What I find interesting about this article is that it critiques heavily about the first 200 pages, says almost nothing about the next 600, and then says the conclusion is unsatisfactory because it didn’t quote the book the author wrote in 1991. It’s transparently personal.

Academics write books. Get over it.

Yeah it’s a summary work that draws on decades of research. Both of these authors are extremely well-published in their respective fields. I’m like a third of the way through Dawn of Everything and it’s just as academic as “Debt” was, and neither are mass-market pulp. But work like this always draws hit pieces because it’s a way for critics to get their name out there.

Check out “The Dawn of Everything” by Wengrow and Graeber

What is wrong with it? I’ve been using it for years and it does what it’s supposed to do.

You forgot about using said military to destabilize the rest of the world and force migration to the metropole to replace your workforce

The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They’re the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin’s work.

Everyone in the US is complicit. Everyone in NATO member countries is complicit. Everyone not fighting to overthrow their imperialist government is complicit. Again, not the point.

Ok so how does not voting help with this?

You are complicit by living in the US and paying taxes which fund military aid to Israel. Not voting does not absolve you. And in the case of this election, it makes you slightly more complicit because one of the war criminals who is running is slightly worse than the other.

The idea that not voting is some form of protest that has material consequences for the ruling class is ahistorical. It took centuries of struggle to attain universal suffrage. The people in power are perfectly happy to have only a small fraction of the demos exerting any political power at all; in fact this is how most civilizations have functioned for the past few thousand years.

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Right because if that happened investors would dump their shares and invest in companies that use slave labor.

Could you link a source? I just want to believe this; I’ve never actually seen evidence of it.

They’re only useful for parties imo. Otherwise you put your spatula (or whatever) in the dishwasher and have to wait all week for the dishwasher to fill up with all the other dirty dishes just so you can have your clean spatula back. But yes in the US they are in every kitchen.

Listen how can I get a quart of milk from the store without also taking two chairs, a loveseat, a sound system, my heater and air conditioning unit, some steel armor plating, and a storage unit?

The issue is with what they are actually able to accomplish, not what they say they’ll do. And that goes for every Democrat since Carter.

Removing these biases is the whole point of public funding for things. Everyone shares the same resources and people who have more wealth give more. The fact that major institutions that perform public functions rely on private donations is the problem.

Not enough data for language scrape

My local is great but I don’t have any others to compare to so it’s a pretty vapid description. There’s a PSL here too and they come to a lot of our events. It’s always interesting to hear from the more radical formation.

The thing with DSA “party discipline” is that it’s not a political party. It’s basically a nonprofit with local chapters that all have their own agendas, some of which run candidates. So I’m interested to see what happens with a more centralized (as far as I understand it anyway) structure like PSL.

In terms of labor organizing I do think the political climate matters. The rail strike is an example of national scale union busting, but on more local levels (Starbucks, Amazon, Cemex…) that the NLRB actually matters. Here’s an article about it.

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/how-bidens-nlrb-has-boosted-bottom

Right. If democrats want those votes then Biden needs to make significant progress on ending the genocide now. The threat from third parties exerts an outsize pressure on the Democrats to actually do something. But of course they likely won’t, and instead Trump will take advantage of this.