drwhat posted:limey island of fuckshits update: lol fascist majority
now now, that won't be confirmed for at least a few hours.
drwhat posted:limey island of fuckshits update: lol fascist majority
we already knew that, but what are the election results looking like?
shriekingviolet posted:drwhat posted:limey island of fuckshits update: lol fascist majority
we already knew that, but what are the election results looking like?
:entire marching band made only of snare drummers and cymbal players comes in to play a deafening cacophony of overlapping unsynchronized rimshots:
i'm serious guys. if you don't need to actually kill yourself in the process because of your fucked up belief system it's relatively easy to do terrorism
— joolsd (@joolsd) December 12, 2019
Hmm uhh
shriekingviolet posted:drwhat posted:limey island of fuckshits update: lol fascist majority
we already knew that, but what are the election results looking like?
ilmdge posted:I like Jools, let's see his response
i'm serious guys. if you don't need to actually kill yourself in the process because of your fucked up belief system it's relatively easy to do terrorism
— joolsd (@joolsd) December 12, 2019
Hmm uhh
nice
trakfactri posted:he's "stalin" all right... stalin out in the polls!!
ilmdge posted:I like Jools, let's see his response
i'm serious guys. if you don't need to actually kill yourself in the process because of your fucked up belief system it's relatively easy to do terrorism
— joolsd (@joolsd) December 12, 2019
Hmm uhh
find out what happens when ironic commie terrorist twitter goes unironic this holiday season in "Sixty-Nine Lions"
sovnarkoman posted:after watching like 20 successive election victories of erdoğan with pretty much the same percentage and pretty much the same disbelieving reactions from the "opposition" voters i can now relax and watch the brits indulge in the same nonsensical theorycrafting
like any aspirant parasites of the semi-periphery, the turk "left" on twitter are tweeting up a storm about corbyn s defeat and race each other to prove themselves as the greater expert on britain while not giving much of a shit about anything happening in the third world. my personal favorite is the staunch "stalinist" ex-academic who tweets nonstop about how good stalin was and who is now blaming corbyn and the european left for being too friendly to immigrants lol
Dagenham and Rainham: Lab HOLD
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) December 13, 2019
LAB: 44.5% (-5.6)
CON: 43.8% (+3.9)
BREX: 6.6% (+6.6)
LDEM: 2.7% (+1.7)
GRN: 1.4% (+0.2)
Full results: https://t.co/pHAmhckPls #GE2019
London's portion of the Red Wall holds for Labour: Jon Cruddas elected.
the tories LOST! VOTES! HERE!
— joolsd (@joolsd) December 13, 2019
Edited by ilmdge ()
sovnarkoman posted:like any aspirant parasites of the semi-periphery, the turk "left" on twitter are tweeting up a storm about corbyn s defeat and race each other to prove themselves as the greater expert on britain while not giving much of a shit about anything happening in the third world. my personal favorite is the staunch "stalinist" ex-academic who tweets nonstop about how good stalin was and who is now blaming corbyn and the european left for being too friendly to immigrants lol
the only tweets i saw that i found kind of interesting were from a frustrated, defeated door-to-door labour canvasser who failed to convince a bunch of really hateful sixtysomethings that jerry corbyn's homemade jam was not in fact an ingredient used in IRA explosives in the 1990s. stuff like that.
that's not a material analysis but i would imagine many people in this strata are white homeowners who bought in in the 1980s, which allowed them to keep up consumption, and their identity and social status are also sunk into a patronage relationship with the british state and nation. but the U.K. has declined in relative terms to the european union, itself an imperialist institution and another basis for capitalist reproduction, seen now as contradicting the repressive needs of this white, conventional, english social strata. this contradiction is located mostly within the imperial superstructure itself, with this strata upholding the primacy of their subjective position (the nation) over the requirements of the common market, or between that social strata's immediate hegemony and the objective conditions.
i dunno if that makes sense. but it doesn't seem like brexit would be a "good idea" if you were looking at it from the perspective of the financial times or whatever. these people are wilfully threatening their own economy! but whatever problems that emerge there are probably more short-term and overall less threatening to them than britain continuing to merge into europe.
that's my guess as to why the left has become confused, and they're trying to figure the puzzle out but nothing they do seems to work and what they do is typically opportunistic and ambiguous. but this is because they have been sold a social imperialist program, as sunday said. they'd rather ignore brexit or just see it as a distraction from getting back to divvying up the third-wold surplus. one thing that is pretty bizarre here on the side is the role of "luxury gay space communist" social media influencers in selling this program to the kiddos, and they hype it up right before the polls close. and then when it fails they tweet out "i am so sorry!!!" as the kiddos emotionally melt down. that seems really exploitative and bad.
