antiwork, sigmarxism, genzedong, and gamingcirclejerk all seem like good spots too
Counterpoint there’s also been Lenin and Marx posting. Though yeah there are a lot of libs but I think they might be reachable
I don’t know what is up.
wouldn't surprise me if LSC is the subject of astroturfing attempts to make sure the radlibs stay libs instead of getting fully radicalized
LSC turned trash since shortly before the 2016 election, and hasn't gotten any better since.
PresidentialRaceMemes is pretty great the mods are very chill and there's enough of a leftist presence to push some good points
Is PRM back to being decent? Mods there seemed pretty hostile to leftists after the admin takeover.
r/antiwork is a great place to radicalize folks, it's pretty socialist friendly as it is. I actually found r/CTH through cross posts there.
Libs will not "wake up" because capitalist imperialism benfits them.
A lib is just an imperialist with a bad conscience.
werelib! werelib? there. what? there lib. there warcriminal.
I went from conservative teenager in the early 2000s to a Ron Paul libertarian to socialist by 2010-11. Chris Hedges and Jeremy Scahill radicalized me and I skipped right over a lib phase
Similar. Grew up in a right wing household. Went libertarian because it was the closest ideology I knew of to what I believed. Quickly learned how awful libertarians were and how the invisible hand doesn't actually exist. Self identified as "apolitical" but was actually somewhere on the bottom left of the political compass for a while, with Orwell and Chomsky to thank for that. Then found Marx.
I'm proud to say I never really was. My bedroom decorations when I was a kid included a decorative chairman Mao plate and a Soviet flag.
The closest I got to being a lib was a phase I went through with anarchism. My dad was a lib and I remember one time when I was kid him freaking out because I stood my ground in saying that I wasn't proud to be Canadian.
Ultimately you are right, some libs stop being libs, but it's never going to be enough as long as the material conditions support them being libs. I think it's anti Marxist to rely on people's good will to change, so I think the primary focus should be on anti imperialism and supporting the third world proletariat in resisting Western imperialism in any way possible.
If third world people can resist imperialism in a significant way, material conditions will change in a way that heightens contradiction dramatically in the west and open up the room for positive change. But as long as the west continues to enslave most of the world, the majority will go along with it.
It's like recycling. Recycling is the perfect metaphor for modern liberalism. They will recycle to pay themselves on the back, but heave to centrism the minute a policy is suggested that means the will need to take the bus to work.
Voting for the harm reduction candidate and making a big deal out of it is the recycling of politics.
Libs don't have a "bad conscience" about imperialism whatsoever, they think it's good, just go on r/neoliberal
Progressive neolibs unironically believe exploitative and extractive forms of "free trade" is the most efficient way to lift developing nations out of poverty, and that they follow "evidence-based policy" (by which they mean "empirical" studies done by international-development and trade economists, funded by NGOs and running econometric regressions using e.g. World Bank data). If you condemn this approach to solving world poverty, they may straight up ask you, "why don't you care about the global poor?" because they don't have the imagination needed to envision an alternative trade system that's actually equitable for all people regardless of nationality instead of just being a Pareto improvement. These neolibs will also claim credit for the rapid rise in the PRC's living standards (because of all the western capital invested in the late 20th century) despite the PRC's economy having features of central planning with partially publicly-owned companies while most other developing countries to receive such investment have had the Chicago-boy austerity and privatization treatment forced onto them by one of the IMF, World Bank, or WTO with significantly less success, the same sort of schemes which they bitterly oppose when proposed by Republicans, Tories, etc. in their own countries. When they eventually notice this contradiction they either stop being progressive or they stop being neoliberals.
Someone got a screenshot of one of my posts on r/neoliberal a bit back lmao
unfortunately, the r/dsa libs are not taking to it, not one bit. all the top posts are shitting on it, and all the comments supporting it are so downvoted RES has them collapsed by default.
The people still in DSA who haven't begun gravitating towards something like the Hawkins or La Riva campaigns or even the MPP by now are going to get sucked completely into the Democratic Party by 2022, and would have already if not for the massive leftward lurch in consciousness this year in the wake of an extremely visibly ratfucked Dem primary. The die-hard Harringtonites who somehow still refuse to learn after the 2020 primary season are worse than useless at this point. Socialists committed to forming an independent left coalition and party to externally challenge the Dems with should build and sustain a leftward pole of attraction to pull the Harringtonites' followers away from them, because the DSA sure as hell isn't gonna purge them from their ranks anytime soon.
what you are saying might make sense if we had a multi-party parliamentary system of the kind marx wrote about when he encouraged a party independent from the social democrats. instead, we have a two-party presidential system. all you can do is send one party the way of the whigs and slap a new name above the door, with mostly the same electorate. it's reforming democrats, either way you look at it. i get it, i hate democrats too. but pursuing an electoral dead-ending ain't the answer. better to ignore elections entirely and do other political work than some kind of MPP gen-x'er participation trophy project. greens are basically the same.
Have you read this? Hawkins wrote this piece back in 2018 and it hasn't aged at all. It includes an analysis of the weaknesses of the Socialist and Green Parties, which Hawkins has dual membership in.
https://isreview.org/issue/107/case-independent-left-party
The ecosocialist wing of the Greens running Hawkins and Walker this year (which appears to be their left wing, and which refuses to cross the class line like Bernie and the DSA entryists, afaik) wants to take this seriously.
