I’ve read State and Revolution. It’s on my bookshelf. Lenin’s point is exactly that electoral candidates aren’t coming and I said as much. We agree there.

The global consequences point is fair. US foreign policy lands on people who don’t vote in Maine. The US is the enemy of the world driven through systemic capitalist deregulation and consolidation. Gaza happened with full Democratic backing. It’s a documented failure that I share your anger about. The harm reduction argument has real limits when the harm being reduced doesn’t include the people bearing the worst of it.

The Indigenous Action piece I’ve also read previously. The settler colonial framework raises structural critiques that standard electoral calculus doesn’t engage and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Again, however, I live in this system. I’m incredibly frustrated, I’m watching my family have issues with healthcare and housing while my tax dollars get used to destabilize and bomb other countries. That’s crystal fucking clear. But I’m not a billionaire, I don’t have the capital to wage war against the controlling powers. I’m a single person who’s attempting to build community and educate as many as possible. I can’t fight a revolution on my own as much as media wants us to believe.

But here’s where I get off the train. “A violent revolution that begins with you” is not a strategy. It’s an endpoint dressed as one. Lenin also wrote extensively about material conditions, organizational capacity, and the specific historical conjuncture required for revolutionary success. The conditions that produced 1917 aren’t the conditions of 2026 America. An atomized, exhausted, heavily surveiled population with no mass revolutionary organization, no dual power structures, and a state with the most sophisticated repressive apparatus in human history. Telling someone to begin the violent revolution is not serious theory. It’s the left equivalent of “just vote harder.”

On PSL, I’m genuinely open to that conversation. If the argument is build third party infrastructure, run candidates at local level, develop parallel institutions, grow organizational capacity over a longer timeline, that’s a real strategic position worth engaging. I’ve been pushing for exactly that kind of local organizing. I’ve been involved with several groups like WFP and DSA. It’s just not what you said. Again, while we door knock, create pamphlets, etc, we do not have the capital to fight the overwhelming capital that chooses to silence us, that quells dissidence, that chooses to run articles about jerking off in a portapotty instead of insider trading scandals and holding the other candidates accountable.

What it sounds like you’re arguing is a generalized argument against all Democrats, regardless of policy or position. And I get it, I’m angry at them too. I’m just angry at the establishment. And this is something that is currently under discussion by many of us. Given the distaste of the party by its base, is it better to take over the democratic party by running those on the left, using the democratic name recognition for voters? Or is it better to abandon the party altogether. In my opinion, given what I’ve lived through for decades, absorbing the party is the better method given our first-past-the-post system. 3rd parties are incredibly weak, and until we get things like RCV and seats filled with popular representation (or a full on revolution) we have to play the game. This is a yes, and situation. We vote for those on the left AND build towards a revolution. Attempting to have the candidate with the furthest left policy disqualified flies in the face of that and our current lived reality. I despise democrats, maybe even more than some here. The establishment dems, the neoliberals, are fascist supporters at best. So, at this exact moment, what’s our choice? Because, unfortunately, a general strike still doesn’t have the critical mass it needs yet, let alone a violent coup.

What you said was stop voting, read theory, and start a revolution. The first person that advice kills won’t be a billionaire, it’ll be my friends, my family, possibly even myself, who all lose the capital we’ve tied our survival to. And the revolution would die right there and then with us.

You’re right that by strict definition there are no socialists in American electoral politics. I’d agree with that. And you’re right that the Democratic Party has historically functioned as a pressure valve that absorbs leftist energy and converts it into votes for a system that doesn’t fundamentally change. I’ve said that for years. I live in it after all. I’ve critiqued the protests that I’ve been a part of for gaining no concessions, no material clawbacks, etc. Believe me, I understand.

Where I’d push back on the liberal/socialist framing specifically: democratic socialism doesn’t require the means of production language to be meaningful. It requires subordinating market mechanisms to democratic control in essential sectors. Platner calling out billionaires, opposing AI capital concentration, advocating for worker compensation reform, that’s all functionally democratic socialist regardless of what label he applies to himself. Labels in American politics are chosen for electability, not ideological precision. Judging his politics by whether he uses the correct vocabulary rather than what he’s actually proposing lets the framing do work the substance doesn’t support. Democratic socialism is currently winning seats within America. And while not true socialism, it’s far better than our current alternatives. Do I want to sieze the means of production and allow workers to be under democratic employ and control as opposed to our authoritarian employers? Fucking absolutely. But I don’t see those candidates yet, nor have I gotten the call that the revolution is beginning.

On the kill comment: that’s documented and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Veteran gallows humor is real but “wanted to kill some people” as a stated enlistment motivation is a thing he wrote publicly. It sits alongside the other documented posts and I take it seriously. The redemption framing requires accounting for that directly, not around it.

On Sanders: entirely fair. Yugoslavia, the genocide timeline, the 2016 pressure valve dynamic. I’m not going to defend his record on those. I share those criticisms.

