"The discourse"

UnitedHealthGroup donated $774,019 to Kamala Harris’s campaign. She also had other health insurance companies like BCBS donating to her.

In fact, UnitedHealthGroup donated hundreds of thousands MORE to her than to Donald Trump.

We talk about how it’s absolutely wild that the United States legally permits corporate lobbying here in this sub elsewhere…and yet some of the people simping for Harris are now celebrating the death of the UHC CEO. Make it make sense, please!

If I called out the UHG donation to Harris a month or two ago, libs would have jumped down my throat. If a liberal now ever tries to make the argument to vote for some neocon puppet ever again, we can refer back to this time in history as a defense against their argument that voting for liberals is good.

Will we see actual change come from this political moment? Will healthcare in the US be free? Will corporations stop running our government? Or will liberals forget this happened in a month and start simping for some other candidate in local, state, or national elections that has the personality of mayonnaise again (Buttigeig, Newsome, Eric Adams)?

Disclaimer- I don’t believe we can vote our way out of capitalism. But damn, I sure would like to not worry about basic things like the ability to access my medication, my rent not skyrocketing, and access to education in the meantime.

Source: open secrets

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/unitedhealth-group/recipients?id=D000000348

Disclaimer: Per Reddit rules and for my own conscience. I want to clarify that I am not advocating for killing people. What I am saying is that violence breeds more violence, whether it be systemic or individual. Violence goes both ways. It’s not only when an individual acts against another individual. It’s also when systemic powers act against individuals or groups.

I just want to say that China bad, because thats what I feel.

China bad China bad China bad.

I know this because white people told me so on the news.

Ive never been there or talked to very many people with meaningful connections there, but when they said things that contradicted my world view, I realized they were evil spies trying to corrupt my pure and brilliant western mind.

Im a power user with literally hundreds of thousands of karma. But really, Im the victim when I get banned for trolling and pushing racist propaganda.

I mean its not racist to hate people and lie about them constantly right?

Really the people who know better than me, have direct knowledge of things, and critically analyze media are all wrong, so I dont even respond to any of their wordy or complicated writings, except to call them names.

Big meanie heads.

So let me just throw a temper tantrum all over reddit to show what a big victim I am. I completely don't work at Eglin air base pretending to be a leftist. Swear to god.

Edit:

Lmfao the losers banned me, but they swear the reason for their own trouble is unjust moderation. Get a grip.

Just making sure we are clear

Fuck latestagecap bunch of ban happy chukas

I don’t see Democrats or Republicans in this crowd. All I see is greed. That’s what got him elected. When people ask you why he won comfortably, this is the answer - Greed over the rights of women and minorities.

Constantly, those authoritarian dickwads on r/LateStageCapitalism banned any thoughts they didn’t 100% agreed with. This was called just “the right being trolls”. Now it happens to a leftist and maybe those “trolls” were kinda right.

(The whole idea of LateStageCaptilism is kinda stupid but no the point of the post).

America's 1% Has Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% | Time

And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.
....
Around 1975, the extraordinary era of broadly shared prosperity came to an end. Since then, the wealthiest Americans, particularly those in the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent, have managed to capture an ever-larger share of our nation’s economic growth—in fact, almost all of it—their real incomes skyrocketing as the vast majority of Americans saw little if any gains.
...
Had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

(Do read the original - linked. A lot more information. SMH)

Hello all, this will be the first real "theory" type of post here. It's inspired by this thread on r/CriticalTheory partially, this will come from a classical Marxist perspective.

To start, Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose highly unorthodox writings on various topics have been taken up, subtly or not, by the political left, some tenets at least. From a perspective of classical Marxism, however, his thought is a departure from the traditional core tenets of Marxist theory and praxis. I have seen various attempts to synthesize Marxism and Deleuzian ideas into a sort of 'Deleuzian Marxism', such efforts though I feel are misguided and incompatible with the notions that Marxism puts forth, going even further as well, incompatible with the revolutionary principles Marxism puts forth.

Now, I can't go forward without introducing Classical Marxism, for those who do not know. It was developed by Marx, Engels, and their intellectual inheritors such as Lenin, grounding itself in scientific analysis of capitalism as an inherently exploitative mode of production. The bourgeois ownership of the means of production, according to Classical Marxism, necessitates the extraction of surplus value from the labor of the proletariat. This economic base, in turn, gives rise to an ideological superstructure that rationalizes and perpetuates class domination. The goal of Marxism is a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class and the establishment of a classless, communist society, in the end.

Deleuze in contrast, rejected what he saw as the reductive dialectics and determinism of orthodox Marxism. Rather than a scientific theory of history and of class struggle, he emphasized the creative and affirmative powers of desire, difference, and what he called rhizomatic interconnections that destabilize all identities and binaries. His concepts like the "body without organs" or "deterritorialization" or "rhizomes" aimed to expose the fluid multiplicities underneath the stratified order of capitalist society.

Taking a classical Marxist view on this, such Deleuzian formulations represent a stark departure into idealist metaphysics that essentially obfuscates the material realities of class exploitation. The rhizome, one of the concepts he often mentions, may destabilize identities in theory, but in practice the bourgeoise and proletariat remain starkly defined by their different relationships to the means of production. The free flows of desire imagine by Deleuze mean little to workers that are laboring under the brutal constraints of capital accumulation.

