Per David Graeber in “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, people used to record debt with “Tally Sticks”. You’d notch the debt you owed at the end of a branch. Then you’d bend it in half. Creditor would get one end. Debtor the other. When you wanted to call in your debt, you’d hold the sticks up together to confirm they matched and that’s what was owed. This practice goes back to the Paleolithic Era.

Incidentally, the Tally Stick would often be longer on the creditor’s end. This was the stock of the stick and thus designated its recipient the “stock holder”.

But assignment and collection of debts isn’t the same thing as assignment and collection of rents and interest, which is at the center of the capitalist economic system.

Humans were constrained by their material conditions. Now that those material conditions have changed, their behaviors have changed to match. This is not a fixed state of affairs. Humans continue to transition between stages just like every other living being.

Greed is as much a part of modern human nature as fear and love. And it is the product of a social condition that rewards growth, punishes disobedience, and requires a larger community to reproduce itself. It is a consequence of social conditioning executed iteratively from parent to child. And a consequence of statistical survival and prosperity played out over populations.

What defines human action is not the basic libidinal impulse, but the interplay between people and their environments over lifetimes and generations. That’s not socialism or capitalism at its root. Socialism and capitalism are simply fruits grown from the post-industrial branches of the tree of human history.

Not in this thread: a serious plan by the high and mighty “progressives” to actually accomplish anything

I gotta say, didn’t the DSA just post up the next New York Mayor? And didn’t he have a laundry list of really popular reforms that the Strong Mayorship of the city effectively hands him a blank check to implement?

Meanwhile, over in Minnesota, the state declared itself a “Trans Refuge” by preventing out-of-state laws from interfering in the practice of gender-affirming health care. In Virginia, the sweep of the state legislature brings the local Ds (who had uniformly supported a trio of constitutional amendments to guarantee Virginians’ right to abortion care, automatically restore voting rights to disenfranchised felons and remove an antiquated law banning same-sex marriage) into a majority needed for their passage.

And that’s before we get into all the progressive ballot amendments - from raising the minimum wage to ending felony disenfranchisement to abolishing the archaic FPTP voting system - that have succeeded in states as blue as California and as red as Florida.

What’s all this about progressives not actually accomplishing anything? Seems like they’re the only ones serious about setting policy.

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White nationalism? From the Dutch?! Who could have seen this coming?

Brother, you’ve got a worse case of brain worms than some Kennedys I could name.

I’d also spout this kind of nonsense

What you’re doing is called “Denialism”. You don’t want to accept that Donald Trump was a staunch friend, financial supporter, and NYC powerbroker working on behalf of the Democratic Party for decades. So instead of facing this reality and what it means about the state of the party, you’re going to cover your ears and pretend it didn’t happen.

If Harris were president right now, would we have gestapo roaming the streets, Nazi ghouls mentioning plenary authority, or giant corporations settling with the FCC to curry favor?

As she seemed intent on continuing the policies of the prior administrations, the answer is clearly “Yes”. We had gestapo doing their dirty work all through the American Southwest going back to the Polk Administration. Bush created ICE, Obama expanded ICE, Trump expanded ICE, Biden expanded ICE, and Kamala Harris campaigned on a platform of anti-immigration that would require her to expand ICE.

Would we have goons like Steven Miller and Curtis Yarvin ranting about unitary executives and divine right of kings under a Harris Administration? Absolutely. Would they be operating in friendly Republican gubernatorial cabinets and think tanks and Congressional offices? Absolutely. Would they be setting national policy through the courts and the legislature and red state executive offices? Absolutely. If Republicans still commanded Congress, would they be authoring national policy that President Harris eventually signed into law? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Would Larry Ellison and Bob Iger and Satya Nadella be kicking back tens of millions of dollars to Republican allies via “settlements”? Would Citadel and JP Morgan be bribing politicians with large purchases of shitcoins to get around campaign contribution limits and other anti-corruption laws? 100% guaranteed. They were doing this shit before Trump took office. Why would they stop now?

Your problem isn’t that these fascist policies exist. Your problem is that they’ve breached “containment” in Red States. Now it’s not just a Texas problem or a Florida problem. Its an Everybody problem. You can’t just ignore the fascism anymore. You can’t say “Those fuckers down south are getting what they deserve”.

