Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Bolivia Elects Socialist Govt 1yr After Rightwing Coup" video.

@dzed5579 If you look at the exit polls (and other polling data) Americans preferred Bernie's policies. Biden won over a much larger share of voters who said beating Trump was their number one priority and did not necessarily vote because they agreed with the candidate's policies. To me, the takeaway there is that voters (especially Democrats) do tend to support social democratic policy. But the media and political establishment had painted Biden as the best chance to beat Trump and people, out of fear, out of exhaustion, out of an understandable but loathsome desire to return to "normal," voted against their policy preferences.
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Ardern isn't a socialist.
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@dzed5579 The "Americans chose Biden" is one of those statements that is technically true while also being incredibly obtuse about how the election went on and the kinds of forces that reified that choice for voters. For instance, look at what Columbia Review of Journalism has written about the media primary.
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Mo Chow 1) Trans rights are human rights. It doesn't matter how small a percentage of the population they are (it's much larger than your ridiculous estimate) they still deserve their rights and dignity. 2) These issues are entirely the creation of one party, the Republicans with the Democrats following suit out of ineptitude and the lack of any agenda of their own. The transgender bathroom controversy only came to the national spotlight on the eve of - I believe it was either their spending bill or a tax cut for the rich. It was a transparent attempt to deflect attention from their economic sabotage to the culture wars. And that tactic has been repeated over and over. Same for the hysteria over ultra late-term abortions (Trump has even claimed post birth abortions!) which always seem to queue up right before an election, as now.
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@dianecastellon6227 You're wrong about some details, but I'm not going to belabor that. I think it's more accurate to say that we have the 22nd Amendment because elites were fed up with FDR New Dealism. To suggest that it was ratified out of some principled defense of democracy ignores historical context - the deep resentment business had for FDR, even going as far as to contemplate a coup, if Smedley Butler is to be believed; the expansion of democracy under FDR; the machinations that nominated the Dixiecrat Truman as VP instead of the more left-wing Henry Wallace; and the desire for economic revanchism. It's important to consider material conditions and context rather than merely appealing to (what we think are) trans historical pronciples. In this context, the 22nd was a response not to an autocratic, corporatist, right wing president but to FDR's social democratic project and therefore an attempt to undermine democracy by preventing or making it difficult for another FDR to stay in power long enough to complete reforms. There isn't a moral equivalence between 8 years of conservative rule and 8 years of leftist rule. In general I think some kind of limits and rotation are good, but ultimately they're arbitrary, and it's more important to look at the actual situation. They're good because they may prevent a certain amount of power from consolidating around an individual, though I think this is a problem even in countries with term limits. Obama, for instance, "only" served two terms, but he garnered from that enormous political capital and influence which persists even now that he's out of office. Term limits only address part of the unequal distribution of power. They're also good, from the perspective of constituted authority, because they ensure that a party is reproducing itself instead of relying on a charismatic or entrenched and futureless gerontocracy. In Bolivia's case, it may have been better if Morales had not run. It appears MAS had potential candidates who could win election. But ultimately the choice came down to corporatist and fascists versus a pro-labor, pro-indigenous candidate. To handwring over process in that situation seems to me the worst kind of mewling liberalism - and indeed liberals were quick to celebrate the military coup by a far right, religious fundamentalist government while extolling the return of democracy. The last thing is that I think it's important to push back on this narrative that Morales, who had won all of his reelections, was a dictator because it's extremely rare to see that logic applied to white leaders of western nations. It is, like it or not, imperialist rhetoric. You may think Angela Merkel, Higgins, Sommaruga, and Netanyahu are dictators, but they are never framed as such in the media despite their protracted tenures. Nor is the Supreme Court, with its lifetime appointments, framed as an authoritarian, despotic institution.
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@TCt83067695 How did he have a four year start on someone who's been in politics for a half century, was speaker for the Senate and Vice president for 8 years and had teased running in 2016? Bernie mopped the floor with everyone else.
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@dzed5579 I always think it's funny when people say "duh" and agree to the opposite of what they previously said.
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@roigrose5045 Again, you're being confused by words rather than thinking about the meaning. Your original contention was that social democracy is a form of socialism. We can compare that to the way leftists, past and present, understand the latter and see it doesn't make sense. We can look at how historically the socialist movement, eg Kautsky, broke off from what became the communist movement and became contented with reforming capitalism. We can also try to understand these terms with respect to their mode of production. Social democracy supports a capitalist mode of production. It's inclusion of a welfare system does not alter the arrangement of its relations of production, which are still based on private property exploiting wage labor to profit by exchange in a market, any more than certain social provisions made by monarchies made their economies less feudalistic. Just because people have diluted or corrupted terms doesn't change the thing itself.
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Arce actually did better than Morales last year, further showing how bogus the coup narrative was.
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Mo Chow And in a sane world that's how they'd be resolved, but you're leaving out the fact that these issues are raised by Republicans to their evangelical, conservative base to scapegoat minorities for an agenda that does nothing to improve their lives materially. Yes, they shouldn't be issues, but what do you do when reactionaries make fringe cultural issues a mainstay of their platform and actively work to strip rights from vulnerable groups?
