so bernie has withdrawn, corbyn got smashed, all around the world horrible capo idiots are trumping their less-shit opponents, and tbh, i am not in the slightest bit surprised. the game is fkn rigged duh, the stinking-rich integrated-world-capitalism cunts control the media, and pretty much everything else, wtf u expek?
i just hope this means that we, “the global democratic left”, can start putting more of our energy into changing the structure of our political systems, so that in the near future it is possible for better/non-neoliberal-toerag candidates to win (and actually be able to achieve things while in power)
this bernie-homer meme plays on what seems to me a common belief: that it’s either law-abiding electoral-politics-as-usual, or saying fuck-it-all and masking up, flipping cars, burning all of the things and fighting the police.
i think both those responses are going to fail, and our best chance is an approach of open and sustained civil disobedience to radically reform the political landscape. breaking the law is a moral obligation when the law upholds injustice and destruction. blah blah blah blah. mass civil disobedience is more than called for, it is a moral necessity. blah blah blah blah. the most effective civil disobedience will make carefully targeted, calm, and sustained actions directly against the things that need to be changed for democracy to actually function.
one of the reasons i h8 writing is that i just have to say the same thing over and fucking over again, and i get bored, and pissed at myself for boring myself, but… for democracy to work we need a democratic media system, not one controlled by ultra-rich neoliberal companies and individuals (the natural enemies of enlightened understanding and democracy)
the reform/revolution dichotomy is another one that annoys the shit out of me, because it is completely false, and seems to lead to much fruitless debate (the other similar false dichotomy being the electoral-politics/black-bloc-smasho one) — this annoyance is basically why i’ve started calling the overthrow of the for-profit media-advertising system a “revolutionary reform”. it is also because that is exactly what it would be.
noam chomsky (who i actually love) is saying bernie’s campaign wasn’t a failure, because it inspired millions of people and shifted the political discourse, and while this is true, it is also wrong. the campaign was solely intended to win the presidency for sanders, and it failed in that singular objective. when you shift the goal-posts post-failure, the successes of the campaign: politically engaging millions, bringing key issues and real solutions to the front, are things that should always exist. they shouldn’t be the rare oddities that they are in modern capitalist-controlled democracies, they are what we deserve and need ALL THE TIME. instead of celebrating the brief appearance of reasonable democratic discussion, we need to find a way to ensure that our public political discourse won’t be an absolute pile of shit for the vast majority of the time, and that way, quite clearly, is to stop allowing our public political discourse to be run by the very same fuckstick capitalists who are destroying democracy, escalating inequality, and quite literally killing millions & our future on this planet.
the millions that were inspired by the sanders campaign, presumably they’re all really fucking deflated now… the political discourse will lurch back into the swamp of dehumanising cods-wallup that it briefly and partially emerged from… so what is everyone going to do? wait for years until the next “not a failure” campaign that will waste everyone’s energy on something that was always destined to fail?
when we finally emerge from COVID-19 lock-down, i’m going to get straight back out there covering ads in the most provocative way possible, because i have to fully refuse to live with a media system that i see working against everything i hold dear (DM me for an exhaustive list of the things that i hold dear).
it is probably too late to stop climate catastrophe collapsing civilisation, but surely we have got to give it our best shot. i think we have about a 0.001% chance of overthrowing capitalism, arresting climate change, and getting a bit of justice going on planet earth, but that’s like a 1 in 1000 chance!! gotta be in it to win it dikheds!!!
in all seriousness, open non-violent civil disobedience totally sucks, but it is still better than dying knowing i was complicit with this fucking frogshit. i often wish there was a way out for me, but there isn’t one, so i just gotta suck it up, cut out my sooky bullshit and get on with it… little help?
