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Mr. Lobe posted:No good splinter sect except my splinter sect Those two quoted posts aren't mutually exclusive. Psl has a decent presence nearby and have been supportive in some of the organizing I've done, and the local leadership is excellent. I don't think joining a party means you're married to them forever fwiw
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Mar 6, 2020 18:49
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Those two quoted posts aren't mutually exclusive. Psl has a decent presence nearby and have been supportive in some of the organizing I've done, and the local leadership is excellent. I don't think joining a party means you're married to them forever fwiw I'm sure they've done some good, but any secretive cadre organization is never more than a couple steps away from a cult. The PSL is even more hush hush than the ISO was, and we saw what happened with that when people started letting sun shine on that organization's leadership. It would not surprise me if PSL has some skeletons in its closet, too That said, it can be fun to join a cult. You make fast friends, if nothing else Mr. Lobe fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 6, 2020 |
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Mar 6, 2020 18:56
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Prince Myshkin posted:You've got many of those people talking about an AOC run in 2024, and she is in several policy respects worse than him. Not being able to get past seeing politics in terms of presidential election cycles seems to affect everybody no matter what radicalism they declaim. throwing out lib as an insult seems to have done a number on peoples brains, there are now people in cspam earnestly arguing that AOC, omar etc are not liberals
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Mar 6, 2020 19:02
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It's weird, feels like we're talking about completely different orgs. Everything seems fairly straight forward, the majority of their information is on their news and their 'training' websites, and nothing has seemed weird so far. Now I'm not discounting the fact that I may be blindsided randomly with a weird sex cult. We all know psl is descended from trotskyists.
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Mar 6, 2020 19:06
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:It's weird, feels like we're talking about completely different orgs. sounds like a win-win scenario tbh
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Mar 6, 2020 19:12
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dex_sda posted:sounds like a win-win scenario tbh I am down with a lot of 'communes' but communal sex cults is not my cup of tea. Also my wife would kill me
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Mar 6, 2020 19:20
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A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:throwing out lib as an insult seems to have done a number on peoples brains, there are now people in cspam earnestly arguing that AOC, omar etc are not liberals it’s because people use lib as a catch all for “person I don’t agree with who I perceive myself as to the left of” instead of meaning specific beliefs or ideological preferences.
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Mar 6, 2020 19:30
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:It's weird, feels like we're talking about completely different orgs. If you'll be blindsided by anything, it'll be the kind of interpersonal dynamics you can't really see from the outside that are what make an organization culty. No amount of transparency in reading materials or training exposes something like that. But, I wasn't being fully glib when I said being in a cult can be fun, I had a good time in the ISO for instance, just turned out there was a lot of institutional rot at the top, which is something I never had reason to pay much attention to until there was suddenly reason to pay a lot of attention to it.
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Mar 6, 2020 19:56
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A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:throwing out lib as an insult seems to have done a number on peoples brains, there are now people in cspam earnestly arguing that AOC, omar etc are not liberals Cspam needs some educational efforts to wean some of its more prolific posters off liberalism for good. For all the affective and aesthetic radicalism here, it seems like posters reflexively embrace electoralism, activist-ism, and localism when forced to stake a position. I feel like a thread dedicated to teaching Marxism would be useful, maybe a readalong with an introductory text on philosophy since that's the big departure from liberalism. I've been meaning to read more intro level stuff to be able to reach out to people more easily anyway.
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Mar 6, 2020 22:14
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Cspam needs some educational efforts to wean some of its more prolific posters off liberalism for good. For all the affective and aesthetic radicalism here, it seems like posters reflexively embrace electoralism, activist-ism, and localism when forced to stake a position.
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Mar 6, 2020 22:34
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the bright side of this though is seeing michael bloomberg, who is just an obvious criminal, going down in flames after spending half a billion (?) or more on the election. to get kinda trollish, what bloomberg was doing rhymes as he attempted to power his way though these structural obstacles into the nomination, although in his case by dumping B-52 stratofortresses full of money on it. and then, predictably, crashing and burning... all jeb-like.
