not voting for trump but low key hope biden doesnt win so the material conditions of a failing America will be on full display
I hate violence and want a peaceful revolution where nobody gets the wall. This is a privileged perspective enabled by the fact that I don’t belong to groups who have constantly suffered violence, and I want to recognize that incrementalism is a luxury reserved for the unoppressed, but I just don’t have it in me to hurt someone in anything other than self-defense.
Revolutionary violence is all in self defence, because the people in power would rather kill you than let go of their power.
Then I would still like it to be the least violence possible, and only as a direct response, never as preventive measure or even as revenge.
Yeah gulags and mass executions are one thing when you’re a poor-ass undeveloped country trying to get out from under capitalism, but if such revolutionary activity were to happen in a developed country, there will certainly be some violence, but hopefully the massive prison system that exists in most of them could be retooled to serve the same purpose in a more humane manner than just shooting them and leaving them to rot (though there are some that deserve that fate for sure).
That sounds nice but I cannot picture him doing that in a space where we wouldn’t accidentally whip him to death for being too slow
Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald, and Noam Chomsky (while imperfect) are actually really, really, really good.
Also, Cornell West and Russell Brand are in the 99.999%-tile of language fluency.
Folks may not like it, but Michael Moore has been right about pretty much everything.
When someone’s right often enough, you don’t disown them for one bad take here or there. A bad action? OK, that’s different. But a few shitty opinions in a sea of good ones should be critiqued and discarded; you shouldn’t write off the whole person.
Everything in this comment applies to left unity, too.
“He tweeted Michelle Obama should run for President, which I consider an actionable offense.” - some dog-eared misanthrope
Moore holds the surreal, distinguished honor of being loathed by the triumvirate of libs, conservatives, and tankies alike.
Question about Michael Moore: Having watched Capitalism: A Love Story recently, I noticed quite a few things in there that appeared to be leftist dog whistles, especially at the end. Is there a chance that Moore might be at least somewhat of a closet comrade, or am I just hearing what I want to hear?
He’s a Democratic Socialist, no bones about it. His blood runs red, but he still naively believes in electoralism.
I think his primary role is that of a propagandist, and I mean that in a good way, of course. His job is to highlight the hypocrisy and inherent unfairness of the system to ordinary people, and he’s been relatively successful at that. I don’t disagree that he’s genuinely democratic socialist, but if his message did suddenly become more radical and “outside the mainstream”, would he be able to reach as many people as he has been able to reach so far?
This might get me sent to the GULAG, but:
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I secretly worry that Marxism has a fatal flaw in it somewhere that ONLY renders it appealing to the middle classes of developed countries, rather than the working classes of developed countries. For example, neither the US nor UK have meaningful communist parties (how many members does the largest communist party in Britain boast, like 5k members?). Even Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves were all middle class or higher.
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A related worry I have is that most American leftists are urban college-educated middle-class, they inherently look down on ‘Trump country’ and Trump supporters even if they don’t vocalize it, and they have no meaningful strategy/interest in reaching out to the working class who lives paycheck-to-paycheck. I admit this is a right-wing talking point, but I can’t shake the feeling that it contains a kernel of truth.
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A final worry I have: The leftist media that emerged after 2008 is dominated by Brooklyn hipsters and academics who have zero chance of organizing a working class movement.
I’m probably wrong on most of these, so I’ll happily turn myself in to the proper re-education authorities as needed.
Marxism has a fatal flaw in it somewhere that ONLY renders it appealing to the middle classes of developed countries, rather than the working classes of developed countries
Good news, friend: it’s also wildly appealing in developing countries.
So yeah, pretty much every demographic other than the one that Marx predicted. Wild, huh?
I’m partial to a Gramscian explanation. In the imperial core, the working class haven’t ever won a war of position, ie propaganda, which heavily limits their ability to win wars of manoeuvre.
I’m partial to a Gramscian explanation. In the imperial core, the working class haven’t ever won a war of position, ie propaganda, which heavily limits their ability to win wars of manoeuvre.
Where can one read more on this?
I think it’s a combination of that and colonial superprofits keeping most workers in the imperial core just a little bit too comfortable for them to risk it all in a revolution.
That’s not to say that the labor aristocracy wouldn’t be better off materially under socialism; it’s just that the circumstances aren’t quite dire enough to motivate a direct revolutionary conflict with the imperialist state.
This video from Hakim on the subject is really good and offers a tangible response to the problem for parties in the core (i.e., support third world revolutionary movements as a priority):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lDZaKjfs4E
But yeah, also propaganda.
Exactly. The Chinese Communist party was an unknown nothing before it made itself known through deed. Listen to the people and work with them directly. You don’t make revolution by sitting around on the internet trying to spread communist ideas to people and waiting until everyone is on our side, that’s how libs do elections. The western lib brainworm burrows deep into all political understanding.
