Been enjoying antifada recently, nice to just have Jamie and Sean shooting the shit
Yeah, it's good their finally comfortable with the old dynamic. Idk how closely you follow the Antifada or MR, but Jamie and Sean were married and got divorced last fall. So there was a bit of awkwardness and as a result we hadn't had them doing pods together as much for a while.
Ya I remember the episode where they announced it :/ good to have em back recording!
Ugh their characterizations of modern ML orgs is absolute cringe. No serious party is larping for the creation of a red army and waging conventional warfare. They seem to not understand mass line being standard these days as well. They joke about libs seeing them as crazy/being cartoonishly ignorant about what they believe, and then go on to do the same to MLs. The rest of the episode isn't bad, just wish they wouldn't straw man the fuck out of MLs as everything they say continues to ring truer by the day.
Well I am for sure shocked that leftcoms would make a disingenuous critique of MLs. I also love that Jamie, who 6 months ago was still calling herself a baby Marxist, now has the confidence to speak so authoritatively on Marxist revolutionary theory.
They are, but most of their points they'd find that ML parties agree and can speak to many of the things they believe they disagree on. Listening to this episode felt like theyd never heard a non-larpy ML perspective and operational strategy in the US, tough to hear from a podcast that 90% of the time is on point.
I cringed so hard when they advocated for "Socialism from below"
I mean a charitable interpretation of what they meant could be something like mass line, which is an ML/MLM concept that they could have discovered existing as a cornerstone to the popular orgs in 15 minutes of research. Somehow they think evil ML parties don't see the same problem they do (uhhhh we have foundational texts on all the forces of contradiction they claim we don't) and that we're blinded in the face of our own "structurally inherent authoritarianism" 🙄🙄🙄
Exactly. ML had real limitations which lead to the development of Trotskyism (I'm interpreting this widely to include Hal Draper and his "Socialism from below" as well as Movementism in general) and Maoism (also interpreting this widely) as critiques of the Soviet Union. The past 50 years have shown that Maoism is by far the superior line of revolutionary theory. It's also not a coincidence that Mao influenced Galula, the French theorist of counter-insurgency warfare. The value of Mao as a theorist of revolutionary warfare in the paradigm of insurgency and counterinsurgency cannot be understated.