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Mar 6, 2020 22:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuaoARJYU0&t=5028s
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Mar 6, 2020 22:48
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Yeah I've been referring to the Sanders theory of change as mass hypervoluntarism when discussing it with friends who are into Bernie, Chapo, whatever. Zizek advocates for this mindset in First as Tragedy, which I've long admired as a direct refutation of doomerism, but it doesn't really seem to hold up even analytically when applied to electoral politics. For one thing, it puts the horizon of change far closer to the present for it to count as anything more than yet another periodic realignment. For another, there's very little attention given to a long-term strategy; it's only ever partially articulated and always relies on winning THIS fight, which is far from assured. For a third, First as Tragedy was published in 2009 and we don't have the same set of strategic constraints anymore.
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Mar 6, 2020 22:54
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Could you explain what voluntarism, activist-ism, and localism mean
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Mar 6, 2020 23:11
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Cspam needs some educational efforts to wean some of its more prolific posters off liberalism for good. For all the affective and aesthetic radicalism here, it seems like posters reflexively embrace electoralism, activist-ism, and localism when forced to stake a position. i'd enjoy a thread for that myself, i haven't read marx thoroughly (read summaries for a bunch of das kapital chapters instead of reading them all, is what I mean) and went straight to conquest of bread etc. but it would be great to get commentary from someone I know is actually leftist
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Mar 6, 2020 23:18
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GunnerJ posted:Could you explain what voluntarism, activist-ism, and localism mean Briefly, voluntarism is the idea that you can win through willpower primarily, that showing up frequently or powerfully enough is the decisive factor in struggle. "Activist-ism" is a critique of a major mode of doing left business: a small group of self-appointed activists do whatever they think is best to accomplish self-chosen goals at the expense of building mass support for a long-term project. The activists can busy themselves with small things forever without accomplishing much or bringing more people into struggle. Localism here refers for the tendency of activists to start local and never move beyond that scale of action. None of these things are inherently bad but they're all obviously limited.
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Mar 6, 2020 23:41
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Briefly, voluntarism is the idea that you can win through willpower primarily, that showing up frequently or powerfully enough is the decisive factor in struggle. Thanks!
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Mar 6, 2020 23:47
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this has always been a pretty standard criticism of revolutions from conservatives, and then from liberals too when the proletariat started fighting for political power. "Yeah, the revolution might be well meaning, but it's too dangerous to fight the system" is some commonplace weak poo poo. dressing it up as some other currently trendy progressive cause is just cover for a centuries old argument.
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Mar 6, 2020 23:51
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:I feel like a thread dedicated to teaching Marxism would be useful, maybe a readalong with an introductory text on philosophy since that's the big departure from liberalism. I've been meaning to read more intro level stuff to be able to reach out to people more easily anyway. I used the RevLeft spinoff Red Menace to finally start doing the reading. There’s so much poo poo to read though.
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Mar 7, 2020 00:46
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https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1235765587193798659 ✊
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Mar 7, 2020 01:15
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organize what?
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Mar 7, 2020 01:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm reading this history of the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union and it's pissing me off because it reads like a lot of the economic troubles that are popularly associated with the USSR and with socialism/communism in general was the product of "economic reforms" passed under the broader program of perestroika. It was essentially re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The USSR by the 1980s was running into a massive trade deficit which was sapping their reserves, and the drive towards a market economy was an attempt to allow firms to be more financially independent from the state which in turn screwed average people due to shortages and inflation. I do think some of it was based on naivety, but there was also just a degree of desperation. As for market socialism itself, it really depends on how it is conducted and if the state itself has enough income to subsidize daily life. Prince Myshkin posted:That's assuming those people aren't just straight up lying or reporting family hearsay, of course. I can't remember who it is but there's someone who goes around telling their sad USSR stories despite having left the country as a literal infant. Yeah this is pretty common as well. Russian/Soviet emigrees from 1980s/1990s have a pretty skewed perspective in general, if they can actually remember it. uncop posted:China turning away from the USSR had nothing to do with Deng, Deng was if anything a "stay superficially friendly with everyone and keep your cards close to your chest" kind of guy. That's pretty much how he was able to plant the seeds of integrating China into the world market. I believe he was very talented and made great plays, which can be seen in how he rose back to the top and higher than he had ever been from a position of underdog and pariah. But when it comes to him, there was very much a struggle of priorities. Yeah, Deng was in power roughly 20 years after the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split and if anything generally repaired relations with the Soviet Union. The difference was geopolitical, and Deng saw that China could be allowed to access foreign markets as long as the PRC was useful to the US and during the 1980s China could slowly start increasing imports via revenue from exports. It worked. The Soviets couldn't do it because they were the "direct enemy" of the US. It wasn't just Mao, Krushchev clearly hosed up and did little to keep the alliance going. Krushchev was naive and shortsighted.
