Socialist Alternative Candidate Pissing Off Establishment and Capitalist Plebs

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLq8U5M1ZKk]

Some of the dipshits in the comment section use the usual 'Teh Soshlizum duzint wirk bewhewhew' line of reasoning and the usual relative privation via countries these same ratfuckers have never set foot in (like Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador). Yet, the capitalist system eventually eats away at itself for the continued survival of corporations and the bourgeoisie. We're seeing it happen right now here in the United States, and these same god damned plebs either can't see it or are just wilfully evil.

Capitalism is at an end-stage that makes the roarin' 20s and the first Great Depression seem relatively peachy. It doesn't matter if you call it corporatism, corny capitalism, etc. The reality is, all capitalist systems fail. And with that failure comes the fascist reaction as we are seeing right now from the two factions of the (corporate) Donor Party, the militarization of the police, the polarization of the general population and so on.

Something has got to give and it has to give NOW.

Here's another argument that the temporarily embarrassed billionaires often use against Socialism: Socialism killed charity.

The problem is, charity almost never benefits those who need it most. And those who are the most vocal about it are the same people or organizations who insist on keeping workers dirt poor. Not only that, but said charity work only serves two purposes: tax write-offs or slush funds through which to enrich the same rich assholes who insist that the world should be Bangladesh. So it isn't that Socialism kills charity. Charity, at least in the case of the most vocal (like the Walton, Koch, or the DeVos families) is a self-serving racket.

That doesn't mean there aren't genuinely good charities out there, but charity alone can't address the complex problems faced by those who need help the most. It's not that the people regurgitating this shit don't understand this, they're simply wilfully evil or just don't care so long as they have theirs.

/rant over

See ya around,

Aspie

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Greyhound's picture

A couple of small additions, if I may.

Capitalism is universally successful at what it does, the problems we keep creating with it stem from our, deliberately imposed, fundamental misunderstanding of just what it is that it does so much better than any other idea we've come up with.

Capitalism is not an economic system and it's certainly not a social system, it is a financial system created specifically to accommodate the needs of an industrial system for manufacturing common goods.
Further, it is amazingly, almost supernaturally good at it.
Even further, the financial mechanisms, the physical communication and electronic devices that have been developed over the intervening centuries to accommodate the capitalist system, are themselves astonishingly good.

People, in the aggregate, are damned clever and we do tend to figure it out, whatever it is.

Our problems are not inherent to these systems. Like any system, they are tools and procedures invented to accomplish specific tasks. Our problems stem from our own acceptance of the notion that these systems are owned, and owned by people that constantly and consistently use them to abuse the collective us.

Tools are tools, only people, the only animal on earth with a choice, can be evil.

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Mark from Queens's picture

Very simply, it's about affordable housing and living wages.

They've made bold stands in Seattle for citywide rent freezes and of course, this national party are the folks behind Fight For 15.

But where I think they can't be stopped is in how they show their commitment to voters.

All candidates refuse to take even a cent of corporate money, insisting on relying only on small individual donations (which of course was probably the single most important takeaway of Bernie's campaign, the ability to fundraise outside of the corporate paradigm so slavishly beholden to by both parties at all levels). They do this by grassroots canvassing, going door to door in neighborhoods explaining who they are and what they seek to do. Policies that call for nationalizing industries that we all rely upon, encouraging workers to strike when wages are depressed and benefit forestalled, and importantly, joining them on the front lines to protest and strike.

When your door bell rings and it's a canvasser for SA, and that person follows up their platform policies with, "and if elected (he/she) will only accept the median income salary for our city, and put the rest into building this movement," the difference between the stale, perfunctory campaigns of stilted corporate-backed candidates comes into sharp relief. Socialist Alternative are part of the people and represent the people.

I've seen Kshama Sawant speak a few times in NYC and met her briefly at each of them. She is one of the most dynamic, focused and intelligent elected officials around. I've donated money to her campaign.

Socialist Alternative can wipe the floor with both parties. All those RW canards about charity, "free market" capitalism, etc that loathsome Libertarian clowns spew can be shredded by simple, straight talk of the fundamentals of socialism. I've even heard friends who I would not have expected to do so, adopt socialist theories of nationalizing industry and cutting the military budget etc, and support these ideas in conversation without even realizing they're doing so. I pat them on the back and say, "glad to see you're a socialist now."

Great to see Socialist Alternative get serious traction in Minneapolis.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

The Aspie Corner's picture

@Mark from Queens But for now I'm registered Green.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Mark from Queens's picture

@The Aspie Corner
Though the MSM lapdog courtiers are not permitted to cover it.

There's hope out there, I have to keep reminding myself. But we don't see interviews or reports from the streets with people such as this young white guy from West Virginian coal country, who sees the whole class war being perpetrated by the wealthy class clear as day:

1st Socialist Alternative Southern Conference was in 2014. I'd bet those numbers have exponentially exploded since then. Should check it out.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

The Aspie Corner's picture

@Mark from Queens Very sharp.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

@Mark from Queens is only 21. Wow. That gives me hope.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

WoodsDweller's picture

I'm growing more certain that Industrial Civilization is the underlying problem. IC requires technology, some technologies can't be produced without the scale of IC, and technology and IC synergize one another.
IC is the application of technology to providing goods and services to a broad cross section of society. We see that as a positive goal, and wonder how best to accomplish it.
The 20th century debate was about how to organize the economy to facilitate IC. Capitalism or socialism, fascism or communism. In the end the winner was the one with the highest growth rate. It looks like mildly totalitarian capitalism has won that contest.
IC fails socially (excessive income disparity, too many people lacking their basic needs, oppressive police state), economically (financial crises), or due to resource depletion (declining quality of raw resources) or environmental degradation.
When optimizing a system you address bottlenecks. How best to optimize IC? What economic system? What tax rates, interest rates, regulations? What ration of public to private sectors?
No matter how well optimized, no matter how clever the technology, it eventually runs into environmental limits.
Industrial Civilization fails. It can't work. That's the solution to Fermi's Paradox.
We're in the final act of IC now. We can tinker around the edges, put up solar panels and make electric cars and fiddle with tax rates, but the environment is shifting to a state which doesn't support human life.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

Wink's picture

@WoodsDweller
that, cures what ails IC. We CAN live in IC with the right mix. Besides, do we really want to go back to the "good old days" of the 1800s? We're not made to go backwards. Solar and wind reduces the cost of electricity to less than $50 /mo. for most households, and most households can afford $50 /mo., saving themselves $50 /mo. IC is doable. I'm less sure capitalism is. As for me, I expect I'll be living in an RV beater in sunny Arizona sooner rather than later. Live for damn near free there. A couple solar panels and generator to keep the sat. dish and refrigerator runnin'...

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Steven D's picture

A large number of "charities" are corrupt. The Red Cross comes to mind. And they are far from the worst.

Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.

Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.
Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.

In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms.

No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time.

But Kids Wish is not an isolated case, a yearlong investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Using state and federal records, the Times and CIR identified nearly 6,000 charities that have chosen to pay for-profit companies to raise their donations. [...]

The nation's 50 worst charities have paid their solicitors nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years that could have gone to charitable works.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Stays on message. Very knowledgeable about the issues. Pleasant, upbeat delivery,

What's not like?

Can't say the same about the party name's acronym unfortunately.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?