I'll remember you this way...
gay_swimmer posted:I'll remember you this way...
not ez2dance2
But if they're not RIP and so on
ghostpinballer posted:never even heard of these jokers
*i come in dressed like a doctor* im sorry but you didn’t have the fail aids but now you do. If there’s anything *leans in and my stethoscope bumps you in the face* sorry *fumble with the stethoscope and it falls off and knocks you in the dick* FUCK *i start crying*
pescalune posted:I actually reckon they're just planning to unite the various Red Guard groups into a new party. No way these guys quit without posting a 3 million word blogpost
i imagine they're going underground like in the 60s because they're planning something really big, like leaving an entire cow carcass outside a PSL meeting
A while back, the original Chairman of the org - who is very talented, was the one who made it so popular and beloved, and whom I respect even though we haven’t been on good terms for a while now - decided she didn’t want it anymore, and offered to sell it to someone who would like to try their hand at it. I offered to buy it - at the time, we were friends, and she was excited for me to take it over.
However, I soon discovered that it took a big toll on me to spend very much time putting myself in the headspace required to make fun of people with polemics, and I didn’t really have it in me to lead the org properly either. So instead...
I was a hardcore Maoist at this time. Very dogmatic. Delusional, even, and dead-set on spreading True Theory however possible, constantly trying to “raise the theoretical level” wherever I was - and this was a symptom that, at the time I took over the org, was just getting worse and worse. It started to alienate more and more of my friends, confuse people, turn people against me as a result of my polemical insensitivity. During that period I tried to somehow insert formalizations I had made into my blog posts, which, lol... it would have been better to just give up on trying to lead a political organization, but I didn’t know when to quit. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I stopped. But I also invited some friends to chair the org during that time, and they continued to post polemics on WordPress without me knowing.
If it’s not clear from my summary of the above, my politics have changed somewhat. I’m still a communist, but I’m not a Maoist anymore, and I don’t approve of the US Maoist so-called “parties” in the least. I don’t want an org that I am technically responsible for to be spreading political propaganda that I think is wrong-headed or even regressive and dangerous to promote on a large scale.
I do want to take this opportunity to complain a little bit about the culture of “leftbook” that draws in vulnerable youth and gives them a sense of purpose and meaning by creating echo chambers where people get to act like Mao was an eternal hero of the working class who bears no decisive responsibility for the direction that China went in, leading to capitalist restoration. The argument goes that it simply wasn’t his fault and that adopting his theories today isn’t a repetition of a historical disaster but something that actually has promise for revolution. Take it from someone who tried very seriously to put those theories into practice - the same flaws that sabotaged the Chinese project will definitely be reproduced in any attempt to redeem their legacies. I see no reason to beat this dead horse when there’s very much an alternative future of thoughtful communism available for us to explore and develop.
The decisive point I want to make about why this stuff is so doomed has to do with the commandist and cultist logic of The Party and The Correct Line. Instead of beginning from actually listening to people and moving on from there to develop thoughtful (and, sure, theoretically-informed) solutions to the problems of capitalism situationally among the oppressed in the process of struggling for a better world, the Maoist model compulsively chooses a Correct Line, forms a Party around it, and mostly just tries to guilt people into accepting their dangerously underthought ideas with righteous outrage while staging action after action promoting the Party Brand as if it’s helping anything. What’s more, we don’t even have the excuse of being in a rapidly developing and completely historically novel situation of Soviet dual power with leaders who are truly at the forefront of revolutionary theory coordinating that struggle. Today, we have people who haven’t seriously thought through the limitations and failures of those leaders and their successors and think that somehow they’ll get somewhere mostly just through following the letter of the Classic Texts rather than studying new developments and advancements in political theory over the last few decades in a depth and breadth that goes beyond their local or national organizing tradition.
It was my very investment in Maoist theory - and translating it into Maoist practice - that did my Maoism in. More and more, I started to see how the commandism - including my own - of those committed to the Maoist party-form and related models was tending to undermine the development of otherwise promising workers’ struggle in Austin and elsewhere.
I also think it’s important to note the serious psychic and personal toll it took on me and many, many others I know who’ve tried to force this model to work. I - and I’m far from the only one - was constantly on the edge of breakdowns, and it was only when I let myself question the compulsive political pressure I was putting on myself that I could make any actual progress in my own clinical treatment.
Wanting to understand the logic behind all of this craziness going on in my life, I studied the history of theory about Maoist organizing, focusing on its rigorous philosophical development in Peru, beginning with Gonzalo and examining the failures of the old US Revolutionary Communist Party led by Bob Avakian.
