not voting for trump but low key hope biden doesnt win so the material conditions of a failing America will be on full display
not voting for trump but low key hope biden doesnt win so the material conditions of a failing America will be on full display
This might get me sent to the GULAG, but:
I secretly worry that Marxism has a fatal flaw in it somewhere that ONLY renders it appealing to the middle classes of developed countries, rather than the working classes of developed countries. For example, neither the US nor UK have meaningful communist parties (how many members does the largest communist party in Britain boast, like 5k members?). Even Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves were all middle class or higher.
A related worry I have is that most American leftists are urban college-educated middle-class, they inherently look down on 'Trump country' and Trump supporters even if they don't vocalize it, and they have no meaningful strategy/interest in reaching out to the working class who lives paycheck-to-paycheck. I admit this is a right-wing talking point, but I can't shake the feeling that it contains a kernel of truth.
A final worry I have: The leftist media that emerged after 2008 is dominated by Brooklyn hipsters and academics who have zero chance of organizing a working class movement.
I'm probably wrong on most of these, so I'll happily turn myself in to the proper re-education authorities as needed.
Good news, friend: it’s also wildly appealing in developing countries.
So yeah, pretty much every demographic other than the one that Marx predicted. Wild, huh?
I’m partial to a Gramscian explanation. In the imperial core, the working class haven’t ever won a war of position, ie propaganda, which heavily limits their ability to win wars of manoeuvre.
Where can one read more on this?
This blog seems to have some stuff
Thanks for the resource. The "Buttigieg" citations scattered throughout are deeply triggering though, lol.
It's Pete's dad, he was an actual Marxist. Shame Pete didn't live up to his farthers revolutionary potential and became a huge lib.
Wasn’t Harris’ dad also one?
Yes lol, I remember him calling Kamala out when she lied about listening to Snoop Dogg and smoking weed.
Her dad roasted her more thoroughly than any campaign competitors.
That's because she was never a real threat. After that "I was that girl" speech against Biden she faded into obscurity after her cop record and general shittiness was revealed
I think it's a combination of that and colonial superprofits keeping most workers in the imperial core just a little bit too comfortable for them to risk it all in a revolution.
That's not to say that the labor aristocracy wouldn't be better off materially under socialism; it's just that the circumstances aren't quite dire enough to motivate a direct revolutionary conflict with the imperialist state.
This video from Hakim on the subject is really good and offers a tangible response to the problem for parties in the core (i.e., support third world revolutionary movements as a priority):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lDZaKjfs4E
But yeah, also propaganda.
Hakim is really good
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Exactly. The Chinese Communist party was an unknown nothing before it made itself known through deed. Listen to the people and work with them directly. You don't make revolution by sitting around on the internet trying to spread communist ideas to people and waiting until everyone is on our side, that's how libs do elections. The western lib brainworm burrows deep into all political understanding.
At the same time, expect resistance and repression. Another part of that lib brainworm tells you that you are free. How free was the civil rights movement? Repression doesn't mean defeat though.
Uhh plenty of African Marxists or Marxist adjacent politicians have existed. Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, etc. Also in South America have had actual democratic socialists, like Evo Morales and José Mujica, be very popular and take power. It's just in the west the propaganda is so strong that the working class won't consider communism because CIA propaganda.
I totally agree with you, my comment wasn't meant to erase Marxists outside America. My concern was that Marx argued socialism would emerge out of a proletarian revolution located where capitalism is the most developed (i.e. the Imperial core), but in reality, the proletariat of the imperialist core tends to be reactionary. And I agree that propaganda is probably part of the reason, along with the imperialists spoils mentioned by another commenter.
Yeah "capitalist realism" has definitely taken over most of the imperial core (that is the view that capitalism is the only system that can function in the modern world and we have to work within it to solve our problems). I highly recommend reading Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. It's a short book, only 90 pages, but very insightful and cool.
I think part of your confusion is considering white working class people from imperialist countries to be a part of a vanguard. they're not. they can't and never will be. if you start looking to the countries getting fucked over by the imperialists, you'll start finding a lot of revolutionary marxists.
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The insistence on adhering to 100+ year old texts, prestige-capping of newer works, and especially the insistence on using 100+ year old definitions of words despite 100+ years of language drift makes Marxism feel more like the domain of a bunch of know-it-all pedants who want something to lord over others than like a revolutionary movement focused on recruiting as many people as possible to the cause.
A serious movement focused on getting shit done would have rewritten the most popular works a dozen times by now.
Marxism was forced to retreat into the universities because by its own admission, it is not a threat there. In a way it was meaningless for Marxists to be organizing in the US from 1950 to 2000 (at least in white communities) because white workers were the labor aristocracy that Lenin was able to predict would arise. Materially speaking it would be impossible for them to build an anti-imperialist movement. Some black groups tried to organize, but without the support of white workers it was snuffed by the feds (with the support of many white workers). This is changing though as the contradictions are heightened and the labor aristocracy is slowly being returned to the status of proletariat. We're in a transitional phase now, akin to the Russian Empire of the 1890s (though obviously quite different at the same time). Socialists are broadly discussing and trying to figure out how to build organizations and reach out to normal people. We are testing different strategies and ideas, and within socialist groups (such as the book clubs of the last century), we are discussing. Marx has already laid out our next step.
"It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. "
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