Lowkey Isekai title aside, do youze think the left can continue its revival?
It certainly feels like this past year is real Empire Strikes Back territory with the defeat of Sanders, Corbyn, and a resurgence of suppression and disorientation of nascent left movements in the west. France is still defiant, but as Mark Fisher would explain and lament, they're fighting to keep their concessions in the narrative of capitalist realism, and not to change the world.
I do see some hope in the light of the Floyd protests + Covid causing state and capitalist failures to immiserate people of their savings and livelihoods, but because workers are so disciplined against collective action or demands beyond minor breadcrumbs, it seems that any progress here has stalled.
Obviously the forces of counterrevolution are quite adept at portraying their paper tiger as nigh-omnipotent and omniscient, and even if the tiger does have claws and teeth, those massive protests really showed its capacity can only take so much.
This site is way to pessimistic. Just because everyone isn't an ML in the US doesn't mean we are gone. Lenin and Mao fought for years before they got lucky once.
I feel ya. However, we can't give up. We got a world to win. We might be last, we might never see it in our lives. I'm not giving up.
Not to mention that psychological depression is at an all time high, and I would wager that understanding how Capitalism alienates all proles could make one more likely to feel that way.
I will be reposting this comment until morale improves. Pin this shit to the front page.
The left is very very small in the US. We have no organized left based political party.
Let's be real about Corbyn; he was a weak leader who refused to purge his party of all Blairites when they kept attacking his character publicly and threatening to move to another party. He should've told them to go for it, and then purged them.
As for Sanders; he did a good job with grassroots and was arguably robbed a second time, but he failed against the monster that is the DNC and their corporate backing.
The progressive wing of the Democratic party is very small. People love to scream about DSA having more members than ever before, but really, the "squad" is all they have in congress and most DSA members holding office are in comfy blue states where they don't have to be concerned with a real challenge. They failed to radically transform the Democratic party, unlike the Tea Party movement that practically took over the GOP by 2012 and had their old neocons like McCain and Romney just barely hanging on from the onslaught. That was over 10 years ago. Now the GOP have literal QAnon believers headed to Congress.
France is still defiant, but as Mark Fisher would explain and lament, they’re fighting to keep their concessions in the narrative of capitalist realism, and not to change the world.
Say what you want about the French but at least they get up and start burning shit down and smashing stuff when they're mad. America had that for a week at the height of the BLM protests and then they let liberals co-opt and completely de-fang the protests.
We are a long, LOOOOOOOOOOONG ways away from a revolution in the US or UK. I doubt it will ever happen to be honest. Both countries are too conservative. They are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If the Brits didn't have a revolution after Thatcher, I doubt they ever have one. As for us in the US, we really don't have a true left movement or party cause we have a bunch of people just arguing endlessly over identity politics and infighting over stupid shit. Thee is no working class movement. At all. Instead of trying to talk to the working class, the left is more concerned with trying to radicalize liberals. I think it's because so many of these so called "socialists" just think that socialism is when the government does stuff, and coming from a middle class background puts you out of touch with the harsh reality of what it's like being poor and working class.
The lesson to learn is - if you don't talk to them, someone else will. Here we are in 2020 and people still don't want to talk to working class people out of fear that they might be chuds or something.
We're more likely to have full blown fascism in the next 4 years, rather than anything left. We've had years to pull our heads out of our asses and assemble a working class movement. It will be too late in a few years when the GOP runs a competent fascist who promises to improve the lives of all the working class voters that they gained in this past election.
We are a long, LOOOOOOOOOOONG ways away from a revolution in the US or UK. I doubt it will ever happen to be honest. Both countries are too conservative.
My opinion right now is that revolution will only happen as a result of economic and ecological collapse. I feel like collapse is what we should really be preparing for.
Here we are in 2020 and people still don’t want to talk to working class people out of fear that they might be chuds or something.
I'm reminded of a quote from Chris Hedges. To paraphrase: "Liberals like the poor but they didn't like the smell of the poor".