Unlike other dogmatic leaders, Alan Badiou and his comrade Sylvain Lazarus instead made the effort to sum up the failures of over a decade of Leninist and Maoist organizing with the thoughtful precision and clarity due to such a serious matter. As far as I’m concerned, the theory they developed, beginning from later on in the Maoist period and leading up to and beyond the formation and praxis of their “post-Maoist” l’Organisation Politique, offers some extremely promising blueprints and lessons for revolutionary organizers today who want to make actual progress and not just spin in circles. A lot of it is actually quite intuitive, but with the benefit of confidence and rigorous justification - the revolutionary thought and desire of the masses comes before any commandist political line, submitting oneself to the discipline of an organization that isn’t always learning, sensitively developing and thoughtfully updating its revolutionary ethics in response to its experience is submitting oneself to political oblivion, we should be focusing more on establishing creative cultures prefiguring communism rather than just mimicking the enemy’s tactics in Trying To Beat Them At All Costs, and so on.
I’m more interested, though, in encouraging people to break free of the confines of a compulsively determined pre-ordained Framework. I’ve found studying history and theory incredibly useful in developing flexible political thought and practice, but once it becomes more about the past than about the future, I think we’re doomed. As Althusser put it, “the future lasts a long time” - why not take responsibility for changing its immensity in truly innovative ways rather than fearfully delegating our revolutionary capacity by hewing strictly to lines passed down from our predecessors?
I think it’s probably time to retire this organization out of respect for what it once was and no longer could be. The political project has reached its conclusion. We are no more.
SparksBandung posted:Hey there. My name's Red Guards Austin (or “RGA”). I’m gonna tell you all a little bit about the recent history of this org, along with some other thoughts and context. To clarify, for those who know me, I’m not the one who’s been making the recent WordPress posts (which I have since deleted - I have also removed the admin in question).
A while back, the original Chairman of the org - who is very talented, was the one who made it so popular and beloved, and whom I respect even though we haven’t been on good terms for a while now - decided she didn’t want it anymore, and offered to sell it to someone who would like to try their hand at it. I offered to buy it - at the time, we were friends, and she was excited for me to take it over.
However, I soon discovered that it took a big toll on me to spend very much time putting myself in the headspace required to make fun of people with polemics, and I didn’t really have it in me to lead the org properly either. So instead...
I was a hardcore Maoist at this time. Very dogmatic. Delusional, even, and dead-set on spreading True Theory however possible, constantly trying to “raise the theoretical level” wherever I was - and this was a symptom that, at the time I took over the org, was just getting worse and worse. It started to alienate more and more of my friends, confuse people, turn people against me as a result of my polemical insensitivity. During that period I tried to somehow insert formalizations I had made into my blog posts, which, lol... it would have been better to just give up on trying to lead a political organization, but I didn’t know when to quit. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I stopped. But I also invited some friends to chair the org during that time, and they continued to post polemics on WordPress without me knowing.
If it’s not clear from my summary of the above, my politics have changed somewhat. I’m still a communist, but I’m not a Maoist anymore, and I don’t approve of the US Maoist so-called “parties” in the least. I don’t want an org that I am technically responsible for to be spreading political propaganda that I think is wrong-headed or even regressive and dangerous to promote on a large scale.
I do want to take this opportunity to complain a little bit about the culture of “leftbook” that draws in vulnerable youth and gives them a sense of purpose and meaning by creating echo chambers where people get to act like Mao was an eternal hero of the working class who bears no decisive responsibility for the direction that China went in, leading to capitalist restoration. The argument goes that it simply wasn’t his fault and that adopting his theories today isn’t a repetition of a historical disaster but something that actually has promise for revolution. Take it from someone who tried very seriously to put those theories into practice - the same flaws that sabotaged the Chinese project will definitely be reproduced in any attempt to redeem their legacies. I see no reason to beat this dead horse when there’s very much an alternative future of thoughtful communism available for us to explore and develop.
The decisive point I want to make about why this stuff is so doomed has to do with the commandist and cultist logic of The Party and The Correct Line. Instead of beginning from actually listening to people and moving on from there to develop thoughtful (and, sure, theoretically-informed) solutions to the problems of capitalism situationally among the oppressed in the process of struggling for a better world, the Maoist model compulsively chooses a Correct Line, forms a Party around it, and mostly just tries to guilt people into accepting their dangerously underthought ideas with righteous outrage while staging action after action promoting the Party Brand as if it’s helping anything. What’s more, we don’t even have the excuse of being in a rapidly developing and completely historically novel situation of Soviet dual power with leaders who are truly at the forefront of revolutionary theory coordinating that struggle. Today, we have people who haven’t seriously thought through the limitations and failures of those leaders and their successors and think that somehow they’ll get somewhere mostly just through following the letter of the Classic Texts rather than studying new developments and advancements in political theory over the last few decades in a depth and breadth that goes beyond their local or national organizing tradition.
It was my very investment in Maoist theory - and translating it into Maoist practice - that did my Maoism in. More and more, I started to see how the commandism - including my own - of those committed to the Maoist party-form and related models was tending to undermine the development of otherwise promising workers’ struggle in Austin and elsewhere.
I also think it’s important to note the serious psychic and personal toll it took on me and many, many others I know who’ve tried to force this model to work. I - and I’m far from the only one - was constantly on the edge of breakdowns, and it was only when I let myself question the compulsive political pressure I was putting on myself that I could make any actual progress in my own clinical treatment.
Wanting to understand the logic behind all of this craziness going on in my life, I studied the history of theory about Maoist organizing, focusing on its rigorous philosophical development in Peru, beginning with Gonzalo and examining the failures of the old US Revolutionary Communist Party led by Bob Avakian.
Unlike other dogmatic leaders, Alan Badiou and his comrade Sylvain Lazarus instead made the effort to sum up the failures of over a decade of Leninist and Maoist organizing with the thoughtful precision and clarity due to such a serious matter. As far as I’m concerned, the theory they developed, beginning from later on in the Maoist period and leading up to and beyond the formation and praxis of their “post-Maoist” l’Organisation Politique, offers some extremely promising blueprints and lessons for revolutionary organizers today who want to make actual progress and not just spin in circles. A lot of it is actually quite intuitive, but with the benefit of confidence and rigorous justification - the revolutionary thought and desire of the masses comes before any commandist political line, submitting oneself to the discipline of an organization that isn’t always learning, sensitively developing and thoughtfully updating its revolutionary ethics in response to its experience is submitting oneself to political oblivion, we should be focusing more on establishing creative cultures prefiguring communism rather than just mimicking the enemy’s tactics in Trying To Beat Them At All Costs, and so on.
I’m more interested, though, in encouraging people to break free of the confines of a compulsively determined pre-ordained Framework. I’ve found studying history and theory incredibly useful in developing flexible political thought and practice, but once it becomes more about the past than about the future, I think we’re doomed. As Althusser put it, “the future lasts a long time” - why not take responsibility for changing its immensity in truly innovative ways rather than fearfully delegating our revolutionary capacity by hewing strictly to lines passed down from our predecessors?
I think it’s probably time to retire this organization out of respect for what it once was and no longer could be. The political project has reached its conclusion. We are no more.
Unlike other dogmatic leaders, Alan Badiou and his comrade Sylvain Lazarus instead made the effort to sum up the failures of over a decade of Leninist and Maoist organizing with the thoughtful precision and clarity due to such a serious matter. As far as I’m concerned, the theory they developed, beginning from later on in the Maoist period and leading up to and beyond the formation and praxis of their “post-Maoist” l’Organisation Politique, offers some extremely promising blueprints and lessons for revolutionary organizers today who want to make actual progress and not just spin in circles.
ialdabaoth posted:how do you go about buyign or selling a communist oarty. do you put an ad in the classifiedds or what
a) police auction
b) pentagon requisition form
c) etsy shop
d) VERY CAREFULLY,
cars posted:Unlike other dogmatic leaders, Alan Badiou and his comrade Sylvain Lazarus instead made the effort to sum up the failures of over a decade of Leninist and Maoist organizing with the thoughtful precision and clarity due to such a serious matter. As far as I’m concerned, the theory they developed, beginning from later on in the Maoist period and leading up to and beyond the formation and praxis of their “post-Maoist” l’Organisation Politique, offers some extremely promising blueprints and lessons for revolutionary organizers today who want to make actual progress and not just spin in circles.
War... war never changes
https://incendiarynews.com/2019/02/04/workers-world-party-confronted-in-southeast-austin/
JohnBeige posted:https://incendiarynews.com/2019/02/04/workers-world-party-confronted-in-southeast-austin/
This made me recoil so hard I ended up vomiting inside my own ass.
There's something so quintessentially American about the whole thing.