Yes because we all can afford to move abroad and not try to improve material conditions. Also, not trying in first world countries will just give governments like the US and UK more leeway to oppress AES and third world countries. BE isn’t even apart of an org either.
I think too much fighting on the internet has fried BE's brain, he thinks vaush is an example of western organizations. In reality the vaush types tend to just stay online and never actually get involved with organizing and agitating, kinda like BE himself.
This has always been his pattern. He has some great videos, but he's just way too obsessed with internet fights, and he seemingly can't stop himself from getting into them.
He used to come into the CTH subreddit and try to get into fights with people there. I think he may have gotten banned.
Lmao literally this I was going to share this video here for m'updoots but then the "evidence" he uses for his claim is... Online neoliberal YouTubers doing neoliberal and libertarian things.
Sure the brutal fact is that the western left is currently decaying towards a state of non-existence (at least in my country) but that doesn't imply that it's permanently doomed. And some meaningless videos of stupid fucking neoliberals doing spectacular displays of verbal diarrhea on a platform that is inherently biased towards right wing content absolutely does not constitute a reading on the state of leftist struggle as a whole.
In Germany, Vaushite-like leftists are a sizeable portion of the self-proclaimed far-left.
But tbh they've been declining for the last 10 years or so and have increasingly fucked off to lib parties and organizations... unfortunately they are being replaced by a rising socially conservative left.
BE genuinely has the emotional maturity of a toddler and it massively impacts my ability to take him seriously.
That aside, I fucking loathe this line of thinking, that we should just give up and let shit collapse. Letting the hardline fascists take over a nuclear power totally uncontested is a fucking terrible move no matter how you cut it. The western Left is absolutely in an awful position and has a significant level of opposition to its existence as anything other than performative the "healthcare pls" wing of the Democrats, but there is still a lot of good work that can be done.
In general, any time someone encourages giving up the fight I encourage viewing it with the utmost suspicion. Intentional or not, it's doing the work of the enemy.
I don't think moving is giving up, intrinsically. I think moving to the the peripheries could be good if done on an organizational level to get comrades with money and skills cooperating on projects internationally and boost up places that need it. I think people moving from the US to like Denmark or Canada is basically giving up. I can't really judge people for doing it in the short term simply because telling them they need sacrifice themselves for hope isn't necessarily going to make the world any better.
I don't like turbo-Sakaist analysis of the imperial core though. It seems to take a neolib understanding of GDP, wealth, etc. and then come to the same conclusion as those neolibs that everyone in the imperial core is beyond wealthy because of capitalism and everyone's benefitting from it. It seems Sakaists think that wealth is from unequal exchange and neolibs think it's due to the peripheries not adopting capitalism hard enough. If everything imperial core workers own is by debt and they can lose everything due to injury, economic downturn, landlord greed, etc. at any moment then they're not actually rich. And people are actually smart enough to recognize this, generally, when asked to think about it.
i wanna make clear that i agree with you that moving doesn't necessarily mean giving up, especially under the conditions you're outlining. my ire was more directed at grandiose statements like the one in the title; shit like "THE WESTERN LEFT WILL NEVER LOVE AGAIN" or whatever both flattens the nascent movements that do exist and deserve praise/support and discourages participation (under the logic that "there's no point anyway")
i can stand rude to an extent but he's such an incredibly petty asshole that i just can't bring myself to care about anything he has to say
i remember having watched a few videos of his and having a generally positive opinion before stumbling across him arguing with someone on some subreddit or another (they were disagreeing with some take he had idr), and he came off as such a wildly self-important dickhead that i genuinely wondered if it was someone just using his name on reddit to make him look bad
turns out that's literally just What He's Like.
“I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.” :che-smile:
Che would be brought to tears if he could see Bernie Sanders continue his legacy of noble struggle against European fascism and imperialism.
the "first world" is boomer term, use imperial core/periphery, which holds true even within countries and cities
Core/Periphery is super scalable too. Even a rural county has one. I read this article about how Rancho Tehema in NorCal is being cut off from services since it’s so far outta town.
The third world still sort makes sense if you look at it from the original definition. Many of the original third world countries are continuing to be neutral today, albeit shifting slightly towards Russia and China. Still, it’s understandable that they can’t afford to choose sides given Covid and climate change
this is so fucking synthetic how does he think the "left" in 1st world countries are his coworkers in the stream/videosphere
"where's the videos about" what the fuck are you talking about :think-mark:
"class collaborationist union that improves working conditions for a small group of people and not the third world" motherfucker how does international solidarity happen without goddamn organization? porting unions literally control the movement of the ingredients for war--but instead of advocating they do anti-war activism BE throws his hands up--nothing to be done.
how about some advice on how to break the domestication and collaborationism of unions? somehow i suspect the guy has nothing to say about this
Especially Weird because in the comments he’s acknowledging they’re all entertainment and content providers
if you're "just" an entertainer maybe you shouldnt be giving tactical advice to the 90% of people who cant move to the periphery while keeping an imperial remote income.
theres something terribly funny about a read settlers MTW being a literal expat gentrifier and excusing it by paying extra on taxis
I think I agree with the analysis, that the left in the first world has been effectively neutralized/domesticated, but I don't support his conclusion that this means we should just give up or move to the third world and colonize it in the name of "doing leftism better somewhere else".
