A dude getting drunk/high and going on tangents after realizing he took himself too seriously for years isn't something you deeply analyze
Fair enough. I enjoy listening to Matt's rants, but I don't try to over-think it and treat Matt as some sort of shaman like the folks at r/acidmarxism tend to do.
religion is bad, Actually, and a dead end. even his marxism-buddhism BS. less of that stuff and more marxism please. also he's wrong about china but comes to the correct position (that china is worth defending against libs and fascists) so i guess i can't get him on that one. everything else is pretty good imo
largely agree with him most of the time especially on domestic issues, but I think he doesn't give enough credit to the communist project in China and has a distorted view of Stalin
Listening to the one he posted to YT now. Matt's reading of current objective conditions and the required material trajectory towards the rise of a workers' third party seems broadly correct (Dems going the way of the Whigs under the weight of their own contradictions, the future workers' party cadres rooted among logistics/healthcare/manufacturing workers with shared experience, etc.), but he's much too pessimistic about the subjective factor and can't quite translate this trajectory into what the US left's concrete next steps should be, because his imagination is constrained by exogenous events not having happened yet.
Matt pretty much completely wrote off the potential of existing independent socialists (Greens, PSL) to help facilitate the bottom-up growth of a much larger workers' party, and seems convinced that pretty much everyone in the US has lumpen characteristics because of their social alienation, hyper-atomized lived experiences, and captivity to ideology and spectacle rooted in historical settler-colonial conditions. Wouldn't this make the basic foundational tasks of party-building, coalition-building, and publishing agitprop all the more important? If we're going to mature past these awful "pringles in a tube" conditions, it'll be because we organized in preparation for future exogenous shocks by educating our cadres, forming social bonds with local activists/coworkers/IRL comrades, participating in solidarity with social and economic justice campaigns, raising an uncompromised Marxist banner the entire time.
The whole point of scientific socialism is to find ways to push forward from existing conditions and responding to them accordingly, but Matt spends the bulk of his time explaining the various ways in which conditions are too hostile instead of applying theory to search for solutions and workarounds, and pointing the way forward for Chapo's large audience.
"Some weird kid steeped up to his eyeballs in Stalin memes who got mad at his parents because they didn't get him a mosin nagant for christmas still understands politics better than politicians."
He said something along those lines once and I laughed really hard.
https://youtu.be/Wo9VBJ8jkhI?t=2641
Aside from the interview at the start of the episode, the surrounding context is hella dated and cringe in hindsight, but it was a great point. Also one of the few comments on the show which reflected highly on us (I do believe it was pointed directly at the subreddit).
I agree with his view that politics has no material basis to it anymore. The rest is just funny rambling.
I think I mostly agree with his domestic views, especially with his most recent stuff about how party divides will happen. With how since they don't vary much economically, most of the divides will come down to cultural lines
For all of Matt's talk on materialism, he engages in more idealism than not
