Chapotraphouse

Can we get some Matt quotes going?

I cleaned up a transcript from a YouTube interview with Left Reckoning that I found inspiring and mildly edited it for clarity in text form:

>>> Organized labor as it's currently considered is absolutely hostage to the democrats. It's not going anywhere. It can't go anywhere. Just as the democrats can't choose any other way to be.

What I've really come to metabolize in the last couple years is [that], yes, they're all demonic creatures. They're evil in their function and in their own personal desires ... They see the world through a monstrous fun house mirror. But they are also disposable. They are replaceable. They are fuses. They're spark plugs. And getting mad at them is like getting mad at those elements of the machine, because if they did act differently they would not get to the positions they are in. If they started acting differently once [they were] in those positions, they would be replaced.

So the union bureaucrats are stuck in the same institutional relationship [as the] Democrats [and that the] people within the party are [in]. So that is why a lot of people have a hard time imagining a third party — because if it's going to be based in labor, how can you see that occurring when the organized labor is unable to extricate itself from the Democrats at an institutional level?

And I think the answer there — the good news and bad news is — that any of these intractable problems that you see [are] going to be resolved by the continuation and the furtherance of crisis and the deepening of crisis. ... Yes, that deepening of crisis is going to be dangerous, and it's going to be painful, but it is also the only context where new possibilities for political action will emerge. And I feel like that is why, fundamentally, a negative, depressed attitude towards the moment we're in, that is fixated on imagining a break [in the status quo] as a an apocalypse, as a cataclysm, as the end, is really just an inability to imagine any kind of life with meaning outside of the very bare, synthetic forms of self-soothing that we have access to in our current, otherwise unsatisfactory lives. If we have faith that life continues past our specific homeostatic relationship to our environment, then everything opens up.