@lorddulaarsenal wrote:
America has deep rooted issues.
I'm very fond of the place and the people but every time I've been there over the past few years I've left thinking how much of it is a poor state. Stats might suggest otherwise but there seems to be a lot of areas which haven't been invested in in a long while. Seemed very stale when compared to years gone by.
Gurgen wrote:
Burnwinter wrote:
It's got little to do with his promises mate. As Gurgen said, people complain that politicians don't deliver on their promises, but the real issue is that the supremacy of globalised, financialised capital means politicians can't deliver on their promises.
Marxism can't turn back the clock any more than racist nationalism can, despite what you hippies may believe. Global capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Communist policies have only inflicted untold miseries upon the world. But capitalism is a flawed system and it has losers, or rather, less big winners. The world is a difference place right now and no politician has the balls to deliver that message.
I'm neither a Marxist of whatever sort you seem to be describing, nor a hippy. For example, I probably subscribe to the theory of class struggle less than most liberal pundits in the wake of Trump's election.
As for communism, the enlightened Europe you appreciate is quite literally the result of the followers and supporters of communism civilising 19C industrial capitalism by threatening to disrupt profit through strikes and mobilisations, and nothing else. Trust me, socialised public services don't exist because of Edmund fucking Burke—or the Ramsay McDonalds of this world for that matter.
But the point I made is about something deeper than political economy—it's about the basics of mobilising political power.
In our own era, two things are clear—firstly, our highly abstract, financialised, exchange-and-profit-driven late capitalism is presently unwilling to check the negative externalities it creates, and secondly, we do not have the political structures required to regulate it ourselves.
Politicians "delivering a message" will not be able to do it. They don't currently have the power to do it. These are material problems. And not because I said so, or Marx said so—these are deep structural problems that will probably only be ameliorated after some real trouble.