meanwhile, it's not clear to me that brexit will actually happen. boris could easily do like trump and drag it out for several more years, come up with something that keeps the trading relationship mostly the same but with his stupid face stamped on it and headlines in the tabloids declaring "BOJO SOLVES BREXIT." the minority who complain can go back to being ignored as usual. then when the next elections roll around, they can say the reason life expectancy has declined for five years in a row after the NHS was sold off to american companies is because we haven't gotten brexit done yet and you need to vote for the conservatives to get brexit done
anyways, world capitalism seems about as secure as it has been in 150 years. there are no meaningful proletarian politics in the first world, and whatever points of resistance in the third world that do exist have been pretty effectively isolated or neutralized.
Fayafi posted:zionism is a cancer of the mind. identitarian movements still reign supreme
i think the key here is how the antisemitism attack was pushed by MI5 cutouts like the guardian to liberal readers to code corbyn as part muslim. he hung around "dodgy" characters and so on
Edited by trakfactri ()
trakfactri posted:anyways, world capitalism seems about as secure as it has been in 150 years. there are no meaningful proletarian politics in the first world, and whatever points of resistance in the third world that do exist have been pretty effectively isolated or neutralized.
But the material conditions ...
trakfactri posted:anyways, world capitalism seems about as secure as it has been in 150 years.
cars posted:if social fash losing in the imperial core is giving you twits this much of a neurotic freakout, stop posting and lurk more
how me a cat can learn how why jeremy corbyn is a fascist thanks
This is the same problem as Sanders, where even if he really had the policy positions many of his supporters wish he did in their fever dreams, the structural defense against them, the overwhelming improbability of voting those positions into office in the country in question, splits the possible electoral results between defeat before the fact and defeat after them. You run for head Hitler in charge, you win or lose that prize. They are not sending you to 10 Downing Street or the White House without an armed escort For Your Own Protection.
It’s the genuinely saddest part of this for me, that if Charlie Brown had gotten to run at the football, it still would have been yanked away, and I watch people do this over and over with Labour and the Democrats and so on, even a bunch of people who ran that metaphor into the ground already, they still think this time is different, this time the structure of the imperial core will explode and drift away like fairy dust as soon as someone or some group with a title and a “mandate” from the bourgeois electoral farce says so.
I don’t think many people on this forum think that way, but it seems to me there is mainly an emotional solidarity when it comes to defending or mourning Labour here among those who do, not a rational one. The other guys are being nasty to our lame and useless pal who says and does some things that sound good to us, it’s not really our fight, but the signs and symbols and rhetoric are familiar, they’re pleasant and even refreshingly combative for acceptable media discourse.
You can see that overtaking more critical people with Sanders too, even ones who aren’t particularly far left compared to him, like, I can’t really believe that Ames and Levine and Dolan don’t think they would be sharpening their knives again as soon as he took office. But right now, Sanders saying vague things that sound good has put him into the role of opposition, so both them and a bunch of self-described radical socialists have slid into position to defend him against the bad guys, the radicals inventing all sorts of fantastic ideas about seizing DSA and by extension the Democrats.
But this is the definition of recuperation. It’s literally what it was coined to mean, turning those signs and symbols and words into dollars for the bourgeoisie, whether in the store or for the campaign. It’s been done before and it’s happening again. Don’t feel too embarrassed if it gets to you at some point, because it wouldn’t be repeated so often as a strategy if it didn’t work.
The other side of the coin to me is, it is blatantly chauvinist to experience this normal event in the imperial core and begin wailing about how Actually everything is bad and done and already defeated everywhere, or “nearly” everywhere, or whatever defeatist formulation you like. That isn’t even knowledge I think any human being could ever claim to have, the prospects of every configuration and contradiction in the world. The emotional impulse is understandable; the way it’s expressed is a choice in context. I expect a lot of it anyway to shortly follow the 2020 U.S. Presidonkle election, and here’s the thing: I expect it even if Sanders somehow wins, because what that would mean, Sanders maintaining continuity of U.S. bourgeois-party policy, would become very evident, very quickly.
I’ve drawn the distinction before in my Posting between how I see the Democrats and how I see Labour, which only matters because, compared to a lot of this forum’s legacy, I’m optimistic about socialism even in the imperial core. If you’re not, stop reading now.
