If you are fortunate, the next four years will be stable. You must educate, organize programs to better material conditions, and bring the proletariat into the left.
Do not betray yourself with “doomer” thoughts, these are a form of liberalism and must be routed out. Despair only perpetuates itself and it is hollow.
You have a feckless neoliberal now in office. Biden will fixate on enriching his donors and once again take his eyes away from the working class. He will expose bourgeoisie electoralism as a fraud incapable of delivering true improvements to the material conditions of the working class.
Do not waste these next years. The left in America has not had this opportunity in almost a hundred years. Seize this moment!
You cannot wait for some ahistorical great man to deliver a new world to you. Those figures only appear so great looking backwards, they reflect the workers they emerged from. All of us have fought alongside stronger comrades than them.
Comrades, this is the calm before climate change crashes down upon you. Unite as leftists and as socialists. Discard your privilege, your chains, your false pride. Seize liberation for all who are oppressed. Build your revolution.
:back-to-me:
I spend literally all day every day spoon feeding people bits of theory from the cash register. I lost count of how many times I dropped the "During the lifetime of great revolutionaries" quote from State and Revolution with regard to ICE and the FBI posting about MLK on MLK day.
I couldn’t agree more. Also I would add that socialist revolution tends to come after or during periods of great upheaval, when the contradictions are most heightened. We’re certainly entering one of those epochs.
If I had seen your post earlier, then I would not have had to write anything at all.
Legit what about like a day of the week where there's no doomposting, all bloomer content every Wednesday to lift your soul.
Fuck doom posting this shit can be turned around easy if a mobilisation on the scale of Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao takes place
I am currently reading Black Night, White Snow (about Russias revolutions) and there's a good bit in there how as the Tzar was losing power, particularly after the 1905 revolution, that the entire atmosphere had a doom mongering atmosphere with people retreating into mystics and shit like that. All the poets/artists etc. retreated into a kind of broken narcissm like what you see now on some sections of the left
Yo thanks ghost of Lenin you seem like a cool dude. Respect :cat-com:
My statement remains unchanged. Revolution was not achieved in America then.
the body text I could give you. the title, not so much
still, GOOD post
ew boomer.
no wait, you're a boomer to the boomers. you're a boomer boomer.
We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.
But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations. Liberalism manifests itself in various ways.
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type.
To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type.
Not to obey orders but to give pride of place to one's own opinions. To demand special consideration from the organization but to reject its discipline. This is a fourth type.
To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.
To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.
To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.
To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along--"So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell." This is a ninth type.
To regard oneself as having rendered great service to the revolution, to pride oneself on being a veteran, to disdain minor assignments while being quite unequal to major tasks, to be slipshod in work and slack in study. This is a tenth type.
To be aware of one's own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them, taking a liberal attitude towards oneself. This is an eleventh type.
We could name more. But these eleven are the principal types.
They are all manifestations of liberalism. Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.
Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.
Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.
We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.
All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.
Mao gets a lot right, but the self-help vibes I get from his writing always put me off.
I made a post about this that I decided to take down cuz I made while drunk and in kind of a bad place, but yeah, I find all this fucking leftist Bushido shit about us "fighting to the bitter end" like we're goddamn Klingons somewhat disingenuous. Let's be honest that's now how most humans are.
some occupy footage came up in a movie i watched, and i really want to start collecting as much as i can find.
as much as the left is always rehashing where occupy went wrong, i realized there's something sort of magnificent about the structure of it and the way it played out that i don't believe resurfaced last summer. i hope it will this time; i think it has a lot to do with taking physical public spaces and holding onto them, which is harder in the age of the internet
i mean i think we kept a lot of the politics. it's a tired point and playing counterfactuals sucks but i doubt we'd have the left we have now without it
you're right that's still age of the internet, but yeah that's what i mean. i look at chaz/chop or whatever and it seems like the internet spectacle blew it up long before it would have died had it been just ten or twenty years earlier
now we just have politicians echoing the sentiments and displaying the aesthetics of occupy without delivering/planning to deliver anything of substance, which is of course hampered by the political system.
well of course! every good movement will be demonized or co-opted at some point, and while i didn't know that then i do now and it's a helpful piece of info going forward. the occupy democrats facebook page is an occupy -> democrat pipeline, and so is /r/occupywallstreet - just chock full of :LIB:
in fact, most of the people who took part in occupy were libs. the fact that not all of them made it over to our side isn't necessarily a failure. what we've had since then are two big pushes at the presidency, which were actual failures in the sense that they didn't get us a president. in the long-term who knows exactly what place the sanders movement will take in history, but i really do believe the left is now in a better position than we were before his campaigns, and before occupy.
