Thanks, it did trigger a bit of a depressive phase, which I sort of expected, but I managed to get through that one.

Well, I recently lost, like, 50% of my credibility as an intellectual as I stopped smoking. So I guess I am now somewhere in between both ends.

something fucked with your attachment style at some point in childhood

Ha, if that ain’t the truth with me - and people claim you can’t diagonse people over the internet from just their comments. Although I guess if I were to use the outdated terms, I’d definitely have both mommy and daddy issues in that case.

Wait, so if I have that same thing as a cishet guy, does it mean I have mommy issues? Or… female focused daddy issues? I always knew my sexuality was needlessly complicated

I know there have to have been even weirder ones I got over the years, but what stuck with me is when a nurse in a psych ward psychiatric clinic called me (a patient) being like a “weird, confused professor” as a genuine compliment.

So, I am heading to bed for the night, because I have been awake all night and day and the day before to catch the debate - but the short answer is: The decline of the middle class and the petite burgeoisie - which I in this case view not in the traditional definition, but also broader, as all the people owning a little bit of capital i.e. savings for old age in some fond or maybe a house of their own. Also the disappearance of job security and stable work relations.

With it, the conservative “lets keep things as they were” mindset of people who had a decent enough life, i.e. mostly boomers that lived through the economic growth phase of the post-war era, but also younger people dreaming of that time or having profited from it through their parents, comes into crisis. But as this mindset argues from its own experience, it dreams of the past (“Things worked back then, right?”), while missing, that the very same “working” system was what had within it, already the inherent nature that eventually led to it decaying around us. So they need to explain the decline as something caused by an outsider, a malevolent force.

At the same time, this decline of the middle class leads them to try and grasp to divisions that might “save” them from proletarisation - becoming properly dependend on paycheck to paycheck and owning nothing but their own labour power to sell on the market. So, racism for example - if you are white, you might just be spared from the above fate. And you can kick down, targeting all those brown people below instead of punching up - the latter is a lot more risky after all. And the people up above can’t be at fault, after all, you (or the people you heard about from the past) had a great life when those were around, right? It just have to be the “right” people, like you and the people of your nationality/race/religion/other ingroup - often depressingly arbitrary.

This is still a very reductive summary, a lot is missing, globalisation, how it relates to the net rate of profit, how consolidation happens, details about the ideology of our current times. But broken down to it’s basics it can be summarised as such. The middle class is disappearing as a consequence of capitalist development, which leads to them becoming panicky and diving headfirst into ideology.

Well, anyway, good night, hope it was possible to understand what I was trying to bring across in my rambling

Yeah yeah, heard it all, haha, dae larper revolution lefties playing teenage boy shooters? Okay, I am sleep-deprived, and I am just genuinely concerned about the state of the world, so yeah, I will write out my position a bit more clearer, well, I will try to, because it is not accelerationism.

So, to assume you are arguing in good faith, even with the ad hominem:

Do you think it’s completely impossible that fascist groups might react with violent actions when Biden or another Democrat wins? I think it is very much a possibility, they are deluded and armed. And they would be trounced, they don’t have the proper support and organisation. It would indeed weaken them.

My goal is not accelerationism, accelerationism is a silly concept to begin with. If so, I would support Trump. But that’s the kind of BS some communist groups did in the 30s “Oh yeah, as soon as the mask of capital falls of its face and Hitler gets elected, people will revolt!”. Nope, as soon as the mask of humanity slips from capital, it kills you. Dead. And uses your hair and teeth as resources. I’m German (and before any arguments come about me keeping out of debating US politics: your politics influences the world, so while I won’t be able to vote, I will have a voice in it). I’ve seen Auschwitz, I’ve read the debates that were held in the 30s. I’ve studied how the center-right thought they could outmaneouver and control Hitler and use him to get rid of those pesky socialists and social democrats. Hell, the NSDAP never even won a proper majority, power was handed to them.

I just look at the global net profit rate over the course of one and a half centuries (spoilers: it’s falling, with the only major times it is rising rapidly after destructive wars - almost like there is something to Marx’s theories of capital consolidation and the pressure it creates. The stagnation only slowed for a while, because the profit crisis of the late 70s was mitigated by neoliberal politics - i.e. class warfare), look at how economical consolidation happened before WWI (the economy was enormously globalised through Colonialism, and trusts or even outright monopolies across industries, with integrated production/logistics/distribution in single companies - think Walmart and Amazon as the closest analogues today), look at how Germany looked in the 30s. I look at ever more desperate venture capital adventures to find avenues of profitability for all the stagnant dead capital that has accumulated, like “Big Data” or now “AI”. I look at the statistics and projected models for the future - I think a lot of people just completely underestimate what kind of a complex shitshow climate change will create. It’s even beyond economics, the material reality of nature is changing under our feet, we have been changing it. There will be death. There will be wars. There will be chaos. I won’t be able to change that, you won’t be, at best, we can mitigate it. That is what the logic of growth and capitalism has given us.

I don’t believe in accelerationism because it is nonsense. No one has to accelerate this shit. Capitalism does its job to reach its logical conclusion fine on its own. It’s also delusional - what, me, some German commie autist who just happened to have the misfortune of having philosophy and history as a hyperfocus is going to influence politics towards anything? Politics follows material reality, with idealism only influencing it insofar as it is itself a material force, in a dialectical, reciprocal exchange with material reality. All I can do at this moment is play Cassandra and argue my position, trying to do my best to support those that are building real-life connections and organisations, within the limits of what this body and brain can do - support unions, neighbourhood groups for mutual aid, educational groups, community defence groups, antifacist groups - and yes, even the Democrats, because I do think, again, that it will be good to have a Democrat in office in this historical moment, even though it, as you may have guessed, it’s very much a lesser evil to me, that I view rather cynically, to give people as much time as possible to organise without extremer persecution, before that one will happen eventually - and maybe weaken reactionary forces by getting them to be stupid, they are good at that.

