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We should look to Lenin. Pundits do very very little for the working class. Unless we're out there building class consciousness in our communities (which I know many here are!), nothing will come of all the coming pain.
Lenin said the three primary struggles: the economic struggle (unionizing, getting better pay, safety, reducing working hours, etc.), the political struggle (socialists in parliament, building the party), and the theoretical struggle (wider spread understanding of Marx but also building on the work he left) are all necessary and not one can be privileged over the others for socialism to succeed. Those basics haven't changed, we still need all three.
You're right, but unfortunately, I don't think we have any of the 3 right now. I wasn't against punditry, but I'm against opportunistic punditry. I wouldn't be so fast to lay that claim on people like Virgil and Bri just yet, but I don't feel like they've been overtly pushing Marxism (admittedly haven't listened in a few months though). Rashida Tlaib is also the only house member other than Tulsi to vote nay on the stimulus/omnibus bill. Now there's certainly a process to all this and maybe this is all ramping up to more overtly ML ideas being pushed in public, but the popular and mainstream left feel very superficial atm. We need hard stances and loud overt Marxists in positions of power. I'm not in a position to judge the elected left, but Sanders endorsing Biden and AOC voting for the stimulus bill and continually giving in to capital isn't the answer.
Good read. I agree, local organization, thus entry into local politics, is one of the only avenues available to the left constructing a mass movement with the kind of resiliency and influence necessary to bring the fight to the national stage.
He took that tweet between jimmy and Matt stoller out of context, i saw the whole stream, matt stoller wasn't arguing against Force the vote, but was acting as a devil's advocate arguing the progressives point that this would risk their seats on committees. Jimmy then for comedic effect yelled "no one fucking voted for progressives to get them on some fucking committee", some people who have only see the small clip took it out of context and claimed jimmy was "being mean again" though it was clearly set up as a bit, and matt has been on Jimmy's show many times. The tweet was aimed at this group to explain that it was simply a comedic bit during a discussion. Both Matt and Jimmy are arguing for ForceTheVote, Yasha is pretending they are on each side of the argument and it's all "performative".
I like Yasha's takes in general, but this feels disingenuous, and him pretending to be above it all by just calling it just "performative".
I like the continual idea that your 5$ subscription to a politics podcast is... idk. Like "Oh their podcast makes money! this is bad!". Like the fuck do you want, dude? People spend 5$ a month to listen to the funny people talk shit about their political enemies. I'm sure we could do something else with our five dollars but what, excatly, do you want?
Well, if they put excess money in either mutual funds or property, one can easily see where they will be in 10 years.
Slight amendment: I’m explicitly talking about super popular podcasts, not that donating five bucks to small podcasters is bad, for example.
Correct take. The only thing worse than hyper-fixating on the presidential race is hyper-fixating on a single congresswoman who doesn't even represent you.
No one is arguing that local politics don't matter.
The idea is that a vote like force the vote could help galvanize local politics.
It all needs to be done