At the same time, expect resistance and repression. Another part of that lib brainworm tells you that you are free. How free was the civil rights movement? Repression doesn’t mean defeat though.
Uhh plenty of African Marxists or Marxist adjacent politicians have existed. Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, etc. Also in South America have had actual democratic socialists, like Evo Morales and José Mujica, be very popular and take power. It’s just in the west the propaganda is so strong that the working class won’t consider communism because CIA propaganda.
I totally agree with you, my comment wasn’t meant to erase Marxists outside America. My concern was that Marx argued socialism would emerge out of a proletarian revolution located where capitalism is the most developed (i.e. the Imperial core), but in reality, the proletariat of the imperialist core tends to be reactionary. And I agree that propaganda is probably part of the reason, along with the imperialists spoils mentioned by another commenter.
Yeah “capitalist realism” has definitely taken over most of the imperial core (that is the view that capitalism is the only system that can function in the modern world and we have to work within it to solve our problems). I highly recommend reading Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. It’s a short book, only 90 pages, but very insightful and cool.
I think part of your confusion is considering white working class people from imperialist countries to be a part of a vanguard. they’re not. they can’t and never will be. if you start looking to the countries getting fucked over by the imperialists, you’ll start finding a lot of revolutionary marxists.
The insistence on adhering to 100+ year old texts, prestige-capping of newer works, and especially the insistence on using 100+ year old definitions of words despite 100+ years of language drift makes Marxism feel more like the domain of a bunch of know-it-all pedants who want something to lord over others than like a revolutionary movement focused on recruiting as many people as possible to the cause.
A serious movement focused on getting shit done would have rewritten the most popular works a dozen times by now.
Marxism was forced to retreat into the universities because by its own admission, it is not a threat there. In a way it was meaningless for Marxists to be organizing in the US from 1950 to 2000 (at least in white communities) because white workers were the labor aristocracy that Lenin was able to predict would arise. Materially speaking it would be impossible for them to build an anti-imperialist movement. Some black groups tried to organize, but without the support of white workers it was snuffed by the feds (with the support of many white workers). This is changing though as the contradictions are heightened and the labor aristocracy is slowly being returned to the status of proletariat. We’re in a transitional phase now, akin to the Russian Empire of the 1890s (though obviously quite different at the same time). Socialists are broadly discussing and trying to figure out how to build organizations and reach out to normal people. We are testing different strategies and ideas, and within socialist groups (such as the book clubs of the last century), we are discussing. Marx has already laid out our next step.
"It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. "
It could be argued that this only becomes within the realm of possibility if there is no imperialist threat, which isn’t a condition that has happened before (assuming that you are referencing the histories of past revolutionary/communist party-led states in your comment).
It’s also worth pointing out that suggesting that the state will intentionally destroy itself is substituting an anarchist understanding of the state into Marxism. The state isn’t abolishing itself, it is abolishing the capitalist mode of production, which by necessity abolishes the conditions under which the state necessarily and naturally arises in a capitalist world.
I definitely agree with your point here, but I also think that the form of the transition matters a great deal. I often wonder if a future transition to socialism might be served better by focusing on eliminating capitalist class relations as opposed to imposing central control over markets. In other words, a form of market socialism with layers of worker and/or community control over workplaces and the economy, as opposed to a top down state capitalist system. The idea being that as the economic sphere is democratized, decentralized and democratic economic planning would be much easier to implement.
I am not really an expert, but my understanding is the Titoist Yugoslavia looks closer to what you are describing, might be worth researching (for both of us). I’d argue that the options for such a transition to socialism matter greatly on the material conditions that a given society, and while it can be enjoyable to discuss what we think the best way to do so is, being so prescriptive ends up deep in idealism instead of actual analysis of history that can better guide us forward.
The thing is that the focus needs to be starting our own party. Electoral campaigns should be like the third of fourth prioty of the workers’ party, and should be treated more like marketing campaigns as you suggest.
I think that the point of the anti-electoral stance isn’t that there’s no use-case, but that there isn’t a place for it in the current US political environment where an actual workers’ party doesn’t exist.
Voting is a tactic in a larger revolutionary strategy, a thing which even Lenin understood smdh :virgil-sad:
Everyone please read “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder for some quality Lenin dunks on ultras with an inflexible tactical line on elections and stuff.
The American system is incredibly undemocratic and inflexible though, and Americans are incredibly brainwashed about it, so I think in the US most of that value comes from propaganda.
Even the Sanders stuff isn’t completely without value when you consider how much easier it is now to break through on the US not being a democracy to a section of Sanders libs, and the effect this had on the old sub. (though that’s only a first baby step to capitalize on)
