Mostly talking about stuff like breadtubers, chapo, and media personalities like that, I can kind of tell why people like Bernie and Jezza where they’re at. Is it the added wealth being a popular media personality gives you, the need to give a consistent product, the need to appeal to a wide breadth of people, and so on?
edit: also props to Brett at RevLeft for continuing to radicalise himself as the show has gone on
I still like Chapo despite the doomer. Amber continues her 50/50 amazing/terrible take record and Matt is halfway down creating a form of Catholic Mysticism/Buddhism that comes from a Dialectical Materialist base.
And a number of the Breadtubers have radicalised. Ollie basically just called Libs pointless idealists in his latest video and is pretty clearly a RevSoc now. ContraPoints is one bad day from finally snapping and becoming a Posadist-Transhumanist (Party line: “I say we take of and nuke the entire site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure”).
The John Olivers etc can’t radicalise because they’d no longer be talking heads then. But even he is becoming increasingly critical of the system and the current attempts to resolve the political crisis.
Well, in what meaningful sense have we outgrown them? We post memes about Stalin? Like I basically understand the politics of the chapos and I disagree with some of their takes but it’s not like chapo.chat has some radical vision of the future that will burn past all the roadblocks leftism has faced in the past few years.
If you’re simply speaking in terms of tactics and that the chapos don’t push for more radical forms of political action I’d agree, but at the same time it’s not like any combination of leftist political action is going to change the next two months. We’re not in the driver’s seat, we’re not even close. It’s completely useless to be saying which breed of leftism is the most righteous one, they’re all on the sidelines right now.
If you like the show, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. But we’re all basically on the same team, this isn’t a time to be drawing battle lines and pushing people away. We should be trying to bring people in, bringing them in on the most radical terms possible, while also not pushing them off if they don’t meet some arbitrary threshold of leftyness. To this end chapo, breadtube, and left media people all continue to serve their purpose. There isn’t really a reason for them to change so long as there is an audience to listen, and that isn’t a bad thing.
I think it’s OK to use radical analyses while also advocating for SocDem reforms that might help some people on a shorter timescale.
Not only because people are suffering right now but also because they aren’t necessarily at odds with one another. That’s something that Angela Davis / Andre Gorz and other abolitionist / ‘non-reformist-reform’ thinkers advocate for: achieve incremental gains that question power structures and lead to bigger gains later.
That’s also a position Rosa Luxemburg disagreed with, convincingly, in Reform or Revolution
“Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal – the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.” …
“But since the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question: “Reform or Revolution?” as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: “To be or not to be?“”
That’s an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing!
I’ll have to read the whole thing (granted I haven’t now) but just from this passage I’m still not convinced they are necessarily at odds. Abolitionist reforms should * make the prospect of future revolution more likely* rather than placating the labor movement (now granted whether these empirically exist is a separate question).
It’s a question of strategy and goals. Reforms for reforms sake, are not part of a strategy for the overthrow of capitalism.
Like, for Marxists/revolutionary socialists, overthrowing capitalism is the basis for building better conditions for people, because capitalism simply cannot do this in a sustainable way. There was a period of time in the 20th century where capitalism was booming in the advanced capitalist nations, and the material conditions existed to grant concessions to the labor movement in the form of reforms.
Those conditions never existed in most of the world, the places on the receiving end of imperialist super-exploitation, where capitalism barely supports life, much less improvements and reforms. And those conditions no longer exist everywhere else–capitalism is basically in perpetual crisis, and the perspective of the ruling class worldwide is austerity for the indefinite future.
The non-reformist reformers sort of try to sit on the fence, but IMO, when it comes down to it, a lot of them de facto argue for reforms for reforms sake, and don’t work the struggle for reforms into a broader revolutionary perspective/praxis.
Bernie is actually hiding his power level. He’s a trotskyist, and probably the most successful one since Leon himself. Successful meaning he came kinda almost close to power but still didn’t get it lmao.
Where’s the evidence that Bernie is a Trot? My understanding was that he was an FDR lib commonly mistaken for a social democrat, and hasn’t been a real Marxist since before 1990.
Breadtubers/podcasters/other media types got into it for attention, and for money. And frankly the pursuit of money+attention kinda overrides everything else. As an example from the Chapos perspective, why rock the boat, why change yourself, why push yourself to be better when you’re making buttloads of money making fun of op-eds?