10 yrs before occupy you had the alter-globalization movement and the anti-wto/imf actions and quebec and the 2000 rnc/dnc and all of that spanning at least up until 9/11 completely wiped it from the public consciousness and scared anyone away from doing any serious direct action. 10 yrs after we've seen the biggest civil rights protests in us history.
i don't really know where we go from here i'm just happy to see the left has grown and i consider all these events of the last several decades as part of the historical process. it doesn't mean you have to repeat them - go out and do your own shit - but i think it's useful to place yourself inside that historical process.
don't fully agree with everything, but that's a solid perspective. my point on seattle is that occupy was bigger as a result, and hopefully the next big thing is even bigger (i think 2020 was an okay start). also sanders and squad need to fail in order to send even more libs down the tube.
i agree with your optimism at the end. contrary to superpol, i think intersectional struggles can help bring libs into the class struggle
i dunno. most libs still think the holodomor happened and that China is committing genocide
Whatever libs think of China has very little impact on the viability of leftist politics in the U.S.
That would be the case if it weren't for this important thing called "foreign policy"
IDK, I think we can maybe sell anti-interventionism to Americans, I'd honestly be happy as fuck with this country having a solidly anti-war SocDem party, but honestly I don't think all the propaganda about "muh Dictators!" is getting out of the American consciousness for at least another generation or two. In other words we can get people to oppose invading China but they're still gonna think Xi is the devil.
Most Americans don't care about foreign policy. They certainly don't care about it to the same extent they care about stuff that affects their ability to pay their bills, and they probably don't care about it as much as the bigger culture war issues (think abortion). Ask your average American what they think about Yemen and where it is on a map; you're not going to get an answer that reflects serious involvement with the issue.
You're right, though, that there's a solid thread of anti-interventionism that most Americans are receptive to (probably because it requires no knowledge of foreign policy). That's the biggest lever leftists can (and should) pull.
The base of support for the Bolshevik Revolution believed the Jewish conspiracy, up until mass literacy campaigns were carried out by the revolutionary government.
Ignorance is not some insurmountable problem. If we organize around peoples' material needs, the people will support us. Their ignorance doesn't matter.
me: despair is generally bad and counterproductive.
you, a genius: ok elon musk redditor technocapitalist
????
That's not dooming though, that's not even close to dooming, that's actually the exact opposite of dooming because it presents a way out. True doom is saying "Everything is fuck'd no matter what, there IIS NO hope."
Its like it being in one of Musk's cars that's heading striaght for a bunch of people tied to the railroad tracks and going "oh no, we're doomed, they're doomed, the car is doomed ot hit the people tied to the tracks. Unless we hit the breaks or tjurn to the left or tjurn to the right. but DOOMED I SAY"
edit: or turn up if this car has a flying mode enabled, or turn down if this is a MoleMobile
edit: or turn up if this car has a flying mode enabled, or turn down if this is a MoleMobile
Turn down for what
There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. I was also radicalized by environmental doomerism, but lib friends and family are really put off by it. They don't care if it's true: they want to live their lives without thinking about it. My parents flatly refuse to let me talk about the realities of climate change, poverty, etc because of my "negative worldview".
People are protective of their ignorance and I understand why. I'm way more anxious and depressed for caring, and buying almost anything makes me feel like shit. So I don't really know a positive way to break through the "stop trying to make me feel bad!" response, because bringing them round to my way of thinking is literally going to make them feel bad.
So I don’t really know a positive way to break through the “stop trying to make me feel bad!” response
Have you tried focusing on the benefits of socialism instead of the disasters capitalism is causing? E.g., focusing on how great it would be if everyone was guaranteed a roof over their head instead of pushing "homelessness is awful and it's barbaric that the richest country in history tolerates it."
