#cornelwest

The US election results aren’t fully counted yet, but it's looking like Kopmala needs a miracle to win the last few states in play. So far, it looks like Trump got 3M fewer votes than in 2020 while Harris got a whopping 15M fewer votes than Biden in 2020. That's a stunning statement of no confidence in a candidate and party that pissed on voters' heads and told us it was raining.

Dems have been going against what the base wants time and again in order to deliver what their 1% owners want; only 8% of Dem voters are actively against #MedicareForAll, for example, yet I didn't hear a single Democrat even mention it this time around. The only time this works for them electorally is when the GOP manages to make itself extra-hated in voters' very recent memory as in 2020 or 2008. Unfortunately for them, it seems like 2024 wasn't one of those times.

Beyond the elections though, what we're witnessing more broadly is the final period of an entire economic system, capitalism. As advanced monopoly capitalism (capitalist-imperialism or just simply "imperialism" in Marxist-Leninist terms) continues to decay, it will become more and more fascist all around. What this means is that there will be no mainstream political options capable of presenting anything else -- and in fact, we should be very skeptical of any that are presented from here on as they most likely will be illusions used to serve the system's needs, not ours, used mainly to buy the capitalists more time.

What I support now is continuing to pull progressive working people out of the insane, anti-democratic death cult of the "Democratic" Party and getting them to organize outside of it, either in a mass left party like the Greens or, for those interested in vanguard studies, a communist party (yet to be formed as most efforts to form a large US vanguard party have resulted in revisionist failures), which in turn can help to advise the mass organizations. Such an effort is not primarily about winning elections within the dying capitalist system, though undoubtedly some wins will be made here and there. It also isn't about "pulling the Democrats left" although we can expect (and must guard against) some amount of left-pandering from Dems as more and more disillusioned workers flee their ranks to join an independent (anti-corporate money, anti-billionaire money) option. It's about advertising the existence of an alternative, disrupting capitalist politics as usual, and building class consciousness and an independent fighting spirit among the workers in preparation for the much more serious struggles ahead, struggles which won't take the neat and tidy form of a capitalist-managed election. Until workers go through the process of detaching their thinking and anxieties from those of the dying bourgeoisie, we won't be able to envision a clear path forward into socialism.

One of the greatest benefits of learning philosophy comes in uncovering how much we take for granted. We think we know what we mean when we say things like ‘truth,’ ‘morality,’ ‘science,’ 'free will,’ 'life,’ 'time,’ 'nature,’ even 'reality’ — but philosophy requires that we (try to) discard our culturally- and evolutionarily-instilled intuitions and judgments and explore the world from scratch. Nothing can be taken for granted.

Moreover, philosophy requires us to confront many of the scariest and most pressing questions of existence. Does life have meaning? When is life worth living? Is there a god? Is there an afterlife? What do we value? What should we value? How can we live a good life? Are we responsible for our decisions? Do we have moral obligations to those who are different from us, such as non-human animals and future generations?

These are not easy things to do. Indeed, approaching these questions with lucidity and passion can be one of the most difficult endeavors in which a human can partake. But our continued existence as a species may very well depend on how we navigate these questions.