I think we need to have hard conversations about how to fix the problem where the left has been neutralized, and how to stop being controlled opposition. I don't know how to get out of this situation, but the first step is to acknowledge it.
He’s just another form of doomer, hiding behind a guise of realism, and producing a bonkers solution (simply join the CPC 5head)
That's A Take to have, I guess. Fair enough, I remember his shit on Israel and Bolivia was pretty good, but I've been out of the loop
as a certified Doomer, it's pretty frustrating trying to talk to lefts trying to beat you over the head with "revolutionary optimism" which in fact is nothing short of Millenarianism.
Pretty disgusting that BE is in the comments of this video downplaying what’s happening with Cop City as “sitting in a forest in Atlanta” and saying “No one outside the us should waste any energy on thinking about them. They sure don’t think about us.” when someone asked for international solidarity regarding it.
Honestly, even if it doesn't directly build towards revolution, acting in ways that hinder the right's growth is crucial in and of itself.
Maoist Third Worldist Empanada
Edit: listened to video. If your image of US "leftists" mostly comes from social media/Vaush, then I understand how he got to this position lol
Edit 2: Also he should've ended by saying "Read Settlers"
If your image of US “leftists” mostly comes from social media/Vaush, then I understand how he got to this position lol
Ironically, BadEmpanada has criticized others for making this same mistake.
Doomer trying to convince you it's all over and the solution is personal lifestyle changes
He doesn't even organize
EVERY FUCKING TIME
:agony-mescaline:
WHY DO WE GIVE THESE PEOPLE ANY AIRTIME
Extremely online :data-laughing: He's right about some of the problems people organizing in the US face if they want to get anywhere (cooption of movements/energy mainly) but it's very clearly skewed by the fact his interactions with the first world left comes in the form of people like :funny-clown-hammer: .
He's right, but for the wrong reasons, the US left won't matter precisely until the security apparatus of western capital is overwhelmed by developments in the Third World, at which point the 17 security agencies and the corporate alliance that sustains it, begins to either breakdown or expand at such an unsustainable rate that it generates "nothing to lose" opposition in the west
The capital flows that create the impoverished conditions of the Third World are filtered back to the west to perpetuate the military industrial complex, once those flows are disrupted, simultaneously opportunities for both the global southern left and the left of the imperial core begin to appear, it has never been either/or, but the primary driver for that dynamic is in the Third World, but that never implies the western left won't have an important role to play once the dominoes begin to fall, even if it's defeated
If there's anything sadder than leftists advancing a strawman of third worldism, it's a "third worldist" unironically embracing that strawman for clicks
some really important praxis has been done in the imperial core (Britain) against arms industries arming israel, and that's just recently.
historically imperial core activists had a huge hand in sabotaging the rightist intervention in the Russian Civil War, and for the pro-USSR wartime policy decisions in WW2. y'all think France and Britain didn't go into Finland against the Soviets purely because of "strategic considerations" and libshit? or were they worried about massive fucking strikes? fuck would the US have given up in Vietnam or Korea when they did without the antiwar movements?
He’s right, but for the wrong reasons, the US left won’t matter precisely until the security apparatus of western capital is overwhelmed by developments in the Third World, at which point the 17 security agencies and the corporate alliance that sustains it, begins to either breakdown or expand at such an unsustainable rate that it generates “nothing to lose” opposition in the west
There's a reason why domestic counterinsurgency really kicked off when the US withdrew from Vietnam after getting owned too many times by the Viet Minh. By cutting their loses and tactically retreating, the US was able to more focus on crushing domestic unrest. The reverse is true. An empire that overextends or is caught up with inter-imperialist war loses their grip on their populace. The 1905 revolution happened at the same time as the Russo-Japanese war and the 1917 revolutions happened at the same time as World War I.
To expect a socialist revolution to occur in a bourgeois state build from the ground up as a bourgeois state without a shred of noncapitalist history, be it feudal or socialist, and without help from the outside, be it socialist savior or imperialist rival, is complete madness.
Just watch stuff on his main channel, which is all pretty good IIRC. The 2nd channel is 99% online slapfights.
The only time someone in the first world has correctly adhered to the principles of Third Worldism is when those Swedes robbed a bunch of banks and sent the money to arm revolutionary groups in the third world
There was the American who fought with Cubans during the revolution and denounced his citizenship. Then hen he realized the revolutionaries were unironic communists, got upset, joined the CIA and begged for his citizenship back in exchange for sabotage