But here’s where your argument hits its ceiling for me. You’re analyzing this from outside the system that has to live with the outcome. The people who lose Medicaid if Collins wins another term aren’t losing it as an abstraction. They’re losing it this year. And their lives possibly shortly after. The critique that electoralism without organizing reproduces the conditions it claims to oppose is analytically correct. It doesn’t tell the person losing their healthcare coverage what to do while the revolution matures though. Besides, I guess, starve? One of the things I have been pleading with the protest organizers is to use that energy to build alternatives to capitalism. It’s only been…marginally effective. Community pantries, gardens, skill share groups, etc. Small and hyper-local and completely unequipped to handle what a general strike or anything if the sort could bring. Those of us who can are trying our best to break out if the system from within, however, the system has deregulated, defunded, diminished, stressed, dumbed down, and exhausted most of is to our breaking points.

Platner versus Collins isn’t a choice between socialism and capitalism. It’s a harm reduction calculation made under constraint in a system designed to offer exactly these kinds of choices. I’m not naive about what that means structurally. I’m making a judgment that incrementally less harm to real people is worth more than ideological consistency from the outside. We need people if we’re going to have a revolution. If they’re all sick and dying and starving…well. Unfortunately the conservative half of us has to experience pain themselves before they wake up and realize reality around them. And centrist libs are happy to tear down any attempt at mild leftist policies that could help people survive. So we have a while to go.

Leagues ahead of Collins isn’t a ringing endorsement. It’s just true.

Got some sources for that? Cause I’m finding Fox News and idk if I trust that lol.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/platners-anti-corporate-crusade-hits-awkward-snag-receipts-tell-another-story

Liberals are most certainly against him with most of the hit pieces coming from DNC or Democrat backed articles. You’ve got establishment democrats that vote with republicans saying that he should be disqualified.

The Blackwater connection is documented and worth talking about. The tattoo is documented and worth talking about. The Reddit posts are documented and worth talking about. None of that is off the table. But “former Abu Ghraib guard who said he was in it for the love of killing” is a very specific claim and you should be able to source that independently of Fox News or DNC opposition research.

The tattoo was covered within 48 hours of him learning about the association. His former campaign director said he should have known given his military history background, which is a fair criticism. His Army background check apparently didn’t flag it, which is either evidence he didn’t know or evidence the system failed. Both are possible. Neither is a clean answer.

The Reddit posts are the harder thing to dismiss. PTSD and depression are real explanations but they’re not automatic absolution, especially the sexual assault comments.

What I’m pushing back on is the pattern of concerns arriving in a coordinated way right before an election against someone who’s running explicitly against the establishment and has Sanders backing. That’s not saying the concerns aren’t real but the timing and the sources matter and deserve the same scrutiny you’re applying to him.

It sounds like you’ve not actually talked to anyone in real life. Go to Maine. Talk to the people. Listen to the platform. You can’t let go of words for actions. You’ve been online too long.

Is it so hard to believe that someone who has experienced the disgust of our system can wake up to it? Isn’t that the whole point? Or are you on the side that no one is redeemable and undesirables should be deported/executed?

Seeing some of the wealthy crying on camera, saying they’ll flee because of a tax, that it’s a nightmare scenario, that it’s akin to a racist slur to tax the rich…

On an unrelated note, did you know that during the french revolution, guillotines were used?

Anyone else notice the influx of anti-platner rhetoric the closer we get to elections?

The fact that liberals and conservatives are spending against him tells me what I need to know.

I’m seeing a lot of people who don’t know what a class traitor is.

But, voters have said that more of the same establishment democrat is apparently what’s needed over policy arguments that would help the working class even if they may come from “the enemy.”

These are most likely the same people who care about Platner’s tattoo instead of policy.

We’re closer than we were, and I appreciate you engaging honestly. But I think the “capitalism as a tool” framing is where we still fundamentally diverge.

A tool is neutral. A hammer doesn’t have preferences on what it impacts. Capitalism does. It has a built-in optimization function that rewards specific behaviors regardless of who wields it or what guardrails are placed around it. It rewards the accumulation of capital. It rewards externalizing costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems because those costs don’t appear on a balance sheet. It rewards buying political influence because the return on investment is demonstrably higher than almost any other capital deployment. That’s the system executing its own logic correctly.

You’re describing a government that “interferes where needed” to correct those outcomes. I’m asking who controls that government and why we should expect it to maintain that independence indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its political influence the same way it compounds its capital. Europe is the test case and the results are coming in. The interference is losing ground. European governments haven’t stopped wanting to intervene but because the structural pressure never stops and the political will to resist it has to be continuously regenerated while capital only has to keep pushing, it is a system you’ll never win against.

You said it yourself: the correct implementation doesn’t exist. Only one that minimizes harm. I’d push that further: a system whose internal logic actively works against minimizing harm isn’t a tool, but instead a system doing what it was designed to do. The harm is the output of the optimization function running correctly.

