Why must the western left just constantly fucking fight among itself rather than ACTUALLY DOING SHIT.
Go support the local unions that are striking near by. Help them connect with your workplace so you can create a network. Find people struggling with rising food prices or houselessness or drug addiction and FUCKING HELP THEM.
They aren't leftists, they've adopted the affect of leftism, not because of a belief in materialist philosophy, or an anarchist philosophy rooted in opposition to hierarchy (though many still call themselves anarchists). They're bored, Western liberals looking for something to argue about online, attaching themselves to the ruling class approved, sanitized list of historical "good guys" because, like all liberals, they fear the moral judgement of future generations more than they want to create a better world for them.
They're just posters, all of the metapolitics on the internet, political compass shit, it only describes a liberal understanding of politics. It isn't actual politics in any form. Posting isn't important.
Okay, how do we change someone’s mind in person when the unimportant posting has already beat us to the punch and filled their subconscious with garbage data?
To the extent that individual opinions matter in a society where working class power has been totally annihilated, just talking to people, sharing the experiences of people who lived through socialist revolutions can be very moving to liberals. My reevaluation of Mao from decades of being told he was a monster came from the teary-eyed testimonies of women sold as chattel to landlords in their teens talking about how the communists liberated them, made them equal, and taught them to read.
Nah. Capitalism is the ocean we all live in but we don't all live at the same point in the water column.
Think of it like this: Marx once compared independent farmers to "potatoes in a sack" because each farm can be mostly self-sufficient, which means they only have the flimsiest interests in common. Cut the sack, resolve those interests, and they all fall apart.
Today most Americans are even more atomized than those farmer potatoes. Most of us aren't in unions, work in either precarious gig jobs or in inhetently individualistic office cultures, are catered to with personalized entertainment options, and move around constantly chasing cheaper rent or better jobs. We're worse than potatoes in a sack, we're chips in a bag.
Not firm enough. Real-world organization comes from workplaces because you have a group of people with similar interests who see each other every day, as capitalism has become more atomized the conditions required to form those kinds of orgs have become more and more rare.
College campuses are the next best thing, but we've seen pretty conclusively by this point that college kids can't organize for shit either. I think the only hope of radical left wing organization in America is a militant group forming in an Amazon warehouse or Wal Mart or something like that.
American capitalism (imperialism) probably helps like half the people that makeup that subreddit and this website
Probably moreso the people from r/196 but you get the point; Americans aren't suffering enough to truly care about capitalism to do anything serious about it
Why must the western left just constantly fucking fight among itself rather than ACTUALLY DOING SHIT.
Go support the local unions that are striking near by. Help them connect with your workplace so you can create a network. Find people struggling with rising food prices or houselessness or drug addiction and FUCKING HELP THEM.
They aren't leftists, they've adopted the affect of leftism, not because of a belief in materialist philosophy, or an anarchist philosophy rooted in opposition to hierarchy (though many still call themselves anarchists). They're bored, Western liberals looking for something to argue about online, attaching themselves to the ruling class approved, sanitized list of historical "good guys" because, like all liberals, they fear the moral judgement of future generations more than they want to create a better world for them.
What is to be done, then? Let them spiral downwards into the crypto-fash they really are? It's not as if they'd ever listen to us.
They're just posters, all of the metapolitics on the internet, political compass shit, it only describes a liberal understanding of politics. It isn't actual politics in any form. Posting isn't important.
Okay, how do we change someone’s mind in person when the unimportant posting has already beat us to the punch and filled their subconscious with garbage data?
To the extent that individual opinions matter in a society where working class power has been totally annihilated, just talking to people, sharing the experiences of people who lived through socialist revolutions can be very moving to liberals. My reevaluation of Mao from decades of being told he was a monster came from the teary-eyed testimonies of women sold as chattel to landlords in their teens talking about how the communists liberated them, made them equal, and taught them to read.
Reality, in other words, has a leftist bias?
Because there's nothing tying us together materially, is the short answer. There's no economic terra firma we can all stand on together.
Capitalism?
Nah. Capitalism is the ocean we all live in but we don't all live at the same point in the water column.
Think of it like this: Marx once compared independent farmers to "potatoes in a sack" because each farm can be mostly self-sufficient, which means they only have the flimsiest interests in common. Cut the sack, resolve those interests, and they all fall apart.
Today most Americans are even more atomized than those farmer potatoes. Most of us aren't in unions, work in either precarious gig jobs or in inhetently individualistic office cultures, are catered to with personalized entertainment options, and move around constantly chasing cheaper rent or better jobs. We're worse than potatoes in a sack, we're chips in a bag.
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Not firm enough. Real-world organization comes from workplaces because you have a group of people with similar interests who see each other every day, as capitalism has become more atomized the conditions required to form those kinds of orgs have become more and more rare.
College campuses are the next best thing, but we've seen pretty conclusively by this point that college kids can't organize for shit either. I think the only hope of radical left wing organization in America is a militant group forming in an Amazon warehouse or Wal Mart or something like that.
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American capitalism (imperialism) probably helps like half the people that makeup that subreddit and this website
Probably moreso the people from r/196 but you get the point; Americans aren't suffering enough to truly care about capitalism to do anything serious about it
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Take the sakaipill
they aren't the "western left", they are children
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