The tax vote proves that politics is about the class system as much as anything else.

[Ken Burch]

It wasn't just a white vs. non-white vote(though that is part of everything).
It wasn't just a straight vs. LGBTQ vote(though that is also part of it).
It wasn't just a men vs. women vote(though that did play a significant role).

As much as those, it was a vote of rich against poor-the few against the many-the powerful against the disempowered.

To end this, we need to stand against all forms of injustice...social oppression AND economic oppression...and to recognize that there is no conflict between either justice struggle.

It's simply about a fight for intersectional justice, justice for the many.

If we work with that understanding and expect whoever we nominate to join us all in working for that, we will defeat these monsters.

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

An excellent post.

It is, as you say, class, and race, and gender, and sexual orientation, and religion, and non-religion, and age category. It is all of these things, because all of these things are used by the capitalists to divide workers.

[Ken Burch]

4. As always, it's about the process of dialog through which common ground is found.

n/t.

[bettyellen]

2. Policy wise, you have to acknowledge the bulk of actions fuck over women and babies in poverty- the

They are the first and most deeply damaged by GOP policies fucking up the social welfare net. (And then the elderly) That idea has been roundly ignored by those who prefer to focus on class- and sexy young ideas like “free college” while kids are starving and now thrown off healthcare.

[Ken Burch]

3. Absolutely. But that doesn't contradict my argument.

That is also at least partly tied to class.

I acknowledge intersectionality.

That's why, at this point, I don't support ANY currently discussed candidate for the 2020 nomination-nobody who's been discussed addresses intersectionality sufficiently.

[bettyellen]

5. Not your argument, but it explains why so many progressives are seen as unbearably self centered

interested in their personal “pork” while ignoring the structural problems with our government that pushes so many people into poverty. Not their problem, they want to “set that aside”, and that attitude makes them useless.

[Ken Burch]

6. I'm all for addressing the structural problems.

And while I don't personally center the free college thing(I'd settle for tuition being kept super low), here's why I find it really disturbing that you keep bringing free college up and equating support for it with selfishness and white privilege;

1)It's not as though we had to choose between free college OR dealing with the structural problems;
2)Some of us supported that because we felt it would help more POC get a university education;
3)People who supported free college were also supportive of fixing K-12; it's just that they felt that ONLY fixing K-12 would mean that a lot of people might get a great high school education and be financially unable to go farther than that.
4)College affordability helps decide whether people can live progressive lives after graduation. If everybody who graduates has to graduate with $80,000 in student loan debt, it means they have to try and get a high-paying job to pay those off and yo can't get a high-paying job without committing to essentially living your life as a corporate conservative.

We need to fix K-12. We also need to fix college costs so people aren't forced to live Republican lives just to pay for college.

What you hear as selfishness is actually good people who want to be able to further their education(and make such furtherance possible for many others)without being forced to lose themselves just to get out of debt.

Rather than endlessly calling out free college supporters for motives they don't have, why not try dialog and working with them for an approach that deals with all of these issues?

[bettyellen]

8. .

Last edited Fri Dec 22, 2017, 10:11 AM - Edit history (1)

[NurseJackie]

9. Excellent post. Thank you for posting this.

[Ken Burch]

10. Please don't try and make this about the primaries. We are past that now.

Most Sanders people did support HRC in the fall, and Trump was not caused by Bernie entering the race. And the support for free college was truly universal in intent. Those who backed it honestly thought it would be good for everybody in the Democratic base and especially for the poor. It wasn't about intentional selfishness and they didn't know it would hurt women or POC(it's still not absolutely clear that it would, but I accept that you have a right to your opinion).

Also, the push for free college was started by young activists themselves-IIRC, it came out of Occupy. It wasn't something Bernie brought in as a bribe that nobody had thought of before he declared.

I agree with you that the proposal should switch from free college to either low-cost college or complete student loan forgiveness, or possibly a large expansion of the current program that forgives student loans in exchange for a period of community service work on a stipend.

And I've actually agreed with you several times now that a lot more needs to be done on K-12.

To my knowledge, most Sanders people weren't pretending basic education was perfect or that it didn't matter. They were simply rejecting the idea that there had to be a choice between improving K-12 OR reducing college costs-that there was no way to do both. And I'm thinking they were probably working on the theory that it wouldn't help much to improve basic education if the poor coing out of high school couldn't afford to go to college. They obviously want every mind to be developed to whatever capacity it can be and obviously want the poor to have a much better education than the poor get now. It's just that they probably assume that if all it leads to is a better high school education, does it really do much more maybe give somebody a slightly better chance at a job at a burger joint or maybe Starbucks? How far can a high school diploma get you in life if you can't ever get any higher education than that because you can't afford college?

That's why I see it as a false choice to make it be improved K-12 OR make college affordable. Seeme to me that to make a real difference, both have to be addressed.

The student loan thing obviously doesn't matter as much as survival for the poor, and I'm sorry if I managed to make it sound like I thought it did. We obviously need new programs for the poor, including federal jobs programs. Totally with you there

I only raised it because of the tragic reality that forcing people to get jobs that pay well enough to retire student loan debt means forcing people to cease being activists for justice or allies of the historically oppressed. It means having to join a wealthy law firm rather than be a public defender or Legal Aid lawyer, or having to be the sort of doctor that only treats millionaires and can't work in a free clinic, or having to do pr for a polluting firm instead of helping run a website where the poor can organize against environmental. It means never being able to do anything transformational or positive, never being on the side of any liberation struggle.

We simply don't live in a society where the kind of jobs that pay well enough to retire student loan debt are jobs in which a person can have progressive or humanistic values. I wish that wasn't true, but it's reality.

It's not as important as the physical survival of the poor, but it's not as though we have to choose between K-12 improvement OR making sure that college graduates aren't forced to become reactionary just to pay for their degrees.

I'm trying to have a respectful dialog with you. Can you please let it be about the future, rather than continually making it about whether or ot people supported your candidate before she was nominated?

[OilemFirchen]

7. Who knew?

Of much more import, you might note that NO Democrats voted for this monstrosity. Including the neo-style. Including the blue doggies. And all of the GS toadies.

Is that revelatory as well?

[Ken Burch]

11. Don't talk to me like I backed Stein. I supported the ticket.

I campaigned for HRC once she was nominated and did all I could to help her get elected.

I wasn't a "there's no difference" type.

[OilemFirchen]

12. I don't know, nor care, who you voted for.

This OP is about your shocking revelation that politics involves class. It's part of a passive-aggressive litany meant to suggest that "mainstream" liberals, centrists and moderates are ignoring lessons from the uber-progressive savants who magically appeared last year. Except, of course, that it's not revelatory, it's not ignored by the "mainstream" and it is getting really tedious.

[OilemFirchen]

14. tl;dr

Well... except for the first paragraph:

BTW, there would be a lot fewer people pointing it out that class matters if our party's leaders hadn't spent so much time arguing that addressing class somehow meant not caring about social oppression, or arguing that we couldn't address economic issues because doing somehow meant ignoring racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and other forms of bigotry.

... which didn't happen. What did occur, however, was the observation that class was not the only defining characteristic when addressing inequity. One group disagreed.

But let's not re-fight the primary, shall we?

[Ken Burch]

15. It's not refighting the primary to point out that Sanders supporters

were never guilty of neglecting social injustice, OR that social injustice can't be combatted without fighting economic injustice.

Nobody on the Left dismissed the need to fight bigotry then, and nobody dismisses it now.

We're all on the same side on that and that we always were.

Just accept that already and let the false division and the false accusations end.

No matter who we supported then, there was never a division on that and there isn't now.

We are ALL equally against social injustice.