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As I get older, I notice something in myself: a certain impatience. With well intentioned people who never seem to learn. With people who claim to be on the right side of things, but who do nothing. With people who think that change is something that just happens, somehow, if only we think the right things. With liberal "progressives."
Here's a recent headline: "Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60,000 for public school teachers."
So fucking what, Bernie? So what? Sanders has been a senator for almost 20 years, and has been in government since 1981. And in that time he has accomplished precisely nothing of value. _No one has_. No politician, anywhere has. Something as dead simple and obvious as paying teachers a living wage right from the start of their career is completely beyond all of them, even in 2023. So, Bernie: what about your "call" for higher teacher's salaries? What? Why should I or anyone else care even the slightest bit that you think the same thing that everyone else with a functioning heart and brain thinks? You will never, ever do this. It will not happen. Or if it does, it will have taken so long to accomplish that it is no longer relevant. _Nothing can_ happen. Neither Sanders nor any other "progressive" elected official has the means, power, and will required to accomplish even this tiny little thing, and still less the thousand other more important problems screaming to be fixed. In fact, the entire electoral system is designed specifically to _prevent_ any of this from happening. And we have loads and loads of evidence to prove it.
Why haven't these people learned the lesson: The U.S. government is precisely where no progress is possible. It's where emancipatory dreams go to die. The entire reason for its existence is to prevent anything from happening, to prevent any expansion of the concrete, real-world freedoms of ordinary people, and to keep capital flowing. There are only two possibilities: 1) everything stays the same, or 2) power and capital are concentrated even further into the hands of the ruling class. The third option — that things get better, that equality improves and freedoms expand — is a phantom.
Or, not exactly a phantom. But something that is impossible specifically within the framework of traditional, capitalo-parliamentarian, state-oriented "politics." Achieving real, positive, liberatory change is absolutely possible, it's just that it requires the struggle of masses of people _against_ the ruling class and the state that represents them (and only them). Politicians love taking credit for things like the civil rights achievements, progress in LGBTQ rights, et al. But that's not how it happened at all. Civil rights for Black folks were not achieved when the president signed some legislation. These rights were won ling before that, in the streets. At best, the government puts a stamp of approval on what has been made politically inevitable by the struggle of thousands and even millions of people, often with a deeply militant and even violent component that is suppressed and ignored after the work is done and it's time to write the history books. The civil rights movement was not, at any point, a peaceful movement. Certain factions within it were non-violent, but this (necessary, admirable) non-violence was made possible precisely by those who weren't non-violent, by the Black people with guns who protected their communities and collectives both before MLK came to town and after he left. And people like MLK were well aware of this, because they understood the realities of the necessary struggle. The same is true of all real liberation struggles.
Furthermore, the civil rights movement achieved far less than is usually acknowledged. After all, of what value are your paper rights when your children are still dying from poisonous drinking water, when schools are still inadequate, when wages stagnate, when...? Of what value are your paper rights when they can be taken away with the stroke of a pen by the fascist who just replaced the so-called progressive in office? This is the asymmetric nature of power: it takes decades to successfully challenge, but only seconds to lose everything you've won.
So I'm impatient with people like Sanders, AOC, Sawant, and all the rest, who spend their lives claiming to fight for justice, but never seem to learn the lesson that change "from within" is fundamentally impossible. And then they have the audacity to tell the rest of us, in the face of their complete failures — not just recently, but _since the inception of liberal democracy itself_ — that we just need to keep voting harder, that if we hope deeply enough that it'll work this time, like magic. That it'll just happen somehow. I have no time for this nonsense any longer.
Just so we're clear, I practice what I preach, and I've been organizing on the ground, in the streets, for over 15 years. With some successes, and a lot of failures. But the difference is I'm not doing the same thing today that I was 15 years ago. Me and my comrades *learn*, we change, we keep what works and we discard what doesn't. And we're under no illusions that we'll win just because we have the right ideas. We're under no illusions that calling for higher wages has any real effect on those wages. Can politicians say the same thing, as they endlessly vote on some "progressive" bill that has no chance of success, and would be overturned by the next Congress even if it were passed?