jarofpiss posted:

i think that's fair but i'm more sympathetic to it because it really looked like a winnable campaign for a while. preparing new socialists to face the grind of defeat is probably important, but i don't know if you can effectively organize around a cynical message tbh. this kind of ties in to what i was saying about third party candidates needing to be feasible to be useful campaigns to organize around. the idea is that when we work collectively, we win, and that's tough to sell if we set out on doomed projects.

your criticisms are reasonable but im not sure i agree that it should be in the messaging. part of this to me is that you go in and earnestly work to win, and believe you can, and if you fail you pull yourself together and move on to the next thing that might work. not saying you are campaigning on losing messaging or anything, it just kinda feels cynical to organize around a candidate with the expectation that they'll betray you. not that you're even wrong about that, but seems hard to get people to join up with that kind of outlook. tell me if i'm misunderstanding your point here.

smarxist posted:

DSA has proven surprisingly resilient, when it first started blowing up in 16, I was pretty close to the ground with everyone else in the Extremely Online Left and it had seemed like Fetontegate and all the toxic poo poo that would bubble up onto twitter/slack indicated that it wasn't prepared for the influx of prominence/members and wasn't doing enough to get the right people in charge, so I'm kind of pleasantly surprised to see how far it has come and to have learned how many great locals there are doing the real work, national is still national but it's not overly hampering what's happening on the ground

Ardennes posted:

It won't change the general dynamics, but weaken the US' hand especially versus many of its allies who are already having their own goals: look at the recent battle for 5G or the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

Larry Parrish posted:

I started skimming the last couple pages but I would like to remind my fellow overly stimulated burgers that there is no election choice that doesn't support a fascist, and hasn't been in our life times. It's not even a 'one party is at least slower' thing. The fascist party yall plan to vote for as a hail mary to stop the other fascist party currently in power is the one that started the ongoing ethnic removal campaign, you dumb fucks.

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

I'm not seeing how, though. What are the levers the US president uses to exert influence? How would those levers be weakened by him seeming less legitimate?

Larry Parrish posted:

I started skimming the last couple pages but I would like to remind my fellow overly stimulated burgers that there is no election choice that doesn't support a fascist, and hasn't been in our life times. It's not even a 'one party is at least slower' thing. The fascist party yall plan to vote for as a hail mary to stop the other fascist party currently in power is the one that started the ongoing ethnic removal campaign, you dumb fucks.

jarofpiss posted:

thx for the clarification larry but i was already called a stupid liberal for thinking this election could represent any sort of barometer on where the american society is re: sympathies toward fascism or vulnerability to the rhetoric

and now i know better so you snooze you lose

jarofpiss posted:

thx for the clarification larry but i was already called a stupid liberal for thinking this election could represent any sort of barometer on where the american society is re: sympathies toward fascism or vulnerability to the rhetoric

and now i know better so you snooze you lose

jarofpiss posted:

Kurnugia posted:

tehfinnishbolshevik is not up to par

dex_sda posted:

i uploaded a youtube video once that was the hitler downfall meme about a near total party wipe in a dnd campaign i was a player in. by my calculations, i should be hanging upside down in a school bathroom with my head in the toilet around the clock

StashAugustine posted:

Btw I really hate to be pushy but are you still planning on effortposting about the Zapatistas?

e-dt posted:

all "breadtubers" are bad because putting a video up on youtube instantly rots your brain to nothing. in related news, i once uploaded a video to youtube

Algund Eenboom posted:

"LOL!"

ToxicAcne posted:

Didn't Melenchon deny French Involvement in the Holocaust? Never really understood the comparison to him and Corbyn, and I really hate France's blatant and flippant Islamophobia. I think that Tariq Ali mentioned that the French Left failed spectacularly by failing to engage with France's Muslim population (about 10% of the population by the way). The hosed up "secularism" from France is polluting Quebec too and causing problems for Muslims in Canada.

quote:

I feel like you should be very, very concerned about "spiteful white identitarian pockets" and I would not call them fringe at all. In fact, I would claim that it is the urban, multicultural public that is "fringe". It's difficult to explain just how casual extreme racism is among large parts of the population if you don't live among these otherwise nice and reasonable people who might even be sympathetic to anti-capitalism, nonetheless saying out loud that it would be better if all those people simply weren't there. Many still vote for ostensibly center or even left parties, possibly won't ever vote for the far right, but they fundamentally agree with large parts of the neonazi ideology and won't stand in their way.

It is true that many of the people of migration background (those under threat), probably a majority despite all of their justified bitterness and disappointment, still desire integration into the social-imperialist system and aren't above kicking away the ladder for those that come after them, both on a very individual level as as a group. European capitalism isn't strong enough to manage this integration, I think. Even if it would be able to manage it, the coming economic crisis is going to radicalise large parts of the population, it's most likely going to be in the direction that they've been radicalizing in for the past decades, and we desperately need to take this seriously. I might be alarmist, but I feel like my analysis is pretty borne out by reality and it is unfortunately the people under threat themselves who don't want to believe that things have already gotten this far, who cling to the hope of integration against better judgement.

The far right is not confused at all about what class they are trying to win over, they have a very large base of support, they are actively preparing for what is to come. They openly find certain groups "undesirable" and would like to get rid of them. Imho we are only waiting for the first real pogroms to happen, and one could argue with the firebombings of centers for asylum seekers that the first steps have already been made.

