of acceptable mainstream discourse, never moves past progressive/social democracy. The Democratic Party serves capital by ensuring a neutered American left

Hopefully this can be changed

The current structure of society is wrong and is extremely harmful. Oligarchy is an abomination which produces terrible outcomes.

You wouldn’t choose this system in a vacuum. Therefore, the system must be fundamentally altered. To oppose this restructuring is both cruel and irrational. It is the epitome of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good - you’re so afraid of change that you’d rather keep an evil system in place.

Such paralyzing cowardice is not reasonable, and it is even less reasonable to feel smug about such cowardice. If you are going to protect this harmful system, then the more appropriate emotion to feel is shame.

Lots of people die in the United States as it is. Homelessness is rising drastically. How long until you’re next to be put out onto the street? Your employer can’t wait until they can automate your job and fire you.

Also, the United States has a long history of carrying out genocide even prior to Gaza. Odd given your fallacious implication that capitalism is peaceful

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66

He doesn’t focus on any of those things though, and instead talks about prioritizing anti-poverty and anti-hypocrisy.

The line that the Gospels are the why and socialism is the how appears to be apt. Liberation Theology is based on this principle. Which is the sect of Catholicism that clearly has heavily influenced both Francis and Leo

Compare the perception of Ukrainians to that of Gazans. Obviously a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though in terms of the underlying conditions

Because not seeing the Palestinians as humans makes it easier to ignore the genocide

If people were being genocided, then that would be an issue. However, we are civilized enough in the West to realize that it is merely Muslim Arabs who are being killed. This makes the justification significantly easier to believe

it chooses to focus on judgement of how others live their lives or choose to enjoy said life rather than focus on the real and tangible injustices we face

Why do you see it this way?

Lack of dense affordable housing, inefficient transportation, empty consumerism, and grossly negligent yet expensive elder care are all examples of real and tangible injustices that Americans face.

Other real tangible injustices also exist, of course. And some of those other injustices may be more severe (homelessness, medical debt, declining life expectancy, unresponsive political systems). But the depicted injustices are real and present. They accordingly deserve to be criticized

We are fighting to change it.

Peacefully and inconsistently

1. Base and superstructure are not being reversed.

To say that trying to talk to someone in public is “just superstructural” and therefore pointless misunderstands Marx’s dialectical method. The superstructure—culture, ideas, social practices—does indeed arise from the base, but it also plays an active role in reproducing the base. Marx writes in The German Ideology that the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class—but this doesn’t mean culture is irrelevant. It means that challenging the dominant cultural norms (such as social atomization or emotional withdrawal) can be part of building class consciousness.

Casual human interaction and social warmth—even in public—are not distractions from revolution; they are preconditions for solidarity.

2. Alienation is a problem to be fought in daily life, not just after the revolution.

Yes, workers are alienated—precisely why we should reject behaviors that normalize atomization. Waiting for material conditions to change before trying to relate to one another humanely is mechanistic and non-dialectical. Marxists don’t just observe alienation—we oppose it.

You complain that people are “hyper-alienated hyper-individuals that don’t talk to anyone and only work”—but then say we must preserve that isolation in the name of respecting their time. That’s a perfect example of how ideology defends the status quo: by making alienation feel like politeness.

3. Human beings are social animals—sociality is part of our species-being.

Marx understood that our species-being is realized through conscious, cooperative activity—work, communication, creativity, and mutual recognition. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he describes how under capitalism, “man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions… and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.”

Avoiding spontaneous social interaction is not “neutral”—it is part of the internalization of capitalist discipline. Public silence is not a natural baseline—it is a social norm formed under capitalism’s conditions of isolation, commodification of time, and mistrust between individuals.

4. We don’t need to “brute force” anything—but we do need to resist social death.

This isn’t about “forcing” conversations. It’s about reclaiming public life from capital. Small acts of human engagement push back against the logic of commodified time and estranged relationships. They are not revolutionary in themselves, but they are practices of de-alienation that matter for prefigurative politics: living as if the world were already more humane.

Just as Marxists support mutual aid, workers’ discussion groups, and community gardens—not because they overthrow capitalism directly, but because they prefigure new forms of life—so too should we support small acts of human connection.

Rejecting all unsolicited conversation in public on the grounds that capitalism has left us too tired to be human is the kind of defeatist logic Marx called “crude communism”—a desire to equalize misery rather than abolish it.

Instead of bowing to alienation, we should treat every opportunity for warmth, connection, and solidarity as a small but real blow against the isolating logic of capitalist society.

If we want a world where people can be free, we should practice being free—even in line at the grocery store.

Posts like this are a psy op to keep English language speakers (especially in North America) lonely and atomized. There are numerous state and nonstate actors who benefit from this

If you are in public, you should expect to be spoken to. Conversations between strangers are an inherent part of existing in public in human society. Doing away with this causes loneliness on the level of a public health crisis

Castro

That’s the International Monetary Fund and World Bank

you start doubting reality so much that you go down the rabbit hole and become an unhinged crazy conspiracy theorist.

Isn’t the alternative to this a class-conscious understanding of reality? Which can only be achieved through defeating ignorance via a genuine and true education?

In any society, the culture is created and maintained by the media and other apparatuses of the ruling class. Collectively, this is referred to as a society’s superstructure

This superstructure reinforces and perpetuates the ownership and norms of productive forces in society, known as the base of a society.

In the USA, the base is oligarchic capitalism, and the superstructure is a neoliberal managerial-cultural apparatus

It’s not that he’s being depicted as dumb, it’s that he’s being depicted as sneaky and scheming

So Orientalism.

Agreed that the AI one has a less phrenological depiction of the Arab

The currently alive billionaires largely didn’t design it; previously alive billionaires designed it and the currently alive ones have refined it.

Which is the way capitalism is supposed to work; it’s a society ruled by and for capitalists - aka the billionaires who own the largest units of capital

Regardless, it is this system that is to blame. The actors within the system are also contributors, obviously. But individualizing systemic issues is not an effective way at seeing the solution.

The way to solve the problem of a bad king is not to replace him with a good king; it is to abolish monarchy altogether and replace it with a system wherein the people are the ruling class

It’s like saying NFL linebackers don’t cause concussions, rather its the rules and protective gear of professional football which cause concussions

Both ways of seeing it are true - the linebacker is the one actually performing the tackle, but he would not be permitted to cause that damage were he not enabled by the inherently dangerous rules and equipment

Same thing here. Clearly the billionaires are the ones directly causing the harm. But they are only able to do so (and only able to become billionaires in the first place) because of the existing system