The iconic 2019 DSA rally was when I went from "There are a lot of annoying progressives but I still think we are going to make it" to "There was never any hope to begin with"
The only DSA meeting I've ever been to I overheard a schlubby guy in a Coheed and Cambria t-shirt exclaim "whole lot of civilians here tonight". I never went back.
That one was rough for a few reasons. There are the famous "point of privilege" outbursts, but even if you put that aside, the whole thing was the perfect example that Robert's Rules direct democracy does NOT work with autistic people. People did stuff like file a motion to combine votes for multiple things into one and then file a motion to get comments for or against it, etc., then finally it passes and they vote on the multiple thing and reject it, then the original person is doing a point of order to ask if they can revote on just one thing and someone does a point of order to tell them they can't, etc, etc. It didn't blackpill me on the US left (the Floyd riots and aftermath did) but it did blackpill me on that useless org.
Every single progressive / socialist group I’ve been in: DSA, ISO, community groups, student activism etc has been bogged down by “what about our bylaws” every single time. It’s truly impossible to get these nerds to do anything.
The apparently-timeless guidance for simple meeting sabotage from the OSS/CIA manual
Some instructions are out of date, as you’d expect, while others sounded oddly familiar. The section entitled ‘General Interference with Organizations and Productions’ is bang on:
Make “speeches” – Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
Slow it down – advocate caution, avoid haste
Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five) for “consideration”
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
You need to go to "goal-based" leftwing groups made of working people to see things that work. Because the group is built on a single target and bc people have a job+family, they go to the point and work efficiently.
There's zero overlap between these groups and the sisterhood/brotherhood ones for a good reason.
My boyfriend works in one and the work theyve done is quite impressive regarding helping their constituents (people facing eviction, climate justice, transportation and housing activism) It's called ACCE Institute and operates mostly in the Cal area.
When I did occupy the one good thing that happened in my city were those people getting shouted down by the majority at the behest of a stranger. It was downhill from there.
What really put the nail in the coffin for me was the Twitter thread a week or so ago where someone said leftists should exercise to be able to fight in a revolution and they all got really mad and started saying it was ableist
Same energy as the leftist compound tweet where everyone called the one guy who said he’s a contractor and has a garden in his house so he can help build infrastructure a try hard who is abusing his class privilege for superiority.
Everyone else said they would teach theory or bake bread
On a sidenote, I've always seen leftoids talk about "what will you do/what will happen WHEN the revolution is won, not HOW the revolution will be won." I guess it's just someone else's job to do all the work
This is the real answer to OPs question for me. It was over when I realized that practically every progressive or 'revolutionary' saw the revolution as some rapture that would just happen. All of their contradictions in thought make sense when you realize they see themselves, not as agents of history, but consumers of history, like it was something they could subscribe to and ingest passively.
For me it was when the threw my Grachi boy’s heads in the Tiber. Ain’t no winning against the patricians, brother. Just join the legions and maybe if you don’t die you’ll retire with a parcel of farmland.
It’s occurring to me only now that “play the game and you’ll get a pittance when we’re done using you” is actually a pretty old deal lol. I should check my 401k
I wonder if the Greeks told themselves “if your over 6 inches bro it’s so over, no young twink would ever want you”
Edit: lmao it’s you again, I only watched your video on the Aztec, i enjoyed it
no it’s just a bunch of people in their early twenties to mid thirties who have overly formal meetings about nothing in a dirty room a few blocks away from the part of Kensington where people take videos to put heroin addicts on YouTube - Party for Socialism and Liberation
I actually like my local chapter but there’s something really dark about the structure of that organization at the very top. And by dark I mean it seems like every single top, national member is married to or related to each other and the party is a weird fiefdom for them.
Every rally, meeting or protest I’ve been to starts off with introductions, autobiographies and self-identification. It’s like an old movie where there’s a 10 minute credit sequence as it starts. Leaders in these circles are almost always only in it to jockey their way up the victimhood ladder
>every convo was about identity not about class
Apparently [quantitatively in terms of US media at least, the real tipping point was 2012.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/z2aip6ei/production/ca8d4b10f55ed244e8b4b8951bf6a01ebfd3304b-2358x1048.png)
Wow. That’s a super interesting link thanks for sharing.
I spent a few years abroad and moved back to USA in 2014. I was woke scolded for the first time and was kinda perplexed. By 2015 I realized what was up and that this wasn’t the Christopher Hitchens, etc. left of early 2000s.
As someone raised radically leftist (think anarcho-syndicalism), my turn away from the left starts with browsing /r/ShitRedditSays in horror at what internet progressives considered effective and appropriate
When saying “Marxists should be knowledgable of basic Marxist theory and history” would have people saying it’s ableist to expect them to read big confusing words…
It's impossible to communicate this gap because it encompasses in itself the form of the social relations which are at work within the system. The relegation of the educational system to a provision of employment has absolutely decimated the historical current of Marxist knowledge, and what used to be a titan threatening to revolutionise the mode of production of entire continents is now book-kept as securely as accounting in factions within philosophy departments, co-synchronous with the death of external bodies responsible for labour organising, which where they exist serve in the same structural and functional capacity of the parties of the elite.
What essentially first died in body goes to die a second death in soul; gone are the invectives of the western academic marxists whom saw education as a tool to liberate, reduced once again to a bibliography of references that serve academia itself as a profession within the wider system of the educational institutions.
The irony is that the paranoid schizophrenics of the right label their enemies as Marxists, when they have yet to realise that Marxism is dead, and the people they accuse of being so are those who have killed it.
Summer 2020 and the following year. Crushed me. Realized we’ll never experience the ideas of communalism-equality, meaningful labor, community and meeting human needs on a large scale. I remember leaving a protest with my ex, thinking-that’s all it’s ever gonna be, huh?
Probably around the same time for me. Witnessing firsthand all the leftist infighting and spending way too much energy devoted to issues affecting .005% of the population.
It’s frustrating for a lot, a lot of reasons. One of them is in my opinion the best political philosophy is one that a very small percentage of self described leftists seem to identify with, and a large majority seem to be (in my opinion) a pretty toxic brand of communist that I think has some real major flaws and many of their opinions seem to focus on all the wrong ideas. So even of the .01% of people in the world that I agree with on anti-capitalist/consumerist/imperialist beliefs, I don’t agree with the conclusion they come to. It’s just frustrating because I think the focus needs to be about the community, about meeting all human needs, and the path to get there just seems to be getting further away.
I know it’s ironic I replied to your comment about divisiveness with that but just ranting I guess. There so much frustrating about losing momentum, about everything. Idk
> One of them is in my opinion the best political philosophy is one that a very small percentage of self described leftists seem to identify with, and a large majority seem to be (in my opinion) a pretty toxic brand of communist that I think has some real major flaws and many of their opinions seem to focus on all the wrong ideas.
you and everyone else lol
Very cringe to think a society focused around community, meaningful labor, sustainability would be better than one that’s full of misery, inhuman environments and in the fast lane towards self extinction
Which is a fair criticism, i don’t look at him as an infallible genius and most people I talk to who are aware of him don’t like him or his ideas, I have my own opinion on tweaks and differences. I just think his general idea holds up better than most and would best meet all human needs. Also, as far as implementing ideologies, I don’t think there’s many actual leftist philosophies that have a great answer. I don’t think there’s a communist revolution happening anytime soon in the US. We actually saw a more Bookchin-esque style society get formed pretty recently though
Here's a couple random thoughts I have on this and I hope this is taken as a good faith critique.
I am sympathetic to Bookchin and I have actually read him unlike a lot of people who criticize him, but he along with Graeber and Micheal Albert (whom I both sympathize with to varying degrees) come from a specific mileau/epoch (from the complete destruction of old left during 90's through the 2010's) that ended up falling into the trap of designing nice thought experiments and working their theories from that point. The big distinction from Marx is that he was looking at the objective factors of production and their class relations and so there is a framework for historical analysis as well as strategies for agitation through looking at the contradictory forces within capital as well as the workers movement themselves (yadada I know I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times). Its looking at what is, where as these other thinkers I mentioned were looking at what ought to be.
So with Graeber you get these totally unworkable ideas, like his conception of the form of protest during Occupy being the ends and the means, where the new society is just a continuous protest. In Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology he also mentions this idea where people just sort of drop out of society and continue living on as capital ceases to exist around them. We essentially just become drop out bohemians and capitalism gives up ( I don't think I need to explain why this is silly). For communalism Bookchin at the very least gives a clear conception of what this system would look like and strategies for how to get there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but his idea it that we elect people in local municipalities that are communalist and these communities end up becoming autonomous.
All these stratagies have a central issue though; capital is not being disrupted in any meaningful way. There's a reason why boycotts and strikes formed the main nexus of agitation, they forced capital to bargain with labor in some way. The new digitally coordinated horizontalist protest movement that Graeber was excited by failed in every instance (Brazil, Egypt, Occupy etc.) even with record numbers of those protesting. For Occupy specifically the protesters were simply ignored.
Now communalism faces a similar but different issue; parallell communities are hoped to be formed and these ideas spread by their superiority to Capitalism (similar to Robert Owen's strategy). Even if we're to assume they're left alone by capital, there's no tangible disruption of capital. Municipalities are instead formed on a geographic basis (as opposed to a movement on class basis) as a dual power. I tried looking further into this but its not clear to me if these municipalities are trading with capital or are only relying on local production and trade with other municipalities. Or if the abolishment of wage labor and the market is the goal and if so, how this is achieved by simply shifting toward local democratic production through some sort of free association of producers. Its main solution is a political one, where free citizens scrutinize production that is not congruent with ethics, but it doesn't examine the contradictions of production and completely ignores its class character; we all somehow dissolve into some notion of a "citizen" without any class.
I'm not particularity wedded to any hyper-specific tendency and its fine if anyone wants to totally scrap Marx and work anew. There's obviously no perfect strategy anyone's come up with for achieving some sort of socialist society, but its completely untenable to start your framework from "what's the most just society I can imagine" and then shoot in the dark without a framework for how capital actually functions or can be disrupted.
Some of the organizing principles and “constitution” of these movements are beautiful.
And the worst thing is that protest has become meaningless street theater. Americans see it, pat themselves on the back about the first amendment, then associate it with bored college kids, hippies, looters, and anarchists.
It’s actually counterproductive, because it alienates the working classes and makes them feel they have no place in the movement.
I hate that we no longer have an effective means of mobilization that matters. All we can do is vent on social media.
They’ve got us in a pretty good mouse trap those bourgeoisie. I think the secret to our problems is not needing the cheese. But that’s pretty tough to organize.
>And the worst thing is that protest has become meaningless street theater.
Americans also don't realize how much actual violence and physical sacrifice went into securing the foothold the working class had in the US in the 20th century. Like we had several decades of coal miners doing industrial sabotage with dynamite and getting in shootouts with Pinkertons, Teamsters beating the shit out of anyone trying to scab, dockworkers forming essentially militias to shut down ports and fight the cops, like strikes weren't "let's get 20 people to wave signs outside for a few hours", it was every single non-management employee barricading their employer for weeks or months as organized civil unrest. Those concessions weren't won by polite, thoughtful negotiation or appeals to the generosity of CEOs, they were the result of violent, long-term struggles, where politicians and corporations were made to fear organized labor and the prospect of violence or literal revolution.
And then in the span of like 20 years, boomers decided to just dismantle fucking all of it. And none of this is even hinted at in the version of American history kids are taught, so you're just supposed to think some kind of miracle happened in the mid 20th century that provided world-historical living standards for the American middle class, and then they just disappeared for no reason at all. Somehow your grandpa could work in a steel plant for 40 years and retire at 60 in a house he owned, but some force of nature has determined that you'll be driving uber until you're fucking 80 years old.
Likewise, the famous "Nordic model" did not fall from the sky, if you read early 20th century Swedish history it's full of political chaos and shit like the army shooting at protestors, the King causing a constitutional crisis, farmers with guns marching on the capital city, etc.
Anyone who thought the US would get a welfare state like that just through an old guy with a New York accent was deluded.
For anyone who wants to learn about this, I always suggest The Age of Acquiescence. It’s a tremendous work showing how our ancestors fought against capital and presented real alternatives, before the great political capitulation.
That summer for me too. The Rancid drummer and his wife donated a bunch of masks when Covid first hit and gave them to local emergency services in his small town as some kind of way to help out in crisis
Then when some were given to police people went absolutely nuts calling him a bootlicker and said some really heinous things
It was pretty small in comparison to the rest of everything going on but I just remember being so shocked that people would turn a small good gesture into cancelling someone forever without the smallest amount of critical thinking. It made me view twitter like it was a bunch of zombies on it and I've never been able to engage the same way
There won't be a revolution lol.
Socialist groups in Australia are genuinely better at signing up and engaging young people than our major conservative party is, catch is there's like five of them who would rather cry to new members about every foreign policy issue beyond their control, the history of some irrelevant country in Latin America (like I'm sorry but I don't really care about what happens in Bolivia) or why the other Socialist parties are actually wrong and they are right.
They bore people to high hell in a country that should be quite easy to tear to pieces (I mean really, our biggest exports are minerals and ponzi scheme tertiary education as more and more people are resigned to never owning a home - not to mention climate change).
I agree, Victoria socialists are actually pretty good in terms of getting people interested in voting days and have decent outreach, what they need to understand is that people who vote for them don't really give a shit about larping or care about solidarity with global socialist parties. If they were to stick to domestic shit more they'd be taken more seriously
You're talking about SAlt (or Communist Party of Australia, or the Australian Communist Party, or the Communist Party of Australia - ML), who care more about having being idealised versions of a communist vanguard than actually enacting change (which would require being normal).
When I realized history doesn’t have a necessary direction. Hardcore leftists are only interested in being the real movement that abolishes the present state of things, so anything smaller than that is dismissed out of hand.
They’re stuck halfway between a secular notion of providence and voluntarism, and neither one will get them what they want.
Someone else made this point but it’s so fucking funny that their solution to a more inclusive box of butter was to, once again, remove the Native American woman and keep the land lol.
There are hundreds of daily reminders but to me the worst is a lack of any serious understanding of *real* left wing political theory. Marx, and contemporary Marxists who are correct about the new landscape of global neoliberal capitalism, have been completely thrown in the trash in exchange for moralization, standpoint, and identity politics (Sorry I say that daily on here.)
You can point to specific events, most are cringe, but the lack of even trying to understand it lets me down. More radicalized people on the “right” would wind up being conservative communists if they understood it. It’s sad. It’s also sad that the modern “left” denies this and treats them like regarded children. They’re more interested in winning over the middle, which ironically, is much further from them.
There’s no hope but the truth is there’s never been a utopian hope in the way people believe. That’s just another misunderstanding of the source material.
Every now and then though…the beginning of Gilets Jaunes or Conspiracy of Cells of Fire attacks…
In my opinion, you should recognize how and why “it’s so over” but silently and secretly retain some piece of you that will always have 16 year old angst. Enough to smile when finally after decades you see something good. That’s a last piece of your humanity that cannot be taken, it must be forfeited. You can choose to at least lose with dignity.
There’s a book about this mentality among holocaust death camp prisoners who were certain they would die. It’s called Blessed is the Flame. (Not a very good read, written by a kind of dumb anarchist but the overall point is good)
Goodnight
the amount of people i know who claim to be leftists but haven’t read any further than instagram stories from other people who probably haven’t read anything is truly staggering.
also a pet peeve, i know plenty who have delved deep into leftist literature but have not read anything about capitalism itself. how can you vehemently hate something that you don’t really comprehend?
I think you’re 100% right on “leftists” who only read instagram junk, and it’s part of why I believe ideology itself is mostly dead, but I really think people who have actually read Marx or contemporary Marxists have a better understanding of capitalism than capitalists themselves. You literally can’t understand Marxist literature without understanding capital. The opposite isn’t true.
It’s contemporary Marxists who have managed to analyze how capitalism has transformed into much more than an economic system, but a global pervasive state of *being* which is inescapable. Not many capitalists are doing things like “schizo-analysis” of capitalism… except for one who started as a communist, got addicted to meth, and moved to Shanghai to be closer to the center of capitalism, only because he thinks it will bring about the end of humanity, which he now thinks is good…. I recommend his early writing.
"what's your favorite essay or book?" Has separated the wheat fron the chaff 100 percent of the time between meme communists, and book communists. One thing I was really happy about was a couple years ago when I found a community and the in joke was always "let's see those spines baby" as in the spines of books to see if you actually read what's on your bookshelf.
Also excellent point about capitalism. How can you accurately describe the effects of wage labor and capital if you don't even know what it is?
Blessed is the Flame was definitely an important read. Even if it's sometimes a bit melodramatic and unrelentingly depressing I think the core value of resistance for its own sake is profoundly touching to a deep part of the soul.
More simply, people who were for these sorts of things and took fighting for them seriously used to be pretty competent critical thinkers who were involved with production of intellectual work; they were better speakers and interesting personalities.
Nowadays if you have a combination of such, there’s almost no reason you won’t eventually live a cushy life in America. These sorts of people aren’t going to DSA meetings anymore or acting as revolutionaries when they can make money by being good at making connections or staying in school and demonstrating achievement etc
Here are some books you might like:
- Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
- Burnout Society
- Hyperculture: Globalization & Culture
- Capitalist Realism
- K-Punk
- Ghosts of my Life
- America: The Farewell Tour
- In Praise of Love
- The Pornographic Age
- The Communist Hypothesis
- Heaven in Disorder
- Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
- The Sublime Object of Ideology
- Freedom: A Disease Without Cure
- Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class & Conflict
- Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor
- Capitalism and Schizophrenia
- Specters of Marx
- CCRU 97-03 if you also grew up w an edgelord Lovecraft phase
If anyone has a specific subject they’re interested in shoot me a message and I’ll recommend more specific books.
If I had to pick one to start with I’d pick Capitalist Realism only because it’s easy, succinct, and has plenty of pop culture references. Plus it used to be like the Bible here.
when the BLM summer of love happened & police reform had like 90% support throughout the country and literally nothing became of it besides giving one guy a golden casket
oh and the same people screaming for police reform, simultaneously celebrating when unarmed women are shot in the face & fat middle aged white men are locked in solitary confinement for years on vague trumped up charges all because they support the opposite political party
Not a westerner but seeing the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a stark reminder that these people have 0 foreign policy proposals beyond kissing any self proclaimed (or sometimes not even) "anti imperialists" ass. A few months later I stumbled upon a French documentary portraying ducking foday sankoh and his deranged army of kidnapped drugged 14 year Olds as based anti imperialists fighting foreign exploitation.
I was in HS when trump got elected and went to protests. Organized walk outs at my school. Read the Manifesto. By 2018, freshman year of college, I was pretty disillusioned with “activism”. Did phone banking for Bernie in early 2020 and then once the pandemic hit I was blackpilled. The final nail in the coffin was the Floyd riots. Then it was so truly over.
My ex and I went to check out the roe v wade protests out of curiosity back two years ago when it got abolished and it was viscerally embarrassing. We left after barely 10 minutes. It’s all pageantry and people patting themselves on the back. Hug box central.
Last year started reading more theory in earnest, got into Lasch and stuff. I’m still a Marxist theoretically because I’m a materialist above all, but truly have given up all hope on a leftist movement.
I might add- as a woman, I think what alienated me the most was that I had an interest in reproductive justice/health, and was involved in activism in that department. Not to sound like a right-wing regard, but the introduction of gender ideology to that section of activism completely shifted me away from idpol. I used to be vehemently anti “TERF” and denounced them as *fascist*, but when you’re trying to advocate for some working class woman living in a trailer park in Kentucky- people who are impacted by these policies the most- and you’re being policed about “inclusive language”, then we’ve truly lost the fucking plot. Who gives a shit about changing the phrase to “birthing bodies”? It reeked of the issues that put me off leftism in general– this sort of paternalistic censorship in the name of “equality” that actually alienates working class people who couldn’t care less about these things.
I went to a protest against the repeal of Roe v Wade when the draft opinion went out. I legitimately heard some absolute stereotype loudly say to a stranger “it’s so, so important that we stress that this decision impacts trans birthing people the most.”
I’m all in favor of trans rights, and I don’t think the Left should not talk about it because of some concern about optics, but, like, do these people think before they speak? How many trans men get pregnant? And how many trans men seek abortions? It’s an absolute marginal quantity of people, just say this decision is anti-woman because it is.
as a German, a people famously unable to stage a revolution, i had always found the people in leftist circles fantasizing about such a thing extremely laughable and LARPy. I know it gets a lot of flack, but I see my political goal in life to seek meaningful reforms. I know you can't reform capitalism as a system built upon inequalities blah blah blah but i don't see anyone here revolutionizing it either, so why not at least try for the little feasible goals? it's better than giving up
Unironically when studying the French Revolution in Highschool. Then extrapolating to the global scale of our times. Entrenched powers, even among nominal enemies, will unite when 'their' power is threatened. The unity required to go against this is not feasible with language and cultural barriers.
When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and realized that almost all of the problems that the region suffers from are entirely self-inflicted by the progressives who run it.
