There’s a sticking point that no one’s been able to explain to me:
If you’re in the minority, revolution is against the democratic will of the people.
If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to actually accomplish something with reform. It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.
If reform isn’t working to bring about your goals, either your goals aren’t popular enough, or they are popular but the people lack the will and organization to vote for them.
If the people lack the will and organization to vote effectively, they certainly lack the will and organization to topple the government.
My area of expertise is managing complex systems and change implementation. I sincerely don’t understand how revolution is supposed to work where reform doesn’t. No one has been able to give me an answer that doesn’t bill down to idealistic hope. How is this revolution supposed to be implemented, and why can’t we build the foundation for revolution while simultaneously using the tools we have for reform? Wouldn’t widespread support for reform be the best possible proof of consensus?
If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to actually accomplish something with reform.
Believing in santaclaus at least gets you presents…
I think (reading aint my cup of tea so I do what I can) that the idea is that the majority of the people are easily swayed
one could argue that this is the case now with the amount of capitalist and anti-leftist projections
and the idea to fix the root cause of the above is tackled by each revolution-worthy system - education, free time, access to knowledge, etc.
though youve got a very good point that if we depend on stupid people to build something better, were buiding it on/with stupid people
good discussion subject, I’ll take it to my friends
Excellent point
departs when full
I love this detail.
Thought this was about the UK reform party at first, still works
Cmon bro, just one more reform, bro. It will fix the system. Bro, i promise. Bro, bro its going to serve us all. This time realy, bro.
What is a revolution if not a lot of small reforms happening all at once?
8·12 hours agoIt is the overthrowing of the current system, and replacing of it with a different one. Not a bunch of small reforms happening all at once.
Funny, the revolution is the one not spinning…
The one not spinning endlessly in a trapped cycle, yes. That’s the point, the reform side is “moving” in place, never actually moving nor is it capable of moving. The revolution van is capable of moving.
I think they’re making a joke that one of the definitions of “revolution” is making a complete circle. In the cartoon, “reform” is making a ton of revolutions.
It’s a play on words joke
Ah, I’m stupid, got it now!
The AI haters will hate this, but I think AI is gonna provide the push that forces the fundamental changes we want. You can only replace so many people with AI and robots. The theoretical point of zero employees also means zero customers, because nobody has any money to buy anything, so making employees obsolete makes business and profits obsolete. In the real world the system will change long before that point, because it will have to. It might be from food riots and social breakdown, or political movements finally taking hold, I don’t know, but AI will make the profit system eat itself. I’m just not looking forward to the extremely difficult transition period.
I want to believe you’re right, but in a world where AI can fully replace human labor, that will likely also apply to the areas of mass surveillance and military suppression.
Imo, one of the scariest and most frustrating developments in robotics in the past 50 years is the ability to process billions of text and voice conversations, all at once, 24/7. Things really take a different tone when all of a sudden the US Government can find it feasible to listen to all of us, every time.
Yes, we’re going to have these surveillance capabilities. Anti-AI memes and boycotts won’t stop it. The rational choice is to develop authority structures the public can trust. Instead of treating the whole concept of authority as the enemy by default, we have to figure out a way to make it trustworthy. The question is how, and I don’t have that answer but I know that’s the question. I see it as kind of analogous to how providing basic income, healthcare, etc. for everybody would cut down on crimes of survival. When people aren’t desperate they don’t do desperate things. If making laws didn’t attract money and prestige, greedy people wouldn’t be part of it but public-spirited people would.
I think you’re talking about accelerationism. IMO, the main problem with unrestrained AI growth is that if AI turns out to be as good as the hype says it is, then we’ll all be dead before revolution occurs.
The trick is to judge things on their own merit and not on the hype around them.
In that case, you should know that Geoff Hinton (the guy whose lab kicked off the whole AI revolution last decade) quit Google in order to warn about the existential risk of AI. He believes there’s at least a 10% chance that it will kill us all within 30 years. Ilya Sutskever, his former student and co-founder of OpenAI, believes similarly, which is why he quit OpenAI and founded Safe Superintelligence (yes that basic html document really is their homepage) to help solve the alignment problem.
You can also find popular rationalist AI pundits like gwern, acx, yudkowsky, etc. voicing similar concerns, with a range of P(doom) from low to the laughably high.
I agree with you that AI will probably replace a lot of white-collar jobs by 2035, which is not that far away, and it will necessitate political change.