The Dems are unreformable from the inside, that much should be obvious to everyone by now. The path that turns the Dems into a mostly-irrelevant party like the Whigs or UK Lib Dems, however, that might be worth pursuing if we can actually start building an external workers' party that transcends the limitations of the Greens or the MPP or PSL by themselves. This means bottom-up organizing beyond the scope of electoral politics (in which case even those currently ignoring elections altogether can still play a role in this base-building process), reinstating dues-paying membership-based party structures, and building a sufficient base among the working class to eventually form a united-front coalition capable of challenging the artificial memberless "state party" structure that was used to ratfuck and neuter the Greens and SP.
Took the time read this, I have to admit, I am a little surprised by how much Hawkins seems to understand the structural issues at work electorally and historically. He's not someone I know much about, but seeing his analysis, I find myself mostly agreeing, but disagreeing to some extent on the prescriptive parts. I don't know what his political views are, it reads like he is a Democratic Socialist, which makes his position understandable. If you believe that electoral methods are the primary driver for socialism, then trying to "whig" the Democrats makes more sense. I am not a DemSoc, I think we need revolutionary socialism. I am supportive of what the DemSocs are trying to do, but I think the bourgeois state is incredibly constrained. We might make some gains there, but I ultimately feel like it's like playing with monopoly money in terms of the eventual goal of communism, it's more of a side-gig. So to me, whether you have DemSocs as an independent caucus elected on a Democratic ballot line, or an independent party elected on their own ballot line makes no difference. Inasmuch as you can be "independent" with only a handful of seats -- you still mostly have to be in a coaliting with Democrats, if nothing else to keep the GOP from taking us back to the dark ages.
I don't see how you change the "state party" situation without changing election law in 50 states, which would mean you'd have to be able to move policy, and we can't. So I agree with him about having a separate "member org" that basically what the DSA is doing. But it seems like he is saying, you need that, but it also needs to have a "state party" counterparty that maintains a ballot line, like the SPA. I just don't think it will be a successful model. What do you gain over just winning Dem primaries, which is a much more realistic path to get elected? Nothing requires you to work with (rather than against) other Democrats. You could even switch parties after being elected. There is no formal relationship between the ballot line and holding office. There is no formal "supply and confidence" like a parliamentary system. There is no "government" formed really, it's just a herd of cats.
My preferred model would be to create a true socialist caucus, which could be not only in Congress, but also in the state and local governments. Our federal system doesn't see much of that kind of political crossover outside of Republican and Democrat, but it would certainly be possible to do it. You would just need some buy-in to the idea for a few key players -- is Sanders would form such an org, or maybe the "Squad" then you get the state legislators like Lee Carter and Julia Salazar, and then on down to local officials like the six DSA members on the Chicago city council, etc. While they have practically zero in common in terms of their role in government, they ought to formally associate in a caucus and organize together, and through the DSA in coalition with other orgs. That is the kind of "party within a party" model that I think would work better than trying to get a new ballot line.
That said, I think everything that has been tried and failed before, is worth reconsidering. Technology has dramatically changed individual communication and democratized mass communication, and how people can do organizing. I feel like the left hasn't even begun to tap into the possibilities yet. Bernie's much-vaunted email list and fundraising numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we got chapo.chat put together in a matter of weeks, just out of an addiction to shitposting! Imagine if we were actually trying to do serious political work.
Is this post talking about well-meaning libs who don't know better or twitter/actual liberals? Liberalism is a capitalist ideology, and I wonder if the actual liberals will ever side with us even if they see their institutions failing. They'll always side with the capitalist system, and will rather die with the ship. Maybe we can see radicalization from well-meaning libs. If we do want to see radicalization from libs though, we need to be their to fill their void from institutional failure with leftist/socialist solutions. A lot of them with good material conditions would also probably stay silent during a descent to fascism as well.
It's definitely extremely hard, especially seeing the systematic change we want in the Imperial Core.
Liberalism is capitalist ideology but most actually existing libs don't have a conscious ideology. Many can be won over, especially if they're working class libs.
I mean I would bet like 90% of us here were libs (or worse) at one point.
No one is born a fully-formed Marxist. Even the red-diaper babies had to be taught. The continuation of this period of heightened crisis is going to cause more working-class (and some downwardly-mobile professional) libs to confront the contradictions head-on, acknowledge the limitations of reformism, realize they can't play by the capitalists' rules, and start drawing revolutionary conclusions. Those of us who radicalized in 2016-2017 drew these conclusions with less information and less evidence against a reformist or social-democratic approach than we have now, so those who were blinded or willfully blind then may now have been made to see. We can and must be ready to point them in the correct direction, towards forging a path to revolutionary socialism and away from the traps and pitfalls of opportunism, ultraleftism, and fascism.
No one is born a fully-formed Marxist
Everyone is born a scientist, it's only through years of indoctrination that children stop asking questions and using their eyes and ears.
Those of us who radicalized in 2016-2017
"the traps and pitfalls of opportunism, ultraleftism"
liberals are beyond parody lmao, you literally just learned about some a few years ago and think you're Lenin
yeah, that's fair. most people have no idea what their ideology is or they're politics are a mess. Well-meaning libs and working class libs who were never exposed to any other proper ideology is our best shot, at least for a decent left-wing opposition.
Yeah no one has read the liberal thinkers that inform liberalism, they just get it through osmosis in the community. Even if you do poli sci in University, unless you study American Political Development, you get a dog shit history of liberalism too. Modern liberalism as an ideology is entirely an invention of the 30s to 50s to give a set of ideas that supported capitalism, and it threw out 100 years of established republican social analysis to do so because if you stick with it, you become socialist.
LMAO. Why did no one tell me I got posted? Can I cash this in?
And it wasn't even an effort-post so much as spur of the moment thinking :( ah well.
