The rad libs are not OK. https://newpol.org/issue_post/internationalism-anti-imperialism-and-the-origins-of-campism/
It is like Gaza changes nothing for these 'radical leftists'.
We socialists are humanists. We believe in and support the fight for humanistic values
No. Or maybe you are. That doesn't mean that communists or marxists are. We are materialist and the whole "psudeo left" or "betrayal of leftist values" narrative of the radlibs melts away because we aren't even claiming to be the same ideology/philosophy as them!
We want a world free from oppression and exploitation, one in which all human beings can have a voice and a vote [lol] about their future. We see civil rights and civil liberties—freedom of religion, assembly, speech, and press, freedom from racial and gender oppression—as essential to the fight for socialism and to the creation of a genuine socialist society.
The radlib description of a future socialist society is just the same as present day liberal society. There is no philosophical maturation from the thinking of liberalism. There is no new evolved system/method based in scientific principles that these "socialists" have created. Just a wishlist. Truly, what a future.
Furthermore, legally speaking, most of these liberal rights can be found in most of the liberal societies. So why is this radlib so dissatisfied at all?
The alternative to monarchy and bourgeois republics, the critics argued, was the creation of democratic republics where citizens had the right to elect representatives to a parliament, which necessarily entailed the right to advocate for political parties and candidates, accompanied by civil rights: free speech, free press, freedom of assembly.
So the modern liberal republics are democratic and unbourgeois then? Is that the situation that decades of liberalism have led us to? Or are all of the liberal republics reverting to fascism yet again?
Marx and Engels supported the Chartists’ fight for democracy, seeing the struggle for democracy as the beginning of the fight for socialism. If workers had the right to vote, they would vote for socialists and socialist policies. Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 also made it clear that for him democracy was central to the struggle for socialism.
I have seen people argue that marx would advocate for voting for kamala harris. I have never seen people pretend as if marx wasn't a militant revolution and somehow thought you could vote in socialism.
Yet the revolutionary socialists of the 1910s and 1920s did not then contemplate supporting Germany or Japan against the United States, nor would they entertain the idea of backing England and France against Germany.
And we are about the enter the part where the author compares China and Russia to imperial japan/Germany.
Fucking every single time.
I have never seen people pretend as if marx wasn’t a militant revolution and somehow thought you could vote in socialism.
I present to you: Ubisoft Marx.
Show
The radlib description of a future socialist society is just the same as present day liberal society. There is no philosophical maturation from the thinking of liberalism. There is no new evolved system/method based in scientific principles that these "socialists" have created. Just a wishlist. Truly, what a future.
Furthermore, legally speaking, most of these liberal rights can be found in most of the liberal societies. So why is this radlib so dissatisfied at all?
It's pure liberal idealism intersecting with the material reality that liberal systems don't actually live up to their propaganda, in someone who also uncritically accepts liberal propaganda as true. So you get this contradictory "the American Empire is the true successor of Karl Marx's legacy with all these slow incremental reforms that just like happen because of vibes or something idk why things happen or what material causes are, all I know is it can be better if we all do the magic vooooting ritual with more purity and faith in the system in our hearts!" gibberish right alongside aggressive contempt for the empire's victims and for any socialist project that just did good things and made things better for its people because they didn't follow the American-prescribed system of letting America say whether they could or not.
Yeah the rest if the article just appears to be some "ussr was the bad guys in ww2" and "stalin scary 😨 " shit. I don't care enough to read further.
I saw some
whataboutism about Uyghurs when I skimmed it, hence this slop post. 
spoiler
Yet these same anti-imperialists object when internationalists come to the defense of the Uyghur people of Xinjiang Province, because both the Trump and Biden administrations have said they support the Uyghurs.
The truth is that socialist internationalists who support the Uyghurs do so despite the fact that the U.S. government says it supports them. We do so for our own reasons and while continuing to oppose U.S. imperialism. We do so because the Uyghurs, like the Poles and the Irish in Marx’s time, have a right to self-determination, and shouldn’t be politically, economically, and culturally subjected to China’s authoritarian state and its Han nationalism
These "progressives" love every colour revolution. She's basically doing the work of the US State Department, who recognizes that the Right will support basically any US-Imperialist adventure without much hestiation, but the liberals/nominally Left, like her audience, are more hestitant. That's why the CIA has cultivated a "anti-authoritarian Left" to manufacture consent for their colour revolutions.
You can add Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow! (which Solnit is a regular guest) to this group of Compatible Left which supported the Nato overthrow of Libya, Syria, HK Riots, Uighurs, and slava Ukraini
that oppress national minorities, beat down movements for democracy, and crush workers’ struggles for a better life
Capitalists projecting all their bullshit onto communists example #5901284
That radlib shit is nothing but poorly disguised white nationalism
Yeah but she doesn't use the cultural markers and language of the white nationalists so how could her deeply paternalistic attitude be reflective of racism?
Yes - the white nationalists amongst some "leftists" caused the downfall of the american communist party and the second international
La Botz has been on this one for a while, and refuses to let anything happening in the world alter his views.
2017: Samir Amin’s Russian Campist Anti-Imperialism
2020: Against Campism, for International Working-Class Solidarity
More 2022: The American Left and Ukraine
2023: We Oppose McCarthyism and Apologizing for China
Imagine witnessing the last several years and still making it your top priority to do a "neither Washington nor Moscow" dance.
Neither Washington nor Moscow but somehow always sides with Washington
authoritarianism
movements for democracy
comfortable western-chauvinist shitlib detected
I recently picked up Hope in the Dark but haven't gotten very far. Has Rebecca Solnit always been like this or is this a recent trend?
From reading some of the other comments, seems like she's been like this since about ~2016 at least. She definitely gained a lot of prominence during the first Trump term #resistance amongst rad libs from my vague recollection.
Well boo, I think she's getting kicked to the bottom of the book pile, then.
Counterpoint:
It should jump to the top of your pile. A good Marxist must be able to stand in the tide, and give critical, objective, materialist analysis to a variety of works and situations.
Too many western Marxists froth at the mouth, seeking the purest information possible, and rejecting the consumption of anything else.
All that does is make people into shitty Marxists.
