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I wish he cited his sources on quotes and stuff. I guess the video is for people who dont have an understanding of utopian socialism and historical idealism, as found in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
Moving away from the realm of idealists though, we stop asking what the "best" and start asking what is "effective".
This is what I thought he was gonna get into, but the praxis he mentions is just individually contributing to mutual aid networks and joining the IWW. A large part of me thinks that simply educating Westerners and expecting them to rise up to support the 3rd world is more idealist than it is materialist.
Consider unions. I bet the majority of his American viewers havent even been in a moderate union, let alone join and effectively recruit for a more radical one like the IWW. But there is a demand for jobs in the States, why not say "fuck it" and try advocating mass entryism into the AFL-CIO trades jobs. Even if it fails to get real results in the few years it takes to get leftists into fields like electrician and teamster, at the end you still have a proletariate that is wealthier, more skilled, more educated, and more radical. You might be able to do this all in the IWW too, the point is to get leftists into positions of power, and by that I mean professions that are critical to the supplying of empire.
Mutual aid isnt a particularly revolutionary either, or at least I havent heard it explained in a way that is. Tmk, mutual aid is about supplying people with the materials they need to survive. But thats just getting by, you need a vanguard capable of seizing power if you want to make use of the support you win from a community by building mutual aid. Otherwise its just a community charity. But the Black Panther Party was able to use the support built from mutual aid to grow their powerbase.
The West needs a theory it can act on and then act on it. I feel like the Western left's problem isnt that it has these idealist liberal sections that need to be purged, in order to do that you need a coherent left in the first place. People are getting way ahead of themselves, but maybe I'm just looking for something to talk about while I cant sleep
Mutual aid isnt a particularly revolutionary either
Not necessarily but that doesn't mean it can't be, for example it is one component of mass line tactics. It definitely has to have an ideological line that combines mutual aid with other forms of revolutionary organizing, forming unions and tenants' organizations while being up front about the ideological underpinnings behind those efforts is a good place to start. As you said there isn't a coherent left in the US and so how to build that from scratch in a way that works within the material conditions present in the imperial core is the real challenge we are faced with.
I agree, I think more centralized versions of mutual aid have been very effect, like the Black Panthers various programs. Mutual aid is part of what fundamentally seperates the Left from the Right, just the idea that everyone should be taken care of.
I think part of making it coherent would involve excorcising the demon of liberalism from the left. I dont like that he uses Destiny as an example of a Western leftist. He isnt, hes a liberal. I dont want people to think of Democrats when they think of the Left. Its disgusting to even consider calling Kysten Sinema or Joe Manchin leftists. A real leftist party would have expelled them, a real communist party :stalin-gun-1:
I agree, I think more centralized versions of mutual aid have been very effect, like the Black Panthers various programs
Yeah the closest thing left of that sort of org in the US is FNB and while some of their chapters are pretty fucking rad (the local chapter is pretty well known for going head to head with the cops) it's a far cry from the militant organization of days past.
I think that doing entryism in orgs like that while trying to foster ties between all these disparate mutual aid groups and more radically minded unions is the place to start. I don't know how else to even begin to transform the western left into something effective but I do think that focusing efforts in those areas will make it more likely to take the energy out of fascist populists, and that's what matters.
We have no idea when things will descend into armed struggle so the best possible course of action aside from making more committed revolutionaries is to just make sure that when the shit goes down more people break left than right.
Some radlib on the SA left subreddit railed against this video because they disagreed that Vietnam had more prominent leftist movements than the west.
They then proceeded to call other users tankies because we supported the communist party in Eswatini/Swaziland, apparently that's "authoritarian"
Either that or some super sectarian person that refuses to support anything
I feel like you'd be a bit better off just reading the article this video is based on. He spends the first half of this video just summarizing the article, and then when he gets to the point where he's actually talking about examples IRL, he starts off with, "during my debate with Destiny..."
I kinda stopped watching after that bc it seemed like some highly online shit that he was using as examples. I don't think this video is truly bad or harmful, but I feel like part of the reason the "American left" isn't useful is because a lot of what's called the "American left" is just online BS. I wish he would have talked about things like Western Marxist parties distancing themselves from Russia, China, Vietnam, etc. because those feel like much more important things in the course of the American left's history. Basically, I wish this video had been less online.
I always ascribed this tendency for purity to liberalism, but I think he's right in saying that it's from our Christian traditions. Fuck, am I a lib? :sadness-abysmal:
Yeah, major :same-picture: energy. Libs (especially radlibs) love to claim to be above christianity, ignoring the massive influence it had on their societies and worldviews.
