Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.

You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.

People that vote right wing aren’t better off just because they voted that way. They’re not tyrants oppressing the left, they’re fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn’t win them anything.

The solution to right-wing banding isn’t left wing banding, it’s disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they’re being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.

Leftist “infighting” is healthy. It’s a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.

Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.

To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).

Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn’t mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we’re black bagged one by one.

Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.

If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

I would gladly sacrifice modern conveniences as part of a societal shift towards degrowth, but it’s psychologically and socially taxing not to choose convenience when it is available. I want these conveniences taken away from me, or taxed into inconvenience.

And perhaps most importantly, when these conveniences are taken away at scale we can replace them at scale with other good things, the way we can’t when making individual choices.

I do not want to drive but I can’t buy a place in a walkable neighborhood when capitalism refuses to build them. I want to save on heating by living in an intentional community but society is so atomized and group housing so rare that I can’t find one to call home.

The solution to a tragedy of the commons is not to have a few people still pay into the commons, it’s to rebuild the system around the commons that makes it the best choice for you personally to support the commons and take sustainably.

but pragmatically and philosophically. They’re like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they’ll be “dead in 20 years”.

Imagine saying this as if human prosperity wasn’t built on people building places for their children and grandchildren.

Capitalism is one of very few philosophies that pretends that selfishness is good, and it would be silly not to blame people that believe in it for the consequences of that philosophy when implemented.

Ordinary western citizens are to blame, because ordinary western citizens could have changed this merely by being morally offended and voting for something else. Most of them personally chose to support capitalism over any alternative. To not even explore the space of possibilities, but to get paid off by corporate-government partnerships that were robbing both the future and the rest of the world.