Admittedly even though I’ve been listening to chapo since 2018-ish I only became “officially part of the community”, as in i started following the podcast every week and joined the subreddit, a few months ago when i became very politically invested upon seeing how bad the government dealt with the pandemic. as a result i’m not too familiarized with a lot of the inside jokes one of them being this collective annoyance at Amber. I’ve heard some rumours about her criticizing the subreddit and telling us all to “get a life” or something along those lines, but apart from that I don’t really know much about her outside of the chapo realm. Care to elucidate me?

  • DSALiberal [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    While I understand where you're coming from, I think there's a disjunct from what Amber was saying about what she perceives as the spontaneity of uprisings with what she's trying to say about material politics. It's not that the working classes who are in revolt are thoughtless, that's far from it. What's important is to look at the grand scheme of things, like the economics, evictions, police brutality, angst from lockdown/covid, unemployment, "essential" labor, breakdown in the healthcare, etc. These are all material factors that coalesce together to cause mass civil unrest. It is like a chemical reaction in some senses, add all these factors together and it causes people to be more class conscious due to their decline in material conditions (poverty, loss of housing, etc.) and engage in real politics in the streets. Amber, like all of the Chapos and much of this site unfortunately, hold an "armchair leftist" view on the world, with it a dooomer outlook that worships the golden calf of electoralism while at the same time knowing medicare for all will never pass in congress. People like this don't care about politics outside of the US national level, let alone international, and act patronizingly toward actual working class people and look at true proletarian uprisings such as BLM with contempt.

    I guess what I'm saying is that there's a problem with idealism in the western leftist community, many former liberals or bernie fans see the current system as something to be reformed, and that current movements to abolish or resist the US neoliberal order should be critiqued as to fit YOUR individual perspective on the world. I don't know, although there are some good rich leftists like Engels, I can't see myself trusting a ragtag gang of millionaires' views on US politics when time, and time again, they've been invalidated by real world events. The podcast is shit, and I'm glad the community doesn't like it much anymore