I also consider that UBI (Universal Basic Income) is probably the most natural way forward. It pays a constant amount to each person per month, based on money collected through a wealth tax. It does not have to be implemented all-at-once, but can be gradually introduced. I.e. only provide $200/(person*month) in the beginning, and then continuously scale up as needed.
The wealth tax is needed simultaneously because the money has to come from somewhere. Printing money anew is not great because it leads to steep inflation.
Exactly, and as automation gradually makes profits obsolete, the wealth tax and UBI should evolve from money into a basic right to receive goods produced by the automation. Money is really just a middleman. If we eliminate scarcity we won’t need it.
I want to believe you’re right. But everything else so far has just been a gradually applied multiplier on human labor, not a full replacement. Instead of a sudden tipping point, we’d watch each other become destitute one by one, perpetually looking out for only ourselves.
People are voting for Reform like they are different to the Conservatives…
They are different. They’re more racist, xenophobic, and (surprisingly, it’s possible) more incompetent.
Yes. I just don’t see the point of discussing the finer details cause they’re both scum, any half decent person would give them both a wide berth.
Edit; I think that they also know exactly what they’re doing.
Such a great passage.
Was this If We Burn or Jakarta Method?
Jakarta Method
Another more recent example is “21th century socialism” in latin america, one by one they’ve gone to shit. Even the ones still standing are one election cycle away from going to shit, it’s all it takes to disassemble a reformist path.
And even if they triumph again and again, what’s stopping an opportunist from slipping through the ranks when the people have no shot at pulling the fucker back down?
Which is literally what happened in Ecuador.
- get on board for revolution
- read up on theory
- learn about the mass line
- do mass line
- masses demand reform.
Gotta square this circle. You definitely don’t want to go down the track of being co-opted by democrats. But you absolutely cannot mobilize the masses by just telling them “wait for the revolution”.
When the masses don’t want revolution, check if they are looting the stuff of people in other countries. If they do, you know where to look for real revolutionary liberation potential.
It takes work, and it takes emotional patience with people. Screaming at the top of our lungs that we must have revolution does nothing. We must be teachers first, show the masses that their attempts at reforms are failing. If they are rational at all, they will listen. If they are not rational, getting angry and scolding them does nothing.
The western left (and I self-criticize when I say this because it applies to me as well) tends to be very infantile, very impatient, and has relatively low levels of militancy within it. I’m a full on hoxhaist. I have a very specific view on what I want socialism to look like, and what strategies I believe are actually beneficial. That being said, if I spend the bulk of my time engaged in disrespecting other tendencies instead of doing literally anything I will never see the world I want. No bunkers will be built, and I will be sad. ☹️
The average person just wants to see us do something. How often do communist parties in the west actually organize things themselves as opposed to hopping onto some liberal groups thing? If we can’t even, for example organize our own red aid in a remotely comparable way to what some rando charity is doing, we got a long ass way to go ya know? There is hardly room to bicker and try to dictate peoples lives and views until we’ve proven to be a force of good.
theres no such thing as waiting for a revolution
it has to be built, and its a lot of work.
luckily if we have a lot of people on board, we can divide the work up and do quite a bunch.
There’s gonna be things that can be attended by direct action (union organizing, literacy, breakfast program, that kind of thing) and things that can’t. I think what leftist leaders should do about the things that can only be tackled by national reform is to encourage people to vote for the progressive democrats where it makes sense; worst case, they lose and we learn nothing, but best case they win and when everyone sees them fail to change anything, it makes it a lot easier to sell people on further revolutionary action.
June 14th
We only do DraftKings here!
not usually on your own soil (openly), but yes you do.
Your right and that’s why June 14th is the protest day - https://www.nokings.org/
i wish you luck and all the best
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Chance the “Socialism” label on the bus to “Fascism” and the comic would still work.
Well yeah, it’s the job of the political process to figure out in which direction the bus should drive …
Fascism is where the reform guys go when they get dizzy.
Fascism is the bus the reform guys go on to take them to the next Spinny ride when the current one breaks down.
i love this and i’m stealing it. lol
The hell it would. Fascism will drive with an empty bus, so to speak.
Would it really? My understanding was it only took off because so many people went along with it.
Yeah. Within the confines of this political cartoon: Fascism relies on people staying on the reform carousel. Reform only has as much power as there are people getting on the revolution bus, and fascists know this.
en empty bus disguised as a huge mean-looking paper tiger if necessary.