Now, I don’t write this to convince you. Not to convince many people reading it. In my experience, my positions are usually too radical for centrists, too critical of Marxism-Leninism for the tankies (hell, I think the Soviet Union had, essentially, and in a Marxist analysis, a capitalist economy - even Stalin acknowledged the rule of value still being in effect in “The Economic Problems of the Soviet Union”), too Marxist for the anarchists. And reactionaries, well, I am already looking into what to do if AfD wins over here in a few more years/decades. Not a guarantee, thank god, but that it is even a real possibility in fucking Germany is chilling and just hammering home what the current historical moment and current reaction to the changes in economical and material realities are, globally.

So I am writing this to at least make someone, somewhere think. Take a step back. For one moment, forget that there are teams, and I am on the “enemy” team. Do you think the status quo is tenable? Do you think moderate politics will survive the next decades? Not because of some larping agitators you think are destroying them, like with accelerationism (again - as if some accelerationists are influential enough to do anything there at this historical moment), but simply because capitalism has always had crises, they have had horrible consequences in the past, and this one comes with a huge climate catastrophe on top. Do you think it’s people like me, somehow fantasising about violent revolution like some CoD game as you seem to imply, that push for violence - or do you at least acknowledge the possibility that violence will simply happen due to material and socioeconomic changes, globally? Revolutions are not pushed by agitators and propagandists, they are pushed by the price of bread. And agitators and propagandists can only try to structure the way a revolution plays out. And that is why I think we will have to prepare for that reality, and eventually doing away with the system and mode of production that led us to this point - as it really is not the only option, no matter how much ideology has presented it as that.

Doubt a lot of people will read the wall of text, and feel free to downvote and criticise me for the instance I cose (back when it was afaik the only one, but admittedly, it fit my politics at least somewhat as well), but this time, you can at least attack my character on the point of my actual positions, maybe call them delusional or something - or surprise me and develop your own positions dialectically against mine, I have no absolute guarantee I am right, so proper critique is welcome - while maybe some tankie might call out how I am a liberal reactionary. But keep this wall of sleep deprived autism-energy monologue at least somewhere in the back of your mind, as one option to analyse what will be coming up in the future.

Yeah, while the republicans have basically openly moved to reactionary and fascist politics, thus implicitly accepting the status quo is over, the influential parts of the Democrats seem to have been clinging completely to the idea that the status quo is what is to be preserved - even though material reality will not make that possible.

Right now, we seem to be in a historical moment, where old privileges are breaking away from a continuing crisis in capitalism that basically has been smouldering since the (late) 70s and kept stable through neoliberal policies thus far. Old privileges being lost results in a reactionary shift worldwide at the moment. It will be harrowing, but there is at least always the possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way - right now, in the coming years, organisation, connecting people, openly presenting radical alternatives to prepare for that moment seems to be the most important work to me.

Too late, I watched it all. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad.

I think that is the worst thing trolling has done to internet culture: People will assume that their conversation partner is not arguing in good faith as the standard assumption.

Zieht die Freitagsfliege dann auch demnächst auf feddit.org um?

You know, as much as one has to keep Machiavellian machinations and Realpolitik in mind… Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Biden did not do well. They report about it in a way that gives them clicks. There is no plan.

Depends, do you mean doctors today or doctors in the late 19th and early 20th century?

I do have an issue with the tankie dumbfucks who will STILL talk about “Genocide Joe” when we have video evidence of trump saying he outright wants the Palestinians eradicated and thinks Biden is too soft on them.

Oh, I get that one. Might lose me some brownie points with some of my fellow communists, but I think they overestimate their own influence and overly moralise the questions when they talk about Biden. Personally, I think the important thing is moving towards communism by making organisation of the working people possible, and that will be forced much more into the underground under another Trump presidency. To me, the one question on my mind is: How can this situation be further used for empowering an eventual revolutionary change, ultimately, it is about power.

As a bonus point: I do think Biden winning might bait the fascists into doing something stupid, like armed revolts which they are certainly not ready for yet, potentially weakening them further, and moving some moderates into openly antifascist organisations.

Fucking cognitohazards in this subreddit, and I lost the game too, great.

You are correct - this will be about the undecided and independent vote. And yes, signalling in the coming days will be important, focus on Trumps lies and obvious deflections.

That doesn’t change that Biden did not do a good job, and that that will make things a lot harder. It’s not the commies and hard lefties, the “useful idiots” in your eyes, that dominate the discourse, it will be pundits and just your everyday Joes talking to each other. And they have not been given good material from the Democrats with Biden, it’s going to be hard work to counter what is an intuitively understood truth with the average watcher: Biden did not do well and left so much on the table, where he could have done a better job attacking Trump on his obvious deflections and lies. The hope is, that maybe the common undecided voter has become tired of Trump’s shtick, countering the surface-level feelings.

That was ironically the best summary of the damn debate. Two out of touch liches talking about golf.

I wonder how the liberals feel now, that pushed Biden on electability and rejected any more radical options because they were too scary and conflicting with the party line.

He got a little more energetic, but not enough, really.

“We had H2O”, what is he even talking about? It’s scary to realise his cult just accepts anything he says.

And then a confused attack on Trump on climate change that was so softball and not to the point… oof… Biden, why?