Despite no longer identifying with liberalism, I still make liberal mistakes. I have caught myself multiple times at this point saying that China is not doing this or that to help Cuba, or Palestine, or to combat some domestic issue. Then I do some digging and it turns out they are actually doing something.

As an example, I thought that China was abandoning Cuba with its energy crisis, but they are actually building solar plants. There are still problems, since the plants will take time to open, and still only provide a fraction of the energy Cuba needs, but this is just one project. I am sure there are more things going on behind the scenes which I just haven't seen yet, because they aren't flashy enough to make it to the front page of the news.

Basically, what I am saying is that I spoke first and investigated latter. This is because I was being lazy. I just want to remind everybody to not repeat my mistakes.

The election discourse has become cancerous because it keeps going in circles. This is because liberals have become fixated on the narrative of there being some large bloc of leftists who are going around trying to convince people to not vote. However, this contingent, does not actually exist? Most of the people I have seen take a stance against voting for Biden aren't telling other people to not vote. Some are, but the number of these people is so vanishingly small (compared to the rest of the electorate) that it becomes clear that the election discourse is entirely a waste of time.

Liberals are also really trying hard to convince these people to vote (by berating them online), and it just seems like this is the most idiotic and time wasting strategy possible. These people have negative charisma.

Even if they actually could actually speak persuasively, wouldn't it be far better to target the large number of non-voting centrists/apathetic people rather than leftists who have taken a principled stance (and thus could only be convinced if you knew more about American and world history, which liberals are blissfully unaware of)?

For as much as liberals are fond of accusing leftists of being impotents on a moral high horse, the election memers aren't accomplishing anything either.

This meme I think is the perfect encapsulation of the liberal mentality. The election is treated as a moral choice in a context free and timeless vacuum. There is no understanding of the laws of motion of history, or the logic that drives the American government, neither of which can be affected by an election.

There is the belief that you can delay fascism by voting for the liberal party, without understanding that it is the failures of the liberal party in the first place that breeds fascism.

Reading the comments on the original post, the closest thing to a long-term strategy I saw was to make progressive (by liberal standards) ideas more popular and to vote more tactically in the next elections. Even when I was a liberal, I knew this was a dogshit strategy because it is vulnerable to the Republican strategy of fucking with the legal system and acquiring power regardless of how people vote.

I cannot understand how liberals, after being being told constantly by their own media sources that republicans have made a science out of undermining American elections, believe that the counter to Republicans is ... more effort on elections.

Sorry about the long post (shortest leftist wall of text be like)

When it comes to the "labour aristocracy" in the first world, I feel like many leftists wildly exaggerate both its size and wealth. This is often done to the point of erasing class conflict in the first world, as this article does. I might be totally wrong here, but i feel like these authors are making anti-marxist errors. The following points are emblematic of what I am talking about (emphasis mine):

>The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.

This is just completely wrong when one considers just how many poor people live in the first world who obviously don't receive super-wages. US poverty rates alone are always above 10%, and that poverty line is widely known to be inadequate. The US also is significantly more wealthy than Europe, where the calculus is even worse. And that doesn't even account for the wild wealth disparities that exist in the first world.

>When ... the relative importance of the national exploitation from which a working class suffers through belonging to the proletariat diminishes continually as compared with that from which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute terms prevails over that of improving the relative share of one part of the nation over the other

What it is saying is that when the working class share of national income becomes high enough, they start to want to exploit other nations as that becomes beneficial. However, the expansion of imperialism in the neoliberal era is also the reason for the stagnation of living standards in the imperial core. By accessing a larger pool of labor in the south, the position of northern workers is threatened. That's why Northern workers have fought against outsourcing, the very fundamental imperialist measure.

>Thereafter a de facto united front of the workers and capitalists of the well-to-do countries, directed against the poor nations, co-exists with an internal trade-union struggle over the sharing of the loot. Under these conditions this trade-union struggle necessarily becomes more and more a sort of settlement of accounts between partners, and it is no accident that in the richest countries, such as the United States---with similar tendencies already apparent in the other big capitalist countries---militant trade-union struggle is degenerating first into trade unionism of the classic British type, then into corporatism, and finally into racketeering

I am not too familiar with the history of the trade union, but wasn't the degeneration of the unions largely a result of state and corporate action against the unions? They engage in union busting, forced out radical leaders, performed assasinations, etc. This seems like an erasure of the class struggle to the point that the unions are depicted as voluntarily degenerating.

I feel like these kinds of narratives, which are popular amongst liberals as well (liberals will often admit that weak nations are exploited. Example - America invades for oil meme) tend to justify imperialism to westerners. I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don't want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that's how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism