I recently saw the PSL promoting this book, it’s about how a socialist USA could look like and as mentioned in the title, is it worth it? If not, are the any different good books regarding this topic?
I recently saw the PSL promoting this book, it’s about how a socialist USA could look like and as mentioned in the title, is it worth it? If not, are the any different good books regarding this topic?
I’m a candidate member of the PSL and I am reading through it currently. I absolutely think it’s worth every (American) comrade’s time and will likely be writing a review and synopsis of the highlights once I’m done (similar to what I did for Marx’s Wage Labour & Capital, Marx’s Value, Price, & Profit, and Parenti’s Inventing Reality).
The introduction writes at length to explain why the PSL is departing, at least partially, from the Marxist tradition of avoiding detailed “blueprints” about what comes after the revolution. Namely, the specific material conditions mentioned below (points (1), (5), and (8)), the priorities deriving from those conditions (points (2), (6), and (9), respectively), and the specific actions to execute on those priorities (points (3)/(4), (7), and (10), respectively):
thank you for the insightful command! Do you think that you can apply these “blue prints” to any western European country too? After all, they’re dependent from the US and does the book also mention how this would affect the western world, American diplomacy, etc?
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It is useful to develop the revolutionary vocabulary by adding more precise terms. Capitalist realism is a notion that insists on the post cold war ideology of the end of history. Alienation is a older and more general term coined by Marx who had no idea that the international revolution would take the turn it took with the cold war.
I’d argue that this term help us discussing how capitalist ideology has solidified itself so much that “progressive forces” of the imperial core have a deeply programmed anti communist kneejerk reaction
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This is the belief of a majority of westerners right now. The goal of the term is just to point that out to people. It’s effective to say shit like “we need to struggle against capitalist realism because this phenomenon is part of our material condition now”
I can’t really imagine producing a speech that points this specific point by using “alienation” and then explaining how this specific kind of alienation is very important. When you coin a term you start having people identifying the phenomenon and think “yo that’s some capitalist realist attitude I need to debunk that”