our capacity to willfully ignore the situation is potentially limitless. but you only have to look around or read the news to see the cracks appearing. employment is still poverty for most people, being young is almost synonymous with being poor.

we live in a geriatric carbohydrate feeding pen and the young, when they arent deliberately destroying themselves, will be wiping up the shit of the useless aging population thats bankrupting them.

It won't address the big problems but it needn't be an either/or decision. I vote labour only with the idea that they might make things a tiny bit easier in the short term while at the same time looking for a more long-term alternative to the cul de sac that both parties ultimately represent.

yeah fair enough.

im sure they do make some small differences, although how you can even tell anymore with the media as it is i dont know.

lets not forget - "i abolished boom and bust"
"we have x years to save the world"
"i believed invading iraq was the right decision at the time"

also, alistair campbell style politics are so bad that i prefer corrupt tories to people like him.

As much as this is a pretty obvious a thing to say, it's become very necessary. I can't think of any other generation of young people who really need to wipe out the old and build something better. I don't know how though, as most young people seem as hopeless as older people right now, save for a few who talk a lot and never do anything of worth.

my point is that theres no longer space in the system to actually do anything. at best you can try, mostly vainly, to keep some of its civilizing structures intact.

a businessman in a town i wont name offered to build a nuclear plant from his own funds, and the council rejected it. can anyone count the number of nuclear plants built in china in the past few years?

the asian system is expanding and thriving as we speak. you get a mix of the best of the welfare state with the best of capitalism and they both work in harmony.

and anyone who wants to respond with a big list of "whats wrong with china" im A) already aware and B) its irrelevant in the long term

Not sure what you mean with this, as both China and India are faced with people growingly inpatient with the lack of welfare state like never before.

yeah, because only 240 million chinese peasants got given pensions

their supposed "impatience" is NOT a drive to overthrow the state and become a US run liberal democracy, it's rather hands held out for more, only pretending to bite the hands that feed them in a simulation of dissidence that's really an effective form of collective bargaining.

You don't overthrow anything because of impatience alone.

sad old marxist is sad. and old.

Oh, give me a break.

And what is your manifesto then?

Still waiting for an answer, darling. Going to bed soon.

Their hopelessness might just be an honest (albeit largely unconscious) response to a situation that is just hopeless. I vote but I'm under no illusion that it really matters in any major way. At least not in a way that'll fundamentally change our course. That'll take something far more radical. But I haven't heard any really credible, or even interesting ideas from outside the political mainstream in ages, be it from marxists, libertarians, or the seemingly countless anarcho groups that've sprung up in the last few years. I've read just about everything from 0 books and semiotexte, and attended more meetings than I can remember. I've looked into all kinds of bright new ideas from Capitalist Realism through to Speculative Realism, but nothing, or at least nothing that gives me any kind of genuine hope.