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.
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.
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