My newest blog post is up. It’s titled ** On The Use Of Clubs. **
A snippet:
“What’s the first thing you think about when you hear the word club? Does it bring to mind a night out dancing with your friends? A day behind a fancy gate wining and dining between rounds of golf? Perhaps getting together with friends to play chess, or cards, watching birds, or exploring nature? Or, does it bring to mind something entirely different — …”
Social power requires organization. Progressivism is fragmented, perhaps because the various aims of progress are competing for resources? Would it not be better to tackle challenges one at a time, instead of all at once?
Organization implies common cause, shared strategy, and coordinated tactics. The oppressors and their dogs are well coordinated.
Meanwhile, efforts to build a just society are diffuse, and even interfere with one another. Which is how the elites like it.
@asbestos
Those are not fixed.
Slavery still exists - Louisiana just announced they were expanding it in prisons & jails. Human trafficking remains hugely entangled with for profit businesses and their ability to keep a permanent workforce who can't go to the authorities is one of the main drivers of our dysfunctional immigration systems.
Multiple states have expanded child labor in the last few years, and children have died and lost limbs and worked long hours in overnight shifts in meatpacking plants with unhealthy conditions.
Public education is more segregated than it was when Brown vs Board of Education was implemented. Even in wealthy communities teachers aren't regularly getting paid enough to live, or getting paid on time, and are now being threatened with jail time for teaching the wrong book.
Women got the right to vote but not gender equality - because voting is not enough to change the collective systems of oppression. When women enter a profession wages go down :( @brent@LeftistLawyer
@asbestos
It's not just that it's not perfect - it's that it has systematically left specific people behind and benefited specific . The same immigrant kids in cages got sent to foster parents where they became the kids working full time in dangerous jobs - and dying in them.
Your conception of fixed is 'fixed for people like you' which is exactly the reason we need solidarity and to address the issues together - if people stop caring when they're no longer immediately affected the poor and minoritized will never get free.
I don't advocate top down social change because of exactly the same issues - it is consistent and for everybody bottom up change that we need because as long as we leave an exception people get hurt and the problems grow and it hurts everybody. Illegal and involuntary employers hurt everybody in their efforts to recreate slave classes, depressing wages, hamstringing regulation and destroying competitors who have to pay fair wages and benefits. @brent@LeftistLawyer
@thesquirrelfish@brent@LeftistLawyer
yes, again you are saying essentially it's not perfect so it does not count. Also don't ascribe states of mind "fixed for people like me" that's pretty insulting.
The original argument was you need to fix everything and you can not tackle things individually. I don't see any historical precedent for that in the entire scope of human history.
Fixed does not mean perfect, or even close to perfect. But it does make a large difference.
Sorry but you've completely lost me. I can't tell who you're addressing, or what points you are dismissing. And to end on a menacing note—how is that not "self-defeating"?
The "right" are winning where they have coordinated in order to put people into positions of real power. Not because they join clubs. In the US, they fought for decades to control congress and stack the supreme court. And they did it. That is called strategic focus.
@brent One reason it’s fragmented is because we keep calling it by undefinable terms like “progressive” and “liberal” that are easily co-opted. Progressives only use the term because they’re afraid of being labelled “commies” and what not. I’m not a “progressive.” I’m a #leftist. I’m proud of it.
@brent@LeftistLawyer
"Progressive" means many things to many people. IMO the major divide is between Liberals and the left. For Liberals, "Progressive" means something like "slightly higher wages and tolerating LGBTQ+ folks". For the left it means "complete liberation for all and an upending of power arrangements". Within the left there are disagreements about means and ends but anyone who isn't toward the libertatian side (with a small 'L' - the adjective, not the noun) is fooling themselves.
You can see the left-vs-liberal dynamic play out all over the place. From the co-opting of protest movements to local political contests. Liberals love to claim the mantle of Progressivism and then use it to reinforce the status quo.
@unikitty@brent@LeftistLawyer Another view might be that "liberal" means "people should be allowed to live their lives how they like as long as they're not hurting anyone else" whereas "left" means "everybody must live their live the One True Way". (With lots of caveats in both cases, of course.)
The problem is when Leftists have used these clubs effectively for political ends, it has more often then not had undesirable results. Witness the Soviet Union, or China, or many other dictatorships that started as a revolt against the bourgeoisie only to result in a worse privileged class ruling over them.
@LeftistLawyer Politely; please do not ever tag me in a post with Caitlin again; she's not my friend, and I don't like her friends or content very much at all. I'm a leftist, and I don't cavort with reactionaries.
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