Now you’re down in the shit here with the rest of us. Welcome to hell, asshole.

Keir Starmer’s going to hang him out to dry for the same reason he’s been unleashing the British Gestapo on all those Grannies with “Palestine Action” banners.

if you think Kamala Harris and Trump were equivalent

Obviously they’re different. One’s got a big “D” next to her name and climbed into her California Senate seat through Jerry Brown’s bed sheets. The other one was a billionaire mega-donor to Hillary Clinton’s Senatorial and Presidential Primary campaigns, and hung out with her husband on trips down to Epstein Island. Also he became a Republican a few weeks after Obama won the Presidency.

Ah, but the great thing about Communist jokes is that everyone gets them.

Hey OP, you wanna go ahead and go to any neighborhood that’s been raided by ICE and tell them how the Dems are exactly just as bad as the GOP?

Obama Leaves Office As ‘Deporter-In-Chief’

Democrats tried so fucking hard to outflank the Republicans from the Right for eight long years. But as soon as they lost, its those damned leftists at fault for not voting harder.

Hell, go tell a bunch of drag queens and trans people.

I’ve got a trans friend who has more rotten things to say about Joe Biden than your eardrums can handle.

This kind of false equivalency is how you end up with Trump.

The fact that there’s no discernible difference between the parties (or, worse, that Trump rhetorically can outflank Dems from the popular left) should cause Democrats to soul-search and come back with a better political strategy. Instead, we just get this dogmatic insistence that Liz Cheney and Michael Bloomberg are better options than Donald Trump, so you have to go pound pavement in the 100° weather knocking doors, begging friends and neighbors over the phone, and dipping into your kids’ college funds to “donate till it hurts” in an effort to get them elected.

It’s perfectly fine to dislike both

It clearly is not. That’s the fucking problem. Telling people “go eat dogshit because its tastier than horseshit” and then bitching when your shit stand can’t break even is the root of the problem.

Time and time and time again, liberal Democrats run away from the popular candidates in favor of the candidates that can raise the most money. Time and time and time again, these candidates lose to Republicans who are raising money from the exact same evil assholes.

And when we finally fucking see a populist start winning in a bright blue city like NYC, you get the liberal media leadership saying this shit on national television.

Bill Maher raises concerns over Mamdani’s Ugandan citizenship on ‘Real Time’

It’s Birtherism all over again.

Without replacing the bourgeois state with a socialist, proletarian one, the ready-made levers for reinforcing the bourgeois mode of production will cause a reversion. The Paris Commune was the first such example of this failure in action.

The Soviet Union was one of the latest. Yeltsin taking office, failing to get his way, and then shelling parliament into surrender being the most prominent example of the failures of electoralism, even in an ostensibly proletarian state.

Gaza also a great instance of the wages of strict electoralism. You rally your people behind a more militant political body (Hamas in 2006) and the end result is your heavily armed neighbors using the results of an election as causa belli. Hell, the American Civil War is another great example, what with a Southern coup government rising up after a Presidential election defeat.

It is through organization and revolution that we can actually move on into a better world.

It gives us a fighting chance, at least. But it is also hard, painful, and requiring enormous self-sacrifice particularly among the early adopters.

Thank you

To a degree. It’s also getting the base comfortable with the idea that these policies are normal. “Hey, look, the Dems already tried to take over Texas with the military. Its a good thing we had Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton to protect us. Now its our turn to do it to California and New York.”

It also raises the stakes in every election cycle. The 2015 Jade Helm conspiracy made “Vote Red No Matter Who” this overriding priority for Texas conservatives. Compared to 2008/2012, when conservatives tried to paint Obama as weak and effeminate and easily manipulated, the “Obama/Hillary are trying to take over Texas!!!” panic coverage got far more apathetic Republicans off their asses and into voting booths.

The physical embodiment of Limousine Liberalism suddenly became the standard bearer for the Old South from with the Republicans’ own party, literally months after Cruz, Rubio, and Bush had exhausted themselves trying to smear him into the pavement.

The cunt completely lost it and challenged me for a fistfight on our office’s premises.

I would not be able to resist delivering a pair of boxing gloves to his desk the next morning.

But when I looked behind, I only saw one set of footprints.

They can and do flag and report accounts to an AI assisted administration that will casually permaban whole communities on a whim.