The demands haven’t changed. They’ve always been, and this is really quite simple; stop sending weapons to Israel while it’s engaging in genocide. The goalposts have not shifted.
Liberals will see no problem choosing polite, handwringing genocide over rowdy, bombastic genocide. They fall so easily for style points and optics completely devoid of substance.
20 years from now, when the only choices are between a dem who wants 20 genocide and a republican who wants 21, liberals will still be frothing at the mouths, blaming anti-genocide leftists for the country’s devoluton into fascism. This is the logical conclusion of liberal “pragmatic utilitarianism”
In biology, one learns about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly. Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires nonlinear leaps, especially by way of moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people. Even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi, such efforts not only anticipate a world beyond capitalism, they concretely advance the working class’s march toward it.
Socialism, in other words, requires nonutilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual. Marx rightly scourged romantic humanism in the abstract, but his personal pantheon — Prometheus and Spartacus, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare — affirmed a heroic vision of human possibility. But can that possibility be realized in today’s world, a world where the “old working class” has been demoted in agency?
Why should they give a fuck about your “demands” when you change them immediately once met?
The demands haven’t changed. They’ve always been, and this is really quite simple; stop sending weapons to Israel while it’s engaging in genocide. The goalposts have not shifted.
Kamala already promised not to impose a weapons embargo on Israel. She still does not call it a genocide. No demands have been met.
What does she mean by everything in her power? Nuking Gaza so the “war” ends? Send in the American military to fight in Gaza?
Liberals will see no problem choosing polite, handwringing genocide over rowdy, bombastic genocide. They fall so easily for style points and optics completely devoid of substance.
20 years from now, when the only choices are between a dem who wants 20 genocide and a republican who wants 21, liberals will still be frothing at the mouths, blaming anti-genocide leftists for the country’s devoluton into fascism. This is the logical conclusion of liberal “pragmatic utilitarianism”
-Mike Davis