HenryKrinkle posted:

because a lot of people less fortunate and less privileged than me would suffer even more under Romney.

maybe you should make electoral decisions on principle rather than trying to run some utilitarian calculus on which wealthy warmonger soothes your privilege guilt the most

Lessons posted:

HenryKrinkle posted:

because a lot of people less fortunate and less privileged than me would suffer even more under Romney.

maybe you should make electoral decisions on principle rather than trying to run some utilitarian calculus on which wealthy warmonger soothes your privilege guilt the most

its cool that both of these posts are just "Privilege". Privilege. Ya got privilege

babyhueypnewton posted:

It's not clear that Obama is the lesser evil at all, his foreign policy, his war on whistleblowers, the far left, Occupy, the anti-war movement are all much worse than anything Bush did and basically COINTELPRO 2.0 (also under a democrat, hmm what a coincidence). His assassinations of American citizens with no habess corpus is unprecedented in history.

Further, because Obama is entirely an advertising campaign about hope and change, Romney has been forced into the role of actually talking about the issues like the Economy (which is probably worse than when Obama took office if we look at the fundamental contradictions in the system and not a bunch of fun money that was pumped into worthless jobs), the actual reasons for the rioting in the middle east (not a youtube video lol), Obama's unprecedented war on immigrants (lol Romney has a tan he's trying to look Mexican!1), and all the terrible things Obama has done that the "left" won't touch.

What exactly makes Obama better? A speech by Bill Clinton on the financial crisis (which he caused), the Iraq war (which he caused), the republicans wanting to gut welfare and social services (which he did), and a bunch of folksy charm? Cause that's all it took to convince D&D and all the dems I know to start Obamarama II.

obama is worse, the democrats and what they represent are million times worse than any republican

marx talks about the "conservative socialists" in ch3 of the communist manifesto. essentially these are the liberals of today that seek to enact social welfare programs to placate the proletariat and maintain bourgeois capitalism from collapsing.

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.