Algund Eenboom posted:

Just as in amerika, i think the most important force to organize, radicalize and prepare for possible mobilization, for any potentially revolutionary situation, is the precariat, the migrant workers whose existence in their country is continuously under threat, and who are the ones most being batted around by global capitalism, while at the same time focusing people's anger towards the financial centers of europe like france and germany.

What is described in the above post as "kicking away the ladder" absolutely exists in amerika where hispanic/latino immigrants often become a comfortable conservative voting block once they're integrated into the country and continue to be bombarded by a white supremacist media that tells them "you're so much better than the people who came into the country illegally, because you worked hard to get where you are," nevermind that they may have come illegally too; ultimately the focus has to be shifted away from ideas of legality and towards the idea that the amerikan border is a myth for everything but labor, why should it not be a myth from labor? Why should farm workers in the USA stand against farm workers in Mexico when they are both influenced by the same amerikan agricultural corporate conglomerates or treaties?

This occurs in tandem with continuing to support anti-imperialist governments in other countries in order to stem the tide of migrants in the first place; like obviously if libya wasnt bombed to hell then significantly fewer libyans would have been forced to move to the countries that bombed them to hell to work for poo poo pay. This kind of thing engenders resentment on both the side of the migrants and on the side of the workers in those countries who were already working for poo poo or slightly more than poo poo pay. And no matter hwhat, only an anti-capitalist ideology can actually be anti-imperialist because it destroys the superexploitation of sanctions and bombing campaigns making those countries poorer and poorer. However i dont live in europe so maybe all of what i say is wrong. U decide dear reader

ToxicAcne posted:

So what's the solution then? Just wait to get massacred by the majority?

Algund Eenboom posted:

What is described in the above post as "kicking away the ladder" absolutely exists in amerika where hispanic/latino immigrants often become a comfortable conservative voting block once they're integrated into the country and continue to be bombarded by a white supremacist media that tells them "you're so much better than the people who came into the country illegally, because you worked hard to get where you are," nevermind that they may have come illegally too

Algund Eenboom posted:

Just as in amerika, i think the most important force to organize, radicalize and prepare for possible mobilization, for any potentially revolutionary situation, is the precariat, the migrant workers whose existence in their country is continuously under threat, and who are the ones most being batted around by global capitalism, while at the same time focusing people's anger towards the financial centers of europe like france and germany.

What is described in the above post as "kicking away the ladder" absolutely exists in amerika where hispanic/latino immigrants often become a comfortable conservative voting block once they're integrated into the country and continue to be bombarded by a white supremacist media that tells them "you're so much better than the people who came into the country illegally, because you worked hard to get where you are," nevermind that they may have come illegally too; ultimately the focus has to be shifted away from ideas of legality and towards the idea that the amerikan border is a myth for everything but labor, why should it not be a myth from labor? Why should farm workers in the USA stand against farm workers in Mexico when they are both influenced by the same amerikan agricultural corporate conglomerates or treaties?

This occurs in tandem with continuing to support anti-imperialist governments in other countries in order to stem the tide of migrants in the first place; like obviously if libya wasnt bombed to hell then significantly fewer libyans would have been forced to move to the countries that bombed them to hell to work for poo poo pay. This kind of thing engenders resentment on both the side of the migrants and on the side of the workers in those countries who were already working for poo poo or slightly more than poo poo pay. And no matter hwhat, only an anti-capitalist ideology can actually be anti-imperialist because it destroys the superexploitation of sanctions and bombing campaigns making those countries poorer and poorer. However i dont live in europe so maybe all of what i say is wrong. U decide dear reader

Dreylad posted:

for the people who were wondering about adolph reed jr. Class Notes is pretty easy to find and a good read. I don't know what "class-first" or "class-centered" leftism or politics is because most political discussions outside leftist circles are bereft of any consideration of class at all. If people who support him online go wild with class and start downplaying race I guess that sucks but the accusations of people being class-exclusionary or tankies or whatever seem to always outnumber the amount of people there are with those politics.

I found Reed's discussion with Michael Brooks back in April or May or whenever about the 1619 Project pretty interesting, since his problem with that project is that its starting point is when black indentured servants arrived in what became the US, not slaves. How a group of indentured servants, black and white, ended up in a society where one group ended up largely enslaved and the other did not is cloaked by a broader narrative of how the US was founded in one particular institution, even though there was a whole dynamic of class and race politics that played out over decades to get to the point where the US had formal chattel slavery. Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom goes into a lot of dense social history about that particular transformation.

Point is that kind tension between race and class plays out again and again now where you have people like Reed who assert that black and white workers have more in common in their day-to-day problems than they do between rich and poor. Couple that with the fact that it's so loving difficult to disentangle broad anti-racist efforts, like former white nationalists trying to reach vulnerable kids, from the anti-racist industry and all the bizarre ideological positions that adopts, like how racism is inherent and not the product of social and economic conditions, and you have set the table for a terrible conversation no matter how you approach it. People don't like hearing that their experiences as a person of colour might not cross class, even though I think most people acknowledge race is a pretty slippery category as it is. Reed is pretty critical of efforts to further break down race into increasingly small subcategories to the point where everyone has their own bespoke oppression that means our experiences are forever out of reach of one another.

Maybe I'm missing the mark here, and I'm happy to be proven wrong but that's where I think some criticism of Reed comes from. There is a whole "post-left" which as far as I can tell are just weirdos on twitter which I do my best to avoid, but I see some frustration with people trying to restate class to be as mutable as race in order to introduce what seem to be conservative ideas about class that are more about trying to recast your political opponents as the elites/managers rather than any real relation to economic power.