[Rich]

The median household income worldwide is $10,000. Only 7 percent of US households are poorer than that.

To be fair I think the figure has to be compared with the world mean income, not the world median income.

Another way of dividing up the population is the poor, less than half mean income, the rich those on more than double mean income and the middling sort, the rest. When done that way, I expect one will understand why the rich and the middling have the numbers to defend the staus Quo, particularly when you take account of the low level of voting and political and social activism by the poor. The middling those between half and double mean income really don't have sufficient to potentially gain from major destabilising change to the status Quo that could potentially leave them much worse off.

Revolutionaries don't make revolutions by gaining majority support. Small but highly motivated minorities can carry out a revolution when society has been demoralised and few people are willing to make sacrifices to actively defend the status quo.

[Dagoth Ur]

Yeah going by median would put American workers on the same economic tier as third-world bourgeoisie (without contextualizing how much power 10g's gets you in a third world nation, and how little it gets you here).

And yes you are right, we need the reactionaries to be demoralized so we can move on to something other than Civil War.

[The Immortal Goon]

Back when I was still a socialist I said that one of Marxism's greatest weaknesses was that for all its critique of capitalism (and it's still useful to some degree for analyzing capitalism) it provided few details on how exactly the new socialist order would work. I also thought that that was also a great strength. By providing no blueprint to follow, future generations of revolutionaries were free to come up with their own designs for how "socialism" would work. But thus far, I don't see a successful model yet. It seems Marxists kind of retreat to this stance where they organize in preparation for when capitalism terminally tears itself apart with its own contradictions. But however bad capitalism gets, that final collapse never happens. Indeed that was what was supposedly happening 8 decades ago. But capitalism rebounded and however bad things have been since then, we've yet to meet a global crisis that matched "the Great Depression".

But all the same, even today when neoliberal fuckups present opportunities for socialists like in Venezuela or Greece, either the socialists attempt radical reforms and end up following the old train wrecks with new train wrecks or (in tacit recognition of this) they backtrack and fail to seriously challenge the capitalist status quo.

There is a blueprint through Lenin, but it is outdated.

The tedium of infighting comes from diagnosing exactly what you're talking about here. For me, it's very basic: Marx, Engels, and Lenin were all very clear with the dialectic conclusions: capitalism was a worldwide system, and thus socialism would have to be a worldwide system that came from the contradictions of the worldwide system. For a variety of reasons this never happened, but the true disaster was pretending that socialism had been attained anyway. In my mind, this was by far the worst ideological problem we have to deal with. It provides so much ammunition for the right, and has poisoned a lot of later movements with nationalism—something that socialism should, by all rights, have dispensed with.

So far as it not occurring in the long, however, I would point to Cromwell in England or even the Feuillants in France. In both cases, a representative government led by the bourgeoisie was "proven" to be a disaster that could never work.

And then it did.

[Cromwell]

So far as it not occurring in the long, however, I would point to Cromwell in England or even the Feuillants in France. In both cases, a representative government led by the bourgeoisie was "proven" to be a disaster that could never work.

And then it did.

This is a very important point.

A lot of people are stuck in a very short-sighted mode of thinking, where Capitalism is the present and, therefore, the forever. They would argue, similarly, in the fourteenth century that to conceive of any other system than Feudalism gaining ground would be utter madness.

[Varax]

There's a lot to get through in this thread, so I'll just start by making a few general points as I see it:

- First of all by credible I assume you mean a leftist movement that is capable of getting any kind of support. Obviously there are plenty of socialist movements that do have a significant amount of support depending on what country/region you go by, so in those cases the "left" is already quite credible. However, I'm going to assume this is mostly pertaining to western countries where the left is very weak, because of course it...
- The "hippy" left has been a complete failure and has only rendered the left in the western countries mostly useless - this has done a lot to discredit leftists as lazy, smelly idiots with no useful ideas that are mostly ostracized from the rest of society and only help to bring any sort of party by being useless.
- Too many splinter groups, again largely due to the uselessness of the left in these countries you get more splintering off.
- Unions and any real sense of "working class" movements have largely become weak and have been decimated by outsourcing and downsizing amongst other things.
- Infiltration of communist and socialist parties by the FBI and other agencies who have acted to discredit them.

On a more broader level I think there's a lot wrong with leftist politics and attitudes in advanced capitalist states to adjust for the way things are going and update themselves into something that would be more relevant.

- The "more working class than you" mentality is unhelpful, because alienates middle strata workers and those "middle class sensibilities" who might have sympathies to socialism or see it as being in their interests. It's kind of a reverse elitism in the way, and often seems to imply that socialism is only for the most destitute "real proles" which also makes the idea of socialism itself unappealing to many "average people" who might who have aspirations and don't view themselves in those terms.
- Being able to talk about socialism as a good thing in itself - beyond just "what's wrong with capitalism" being able to explain why socialism is actually desirable. There are some socialist, post-capitalist models that offer a lot and not just to proles but also to a whole range of people in professional fields such as engineers, scientists, teachers, etc. who might find socialism appealing or these who just want to remove the corrupting influence of capitalism from their daily lives.
- The decline of the industrial proletariat as percentage of the population along with unions and many union workers in the US are in the public sectors (who are under attack by neoliberal austerity measures). Yes you can talk about service sectors and office workers as being "technically proles" but there are differences to be had. Many Marxist conceptions of the class structure are dated in this regards - not just from how these workers relate to the means of production, etc. but also their overall class character and what socialism means for the "working class" in a highly advanced increasingly automated economy.

Many of the above reasons are why I take a syncretic approach to socialism, merging it with technocracy and updating these designs for a more modern socialist approach that will be increasingly relevant and do away with some of the dated concepts. For instance (and I know I'm going to take flak for this from many people here on this, but it needs to be said) the idea that the "proletariat controls the means of production" under socialism. This has rarely ever been the case in historical socialist experiments anyway and is not a very prescient idea going forward. In a factory that has been almost totally automated for instance where does the "proletariat controlling the means of production" really take place? Increasingly in many plants you would have maintenance staff, administrators, planners and the like and very few line workers. I suppose you can still talk about unions and "worker's councils" in some places but do they need to control the means of production? No, the plant managers and technocrats in the planning administration take care of these things. You can still talk about these things in terms of abrogating capitalism and removing the dead hand of private property from the productive process - but doing these things can just lead to further downsizing or workforces themselves. So you can do all of things and have a model of socialism that is highly efficient and surpasses what capitalism is capable of, but it does not entail "workers control" directly so much as socialization of production and management of the resources of society. There is still a lot that can be said about the advantages of such a system and its ability to solve many problems of today's society that are unsolvable by capitalism.