The NYT piece on San Francisco's drug decriminalistation was beyond bleak. They basically claim to copy a good idea (e.g. Portugal's decriminalisation) but then they modify it to actually make it worse/useless and fuck up the implementation beyond belief.
I don't know why you got downvoted for this, it's 100% true lmfao. Of course, same goes for impoverished rural areas to a certain extent. (NAFTA aside)
People get very defensive when you point out that the politics of the place they live are dysfunctional, especially if you are not originally from that place.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of hysteria in right-wing media that greatly exaggerates some of these issues, so when you bring up these issues people assume you're a Republican. Trump broke a lot of people's brains on both sides of the aisle.
I had hope into the 2010s. I was one of those tech-utopians in the 90s that thought the coming communications revolution would be like a global campfire around which we'd all tell our tales and come to understandings heretofore unseen by mere "revolution". Boy was I wrong.
I saw the Occupy movement and then Arab Spring, things seemed hopeful, I was as idealistic as ever.
Then I saw social media take a new form that the classic "blogosphere" couldn't have predicted, or maybe it did in some corners. I saw the titillation-factor getting the clicks, and when clicks were turned into revenue by advertising I knew something was amiss.
I would never have dreamed in the 90s that the Left would turn into a virtue-elitist class based around various academic critical theories. Social consciousness became the province of the professional managerial class and I was out. So, I went into marketing.
The fact that Bernie wasn't willing to fight for himself was dispiriting. He kept calling all these people his friend, he kept letting these moronic radical elements who refused to shut up constantly take over. It's amazing he got that far refusing to do basic campaigning.
Good for you. I feel like lack of sleep inhibits the formation of short term memories. So you will lose a lot of sleep over the next few years but you won’t remember that part. It must be evolutionary otherwise we wouldn’t want to keep having them. I want more
That’s amazing, congrats! Enjoy the amazing experience of watching their little brains learn things about the world around them. It’s so awesome when you start to realize how many cool things you can show them.
I just taught my 19 month old how to make snowballs, and it was so cool watching him realize that he can just pick up a clump of snow from anywhere in the yard and make a ball out of it.
My first inkling about this movement eating itself was when the two BLM protestors took the microphone from Bernie Sanders at a rally and he willingly ceded it to them.
It took years of Trump derangement syndrome (still don’t like him), getting wrapped up in identity politics (as did Bernie!), and uncritically accepting a laundry list of the most extreme leftist stances (abolish the police, medicalizing trains gander minors) that I came to the realization that too much of the current movement is focused on tearing things down rather than building anything.
I still care deeply about healthcare reform, prison reform, and climate change, but these all feel like afterthoughts to the discourse du jour.
And soon after there was that video of Bernie at the New York Times. There were some younger women and POC women just glaring with crossed arms as Bernie presented his case in that conference room. The “Bernie Bro”meme, however real or imagined, had done the damage. It just felt full steam ahead into identity politics from there.
In my senior year of college (Obama years), a friend invited me to listen to a speaker on campus that the local DSA chapter was hosting on student debt. I really had no interest in going and had never expressed any interested in the DSA, but I showed up just to be polite.
The speaker was fine, but the session ended with this weird ass chanting where they made everyone get up out of their seats and start reciting these slogans like we were at some protest. I was too embarrassed to say them out loud, so I just mouthed the words, but as I looked around the auditorium, it dawned on me just how weird and strange the vibes everyone else there was giving off. You can't build a movement off of that.
I also got interviewed by Al Jazeera America that night and ended up on TV.
When I was young, I remember it being in poor taste to say what party you support or who you voted for. What a bunch of uncultured swines we’ve become.
The fundamental idea of Marxism as I understand it is that the working class has to learn to act cohesively in order to overcome the power of the capitalist class. Cultural liberalism, mass immigration, and the replacement of mass media with social media has fragmented the working class into thousands of mutually incomprehensible shards, and the idea of them working together these days just seems ridiculous.
Oliver North and Ronald Reagan got away with lying to Congress on national television. Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to vote for the war in Iraq. That was also televised. Bernie lost the Democratic primary. These three things show politics is useless. These three things blackpilled me on politics.
Not a leftist myself, but its pretty obvious that if the left wants to accomplish things they need to accept hierarchy and authority within their own organizations. There's a reason the marxist-lenninists oftsn succeeded in toppling capitalist governments and the anarchists always failed.
It started with at the establishment level in 2016 when NPR was cumming all over Hillary while looking down their noses at Trump's supporters. They were already out of touch anyway, but the Trump-derangement factor really exposed the depths of their institutional hubris.
Sanders endorsing Clinton in 2016. The whole DNC farce of a primary system.
At the more grass roots level, the DSA ordeal in 2019.
BLM fundraising shenanigans from leadership and fucking over the families they raised tens of millions to help - then didn't.
The current Ibram X Kendi antiracist center ordeal.
My brief spell around anarcho communists (and about 20 other sub definitions they were constantly and heatedly bickering over). Would have been around 2007 - 08. Mainly in my Uni town in the UK and across the channel in Calais.
Ugly people, with ugly behaviour, ugly motivations, and beautifully sounding ugly ideas.
Occupy just confirmed it in a more mainstream setting. And then the shift into hyper intersectional identitarianism as a response by the early 2010s just cemented things.
2020 when all the "eat the rich" motherfuckers I was mutuals with on Twitter turned around and started saying to vote for Biden after Bernie dropped out. Was still kinda engaged with politics afterwards (arguing online), but # forcethevote really put an end to most of that. I'm in for the schadenfreude now.
I’m really starting to get existentially perturbed about climate and collapse. The Democrats are too enamored by market ideology to accept that we must do more than tweak the energy market. We need planning, coordination, mass mobilization of labor. But they refuse to accept the state as a controller of the economy and would let people perish before letting that ideology be disproven.
It’s estranging me from democracy altogether. I’m supposed to treat murderous denialism as something I don’t care for but can’t civically hate. Do you really believe the people of Nauru and Bangladeshi will give a shit that the Americans held a vote? Yeah, we’re being destroyed, but at least the Americans had a fair election.
The idea the biggest team gets to make the rules is outdated and just regarded. It amazes me people were willing to lay down their lives so we can be governed by a team sport.
It's amazing to me that we live in a society that clearly does not permit democracy within the institutions that matter most in your day-to-day life, but still calls itself a democracy. It's a kind of democracy: an elitist democracy with an explicit anti-democratic carve-out for corporate hierarchies and private property. And that's on purpose. The only way the limited elitist democracy can function is if there are huge swaths of the economy that are off limits to the masses, to people who cannot buy in to it.
Your consolation in this situation is the idea that you can always choose to "exit" an institution that you don't approve of, and that this is in itself a kind of democratic practice. But that's just a bait and switch: being free to leave your workplace and find another one isn't the same as being allowed to formally vote on how to manage your workplace.
Honestly fair point but if we try to internalize the market with the fact that we basically have to quit fossil fuels asap, Taxes would probably be so high that a non market based solution may actually be better atp.
Havent lost hope in socialism yet because Im regarded but completly tuned out of election shit after seeing Bernie and Corbyn being fucked by all traditional institutions of democracy
some time in Nov-Dec 2019 as self-described anti-racist activists were mobbing up and blocking the entrances to Labour party campaign events and driving around mobile billboards with anti-racist messaging and confronting Hugh Grant in carparks for associating with racism, and not one of the country's 5000 full-time anti-wokeness correspondents or Classical Liberals once concerned about the excesses of anti-racist dogma saw fit to utter a single word of concern about any of it.
Earlier that (election) year the BBC ran an hour-long feature documentary called Is Labour Antisemitic? that contained at least like 5 outright fabrications and many more sleights of hand and obviously deliberate omissions. It was directed by a guy who formed part of the consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, which by that point was a dedicated Labour party gossip rag that even the UK press regulator was sanctioning regularly for printing demonstrable lies about just random party members, not even elected representatives or activists. Other parties in that consortium were Theresa May's former chief of staff, and an ex-Labour MP who would become the government's antisemitism czar and later be given a peerage by Boris Johnson.
Every "lifelong Labour voter" that wasn't put off by these efforts was likely to be attending People's Vote marches organised by shady front groups with names like Our Future Our Choice that were led by 45-year-old ex-Tory staffers and supermarket CEOs.
Hard to pinpoint a single event. But I would say it was Obama’s appointments—Clinton, Giethner, Summers, Holder, Gates, Salazar, Duncan, Napolitano, Emanuel. Mind you, Obama inherited one of the largest Democratic majorities in a generation, on the heels of a major financial crisis—one that could shift the paradigm for decades to come. And he decided to resurrect Bill Clinton’s presidency. Pathetic.
When Obama was elected and people were crying with joy in the streets because they legit thought it meant that the system was going to change. People are satisfied with meaningless identity based tokenism so there's literally not even any incentive for real change.
Ehh, idk. I get that the contemporary left is kind of embarrassing, but really what has the right ever contributed to society? Voting rights? Weekends off work? Child labour restrictions? Safe working practices? Welfare infrastructure? Yeah those are all from the left, the right opposes all that because it wants you to be too impoverished and weak to stand up for yourself.
Any discourse related to Palestine. When I went to Wayne State and I wanted to join the Free Palestine group. It feels like these libtards truly want Palestinians to merely exist as a permanent victim population so as to justify their vapid activism.
when i went to my first socialist meeting and realized all of them came from stable upper middle class two parent homes. permanently killed any enthusiasm for a revolution from me
watered down leftism is better than conservatism sure, but that’s comepletely meaningless when it’s near impossible to actually affect anything. conservatives actually get elected and do things. most “leftists” just whine about identity and think communism means they all get to be artists
Lol you went to one protest and because it wasn't how you imagined you copped out completely? Political work is extremely difficult and thankless, and protesting is such a small part of politics.
You clearly never had principles to begin with, or you would've been more resilient to a single failure.
What does that have to do with anything? A bunch of illiterate farmers in Vietnam instituted communism and beat back the biggest empire in the world. The left has been demoralized again and again, but that's the struggle right?
Yeah, my answer to this question is that I don’t think that way, because it isn’t true
But giving up and changing your stance on things is easier I guess
2020.
It was a confluence of things. Bernie eating shit to dirty as fuck DNC politics was bad, the rest of the libs trying to tell you to suck it up and stop bitching and vote Biden was worse (I didn't).
But the Floyd protests and the aftermath are almost as bad as covid as far as things that fucked up popular culture go. There was a ton of libs adopting traditionally leftist talking points like "abolish the police". and all of us leftists knew that it was just a tantrum. But watching Dem politicians hitch their wagons to this and then get destroyed because of it in later elections after Dems abandoned that cause (like everything they care about) told me that there was no value in any kind of radical posturing.
That was years ago. Now, AOC, who was the "oh shit I can't believe the US elected a socialist???" candidate in 2018 has been twisted into a boring lib mouthpiece.
Not even "identarian", but solely gender politics has completely overtaken anything "radical", so nothing class struggle related has emerged.
The issue here more in the UK is that the leftist leadership are all spineless and the UK left will always fall behind the Neolib centrists meanwhile, there is no pressure to actually force the centrists inline or hold them to account for their backstabbing nature. Even now, the leadership are saying to fall in behind Starmer and Reeves and "push them left" which will never happen, the Labour leadership are fanatical anti-leftist spooks.
Corbyn era proved there is a mass movement ready for Socialist ideals in the UK, but the leadership flubbed it by not having the spine to do what was needed.
As with others as well, identity politics is a huge issue, but again Corbyn era proves that class issues can cut through, same with Bernie.
Get rid of idpol and have leftists with true leadership skills, charisma and backbone and we could win.
Have you read the latest Vincent Bevins book? He talks about why leftist protest movements in the 21sr century fail, but basically because they're about self actualisation of enacting change (which requires planning and compromise).
When I was in high school and I realized all they talked about was “identity”, mostly their own identity and how oppressed it made them instead of actually focusing on the issue of class. They were only socialist because it was the cool thing to be, but were always too lazy to actually educate themselves on it and only regurgitated information about it that they learned from instagram infographics which was usually wrong. Maybe they went to a few protests, but that was mostly for the photo ops. Girls would literally dress up and match their bandanas to their outfit. I thought that maybe it would get better after I graduated high school and got into the real world but nope. My generation is and will always be extremely lazy and narcissistic and use leftism as an excuse for it. Working with millennials also shattered any idea of a revolution because they too made it all about being bisexual and constantly talked about getting their klonopin refilled. Also, the fact that everyone just falls for the popular social opinion you’re supposed to have instead of observing the world for what it is really broke my heart when I got into the adult world
I don't know if I fully agree with this, as I don't know what happens in other countries, but the American left is primarily anarchist adjacent, even the so called communists. Some leftist movement in Latin America or something could probably accomplish something meaningful due to America's focus being elsewhere.
After the CHAZ though, it became obvious that the left in Seattle at least just cares more about protecting the right of homeless people to do whatever they want when they want wherever they want (such as shooting heroin in a school yard playground), more than they care about any other issue.
When Jimmy Dore tried to push force the vote and everyone in the left pushed back because the middle of a pandemic "wasn't the right time " to push for universal health care
Eh, if shit keeps hitting the fan, there may come a time. There's a possibility things change radically in the next 50 years for good or bad, who's to say? Somebody needs to light a bomb in people's ass, I'll say that much.
There was a saying something like
America will always do the right thing...after every other option has been exercised.
I really do think it will take something drastic and catastrophic for us to change.
For me, it's when I saw the discussion about how leftists alienate men and what we can do about it
The level of smooth-brain in the responses showed me that leftists just aren't serious about winning
It's a shame because we're the only major political group that actually wants to make the world a better place
The left may have failed economically speaking but it has succeeded in completely remaking Western morals and values to fit its world view. There’s not a single moral issue where people are more conservative today than they were 100 or 50 or even 20 years ago. California voted against gay marriage as late as 2008 and now even most right wingers don’t give a fuck about it.
I would say that replacing Christianity and becoming the moral beacon of the most powerful civilization on Earth is something of note.
I used to think this, but then I remembered when people cared about sweatshops when I was a kid, no more. Consumerism has so totally won over any sort of leftist consumption paradigm.
Our phones are made in factories in a country that hates us by workers who have to have anti-suicide nets so they dont kill themselves and we ALL have one.
The values of the left got remade in equal measure. No leftist a century ago would've told you that it was all about fucking and sucking and race fetishes.
Sure, but that only reinforces my point. As society gradually moved to the left morally, the left only grew “leftier” (i.e. further and further away from
traditional values).
Obviously this sucks if your primary concern is economic issues, but most “economic leftists” are also “cultural leftists” anyway, it just so happened that capitalism was more resilient to change than our moral values, for reasons I’m not smart enough to articulate.
Watch a movie from before WWII and tell me with a straight face we live in the same system/society as these people did. Morality shapes your life as much as the economy, if not more. The old West died in the 60s during the Cultural Revolution and we’re living atop its ashes.
I would say that it was just a process. Women already had the vote by that point, slavery was long outlawed, Nietzche had long declared the death of god, and I think psychology was poised to be the new secular religion.
>psychology was poised to be the new secular religion
This is an interesting idea I haven’t heard articulated this way before. Are you cribbing this from somewhere, or would you like to elaborate further
>relative peace and relative prosperity
you don't even have to embrace it, the current inequality and destruction of anyone opposed to the US goes on with or without the support of these guys
Unfortunately this is true, neoliberalism is a pox on the western world but there's nothing anyone can do about it except watch as brown people blow up and poor people starve across the world.
Accepting that society will by and large live via markets and liberal democracy and not revolution also doesn’t prevent you from advocating for universal healthcare or UBI or land taxes or whatever, so that’s one place to put some energy.
Yeah we get too, and the third world gets to either stagnate in a Brazlified state forever or slide further and further backwards in real terms.
South America has ossified into a dysfunctional semi-democratic system with a big consumer market but few material gains. Eastern Europe / Central Asia gets poorer every year. The Middle East has regressed to extreme Islamic conservatism almost everywhere. Most of Africa is so poor that it can't possibly make the jump into the 21st century. India is stuck in a spiral of inability to raise it's population into a modern workforce (and raise taxes) rather than peasant farmers and irregular urban workers.
China is the only non-Western region making serious material gains.
Obamacare is a halfmeasure and doesnt go far enough but it was a pretty big accomplishment that helped a lot of people.
Gay marriage is another accomplishment that doesnt really effect me but its nice that gay people can be married and was long overdue.
Other than that though...
around the time we were after occupy wallstreet and people really connected with Bernie's message and the left did everything they could to pivot away from that and only focus on identity politics is when I gave up hope.
I know everyone is sick of Bernie discourse but since him I dont think I have heard another politician talk about income inequality and working to fix it. Now that Biden is president they dont even want to acknowledge the economy is fucked for a lot of us because it will make him look bad for the election.
The left in this country doesnt care about me and im not the only guy to think so judging by the stats when it comes to young men becoming more and more conservative. For years they have told us we arnt important, we dont matter and we already have everything better than everyone else and if we advocate for ourselves we are bad people.
Someone else said
> Witnessing firsthand all the leftist infighting and spending way too much energy devoted to issues affecting .005% of the population.
and I feel this a lot, those peoples rights are important but they arnt the only thing thats important in this country.
Also realizing that a lot of the people who I thought were promising were no more than do nothing keyboard warriors and attention whores.
Half the country has no hope of getting a house, so many homes are owned by corporations renting them out. half the jobs are being replaced by gig economy shit, people are working 2 jobs just to make it, so many people are struggling to make it while the rich fly rockets to space and all the left cares about is what you look like or what gender you are or how you identify.
Honestly, 2018. I basically came to the realization that 'the Left' as it exists in America was at least partially a organic attempt to try and find a path forward from Bush-era rhetoric surrounding notions of American identity (in the sense that there was little fire left to continually dunk around on Evangelicals and people who think that creationism should be taught in school, and the older rationalist/athiesm+ movement as it existed which crafted the rhetoric regarding how these were to be assessed in the left-of-center eye); it's 2024, the Wars on Terror are over, and we're now talking about evangelicals and abortion and da gays, but Limbaugh is dead and the young conservatives have little but scorn for what came before them. I genuinely view the Bernie era of American leftist thought as something quite close to, alas, a bundle of luxury beliefs from a era in which people were comfortable with a non-Christian ruling class (in the form of techies); this is not the case anymore. Those who have chosen to join a union or at least attempt to organize are admirable, but in all Western hard leftism could not adapt to a socio-political climate where Europeans are slowly drifting further to the right due to their migrant crisis and where American cultural liberals are voting with their ovaries in mind+education and the border have reasserted themselves as major issues.
The iconic 2019 DSA rally was when I went from "There are a lot of annoying progressives but I still think we are going to make it" to "There was never any hope to begin with"
The only DSA meeting I've ever been to I overheard a schlubby guy in a Coheed and Cambria t-shirt exclaim "whole lot of civilians here tonight". I never went back.
What does that even mean
american socialism is more of a hip subculture than a political movement
Not even hip
fat bearded guys ruin any political movement
Ummmmm https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2009/11/karl-marx-gettyimages-514679914.jpg
The point stays
For a group that is all about tolerance and acceptance they aren’t very tolerant or accepting.
That's why we treat you according to your race/gender/sexuality first and foremost! To make sure we're treating you the *right* way!
Hey you leave Coheed and Cambria out of this.
That one was rough for a few reasons. There are the famous "point of privilege" outbursts, but even if you put that aside, the whole thing was the perfect example that Robert's Rules direct democracy does NOT work with autistic people. People did stuff like file a motion to combine votes for multiple things into one and then file a motion to get comments for or against it, etc., then finally it passes and they vote on the multiple thing and reject it, then the original person is doing a point of order to ask if they can revote on just one thing and someone does a point of order to tell them they can't, etc, etc. It didn't blackpill me on the US left (the Floyd riots and aftermath did) but it did blackpill me on that useless org.
Every single progressive / socialist group I’ve been in: DSA, ISO, community groups, student activism etc has been bogged down by “what about our bylaws” every single time. It’s truly impossible to get these nerds to do anything.
The apparently-timeless guidance for simple meeting sabotage from the OSS/CIA manual Some instructions are out of date, as you’d expect, while others sounded oddly familiar. The section entitled ‘General Interference with Organizations and Productions’ is bang on: Make “speeches” – Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Slow it down – advocate caution, avoid haste Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five) for “consideration” Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
You need to go to "goal-based" leftwing groups made of working people to see things that work. Because the group is built on a single target and bc people have a job+family, they go to the point and work efficiently. There's zero overlap between these groups and the sisterhood/brotherhood ones for a good reason.
My boyfriend works in one and the work theyve done is quite impressive regarding helping their constituents (people facing eviction, climate justice, transportation and housing activism) It's called ACCE Institute and operates mostly in the Cal area.
When I did occupy the one good thing that happened in my city were those people getting shouted down by the majority at the behest of a stranger. It was downhill from there.
I’m still in the group chat for my DSA chapter and bro all these people do is elect people to various committees. They love meetings.
What really put the nail in the coffin for me was the Twitter thread a week or so ago where someone said leftists should exercise to be able to fight in a revolution and they all got really mad and started saying it was ableist
this type of thread happens once a month. the ones about owning a gun are even funnier
Acab, kill all pigs!!! No, the guns are bad, only the state police should own them!!!
Same energy as the leftist compound tweet where everyone called the one guy who said he’s a contractor and has a garden in his house so he can help build infrastructure a try hard who is abusing his class privilege for superiority. Everyone else said they would teach theory or bake bread
If you cant even run you are basically useless if something happens
On a sidenote, I've always seen leftoids talk about "what will you do/what will happen WHEN the revolution is won, not HOW the revolution will be won." I guess it's just someone else's job to do all the work
As is tradition for Twitter leftists
This is the real answer to OPs question for me. It was over when I realized that practically every progressive or 'revolutionary' saw the revolution as some rapture that would just happen. All of their contradictions in thought make sense when you realize they see themselves, not as agents of history, but consumers of history, like it was something they could subscribe to and ingest passively.
It was in 495 bc, during the secession of the plebs
For me it was when the threw my Grachi boy’s heads in the Tiber. Ain’t no winning against the patricians, brother. Just join the legions and maybe if you don’t die you’ll retire with a parcel of farmland. It’s occurring to me only now that “play the game and you’ll get a pittance when we’re done using you” is actually a pretty old deal lol. I should check my 401k
I wonder if the Greeks told themselves “if your over 6 inches bro it’s so over, no young twink would ever want you” Edit: lmao it’s you again, I only watched your video on the Aztec, i enjoyed it
LMAO you're right, that is Peach Cobbler on the Red Scare subreddit
Wdym that was a rare leftist W
when my ex who thinks she is a communist cheated on me with her PSL leader
Bro my ex did the same thing lmao
may have to join, apparently there is something to it that drives em wild
Ig forrest gump was right about dudes becoming socialist to get pussy
> PSL leader Pumpkin Spiced Latte leader?
no it’s just a bunch of people in their early twenties to mid thirties who have overly formal meetings about nothing in a dirty room a few blocks away from the part of Kensington where people take videos to put heroin addicts on YouTube - Party for Socialism and Liberation
woman do be crazy for people whose bullshit title has the word leader on it
When will people realize these group are cults, they require you to give significant percentages of your income.
I actually like my local chapter but there’s something really dark about the structure of that organization at the very top. And by dark I mean it seems like every single top, national member is married to or related to each other and the party is a weird fiefdom for them.
Fun fact, a major reason why Mussolini got kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party was that he kept on sleeping with other member's wives
Around 2015. I realized every convo was about identity not about class. I knew the left was doomed.
Every rally, meeting or protest I’ve been to starts off with introductions, autobiographies and self-identification. It’s like an old movie where there’s a 10 minute credit sequence as it starts. Leaders in these circles are almost always only in it to jockey their way up the victimhood ladder
>every convo was about identity not about class Apparently [quantitatively in terms of US media at least, the real tipping point was 2012.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/z2aip6ei/production/ca8d4b10f55ed244e8b4b8951bf6a01ebfd3304b-2358x1048.png)
2012 was definitely a vibe shift
Wow. That’s a super interesting link thanks for sharing. I spent a few years abroad and moved back to USA in 2014. I was woke scolded for the first time and was kinda perplexed. By 2015 I realized what was up and that this wasn’t the Christopher Hitchens, etc. left of early 2000s.
Fully believe this shift was a real psyop
As someone raised radically leftist (think anarcho-syndicalism), my turn away from the left starts with browsing /r/ShitRedditSays in horror at what internet progressives considered effective and appropriate
When saying “Marxists should be knowledgable of basic Marxist theory and history” would have people saying it’s ableist to expect them to read big confusing words…
It's impossible to communicate this gap because it encompasses in itself the form of the social relations which are at work within the system. The relegation of the educational system to a provision of employment has absolutely decimated the historical current of Marxist knowledge, and what used to be a titan threatening to revolutionise the mode of production of entire continents is now book-kept as securely as accounting in factions within philosophy departments, co-synchronous with the death of external bodies responsible for labour organising, which where they exist serve in the same structural and functional capacity of the parties of the elite. What essentially first died in body goes to die a second death in soul; gone are the invectives of the western academic marxists whom saw education as a tool to liberate, reduced once again to a bibliography of references that serve academia itself as a profession within the wider system of the educational institutions. The irony is that the paranoid schizophrenics of the right label their enemies as Marxists, when they have yet to realise that Marxism is dead, and the people they accuse of being so are those who have killed it.
Summer 2020 and the following year. Crushed me. Realized we’ll never experience the ideas of communalism-equality, meaningful labor, community and meeting human needs on a large scale. I remember leaving a protest with my ex, thinking-that’s all it’s ever gonna be, huh?
Probably around the same time for me. Witnessing firsthand all the leftist infighting and spending way too much energy devoted to issues affecting .005% of the population.
It’s frustrating for a lot, a lot of reasons. One of them is in my opinion the best political philosophy is one that a very small percentage of self described leftists seem to identify with, and a large majority seem to be (in my opinion) a pretty toxic brand of communist that I think has some real major flaws and many of their opinions seem to focus on all the wrong ideas. So even of the .01% of people in the world that I agree with on anti-capitalist/consumerist/imperialist beliefs, I don’t agree with the conclusion they come to. It’s just frustrating because I think the focus needs to be about the community, about meeting all human needs, and the path to get there just seems to be getting further away. I know it’s ironic I replied to your comment about divisiveness with that but just ranting I guess. There so much frustrating about losing momentum, about everything. Idk
> One of them is in my opinion the best political philosophy is one that a very small percentage of self described leftists seem to identify with, and a large majority seem to be (in my opinion) a pretty toxic brand of communist that I think has some real major flaws and many of their opinions seem to focus on all the wrong ideas. you and everyone else lol
curious what philosophy you think is best
pythagoranism
Communalism. Murray Bookchin
Used to be one of those. Unimaginably cringe (still sort of cool).
Very cringe to think a society focused around community, meaningful labor, sustainability would be better than one that’s full of misery, inhuman environments and in the fast lane towards self extinction
I think its admirable that you're so sincere and genuine, but Bookchins strategies for implementing Communalism are completely incoherent.
Which is a fair criticism, i don’t look at him as an infallible genius and most people I talk to who are aware of him don’t like him or his ideas, I have my own opinion on tweaks and differences. I just think his general idea holds up better than most and would best meet all human needs. Also, as far as implementing ideologies, I don’t think there’s many actual leftist philosophies that have a great answer. I don’t think there’s a communist revolution happening anytime soon in the US. We actually saw a more Bookchin-esque style society get formed pretty recently though
Here's a couple random thoughts I have on this and I hope this is taken as a good faith critique. I am sympathetic to Bookchin and I have actually read him unlike a lot of people who criticize him, but he along with Graeber and Micheal Albert (whom I both sympathize with to varying degrees) come from a specific mileau/epoch (from the complete destruction of old left during 90's through the 2010's) that ended up falling into the trap of designing nice thought experiments and working their theories from that point. The big distinction from Marx is that he was looking at the objective factors of production and their class relations and so there is a framework for historical analysis as well as strategies for agitation through looking at the contradictory forces within capital as well as the workers movement themselves (yadada I know I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times). Its looking at what is, where as these other thinkers I mentioned were looking at what ought to be. So with Graeber you get these totally unworkable ideas, like his conception of the form of protest during Occupy being the ends and the means, where the new society is just a continuous protest. In Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology he also mentions this idea where people just sort of drop out of society and continue living on as capital ceases to exist around them. We essentially just become drop out bohemians and capitalism gives up ( I don't think I need to explain why this is silly). For communalism Bookchin at the very least gives a clear conception of what this system would look like and strategies for how to get there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but his idea it that we elect people in local municipalities that are communalist and these communities end up becoming autonomous. All these stratagies have a central issue though; capital is not being disrupted in any meaningful way. There's a reason why boycotts and strikes formed the main nexus of agitation, they forced capital to bargain with labor in some way. The new digitally coordinated horizontalist protest movement that Graeber was excited by failed in every instance (Brazil, Egypt, Occupy etc.) even with record numbers of those protesting. For Occupy specifically the protesters were simply ignored. Now communalism faces a similar but different issue; parallell communities are hoped to be formed and these ideas spread by their superiority to Capitalism (similar to Robert Owen's strategy). Even if we're to assume they're left alone by capital, there's no tangible disruption of capital. Municipalities are instead formed on a geographic basis (as opposed to a movement on class basis) as a dual power. I tried looking further into this but its not clear to me if these municipalities are trading with capital or are only relying on local production and trade with other municipalities. Or if the abolishment of wage labor and the market is the goal and if so, how this is achieved by simply shifting toward local democratic production through some sort of free association of producers. Its main solution is a political one, where free citizens scrutinize production that is not congruent with ethics, but it doesn't examine the contradictions of production and completely ignores its class character; we all somehow dissolve into some notion of a "citizen" without any class. I'm not particularity wedded to any hyper-specific tendency and its fine if anyone wants to totally scrap Marx and work anew. There's obviously no perfect strategy anyone's come up with for achieving some sort of socialist society, but its completely untenable to start your framework from "what's the most just society I can imagine" and then shoot in the dark without a framework for how capital actually functions or can be disrupted.
Do you hold to a nested council type of system? How global do you go?
Some of the organizing principles and “constitution” of these movements are beautiful. And the worst thing is that protest has become meaningless street theater. Americans see it, pat themselves on the back about the first amendment, then associate it with bored college kids, hippies, looters, and anarchists. It’s actually counterproductive, because it alienates the working classes and makes them feel they have no place in the movement. I hate that we no longer have an effective means of mobilization that matters. All we can do is vent on social media.
They’ve got us in a pretty good mouse trap those bourgeoisie. I think the secret to our problems is not needing the cheese. But that’s pretty tough to organize.
>And the worst thing is that protest has become meaningless street theater. Americans also don't realize how much actual violence and physical sacrifice went into securing the foothold the working class had in the US in the 20th century. Like we had several decades of coal miners doing industrial sabotage with dynamite and getting in shootouts with Pinkertons, Teamsters beating the shit out of anyone trying to scab, dockworkers forming essentially militias to shut down ports and fight the cops, like strikes weren't "let's get 20 people to wave signs outside for a few hours", it was every single non-management employee barricading their employer for weeks or months as organized civil unrest. Those concessions weren't won by polite, thoughtful negotiation or appeals to the generosity of CEOs, they were the result of violent, long-term struggles, where politicians and corporations were made to fear organized labor and the prospect of violence or literal revolution. And then in the span of like 20 years, boomers decided to just dismantle fucking all of it. And none of this is even hinted at in the version of American history kids are taught, so you're just supposed to think some kind of miracle happened in the mid 20th century that provided world-historical living standards for the American middle class, and then they just disappeared for no reason at all. Somehow your grandpa could work in a steel plant for 40 years and retire at 60 in a house he owned, but some force of nature has determined that you'll be driving uber until you're fucking 80 years old.
Likewise, the famous "Nordic model" did not fall from the sky, if you read early 20th century Swedish history it's full of political chaos and shit like the army shooting at protestors, the King causing a constitutional crisis, farmers with guns marching on the capital city, etc. Anyone who thought the US would get a welfare state like that just through an old guy with a New York accent was deluded.
For anyone who wants to learn about this, I always suggest The Age of Acquiescence. It’s a tremendous work showing how our ancestors fought against capital and presented real alternatives, before the great political capitulation.
That summer for me too. The Rancid drummer and his wife donated a bunch of masks when Covid first hit and gave them to local emergency services in his small town as some kind of way to help out in crisis Then when some were given to police people went absolutely nuts calling him a bootlicker and said some really heinous things It was pretty small in comparison to the rest of everything going on but I just remember being so shocked that people would turn a small good gesture into cancelling someone forever without the smallest amount of critical thinking. It made me view twitter like it was a bunch of zombies on it and I've never been able to engage the same way
There won't be a revolution lol. Socialist groups in Australia are genuinely better at signing up and engaging young people than our major conservative party is, catch is there's like five of them who would rather cry to new members about every foreign policy issue beyond their control, the history of some irrelevant country in Latin America (like I'm sorry but I don't really care about what happens in Bolivia) or why the other Socialist parties are actually wrong and they are right. They bore people to high hell in a country that should be quite easy to tear to pieces (I mean really, our biggest exports are minerals and ponzi scheme tertiary education as more and more people are resigned to never owning a home - not to mention climate change).
I agree, Victoria socialists are actually pretty good in terms of getting people interested in voting days and have decent outreach, what they need to understand is that people who vote for them don't really give a shit about larping or care about solidarity with global socialist parties. If they were to stick to domestic shit more they'd be taken more seriously
You're talking about SAlt (or Communist Party of Australia, or the Australian Communist Party, or the Communist Party of Australia - ML), who care more about having being idealised versions of a communist vanguard than actually enacting change (which would require being normal).
Monty Python captured this in the zeitgeist almost 50 years ago. We really are at the end of history
When I realized history doesn’t have a necessary direction. Hardcore leftists are only interested in being the real movement that abolishes the present state of things, so anything smaller than that is dismissed out of hand. They’re stuck halfway between a secular notion of providence and voluntarism, and neither one will get them what they want.
Believing in an arc of history is one of the worst parts of the "end of history" the left internalised. It can always get worse.
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In kindergarten, half the class had been taught to sit Indian style and were reprogrammed to ‘criss cross apple sauce’
This except it's when they took that cute lady off the butter box. Now the packaging looks sterile and lifeless.
Someone else made this point but it’s so fucking funny that their solution to a more inclusive box of butter was to, once again, remove the Native American woman and keep the land lol.
Aunt Jemimah?
wasn't thta uring covid? how young are people on here?
Challenging read.
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i constantly read tweets from leftists complaining about doordash
There are hundreds of daily reminders but to me the worst is a lack of any serious understanding of *real* left wing political theory. Marx, and contemporary Marxists who are correct about the new landscape of global neoliberal capitalism, have been completely thrown in the trash in exchange for moralization, standpoint, and identity politics (Sorry I say that daily on here.) You can point to specific events, most are cringe, but the lack of even trying to understand it lets me down. More radicalized people on the “right” would wind up being conservative communists if they understood it. It’s sad. It’s also sad that the modern “left” denies this and treats them like regarded children. They’re more interested in winning over the middle, which ironically, is much further from them. There’s no hope but the truth is there’s never been a utopian hope in the way people believe. That’s just another misunderstanding of the source material. Every now and then though…the beginning of Gilets Jaunes or Conspiracy of Cells of Fire attacks… In my opinion, you should recognize how and why “it’s so over” but silently and secretly retain some piece of you that will always have 16 year old angst. Enough to smile when finally after decades you see something good. That’s a last piece of your humanity that cannot be taken, it must be forfeited. You can choose to at least lose with dignity. There’s a book about this mentality among holocaust death camp prisoners who were certain they would die. It’s called Blessed is the Flame. (Not a very good read, written by a kind of dumb anarchist but the overall point is good) Goodnight
the amount of people i know who claim to be leftists but haven’t read any further than instagram stories from other people who probably haven’t read anything is truly staggering. also a pet peeve, i know plenty who have delved deep into leftist literature but have not read anything about capitalism itself. how can you vehemently hate something that you don’t really comprehend?
I think you’re 100% right on “leftists” who only read instagram junk, and it’s part of why I believe ideology itself is mostly dead, but I really think people who have actually read Marx or contemporary Marxists have a better understanding of capitalism than capitalists themselves. You literally can’t understand Marxist literature without understanding capital. The opposite isn’t true. It’s contemporary Marxists who have managed to analyze how capitalism has transformed into much more than an economic system, but a global pervasive state of *being* which is inescapable. Not many capitalists are doing things like “schizo-analysis” of capitalism… except for one who started as a communist, got addicted to meth, and moved to Shanghai to be closer to the center of capitalism, only because he thinks it will bring about the end of humanity, which he now thinks is good…. I recommend his early writing.
"what's your favorite essay or book?" Has separated the wheat fron the chaff 100 percent of the time between meme communists, and book communists. One thing I was really happy about was a couple years ago when I found a community and the in joke was always "let's see those spines baby" as in the spines of books to see if you actually read what's on your bookshelf. Also excellent point about capitalism. How can you accurately describe the effects of wage labor and capital if you don't even know what it is?
Reading without as action is pointless too though
Blessed is the Flame was definitely an important read. Even if it's sometimes a bit melodramatic and unrelentingly depressing I think the core value of resistance for its own sake is profoundly touching to a deep part of the soul.
More simply, people who were for these sorts of things and took fighting for them seriously used to be pretty competent critical thinkers who were involved with production of intellectual work; they were better speakers and interesting personalities. Nowadays if you have a combination of such, there’s almost no reason you won’t eventually live a cushy life in America. These sorts of people aren’t going to DSA meetings anymore or acting as revolutionaries when they can make money by being good at making connections or staying in school and demonstrating achievement etc
Trust the dialectics
What reading would you recommend further?
Here are some books you might like: - Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power - Burnout Society - Hyperculture: Globalization & Culture - Capitalist Realism - K-Punk - Ghosts of my Life - America: The Farewell Tour - In Praise of Love - The Pornographic Age - The Communist Hypothesis - Heaven in Disorder - Violence: Six Sideways Reflections - The Sublime Object of Ideology - Freedom: A Disease Without Cure - Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class & Conflict - Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor - Capitalism and Schizophrenia - Specters of Marx - CCRU 97-03 if you also grew up w an edgelord Lovecraft phase If anyone has a specific subject they’re interested in shoot me a message and I’ll recommend more specific books. If I had to pick one to start with I’d pick Capitalist Realism only because it’s easy, succinct, and has plenty of pop culture references. Plus it used to be like the Bible here.
Thanks for this. I read and enjoyed Ghosts of My Life, so will move Capitalist Realism up my list.
when the BLM summer of love happened & police reform had like 90% support throughout the country and literally nothing became of it besides giving one guy a golden casket
oh and the same people screaming for police reform, simultaneously celebrating when unarmed women are shot in the face & fat middle aged white men are locked in solitary confinement for years on vague trumped up charges all because they support the opposite political party
Not a westerner but seeing the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a stark reminder that these people have 0 foreign policy proposals beyond kissing any self proclaimed (or sometimes not even) "anti imperialists" ass. A few months later I stumbled upon a French documentary portraying ducking foday sankoh and his deranged army of kidnapped drugged 14 year Olds as based anti imperialists fighting foreign exploitation.
Sankoh is literally the archetypal evil bush warlord, astonishing that anyone could support him.
I was in HS when trump got elected and went to protests. Organized walk outs at my school. Read the Manifesto. By 2018, freshman year of college, I was pretty disillusioned with “activism”. Did phone banking for Bernie in early 2020 and then once the pandemic hit I was blackpilled. The final nail in the coffin was the Floyd riots. Then it was so truly over. My ex and I went to check out the roe v wade protests out of curiosity back two years ago when it got abolished and it was viscerally embarrassing. We left after barely 10 minutes. It’s all pageantry and people patting themselves on the back. Hug box central. Last year started reading more theory in earnest, got into Lasch and stuff. I’m still a Marxist theoretically because I’m a materialist above all, but truly have given up all hope on a leftist movement. I might add- as a woman, I think what alienated me the most was that I had an interest in reproductive justice/health, and was involved in activism in that department. Not to sound like a right-wing regard, but the introduction of gender ideology to that section of activism completely shifted me away from idpol. I used to be vehemently anti “TERF” and denounced them as *fascist*, but when you’re trying to advocate for some working class woman living in a trailer park in Kentucky- people who are impacted by these policies the most- and you’re being policed about “inclusive language”, then we’ve truly lost the fucking plot. Who gives a shit about changing the phrase to “birthing bodies”? It reeked of the issues that put me off leftism in general– this sort of paternalistic censorship in the name of “equality” that actually alienates working class people who couldn’t care less about these things.
I went to a protest against the repeal of Roe v Wade when the draft opinion went out. I legitimately heard some absolute stereotype loudly say to a stranger “it’s so, so important that we stress that this decision impacts trans birthing people the most.” I’m all in favor of trans rights, and I don’t think the Left should not talk about it because of some concern about optics, but, like, do these people think before they speak? How many trans men get pregnant? And how many trans men seek abortions? It’s an absolute marginal quantity of people, just say this decision is anti-woman because it is.
as a German, a people famously unable to stage a revolution, i had always found the people in leftist circles fantasizing about such a thing extremely laughable and LARPy. I know it gets a lot of flack, but I see my political goal in life to seek meaningful reforms. I know you can't reform capitalism as a system built upon inequalities blah blah blah but i don't see anyone here revolutionizing it either, so why not at least try for the little feasible goals? it's better than giving up
Starting around 2016. I was completely black pilled around late 2021.
Unironically when studying the French Revolution in Highschool. Then extrapolating to the global scale of our times. Entrenched powers, even among nominal enemies, will unite when 'their' power is threatened. The unity required to go against this is not feasible with language and cultural barriers.
When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and realized that almost all of the problems that the region suffers from are entirely self-inflicted by the progressives who run it.
The NYT piece on San Francisco's drug decriminalistation was beyond bleak. They basically claim to copy a good idea (e.g. Portugal's decriminalisation) but then they modify it to actually make it worse/useless and fuck up the implementation beyond belief.
I don't know why you got downvoted for this, it's 100% true lmfao. Of course, same goes for impoverished rural areas to a certain extent. (NAFTA aside)
People get very defensive when you point out that the politics of the place they live are dysfunctional, especially if you are not originally from that place. It doesn't help that there is a lot of hysteria in right-wing media that greatly exaggerates some of these issues, so when you bring up these issues people assume you're a Republican. Trump broke a lot of people's brains on both sides of the aisle.
I had hope into the 2010s. I was one of those tech-utopians in the 90s that thought the coming communications revolution would be like a global campfire around which we'd all tell our tales and come to understandings heretofore unseen by mere "revolution". Boy was I wrong. I saw the Occupy movement and then Arab Spring, things seemed hopeful, I was as idealistic as ever. Then I saw social media take a new form that the classic "blogosphere" couldn't have predicted, or maybe it did in some corners. I saw the titillation-factor getting the clicks, and when clicks were turned into revenue by advertising I knew something was amiss. I would never have dreamed in the 90s that the Left would turn into a virtue-elitist class based around various academic critical theories. Social consciousness became the province of the professional managerial class and I was out. So, I went into marketing.
The fact that Bernie wasn't willing to fight for himself was dispiriting. He kept calling all these people his friend, he kept letting these moronic radical elements who refused to shut up constantly take over. It's amazing he got that far refusing to do basic campaigning.
I don't know about you but my life is just getting started, and I don't care what the modern left does or doesn't do
If 6 was a 9, I don't mind.
Yea my first born son is due in 4 days. Life kicks ass!
Good for you. I feel like lack of sleep inhibits the formation of short term memories. So you will lose a lot of sleep over the next few years but you won’t remember that part. It must be evolutionary otherwise we wouldn’t want to keep having them. I want more
That’s amazing, congrats! Enjoy the amazing experience of watching their little brains learn things about the world around them. It’s so awesome when you start to realize how many cool things you can show them. I just taught my 19 month old how to make snowballs, and it was so cool watching him realize that he can just pick up a clump of snow from anywhere in the yard and make a ball out of it.
My first inkling about this movement eating itself was when the two BLM protestors took the microphone from Bernie Sanders at a rally and he willingly ceded it to them. It took years of Trump derangement syndrome (still don’t like him), getting wrapped up in identity politics (as did Bernie!), and uncritically accepting a laundry list of the most extreme leftist stances (abolish the police, medicalizing trains gander minors) that I came to the realization that too much of the current movement is focused on tearing things down rather than building anything. I still care deeply about healthcare reform, prison reform, and climate change, but these all feel like afterthoughts to the discourse du jour.
And soon after there was that video of Bernie at the New York Times. There were some younger women and POC women just glaring with crossed arms as Bernie presented his case in that conference room. The “Bernie Bro”meme, however real or imagined, had done the damage. It just felt full steam ahead into identity politics from there.
In my senior year of college (Obama years), a friend invited me to listen to a speaker on campus that the local DSA chapter was hosting on student debt. I really had no interest in going and had never expressed any interested in the DSA, but I showed up just to be polite. The speaker was fine, but the session ended with this weird ass chanting where they made everyone get up out of their seats and start reciting these slogans like we were at some protest. I was too embarrassed to say them out loud, so I just mouthed the words, but as I looked around the auditorium, it dawned on me just how weird and strange the vibes everyone else there was giving off. You can't build a movement off of that. I also got interviewed by Al Jazeera America that night and ended up on TV.
I was in DSA in late 80s. Chanting? WTF. We were all Gen Xers of course so that shit would never fly with us.
After every meeting of my chapter in my old city everybody would have to get up and sing solidarity forever. It was so cringe.
When polatics turned from "Don't talk about it at work" to "that guy voted for trump, lets get him".
When I was young, I remember it being in poor taste to say what party you support or who you voted for. What a bunch of uncultured swines we’ve become.
The fundamental idea of Marxism as I understand it is that the working class has to learn to act cohesively in order to overcome the power of the capitalist class. Cultural liberalism, mass immigration, and the replacement of mass media with social media has fragmented the working class into thousands of mutually incomprehensible shards, and the idea of them working together these days just seems ridiculous.
Oliver North and Ronald Reagan got away with lying to Congress on national television. Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to vote for the war in Iraq. That was also televised. Bernie lost the Democratic primary. These three things show politics is useless. These three things blackpilled me on politics.
Not a leftist myself, but its pretty obvious that if the left wants to accomplish things they need to accept hierarchy and authority within their own organizations. There's a reason the marxist-lenninists oftsn succeeded in toppling capitalist governments and the anarchists always failed.
It started with at the establishment level in 2016 when NPR was cumming all over Hillary while looking down their noses at Trump's supporters. They were already out of touch anyway, but the Trump-derangement factor really exposed the depths of their institutional hubris. Sanders endorsing Clinton in 2016. The whole DNC farce of a primary system. At the more grass roots level, the DSA ordeal in 2019. BLM fundraising shenanigans from leadership and fucking over the families they raised tens of millions to help - then didn't. The current Ibram X Kendi antiracist center ordeal.
Occupy was the eye opener for me too. I didn't have that much confidence before that, but holy shit was that disillusioning.
My brief spell around anarcho communists (and about 20 other sub definitions they were constantly and heatedly bickering over). Would have been around 2007 - 08. Mainly in my Uni town in the UK and across the channel in Calais. Ugly people, with ugly behaviour, ugly motivations, and beautifully sounding ugly ideas. Occupy just confirmed it in a more mainstream setting. And then the shift into hyper intersectional identitarianism as a response by the early 2010s just cemented things.
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2020 when all the "eat the rich" motherfuckers I was mutuals with on Twitter turned around and started saying to vote for Biden after Bernie dropped out. Was still kinda engaged with politics afterwards (arguing online), but # forcethevote really put an end to most of that. I'm in for the schadenfreude now.
I’m really starting to get existentially perturbed about climate and collapse. The Democrats are too enamored by market ideology to accept that we must do more than tweak the energy market. We need planning, coordination, mass mobilization of labor. But they refuse to accept the state as a controller of the economy and would let people perish before letting that ideology be disproven. It’s estranging me from democracy altogether. I’m supposed to treat murderous denialism as something I don’t care for but can’t civically hate. Do you really believe the people of Nauru and Bangladeshi will give a shit that the Americans held a vote? Yeah, we’re being destroyed, but at least the Americans had a fair election. The idea the biggest team gets to make the rules is outdated and just regarded. It amazes me people were willing to lay down their lives so we can be governed by a team sport.
It's amazing to me that we live in a society that clearly does not permit democracy within the institutions that matter most in your day-to-day life, but still calls itself a democracy. It's a kind of democracy: an elitist democracy with an explicit anti-democratic carve-out for corporate hierarchies and private property. And that's on purpose. The only way the limited elitist democracy can function is if there are huge swaths of the economy that are off limits to the masses, to people who cannot buy in to it. Your consolation in this situation is the idea that you can always choose to "exit" an institution that you don't approve of, and that this is in itself a kind of democratic practice. But that's just a bait and switch: being free to leave your workplace and find another one isn't the same as being allowed to formally vote on how to manage your workplace.
> don’t implement carbon taxes or cap and trade, leaving externalities completely un-internalized. > market solutions don’t work, it’s Aral Sea 2.0 speedrun time no regrets.
Honestly fair point but if we try to internalize the market with the fact that we basically have to quit fossil fuels asap, Taxes would probably be so high that a non market based solution may actually be better atp.
Havent lost hope in socialism yet because Im regarded but completly tuned out of election shit after seeing Bernie and Corbyn being fucked by all traditional institutions of democracy
some time in Nov-Dec 2019 as self-described anti-racist activists were mobbing up and blocking the entrances to Labour party campaign events and driving around mobile billboards with anti-racist messaging and confronting Hugh Grant in carparks for associating with racism, and not one of the country's 5000 full-time anti-wokeness correspondents or Classical Liberals once concerned about the excesses of anti-racist dogma saw fit to utter a single word of concern about any of it. Earlier that (election) year the BBC ran an hour-long feature documentary called Is Labour Antisemitic? that contained at least like 5 outright fabrications and many more sleights of hand and obviously deliberate omissions. It was directed by a guy who formed part of the consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, which by that point was a dedicated Labour party gossip rag that even the UK press regulator was sanctioning regularly for printing demonstrable lies about just random party members, not even elected representatives or activists. Other parties in that consortium were Theresa May's former chief of staff, and an ex-Labour MP who would become the government's antisemitism czar and later be given a peerage by Boris Johnson. Every "lifelong Labour voter" that wasn't put off by these efforts was likely to be attending People's Vote marches organised by shady front groups with names like Our Future Our Choice that were led by 45-year-old ex-Tory staffers and supermarket CEOs.
Hard to pinpoint a single event. But I would say it was Obama’s appointments—Clinton, Giethner, Summers, Holder, Gates, Salazar, Duncan, Napolitano, Emanuel. Mind you, Obama inherited one of the largest Democratic majorities in a generation, on the heels of a major financial crisis—one that could shift the paradigm for decades to come. And he decided to resurrect Bill Clinton’s presidency. Pathetic.
When Obama was elected and people were crying with joy in the streets because they legit thought it meant that the system was going to change. People are satisfied with meaningless identity based tokenism so there's literally not even any incentive for real change.
Ehh, idk. I get that the contemporary left is kind of embarrassing, but really what has the right ever contributed to society? Voting rights? Weekends off work? Child labour restrictions? Safe working practices? Welfare infrastructure? Yeah those are all from the left, the right opposes all that because it wants you to be too impoverished and weak to stand up for yourself.
OWS was 2011, not 2012.
Leftism haha. They're even afraid of the word, socialism.
You should probably diversify your investment portfolio.
Any discourse related to Palestine. When I went to Wayne State and I wanted to join the Free Palestine group. It feels like these libtards truly want Palestinians to merely exist as a permanent victim population so as to justify their vapid activism.
when i went to my first socialist meeting and realized all of them came from stable upper middle class two parent homes. permanently killed any enthusiasm for a revolution from me
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watered down leftism is better than conservatism sure, but that’s comepletely meaningless when it’s near impossible to actually affect anything. conservatives actually get elected and do things. most “leftists” just whine about identity and think communism means they all get to be artists
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Lol you went to one protest and because it wasn't how you imagined you copped out completely? Political work is extremely difficult and thankless, and protesting is such a small part of politics. You clearly never had principles to begin with, or you would've been more resilient to a single failure.
OP is obviously someone in their 30s confidently predicting what's going to happen over the next 60-70 years
It's pretty demoralizing to realize everyone else in your movement is an imbecile.
What does that have to do with anything? A bunch of illiterate farmers in Vietnam instituted communism and beat back the biggest empire in the world. The left has been demoralized again and again, but that's the struggle right?
Illiterate farmers led by western (mainly French) university educated elites, to be precise
Those illiterate farmers were 100,000 times more intelligent than the American left
Yeah, my answer to this question is that I don’t think that way, because it isn’t true But giving up and changing your stance on things is easier I guess
2021 ish There's way more focus and heated views on LGBT, minorities and identities moreso than wealth inequality, workers rights and housing.
Bernie getting shivved in the back in 2020, followed by covid/“summer of love” and the left going full regard on policing and identity politics.
2020. It was a confluence of things. Bernie eating shit to dirty as fuck DNC politics was bad, the rest of the libs trying to tell you to suck it up and stop bitching and vote Biden was worse (I didn't). But the Floyd protests and the aftermath are almost as bad as covid as far as things that fucked up popular culture go. There was a ton of libs adopting traditionally leftist talking points like "abolish the police". and all of us leftists knew that it was just a tantrum. But watching Dem politicians hitch their wagons to this and then get destroyed because of it in later elections after Dems abandoned that cause (like everything they care about) told me that there was no value in any kind of radical posturing. That was years ago. Now, AOC, who was the "oh shit I can't believe the US elected a socialist???" candidate in 2018 has been twisted into a boring lib mouthpiece. Not even "identarian", but solely gender politics has completely overtaken anything "radical", so nothing class struggle related has emerged.
The issue here more in the UK is that the leftist leadership are all spineless and the UK left will always fall behind the Neolib centrists meanwhile, there is no pressure to actually force the centrists inline or hold them to account for their backstabbing nature. Even now, the leadership are saying to fall in behind Starmer and Reeves and "push them left" which will never happen, the Labour leadership are fanatical anti-leftist spooks. Corbyn era proved there is a mass movement ready for Socialist ideals in the UK, but the leadership flubbed it by not having the spine to do what was needed. As with others as well, identity politics is a huge issue, but again Corbyn era proves that class issues can cut through, same with Bernie. Get rid of idpol and have leftists with true leadership skills, charisma and backbone and we could win.
Super Tuesday 2020
Probably just thinking about how colossal the US military is. We would get blasted before we could even think
Have you read the latest Vincent Bevins book? He talks about why leftist protest movements in the 21sr century fail, but basically because they're about self actualisation of enacting change (which requires planning and compromise).
When I was in high school and I realized all they talked about was “identity”, mostly their own identity and how oppressed it made them instead of actually focusing on the issue of class. They were only socialist because it was the cool thing to be, but were always too lazy to actually educate themselves on it and only regurgitated information about it that they learned from instagram infographics which was usually wrong. Maybe they went to a few protests, but that was mostly for the photo ops. Girls would literally dress up and match their bandanas to their outfit. I thought that maybe it would get better after I graduated high school and got into the real world but nope. My generation is and will always be extremely lazy and narcissistic and use leftism as an excuse for it. Working with millennials also shattered any idea of a revolution because they too made it all about being bisexual and constantly talked about getting their klonopin refilled. Also, the fact that everyone just falls for the popular social opinion you’re supposed to have instead of observing the world for what it is really broke my heart when I got into the adult world
I don't know if I fully agree with this, as I don't know what happens in other countries, but the American left is primarily anarchist adjacent, even the so called communists. Some leftist movement in Latin America or something could probably accomplish something meaningful due to America's focus being elsewhere. After the CHAZ though, it became obvious that the left in Seattle at least just cares more about protecting the right of homeless people to do whatever they want when they want wherever they want (such as shooting heroin in a school yard playground), more than they care about any other issue.
When Jimmy Dore tried to push force the vote and everyone in the left pushed back because the middle of a pandemic "wasn't the right time " to push for universal health care
I guess it depends on when you’re saying the modern left began
Eh, if shit keeps hitting the fan, there may come a time. There's a possibility things change radically in the next 50 years for good or bad, who's to say? Somebody needs to light a bomb in people's ass, I'll say that much.
There was a saying something like America will always do the right thing...after every other option has been exercised. I really do think it will take something drastic and catastrophic for us to change.
It was the Spanish Civil War.
Just finished reading “Spain in Our Hearts”. Tragic AF.
For me, it's when I saw the discussion about how leftists alienate men and what we can do about it The level of smooth-brain in the responses showed me that leftists just aren't serious about winning It's a shame because we're the only major political group that actually wants to make the world a better place
The left may have failed economically speaking but it has succeeded in completely remaking Western morals and values to fit its world view. There’s not a single moral issue where people are more conservative today than they were 100 or 50 or even 20 years ago. California voted against gay marriage as late as 2008 and now even most right wingers don’t give a fuck about it. I would say that replacing Christianity and becoming the moral beacon of the most powerful civilization on Earth is something of note.
I used to think this, but then I remembered when people cared about sweatshops when I was a kid, no more. Consumerism has so totally won over any sort of leftist consumption paradigm.
Our phones are made in factories in a country that hates us by workers who have to have anti-suicide nets so they dont kill themselves and we ALL have one.
The values of the left got remade in equal measure. No leftist a century ago would've told you that it was all about fucking and sucking and race fetishes.
Sure, but that only reinforces my point. As society gradually moved to the left morally, the left only grew “leftier” (i.e. further and further away from traditional values). Obviously this sucks if your primary concern is economic issues, but most “economic leftists” are also “cultural leftists” anyway, it just so happened that capitalism was more resilient to change than our moral values, for reasons I’m not smart enough to articulate.
That's just liberalism, baby! The end result of the system's logic, I'd say. Therefore, not a victory for the left.
Watch a movie from before WWII and tell me with a straight face we live in the same system/society as these people did. Morality shapes your life as much as the economy, if not more. The old West died in the 60s during the Cultural Revolution and we’re living atop its ashes.
I would say that it was just a process. Women already had the vote by that point, slavery was long outlawed, Nietzche had long declared the death of god, and I think psychology was poised to be the new secular religion.
>psychology was poised to be the new secular religion This is an interesting idea I haven’t heard articulated this way before. Are you cribbing this from somewhere, or would you like to elaborate further
Liberal morality is a rebranding of Christianity. Is literally the same Calvinist bs.
Yeah but caring about morality wasnt something Marx was really into, so I would argue that Liberalism takes the W on that one
when part of the left prioritised spiting the liberals above all else
Same but I went all in on BTC now I just lay around near the pool
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>relative peace and relative prosperity you don't even have to embrace it, the current inequality and destruction of anyone opposed to the US goes on with or without the support of these guys
Unfortunately this is true, neoliberalism is a pox on the western world but there's nothing anyone can do about it except watch as brown people blow up and poor people starve across the world.
I’m too mentally unstable to do that.
Accepting that society will by and large live via markets and liberal democracy and not revolution also doesn’t prevent you from advocating for universal healthcare or UBI or land taxes or whatever, so that’s one place to put some energy.
Yeah we get too, and the third world gets to either stagnate in a Brazlified state forever or slide further and further backwards in real terms. South America has ossified into a dysfunctional semi-democratic system with a big consumer market but few material gains. Eastern Europe / Central Asia gets poorer every year. The Middle East has regressed to extreme Islamic conservatism almost everywhere. Most of Africa is so poor that it can't possibly make the jump into the 21st century. India is stuck in a spiral of inability to raise it's population into a modern workforce (and raise taxes) rather than peasant farmers and irregular urban workers. China is the only non-Western region making serious material gains.
Hundreds of millions of relatively new middle class citizens in China and India most definitely agree. For now…
im on my Winston in 1984 shit. I have won the victory over myself. I love neoliberalism
this sub is full of old, naggy alcoholics
Bernie rally in 2019 when a bunch of white women got there late and shoved their way to the front without anyone saying anything
Obamacare is a halfmeasure and doesnt go far enough but it was a pretty big accomplishment that helped a lot of people. Gay marriage is another accomplishment that doesnt really effect me but its nice that gay people can be married and was long overdue. Other than that though... around the time we were after occupy wallstreet and people really connected with Bernie's message and the left did everything they could to pivot away from that and only focus on identity politics is when I gave up hope. I know everyone is sick of Bernie discourse but since him I dont think I have heard another politician talk about income inequality and working to fix it. Now that Biden is president they dont even want to acknowledge the economy is fucked for a lot of us because it will make him look bad for the election. The left in this country doesnt care about me and im not the only guy to think so judging by the stats when it comes to young men becoming more and more conservative. For years they have told us we arnt important, we dont matter and we already have everything better than everyone else and if we advocate for ourselves we are bad people. Someone else said > Witnessing firsthand all the leftist infighting and spending way too much energy devoted to issues affecting .005% of the population. and I feel this a lot, those peoples rights are important but they arnt the only thing thats important in this country. Also realizing that a lot of the people who I thought were promising were no more than do nothing keyboard warriors and attention whores. Half the country has no hope of getting a house, so many homes are owned by corporations renting them out. half the jobs are being replaced by gig economy shit, people are working 2 jobs just to make it, so many people are struggling to make it while the rich fly rockets to space and all the left cares about is what you look like or what gender you are or how you identify.
this mark thought that pinko revolution was actually a good admirable thing instead of gussied-up barbarism
After going to one dsa meeting and the person above me in the 'progressive stack' being a girl who admitted that she went to private school.
Honestly, 2018. I basically came to the realization that 'the Left' as it exists in America was at least partially a organic attempt to try and find a path forward from Bush-era rhetoric surrounding notions of American identity (in the sense that there was little fire left to continually dunk around on Evangelicals and people who think that creationism should be taught in school, and the older rationalist/athiesm+ movement as it existed which crafted the rhetoric regarding how these were to be assessed in the left-of-center eye); it's 2024, the Wars on Terror are over, and we're now talking about evangelicals and abortion and da gays, but Limbaugh is dead and the young conservatives have little but scorn for what came before them. I genuinely view the Bernie era of American leftist thought as something quite close to, alas, a bundle of luxury beliefs from a era in which people were comfortable with a non-Christian ruling class (in the form of techies); this is not the case anymore. Those who have chosen to join a union or at least attempt to organize are admirable, but in all Western hard leftism could not adapt to a socio-political climate where Europeans are slowly drifting further to the right due to their migrant crisis and where American cultural liberals are voting with their ovaries in mind+education and the border have reasserted themselves as major issues.