The Democrats are not and have never been a labor party but simply a party that became financially dependent on trade unions. Democrats have no concept, however ancient and hollow, of their party as a workers’ party, not a party that benefits workers but one that belongs to them. Democrats as party members outside of the equivalent of the “parliamentary party” do not have a conception that anything else could even be described as “the Democratic Party”. Even DSA cannot conceive of their goals as anything beyond putting media-savvy Democrats in office who pay lip service to “socialism” and waiting to see if they get betrayed or not, if that makes a vague, imperialism-funded, welfare-state pseudo-“socialism” happen or not. The rank-and-file DSA concept of taking over the Democratic Party is to get themselves into a position where they feel comfortable submitting utterly to its leaders, the “good” bourgeoisie.
Labour, on the other hand, does have such a legacy on its books, however rickety and practically dubious that legacy may be. They do have at least the creaky structural conventions of a party ostensibly belonging to workers; they have a history, however dusty and cob-webbed, of a road to socialism as part of their platform.
That does not make Labour a Communist or even a radical party, of course; they are a bourgeois party that is the center-left wing of imperialism, social fascist in ideology. But I think it’s likely that the guaranteed failure of the Corbyn camp, which would have happened regardless of whether Labour won the election, has at least the potential to peel off more disgruntled people from Labour into a socialist movement than would ever happen with DSA. There is a historical difference underlying the two ideologies and the two parties.
And just to piss off the maximum number of posters, I’ll mention again that I’m also optimistic about some amount of DSA’s future sadsack Sams, post-2020, finally becoming socialists themselves. Which of them go that route will depend on their class character, on their relative inability to abandon the struggle as though it were what’s currently called a new religious movement, and previously called a “cult.”
cars posted:The other side of the coin to me is, it is blatantly chauvinist to experience this normal event in the imperial core and begin wailing about how Actually everything is bad and done and already defeated everywhere, or “nearly” everywhere, or whatever defeatist formulation you like. That isn’t even knowledge I think any human being could ever claim to have, the prospects of every configuration and contradiction in the world. The emotional impulse is understandable; the way it’s expressed is a choice in context. I expect a lot of it anyway to shortly follow the 2020 U.S. Presidonkle election, and here’s the thing: I expect it even if Sanders somehow wins, because what that would mean, Sanders maintaining continuity of U.S. bourgeois-party policy, would become very evident, very quickly.
yeah, you're probably right. just frustrated.
--
i think you sussed out and jumped on some (petty-bourg) frustration on my part. i was about to huff and puff my way out of here because of the criticism, but i think that would be frustration bouncing back again, so i'll stick around and submit to further swamp maoist ranger training.
Edited by trakfactri ()
trakfactri posted:yeah, you're probably right. just frustrated.
No worries... I just see this stuff as yeah it does matter, it does matter, for instance, that socialists in the imperial core still form the foundation of domestic resistance against imperialist bombings and invasions, it’s been true in every such movement for years and years no matter how others try to downplay it. (You can tell whenever those trying to destroy those movements try to play it up to excess.) It matters how that resistance still has disproportionate impact because of its proximity to centers of power, and it matters how bourgeois-ideology media make it very easy to look at measured but real victories and say Everything Is Forever Bad, We Never Won Anything, I Always Already Knew That It’s Hopeless And Worthless, and feel ever so clever about that, even though it’s false and the person didn’t always think that.
One big way that hopeless/worthless bullshit succeeds is to get people to look at imperialist assaults on governments abroad, and say, No need to respond to that, those suffering under imperialism are already defeated because they’re opposed. And when it comes to socialist governments under assault by imperialism. to say, No one can be socialist anymore anyway, so no need to worry about it.
This was the bourgeois ideology of the end of the Cold War as the end of history, when Western Marxists supposedly needed to de-Marx themselves and abandon support for socialist governments to continue their work. It was recapitulated as the ideology of the academic socialist cynic who saw themselves in a “post-9/11” generation war, and again, on a smaller scale, during the Obama administration over Libya and Yemen, Guantanamo and Afghanistan.
The U.S. government and its allies use bombs and guns and coups on these governments abroad not because the bourgeoisie thinks that’s rad (and they should be more into spending on health care, says DSA) but because those governments have to use force to maintain the bourgeoisie in power, fomenting crisis after crisis as they do.
And as probably a better anti-imperialist than I am a socialist, to me, responding to that with outright denial that resistance even exists, or matters, looks like a lot of living people looking at a lot of dead bodies in the past, present and future and saying, Fuck you, that could never be me. And IMO that’s not just depraved, it’s a comfortable lie history has long ago destroyed.