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Mar 7, 2020 01:34
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dex_sda posted:i'd enjoy a thread for that myself, i haven't read marx thoroughly (read summaries for a bunch of das kapital chapters instead of reading them all, is what I mean) and went straight to conquest of bread etc. but it would be great to get commentary from someone I know is actually leftist A few years ago cspam had a let's read of capital that kinda fell off around volume 3 It was a great thread but capital was too intimidating for most so it stayed relatively small
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Mar 7, 2020 02:15
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Dreddout posted:A few years ago cspam had a let's read of capital that kinda fell off around volume 3 The real trick is to do a read-through (“let’s read” is a disgusting phrase) of georges politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy, an extremely well-written introduction to historical & dialectical materialism. However I’m bad at writing, but I might get around to it one day
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Mar 7, 2020 02:27
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Lightning Knight posted:This is the part I don’t really understand. I understand that Gorbachev did dumb stuff and that he’s generally perceived as a grifter or counter revolutionary or whatever, but the idea that he intentionally sabotaged the Soviet Union with market reform doesn’t make sense. He had an institutional investment in maintaining his own authority and position. It seems more plausible that he was responding to legitimate problems in an unproductive or ill-advised fashion, but what those problems were and what he should’ve done instead is unclear to me. I don't think Gorbachev was a "wrecker" or an otherwise ill-intentioned person. In both books I've read about his time, they gave the impression that Gorbachev was genuinely trying to improve the Soviet system in response to known problems such as wastage, low productivity, the need for better quality of life, and so on. Like, one of the reforms he did was to allow cooperatives a greater role in the economy, and while it did create problems such as distorting wage scales because coops paid people far better than the public sector did and sold good more expensively than state-run firms, the intention was that coops were a form of "more democratic" organization of a productive enterprise and so should be encouraged to developed. Or like, he encouraged the introduction of genuinely competitive elections across multiple different parties in the USSR, and while with hindsight we can say that the rupture of the CPSU from being The State and the rise of non-communist parties would lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the reason he did that was he genuinely believed it was a good idea to make the USSR's political environment a more diverse, more democratic spectrum.
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Mar 7, 2020 03:43
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Yeah I've been referring to the Sanders theory of change as mass hypervoluntarism when discussing it with friends who are into Bernie, Chapo, whatever. Zizek advocates for this mindset in First as Tragedy, which I've long admired as a direct refutation of doomerism, but it doesn't really seem to hold up even analytically when applied to electoral politics. For one thing, it puts the horizon of change far closer to the present for it to count as anything more than yet another periodic realignment. For another, there's very little attention given to a long-term strategy; it's only ever partially articulated and always relies on winning THIS fight, which is far from assured. For a third, First as Tragedy was published in 2009 and we don't have the same set of strategic constraints anymore. ehh, it's not *completely* impossible. bernie keeps saying that getting people in to office is just the beginning of a long rear end process. a violent revolt is going to have the same problem, but with even more shooting involved, which is the thing to avoid. the hope here is that the buzz around socialist grandpa election succeeds in building a movement massive and organized enough that capital can't oppose entirely consequence free, and then work from there. after all, the only alternative currently in the oven is a revolt that's gonna make 1917 look like a piece of cake by comparison, and nobody in their right mind should be gunning for that (but do prepare for it anyway).
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Mar 7, 2020 04:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't think Gorbachev was a "wrecker" or an otherwise ill-intentioned person. In both books I've read about his time, they gave the impression that Gorbachev was genuinely trying to improve the Soviet system in response to known problems such as wastage, low productivity, the need for better quality of life, and so on. He wasn't intentionally a wrecker, but you could honestly say (like Krushchev) that he was just hopelessly naïve. Sorry to say, but competitive elections were clearly used by the US to get further influence inside the USSR and absolutely increased nationalism across the Republics. The USSR was obviously under heavy economic and political pressure during the mid-1980s but in such an environment, compromise and "openness" was actually more hurtful than healthful. The ultimate people who would pay the price are everyday people themselves.