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Mo Chow I already said all of that.
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Mo Chow I agree it's a diversion. I already explained that to you. And yes, other countries have their culture war issues, largely instigated by the right.
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@Darke_Exelbirth It isn't. It's a form of capitalism. Socialism is the early stage of communism. Saying social democracy is a form of socialism is akin to saying capitalism is a form of communism.
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Mo Chow You didn't answer my question though. I understand you think these issues are deflections and have a simple solution. But the fact is that a portion of the country believes they are important and are using political power to try to curtail things like abortion and trans rights. So what do you do? Engage with the issue and protect those rights or continue to say it's not an issue and let the conservatives carry out their agenda?
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EATSHITYOUTUBE EATSHITTRUMP That's utter horse shit.
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@roigrose5045 It's incredible how wrong that is. A great demonstration of how people can get completely confused by letting words fo their thinking for them.
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@berniethekiwidragon4382 Not enough "social cohesion."
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@roigrose5045 How many times do I have to say it? You can't just naively look at the name. You have to look at the underlying structure and agenda. That's the value of a materialist analysis over an idealistic analysis. Juan Guaido's party is nominally a member of the Socialist International. They're also pro-capitalism, pro-imperialism, pro-corporation, etc. Are they socialist? Come on. Please find a better argument.
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@dzed5579 As I pointed out in my previous comment, you're treating Biden's election as a result of policy when all the evidence suggests otherwise. It was an election of optics, not policy. The fact that you keep flip flopping on this is really interesting.
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Mo Chow I think I agree with a lot of that, but I think the framing is very reactionary. It's simply not true that Democrats spend all or even most of their time on transgender bathroom access. That's such a bizarre statement to make even if you want to criticize liberals' cynical deployment of identity politics.
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Mo Chow It'd be great to get a source for those numbers.
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@roigrose5045 Did you go back and completely change your comment? Lol.
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@roigrose5045 I was going to give you a longer reply, but now it's evident you don't know what you're talking about. In fact, China has long maintained that they are communist in aspiration - like the USSR was - and for theoretical and developmental reasons have seen fit to implement private AND state capitalist enterprises to develop their productive capacity before integrating socialist reforms. This is obvious when one looks at the actual structures, institutions, and material conditions - not just at labels. As the economist Richard Wolff has written, "Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked." https://braveneweurope.com/richard-d-wolff-socialist-or-capitalist-what-is-chinas-model-exactly The "socialism" he refers to there and elsewhere in the article is an aspirational socialism, not a material socialism, judged by the change in the mode of production. That is why he can describe China or the USSR as both "socialist" and capitalist - socialist in intent, capitalist in reality. Social democracies in Europe don't even pretend to aspire to post-capitalism anymore. Everything they do is in service of managing capitalism. He's also written of social democracy, "The most visible example of this is in the social democracies of the Scandinavian countries, which practice a gentler, kinder form of capitalism." https://www.rdwolff.com/socialists_need_to_fight_for_economic_change
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@roigrose5045 Honestly, what even the fuck are you talking about? Have you done any reading on this topic? Why would capitalism equal democracy? I never said it. It's irrelevant in this discussion. I'm not "using my own reasoning." I'm relying on an extensive tradition of critique grounded in material analysis. Social democracies are literally capitalist for exactly the reasons I described and which you've completely ignored in favor of babbling about labels - they have private property which exploits wage labor to generate a surplus through exchange in a market. Point to a single social democracy that doesn't do that. There isn't one. The goal of socialism is not to secure welfare concessions - which have been and are being eroded by the capitalist base in European social democracies - but to emancipate the conditions of labor. That's why attending to material reality - and not mere labels or political reformism - is important.
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@roigrose5045 Do you actually have any intention of addressing substance or are you just going to waffle all over the place? This is extremely tedious.
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@roigrose5045 And you haven't, and you haven't addressed any of the glaring problems I raised in your claim regarding eg European social democracy, China, social relations, etc.
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@roigrose5045 It's really not.
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@roigrose5045 Also notice that no attempt was made to address the fact that many so-called socialist parties, like Guaido's, are precisely pro-capitalism. Why try to understand reality when you can just shuffle terms around and pretend socialism is when the gubment does things.
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@roigrose5045 My Kautsky? The one I criticized for being a social democrat? The one you've obviously never read anything about? That's my Kautsky? Lmfao And yes, Sweden's history of social democracy is a history of capitalism. I also have to point out, again, you never addressed the inherent silliness in your comments about China, parties like Popular Will, or relations of production. Totally vapid, devoid of content.
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@roigrose5045 Why is having universal healthcare a criterion for a mode of production? Hint: It isn't. Still haven't addressed a single point I raised.
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@roigrose5045 Are you drunk?
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@roigrose5045 Actually, are you drunk?
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@dianecastellon6227 FDR was president for 12 and, had he not been in poor health, might have kept going. Was he a dictator? Are our senators, some of whom've been in office that long, dictators?
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