Bernie Sanders in one word

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32. You didn't digest a single thing I posted...

"What I think" is irrelevant. Sanders is utterly irrelevant. He will accomplish absolutely NOTHING within the capitalist system without a mass movement to force change. Sanders does not want real change...he wants to tweak the staus quo. The Abolitionists didn't fight for a kinder gentler slavery. They fought for an end to slavery period. The idea of a kinder gentler slavery was as absurd an idea as the idea of a kinder gentler capitalism that liberals envision. When the foundations are rotten to the core... no tweaking will get rid of that rot. Is there something about the foundations are rotten you don't get ?

It's not up to me to give you a plan as no individual has that power. I am a bee in a hive as are you. I owe you no explanation or plan whatsoever from that perspective. What part of collective class struggle don't you understand ? It takes a movement to rise up and fight against oppression in any form. Class struggle is a collective struggle not about a "general" (as you put it) coming to save the masses as we sit back and live on hope and the next electoral savior. Debs had it exactly right.

"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves."

--Eugene V. Debs

Maybe you would like the leftists to wave a magic wand and change it overnight ? You have to build a movement but the movement and demands need to be defined. The "Sanders movement" is not a leftist movement defined. It is well-fed wage slaves with some added perks and crumbs thrown in. You would like the leftists to just accept that capitalism is indeed the end of history and hold hands with the ruling class while working on the Sanders plan to "make capitalism alright" again. Healthy and well fed wage-slaves doesn't solve the problem of who controls the resources, the commons, and the means of production. Bernie's platform does not challenge the system. Bernie's platform fits into the system and continues the exploitation while silencing and co-opting the demands of leftists back into the system.

Organize for what is the real question "progressives" have to ask themselves. Organizing to "reform" capitalism into a kinder type of wage-slavery ? Capitalism - in ANY form that progressives imagine possible - will never render social and economic justice for the working class as a WHOLE. What part of capitalism CAN NEVER work for the majority and never will don't you get Sabrina ? ALL of these feel good "progressive platform" platitudes are horseshit lip-service. Without addressing the 800 pound gorilla in the room - which is capitalism -it is all meaningless pablum. If Sanders wants to get out a real message... he needs to address and start talking about working class political power and who owns the commons and the means of production and put this feel good "help for the middle class" bullshit to rest. Bernie is still speaking in the tongues of the ruling class when he spouts that horseshit. The "middle class" is an illusion with no solid foundations whatsoever going forward. It is a decomposing bourgeois social structure and an aberration.That "middle class" prosperity that working class people had - for a few decades - was nothing other than crumbs thrown to the workers so the theft of labor by the capitalists could continue with little protest. If the working class people are to get anywhere... we have to stop buying into the lie that "benevolent capitalism" is possible. It isn't... and it will get worse not better for the majority of us.

Liberal/Progressive activists tie themselves in knots trying to force change and "reforms" in a system that CAN NEVER be tamed, changed, or reformed to meet the human needs of the collective masses as a whole. Creating and clinging to that illusion of reformed capitalism is the utmost of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy and a very difficult job for liberal and progressive activists to reconcile. On the other hand.... leftists, marxists, ect... are under no such illusions and the outlook is a very simple and straightforward one. Capitalism has to go. The WHOLE fucking lot of it, not just selective feel good parts of it. Preaching progressive programs in a capitalist empire is like putting a band-aid on a limb infected with gangrene.

It isn't personal and it never was Sabrina. The disconnect between liberalism and leftism can't be reconciled and it never will be. Liberalism is capitalism and that is the bottom line.

I'll leave you with this from a another "leftist purest without a plan."

"I think that the hurdle that most people must pass is not in Marx or Socialism but in the very unsettling thought that there is nothing in the existing social system that is accurately portrayed and nothing within its bounds that may be employed to change that."

And also this.

"But it is not the highness or lowness of wages which constitutes the economical degradation of the working class: this degradation is comprised in the fact that, instead of receiving for its labour the full produce of this labour, the working class has to be satisfied with a portion of its own produce called wages. The capitalist pockets the whole produce (paying the labourer out of it) because he is the owner of the means of labour. And, therefore, there is no real redemption for the working class until it becomes owner of all the means of work -- land, raw material, machinery, etc. -- and thereby also the owner of the whole of the produce of its own labor."

--Friedrich Engels

You may parse and dice that in a million different ways to suit the capitalist agenda Sabrina but those two quotes sum up the true objective reality of capitalism and "what is to be done."

"When all the bricklayers, and all the machinists, and all the miners, and blacksmiths, and printers, and hod-carriers, and stevedores, and house-painters, and brakemen, and engineers, and conductors, and factory hands, and horse-car drivers, and all the shop-girls, and all the sewing-women, and all the telegraph operators; in a word all the myriads of toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing which you call Power ... when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains a people has risen."

--Mark Twain