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Mar 7, 2020 04:58
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Truga posted:ehh, it's not *completely* impossible. bernie keeps saying that getting people in to office is just the beginning of a long rear end process. a violent revolt is going to have the same problem, but with even more shooting involved, which is the thing to avoid. even if you have a successful 1917-style revolt you still run into the problem the bolsheviks faced in that you have a massive state bureaucracy that wont go away quietly, and the easiest thing to do is absorb it and try to direct it towards your socialist project, which is probably even more of a fool's errand today given the size and scale of the us government.
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Mar 7, 2020 05:04
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Algund Eenboom posted:The real trick is to do a read-through (“let’s read” is a disgusting phrase) of georges politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy, an extremely well-written introduction to historical & dialectical materialism. However I’m bad at writing, but I might get around to it one day http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/epop/index.html
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Mar 7, 2020 05:04
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Cspam needs some educational efforts to wean some of its more prolific posters off liberalism for good. For all the affective and aesthetic radicalism here, it seems like posters reflexively embrace electoralism, activist-ism, and localism when forced to stake a position. If I had time I'd do a "Let's Read Lenin" thread going through the Big Four texts chapter by chapter.
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Mar 7, 2020 05:32
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 hot
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Mar 7, 2020 06:47
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this was originally the PSL thread, you know
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Mar 7, 2020 07:17
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I Remember
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Mar 7, 2020 07:29
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Whoa, thanks for the Politzer book recommendation, I'm obsessed with dialectics but had never heard of it! Now I have to read it, at least to compare it with "Marxist Philosophy - An introductory Notes" from IIRC CPI-ML (as in India) in the 70's. The two books have very similar scopes and lengths, but the latter isn't an incredibly professional work, or at least the english translation isn't. I've also wanted to do a more theoretically oriented thread but I've struggling with how to keep it accessible to new people as it gets going and how to get it going in the first place. I've been sort of preparing to start an imperialism thread to help people form a coherent mental model to put the stuff from the various world event threads in, and the recommendation of a readalong of the Politzer book seems like something I might do as well, as content for a "thinking about thinking marxistly" thread. If the interest is there, maybe I should get to actual posting at some point.
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Mar 7, 2020 07:42
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bernie is the power bottom a lot of great av material there
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Mar 7, 2020 07:56
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Idk why it’s cracking me up that he drew chest hair on all of them except Mao
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Mar 7, 2020 08:01
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The Red Bed of Cummunism
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Mar 7, 2020 08:09
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Marx: Dom Bottom Stalin: Dom Top Bernie: Switch Power Bottom Castro: Sub Switch Mao: Sub Top They're all queer and all in the same polycule, although Marx has a on again off again thing with Engels. Communism is the cuddle puddle of the workers.
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Mar 7, 2020 08:14
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uncop posted:Whoa, thanks for the Politzer book recommendation, I'm obsessed with dialectics but had never heard of it! Now I have to read it, at least to compare it with "Marxist Philosophy - An introductory Notes" from IIRC CPI-ML (as in India) in the 70's. The two books have very similar scopes and lengths, but the latter isn't an incredibly professional work, or at least the english translation isn't. It's extremely powerful as an introductory text to basic Marxist concepts, since it's more or less a collection of the lecture notes he gave from his courses as a teacher at the Workers University of Paris before he was executed by the nazis. The beginning is a fairly elementary explanation of the problems of idealist philosophy so that might be a little tedious, but the latter chapters are indispensable
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Mar 7, 2020 08:19
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Algund Eenboom posted:Situationism was a theory created by anarchist avant-gardists, about how the alienation produced by capitalism had extended itself, in sufficiently advanced capitalist societies (mostly the us, uk, and france), to any and all aspects of society, in a way that was totalizing and invisible. THey were fairly anti-ussr and burned themselves out after about a decade or so, but made a pretty important contribution to modern marxism in the idea of "the spectacle," or the complete accession of everything in society to commodity fetishism and the commodity form. Usually when people refer to "spectacle" today they're talking about mass media, because it was regarded by the situationists as the most important aspect of capitalism's influence on basic aspects of human life like the way we understand information. The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord is definitely the most important written work from situationism and was one of the major catalysts for the 1968 student riots in Paris. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm It sounds like you are describing Inverted Totalitarianism, AKA American Fascism. https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X
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Mar 7, 2020 08:54
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