Your analysis seems astute, and lays open a path for people cognizant of the state of affairs in the US. We are in decline, but decline can last for ages and does not lend to conditions of revolution. And since we are in such a state of affairs, it is tempting to retreat into smaller anarchist-esque fiefdoms of community and local activism, rather than be convinced to make bold, energetic, broader regional or national major efforts to make revolution or even reform is even possible.
I don't believe the GOP picked up any "working class" voters. The blacks and Hispanics who voted for Trump voted largely along class lines. The democrats are the party of the very wealthy, corporations and the poor. The GOP is now the party of the small business owner, landlords and cops.
but he failed against the monster that is the DNC and their corporate backing.
Sanders should have really run as an independent in the election. He very possibly would have won. The man is a coward.
Haha he would have never won, my guy. You can't beat them at the game they make the rules for.
My vision gets blurrier and darker every day as I see the momentum from the Floyd protests, themselves in large part the unspent energy of a potential progressive presidential campaign, provide empty results. People marched on the street, looked around, smiled, and went home. Naming and shaming did nothing when there were no organizers to challenge power in meaningful, economic ways.
I really don't think we'll get that back before a lot more people die, covid and beyond.
Yes, Bernie's and Corbyn's back-to-back defeats cratered the Anglo left and have blocked the pipelines with panicked and confused radicals, the protests were the last hurrah, everywhere opportunism abounds, now we'll have to wait for biden's accumulative failures to trigger another right-wing resurgence from which the anglo left can try to appropriate collective energy and redirect it leftward.......in three years at the earliest
That would involve reading/implementing theory and alienating the socdems, and well that's simply a step to far for some people
the protests were the last hurrah, everywhere opportunism abounds, now we’ll have to wait for biden’s accumulative failures to trigger another right-wing resurgence from which the anglo left can try to appropriate collective energy and redirect it leftward
Pretty much what I see is going to happen, agree with this. The right wing are just far more organized and have decades to organize. We haven't seen nothing yet from them, but when we do, it's going to be scary. The backlash to Biden's failures are going to be pretty harsh.
The right wing are just far more organized and have decades to organize. We haven’t seen nothing yet from them, but when we do, it’s going to be scary.
The right wing has hegemonic control over the narrative and people's basic conception of the world. The Kochs etc haven't just been plotting and planning, they write the legislation that gets passed and changed the very meaning of words like government, democracy, freedom etc. in the minds of millions.
We don't have to wait and see what they'll do, we live in the world they have made, any future iteration will just be the same but worse.
The West is the power center of neoliberalism. It's where the rulers live. So as such, even as the elites powers dwindle, it will remain relatively calm unless drastic things happen. Already the pandemic is shaking things quite a bit, and the elites themselves in the US at least are quite fractured. So eventually when their ability to manufacture consent and enforce their power dwindles the conditions in the west would be more conductive to a widespread leftist resurgence.
I mean maybe the developing world should be leading in the fight against neoliberal capitalism. All we can do is try to resist American hegemony as a 5th column.
We have been setback, but we have better ground than we have had since basically the 60's. Biden being an austerity president gives us opportunity to direct people away from liberals. We just have to go out and connect with people and orgs.
The west cannot succeed at leftism. Read Mao and Deng. They explain that due to the western hegemony, Western leftism cannot exist. In fact, most western leftists are ineffective and don’t perform revolutionary feats. This is due to centuries of Agitprop against the third world via the Intelligentsia, which we refer to now as the PMC. Revolution can only occur by the oppressed, and all westerners are oppressive
Any interpretation is a lot better than telling a leftist asking a genuine question to kill themselves
Maoism =/= Third worldism. Third Worldism is only one strain of Maoism
Its not upheld by any MLM orgs. The CPP does not uphold it, the CPI(M) does not uphold it. Only irrelevant white led sects like LLCO uphold it.
Then you are a fool and should not be let near any positions of power.
Research the relationship between Mao and Stalin during the 1930s and 1940s and get back to me
yeah and that's because Stalin kept having dumb takes on China because he did not understand the conditions very well. As a result, Mao distanced himself from him and they were successful. The Chinese do not know America as Americans do, if you just do what they tell you to do then you will fail horribly.
I think that the oppressed know more about communism than I, who has never been oppressed