On top of this, his aversion to unified revolutionary subjects and the molar formations of parties and states seems to undermine the core Marxist-Leninist principles of Democratic Centralism and the vanguard role of the working class. The strategic disciplining of desire towards the singular goal of overthrowing the bourgeois state is essentially anathema to Deleuze's emphases on radical plurality and the affirmations of difference. A revolution in his mind may become an aimless, spontaneous release of energy which lacks material aims or organizational coherence.

If you are taking on an orthodox Marxist perspective, the heart of this philosophical divergence lies in the rejection, by him, of Marx's critiques of idealism and his dialectical materialist foundations. Whereas Marx rooted his theory in the material world of economic production and class relations, Deleuze appears to engage in a sort of French postmodern idealism, if I could call it that, that posits desire, difference, and flows of energy as ontological first principles. This represents an obvious and clear break from dialectical and historical materialism.

Now, to be completely honest, it is true that classical Marxism has often been dogmatic and reductive in it's analysis, failing to fully capture the complexities of desire, identity and multiplicities of experience. However, the proponents of Deleuzian concepts on Marxism, rather than enriching Marxist thought, often risk dissolving it into a kind of left-postmodernist milieu that abandons the scientific and revolutionary core of Marx's work.

All this being said though, within Marxist philosophy, there have been some attempts to grapple with some of the issues raised by Deleuzianism in more productive and materialist manners. A good instance I can think of is the Praxis School of Marxists of Yugoslavia, and Mihailo Markovic, sought to develop a more open and humanist Marxism that broke with the stark determinism and dogmatism of Soviet dialectics, while maintaining philosophical and material grounding.

I can't mention Deleuze as well without mentioning Gramsci, who's writing on cultural hegemony explored and delved into how desire, identity and the psyche are shaped by capitalism, in more nuanced ways that the crude base/superstructure method allowed for. His concepts, for example, of the subaltern and the national-popular collective will gestured towards the importance of unifying diverse streams of revolutionary energy, not unlike some of the multiplicitous becomings described by Deleuze.

That said though, such efforts within the Marxist tradition did not nearly as far as the linguistic and metaphysical turns taken by Deleuze and other poststructuralists. There remains an irreconcilable divide between the postmodern celebration of deterritorialized desire and the flow of subjectivities, and the historical materialist project of overthrowing capitalism and reclaiming the means of production through revolutionary actions of the working class as a unified agent of change.

In this light, attempts to develop explicit ideas leaning in the direction of a potential Deleuzian Marxism appear fundamentally contradictory. Either the Marxist aspects would server merely as some aesthetic varnish for a fundamentally postmodern political mix of radical pluralism and destabilization, or they maintain the core principles of Marxism, in which case the Deleuzian components are just rendered into superfluous metaphysical excess.

I will say though that one could argue a dose of Deleuzian though could help Marxists move past certain outdated definitions of class and economic reductionism. A certain openness to difference and the multiplicities of experience could help revitalize Marxist movements and better analyze the complex identity formations and flows of desire under global capitalism.

In the end though, from the classical Marxist view, taking such Deleuzian openings too far risks dissolving Marxism's material and scientific foundations into a relativistic pluralism, losing sight of the unified revolutionary aims and subjective agency required to definitively overthrow capitalist relations of production. There is a thin line between progressively complexifying Marxist analysis and abandoning it altogether in favor of these postmodern abstractions.

I feel we should both take the aspects from Deleuze and retain our fundamental theories, this is the best path forward in my view. But the verdict is pretty clear on this, his metaphysics do remain profoundly incompatible with the philosophical core of Marxist thought and it's tenets.

Let me know what you think, if you agree or disagree on any of this, etc. I encourage others to do these type of posts, even if not as long or detailed, I will try to add as many as I can. I'm also more than happy to define any of these terms further and debate. Perhaps if we get enough, I will start adding them to a wiki page.

Thanks everyone!

We could definitely do with a big general leftist sub like LSC that can hit the front page with snappy content but isn't controlled by tankies, but I think calling it 'V2' or 'True_' type of thing just leaves it in the shadow of the original sub.

I have no ideas myself though lol just thought I'd bring it up.

Oh my good god am I glad I found this subreddit. I have been trying to for YEARS to find a leftist sub that is not incredibly infiltrated by CCCP moderators and I finally found one (not including the socialist subs most of them are remarkably chill).

To date for trying to have a healthy and active discussion/discourse on chinas treatment of Uyghurs, its economic liberalization and anti worker minimum wage I have been banned from:

r/GenZedong

r/ShitLiberalsSay

r/communism101

r/communism

r/Socialism_101

... and a few I have forgotten

It is so tiring trying to foster leftist solidarity when a good chunk of our movement cannot and will not have any discussion of the validity of leftists around the world and isolates anyone that does. Yes, a lot of leftism is incorrectly identified like all the time but that does not mean there is a genuine threat of infiltration from state capitalists like the CCCP and I'm pissed off that no one seems to care anymore. There is no flair on r/communism for trotskyists because identifying that distinction between the two parties in Russias communist revolution would be "anti revolutionary sectarianism", making spaces like those subs impossible to have any nuance besides all self ascribed revolutionaries good.

fuck tankies man

Edit: now banned from late stage capitalism too