this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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AI summary :
The article "Why Can't We Be Friends?" examines ideological divisions within leftist movements, particularly focusing on differing strategies for dismantling capitalism and patriarchy. It criticizes the tendency to support these goals in theory without agreeing on or committing to practical, effective steps for their realization.
It's a failure of imagination, to imagine a different way to do things. Because anything that would challenge the status quo has been made unthinkable to begin with. And then you have to rely on a critical mass of people, thinking the unthinkable and then agreeing and committing to practical and effective action to bring it about.
All this is itself a thought terminating cul-de-sac. Things do not start at the end. You don't start with a viable alternative before you criticize what you currently have and point out what is bad about it.
We're at the "shit is fucked, yo" stage. Your entire life you toil, get the bare minimum and then you die. That's the current state of things for most people. That's one of the few things we can agree with.
Thats utopian socialism. Idealizing something you want and then trying to bring it about. Scientific socialism is noticing the adjacent to good things that capitalism has caused and liberating them from the contradictions of capitalism that prevent them from being good. See: universal education, systematized Healthcare, public transportation, a centralized, dynamic labor force.
So, we need, fewer "capitalism has made my life an endless threadmill" memes and more "capitalism lets me have out of season avocados" memes ?
And then somehow devise a plan to reproduce the positive aspects but without relying on the profit motive and cut throat exploitation to do achieve it ?
No, more along the lines of "capitalism has developed a centralized and educated labor force out of serfs, which means we now have the tools to live a lot more comfortably if we stopped being exploited by the capitalists, and the easy communication from centralization and education means we have the tools to communicate and develop class consciousness"
Or "under capitalism, we have a lot more logistical ability to have doctors and have them see patients do to the transportation needs for profit extraction, but the profit motive reduces the amount of Healthcare people can receive, if we got rid of the middlemen we'd have the resources to teach more people to be doctors, everyone would have better Healthcare and doctors would have less stressful jobs"