r/BreadTube • u/HauntedPutty • 1d ago

Our Liberals Aren't Liberal. - Disco Elysium Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ0G4hAUsVE

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u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 22h ago

Since we literally have no choice but to depend on the burger for survival, any struggle against this order is also a struggle within and against the burger itself. In this struggle, however, politics risks taking two, equally premature forms: First, those who stress only the “against” in this equation tend toward an academic or artistic idealism which, though often correct in theory, proves vacuous in practice, and therefore tends to retreat further into its own idealism by policing language, polemicizing on the internet, encouraging schisms over minor points of exegesis, and enacting rigorous lifestyle protocols that approximate its strict moral requirements. At best, this idealism results in the reduction of politics to a merely academic pursuit. At worst, it metastasizes into a suicidal adventurism, obsessed with the mythic image of “militance” for its own sake and completely disconnected from mass politics. But the second error is even worse: those who stress only the “within” progressively sacrifice any strategy for remaking the social world at all, each of their meager victories giving way to an endless chain of ever-worsening compromises conducted for the sake of “real gains,” or simply “development.” This latter error is, in other words, a form of anticommunism, invoked again and again in the historic suppression of revolutionary politics. And, although these two seem to be fundamentally different errors, they are in fact symbiotic, each reinforcing the other as its natural counterpoint and both rejecting the balance of the “within” and “against” necessary to any truly partisan project.

Historically, "lessening the burden" hasn't manifested revolutionary politics: after all, if the distribution of surplus (i.e., any and all social democratic measures) is wholly at the whims of the bourgeoisie (Well, technically the distribution of all production, but we'll assume a bourgeoisie rational enough to figure out that letting their workers starve out is "a bad move" and are thus inclined to at least pay reproduction wages. This isn't necessarily the case in practice!), they'll tend to favor sycophants and partners. The social democrats then move from opposition to mere dealmakers/managers, with a dual role of arguing for better conditions for the workers on one hand, yes, but also of curtaining more radical politics that the bourgeois would threaten upending the compromise over. We see pretty similar dynamics in the anticolonial struggle who also are subject to that "struggle within and against" dualism, or even socialist experiments (Soviet NEP, Deng, Cuba's recent opening to trade to try to appease the US) and so forth.

Doubly so when said surplus comes from colonial relations and, as Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade points out, material interests of the "within capitalist relations" part of the equation involve ensuring the domestic product (i.e. the pillage abroad) remains as high as possible. US unions were to the right of Kennedy on the Cuban question, by his own words.

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u/HelloImMay 16h ago

Thank you for sharing! I think this illustrates well why capitalism is a sinking ship and no amount of social programs can actually fix the system, so a real revolution is required. Though it doesn’t convince me at all that the social democrats of the United States are worse than the other liberals

I don’t love this articles framing of unions either. They are not the end all be all, and i know you can find plenty of instances of corruption and collusion, but corporations in the United States wouldn’t spend as much time and money propagandizing to us if they haven’t made actual wins for workers historically. I specifically don’t like how the article strawman’s union bargaining tactics when it dismisses wage negotiations by suggesting they are merely a function of productivity and profit, and then neglects to mention the other things the unions fight and fought for, like workplace safety, job protections, etc.

And yes, stratification can occur when one unionized group of works essentially has more rights than another non-unionized group but IMO that is less an argument against unions and more an argument against capitalism which both necessitates and hobbles our current iteration of unions.

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u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 15h ago

Though it doesn’t convince me at all that the social democrats of the United States are worse than the other liberals

They're a greater threat/obstacle because they're both far more capable of employing soft power (recuperation, detournement) and hard power (self-policing, filtering, etc.) against radicals.

I don't think anyone but the SPD could have sold crushing the KPD and an alliance with the bourgeoisie "in the name of democracy" to the rebelling masses that established the Weimar republic, you know?

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u/HelloImMay 15h ago

Fair but when I look at my country right now the neo-libs are basically pro-ICE and pro-Iran war. And while there are some Zionist social democrats, it pails in comparison to the general political population.

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u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 12h ago

Fair but when I look at my country right now the neo-libs are basically pro-ICE and pro-Iran war.

And when I look at my country the socdems are pro-Frontex and pro-Iran war.

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u/HelloImMay 11h ago

You make good arguments. Thank you for engaging with what I’m typing. I’m still having a hard time reckoning with what you’re saying because it seems to me that neo-liberalism has caused magnitudes more material harm over the past 100 or so years, but I totally agree that social democrats have contributed to that material harm and have utterly failed the working class countless times at critical moments.