- cross-posted to:
- socialistra@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- socialistra@midwest.social
content warning: video discusses racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, hate crimes, police violence, fascism, holocaust
Video is about the rise of fascism in modern times.
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Nice his alt-right playbook series was really instrumental in my understanding of fascism and tangentially becoming a communist.
I remember one of the videos where he ended it saying "If you want to fight fascism, move left"
That really resonated with me.
Yep was watching him and Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, and some leftist media critics like Hbomb and Renegade Cut and as I came to the realization that the people I found had the most insightful analysis were at least some flavor of Marxist or anarchist, I started to realize so much about my own ideology that I had been lacking the language and vocabulary to articulate. Then I stumbled across the Chapo podcast ironically through the youtube algorithm, they were mercilessly shitting on Hillary and Obama but obviously not in the same way or for the same reasons that chuds do and I started realizing I needed to completely reeducate myself politically.
When we overthrow capitalism and implement real global communism EJ will be making communist education kids shows like an even more based version of Sesame Street.
I, too, needed the labor theory of value explained to me with hand puppets. What can i say, it worked and got me to read Luxemburg and Lenin and things like that.
tbh when he brings up the alt right this video suddenly feels like it's about six years old. It's an interesting video about how mainstream arguments operate within the framework of modern America, but are the "alt right" even relevant anymore?
It’s a continuation of an old series. The brand of the alt right is dead, but the figures are still around and have been either mainstreamed or memory holed depending on who you’re talking about
they're incorporated into mainstream republicans aren't they?
Random dig at communism towards the end, but otherwise a decent video especially for clueless well-meaning libs.
He "came out" as anarchist sometime last year AFAIR, and he definitely has his share of lib brainworms. But i must admit that this vid may very well be the most consistent, clearsighted takedown of the role marginalized people play in US politics i've ever seen from somebody who isn't a communist.
People should still read Settlers afterwards for the full picture, ofc.
Yeah I cringed a little too. It isn't necessarily a comment on communism, just a statement that the USSR wasn't ultimately defeated on the military battlefield. I'm not sure what point he was trying to make? That the Vietnam war didn't count? That communism wasn't a military threat to white supremacy?
I’m not sure what point he was trying to make?
As far as i understood it, the point was that nazis need marginalized groups as enemies because ideologies wax and wane in popularity. Gorbachev shows that you can stop being a communist, but you cannot stop being black. The 00s show that the imperialist and fascist obsession with communism can be replaced with other designated enemies like "political islam" when geopolitics shift and different battlegrounds for imperialist projects become more important.
There's a lot of cringe attached to that section, but i see where he's coming from. OFC he should highlight more how integral anticommunism is to fascism, that's a miss there. When nazis hate me for being a commie, that's obviously wrong, that's obviously threatening, that's obviously a huge part of why the USA has spent 75 years propping up fascists all over the world - but at the end of the day, being persecuted by anticommunists means that i get persecuted for a choice i've made, for a deliberate engagement on the political playing field, for taking a side out of my own volition. Yes, it's the correct side, unlike the fascist one, but like the fascist one, it means that i'm an active agent in political struggle. I chose this.
I didn't choose to be trans. It's who i am, i can't change this without going back into repression and ultimately destroying myself, making myself wither like a plant that is fully deprived of sunlight and water. And when i encounter transphobia, it's personal, it hits closer to home than when i encounter anticommunism. I get reminded that there are people who want to exterminate me not for what i think and for how i act based on these thoughts and beliefs, but for how i was born, for how i am. For absolutely no fault of my own.
And that difference is at the very core message of this video: Marginalized groups (as merely involuntary members of that marginalized group, not as activists for their own rights) aren't players in this game. We're the ball. Libs who say trans rights way too often say this just because professing performative support for me is a way for them to trigger chuds and feel superior to them. They do not really care about me and most of them they know next to nothing about what it means to exist as a trans person and which struggles we face apart from the GOP really hating us. Hell, even with other leftists, i often feel as if they only respect me as long as i'm a trans comrade and that their support for trans causes falters as soon as the trans person in question is very obviously a lib and does a public liberalism. We are not viewed as full people in the same way white cishet able bodied culturally christian alochthonous dudes are, the people the vid refers to as "the everyman". We are reduced to tokens on a playing field and have to actively struggle to have any amount of agency in that game, even within progressive circles.
This ties directly into the main takeaway from this video, that you cannot have leftist politics without identity politics. That only focussing on class and saying "we're all people, let's completely ignore identity politics" is a deeply exclusionary message that will weaken and wreck our movement because it drives what are theoretically the most revolutionary strata of society away from a revolutionary movement.
Unrelated to the comment, which is great btw,
alochthonous
What does this mean? "non-native american"?
"non-native", as in descendant of more or less recent immigrants. The opposite is authochtonous, which means native and was the word i actually wanted to use - i'm Euro, so being a mayo means being native, not being a settler. I guess it's mostly superfluous, Amerikans today regard all white citizens as part of the in-group, but Euros are weird in that regard and it makes some sense to differentiate between the native white population and especially eastern or southern white immigrants.
"non-native", as in descendant of more or less recent immigrants. The opposite is authochtonous, which means native and was the word i actually wanted to use - i'm Euro, so being a mayo means being native, not being a settler. I guess it's mostly superfluous, Amerikans today regard all white citizens as part of the in-group, but Euros are weird in that regard and it makes some sense to differentiate between the native white population and especially eastern or southern white immigrants.
