Friday, July 19, 2019

what the situation really draws attention to is the ubiquity of class structure, and the role-playing that dominates the existing capitalist paradigm. you see this written about abstractly. but, the bernie sanders campaign, whatever it's rhetoric, has an income source and a budget, and it has to be ruthless about minimizing expenditures in order to maximize profit, which in context means maximizing expenditures for campaign outreach expenses, like advertising. the campaign cannot escape capitalism; it exists within capitalism, and must abide by the rules of it. so, to speak of hypocrisy would be to reduce a systemic analysis to a moral judgment, which would be a conservative's way of approaching the situation. a leftist should be able to understand that you can't overpower capitalism with slogans and wishful thinking, and it's not possible to live suspended from it in an ether of self-righteousness.

to argue that he's not aware of the situation is just to demonstrate the point; you're essentially suggesting that he's the ceo, and so doesn't have time for entry-level employees - which is probably actually broadly true.

but, that demonstrates the impossibility of building a socialist political movement on top of a conservative social movement. the real lesson is one we already knew: the social revolution must come first.