At some point “we need better regulation” becomes “we need to replace the thing that keeps eating the regulation.” That’s where I am. With as much abundance as we have within the world, why must we restrict ourselves to a single system of economics that has been proven to fail, that is both anti-democratic and anti-life?

As is often said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, eh?

I’m sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree.

Europe is a useful example but not in the way you think.

The Nordic and Western European mixed economies you’re pointing to weren’t built by capitalism behaving itself. They were built by strong labor movements, socialist parties, and the credible threat of communist revolution making concessions politically necessary for capital to survive. The welfare state wasn’t capitalism working as intended but was capitalism being forced to share under duress. The moment that pressure lifted, the erosion started.

And it is eroding. Housing crises in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin. Healthcare privatization creeping into NHS and other systems. Austerity gutting social programs across Southern Europe. The same private equity firms extracting the same rents from the same essential services. The guardrails aren’t holding because capital accumulates political influence the same way it accumulates capital. Continuously, patiently, and structurally. It doesn’t need to win every fight but instead keeps the pressure on, just aa it has in the US.

The US didn’t fail to regulate capitalism in that Americans are uniquely stupid or uniquely corrupt (they are plenty of both though, I’m American, I know). It failed because capital had enough runway to capture the regulatory apparatus before the guardrails were fully built. Europe had a head start on the welfare state and is watching it get dismantled anyway. The difference is timeline rather than trajectory.

So yes, regulated capitalism produces better outcomes than what we have. Which is authoritarianism, greatest wealth disparity, lowest health outcomes, etc etc. The question is whether those outcomes are stable without continuously fighting the same structural forces that produced American oligarchy in the first place. History suggests they aren’t. Which means the guardrails aren’t a solution. They’re a holding action that requires winning the same political fight indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its advantages over time.

At some point you have to address the root, not just keep patching the symptoms. And that root, friend, is capitalism. A system designed to extract profit. The foundation is to amass profit, and the only way to do that is through exploitation. Capitalism rewards the most narcissistic, the most unempathetic, the most willing to exploit. And whenever capital amasses, it just becomes a simple math problem where buying influence results in deregulation which results in greater profits.

We’ve a planet full of life, nature, food, wonder, and instead we created debt, war, and capiralism. How can such a flawed system ever be implemented “correctly?” Instead, the American way is the intended implementation of capitalism. It always was.

Democracy poses political risk to authoritarians so…yeah, Palantir and “age verificatiom” is a great idea

Nothing becomes affordable in the US. We run on capitalism. How would oligarchs make more money if they lowered prices?

But capturing consumers, establishing monopolies, and stifling innovation? Hell yeah, let’s burn this place down! (Literally, like, sea levels are rising, water is becoming scarce, species and ecosystems are going extinct, etc)

Because their fundamentalist religion is based on oppression and conversion. Crusades and all that.

Should he shut down world liberty financial? Pretty sure they use crypto.

Exactly what I said would happen.

Me smrt billionaire, me track token quantity. Dat look good. Use most tokens iz gud. Wat does kwalitee mean?

$5,000 and $20 to affected parties and we’ll move on.

What? That’s not enough? But how can you be so mean to the struggling corporation?

Finding the will to keep doing my job for a corporate overlord.

There’s so much I want to do and build and create. But I have people who rely on me and we’ve tied our survival onto capital and I don’t have any generational wealth to have capital to risk on any things I want to learn and create. Which, the things I want to make I don’t want to “make money” off of them in the first place. I just want to give back and help people, I always have. But the only way to survive in this world that I didn’t agree to is with a profit motive.

Very first world problem, I know, I’ve been somewhat privileged and lucky up to this point. The only reason I was able to afford college is because my mother chose to become a professor so her children could get tuition remission. Which they’ve tried to remove from professors several times over the decades.

It’s just like…why can’t we be human to each other?

Guillotines were used in the french revolution.

And when we convict this motherfucker and his family and his administration of pedophile billionaires, it damn well better be THEIR money paying to rebuild and not the taxpayers. Hold the scum accountable.

I guess it’ll be null and void if his family is executed if there’s a french style revolution. Did y’all see Ivanka talk about how she impulse bought a fucking private island as a fixer-upper? To manifest her tangible spiritualism or some shit?

Brother…they’re calling CNN liberal because they’re writing a news story trying to “call out” China for building infrastructure into a new area they’re planning to build out…almost like having a rail station is both good for transporting people and materials for construction.

If you look at the dates, the CNN article is of the station from 2017. The top image is the same station in 2020, showing the progress of urbanization.

You’re proof of OP’s title lol.

Liberals and conservatives get too horny trying to attack communism while they kill everyone around them with capitalism.

😮‍💨

Yet why aren’t we recording all of their pedophilia, fraud, etc?

All billionaires are pedophiles and fraudsters unless proven innocent in my opinion.