pogfan1996 posted:A big part of my political development was thinking that Obama would have a positive effect on creating a more just foreign policy, which absolutely was destroyed by the 8 years of his presidency. I haven’t seen convincing evidence that the bourgeois political game is worth playing if you’re looking to affect imperialism. I see a solid track record of divvying up the super profits through social democracy within the political system, but then the question is whether that’s getting us any closer to socialism? That strategy doesn't seem to have a good track record so far.
don't get me wrong. i'm extremely pessimistic and have earned my right to bloviate about it on the internet in a rather subdued way. but i'm not going to argue with people in the south when they say that the main goal of 2020 for US left should be to get trump out of office. i'm not going to roll my eyes and say "actually i'm trying to focus on where i can make a difference, and that is communist politics, solidarity with the third world, and scientific analysis."
there is such an intense and detrimental disconnect between anti racist organizing and anti imperialist organizing, but the good news is that this is changing (albeit slowly). and that's taken a lot of work a lot of really intentional organizing that has been sabotaged at every step by empire. great progress is being made despite this because the reality of our struggle is increasingly harder to deny. we are on the cusp of internationalism, but this means attuning yourself closely to what our class in the south are asking for our mass orientations to be. i wish people stopped fetishizing the third world as shit out of mao memes and actually made efforts to speak with maoists from the third world. i wish that people stopped fetishizing AS and spoke with people who are living it.
pogfan1996 posted:jeantatlock posted:pogfan1996 posted:Petrol posted:
Well you've just answered your question in the affirmative. Whether Corbyn would have been better in this regard than Johnson is purely hypothetical but I think the answer is a resounding "yes, maybe, a bit".
So let's not worry about hypotheticals, when has electing the more progressive imperial candidate led to sizeable benefits to the rest of the world?
The people of Venezuela, Libya, Syria, etc certainly didn’t benefit from the election of Obama.actually, the leadership of venezuela have been quite clear on the fact things have been much worse under trump. after all, it was under a trump government that the core was able to cut off all CITGO revenue and ramp up sanctions as well as promote a fake president and stoke a contra army on their borders with colombia. cuba additionally had a massive source of foreign currency cut off when the trump government ramped up the blockade and slammed the doors shut on P2P visas. syria has permenant US military bases now after trump directly shot at syria with hundreds of tomahawk missiles. there's a general from fairfax rolling around libya as we speak. this is not in any way to absolve obama for his crimes against humanity, but it is to point out that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between the obama and trump administrations (yes, even clinton and george w) that are hard to deny.
IDK Jean, the consensus is that Trump is following the same path as Obama as it pertains to Venezuela
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/01/when-it-comes-to-venezuela-trump-follows-in-obama-footsteps/
And Maduro certainly doesn't seem to agree with you
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-usa-trump-idUSKBN15101M
these stories are dated. both of them.
jeantatlock posted:pogfan1996 posted:A big part of my political development was thinking that Obama would have a positive effect on creating a more just foreign policy, which absolutely was destroyed by the 8 years of his presidency. I haven’t seen convincing evidence that the bourgeois political game is worth playing if you’re looking to affect imperialism. I see a solid track record of divvying up the super profits through social democracy within the political system, but then the question is whether that’s getting us any closer to socialism? That strategy doesn't seem to have a good track record so far.
don't get me wrong. i'm extremely pessimistic and have earned my right to bloviate about it on the internet in a rather subdued way. but i'm not going to argue with people in the south when they say that the main goal of 2020 for US left should be to get trump out of office. i'm not going to roll my eyes and say "actually i'm trying to focus on where i can make a difference, and that is communist politics, solidarity with the third world, and scientific analysis."
there is such an intense and detrimental disconnect between anti racist organizing and anti imperialist organizing, but the good news is that this is changing (albeit slowly). and that's taken a lot of work a lot of really intentional organizing that has been sabotaged at every step by empire. great progress is being made despite this because the reality of our struggle is increasingly harder to deny. we are on the cusp of internationalism, but this means attuning yourself closely to what our class in the south are asking for our mass orientations to be. i wish people stopped fetishizing the third world as shit out of mao memes and actually made efforts to speak with maoists from the third world. i wish that people stopped fetishizing AS and spoke with people who are living it.
What specifically are your referring to? I find it very difficult to believe Maoists in the third world would say this since Maoism was created out of rejecting the comintern saying to do exactly this and the consistent rejection of eurocommunism but it's possible. Regardless, even if the third world told you to do something it would not make it right, that is the essence of Maoism. I was told a few weeks ago that Maoism cannot accept that revolution in the first world is not possible and that's true. But it's also true that if you are going to really embrace third worldism, the terrain of analysis fundamentally changes and the correlates between left and right in the first world are no longer clear (as I said earlier, it may be the lesser evil to destroy the EU). You can't have it both ways and substitute Maoism and the third world broadly for the comintern and the scraps of social democracy for revisionist communist parties.
pogfan1996 posted:A big part of my political development was thinking that Obama would have a positive effect on creating a more just foreign policy, which absolutely was destroyed by the 8 years of his presidency. I haven’t seen convincing evidence that the bourgeois political game is worth playing if you’re looking to affect imperialism.
Ah, but you see, you yourself are evidence that playing the game and being destroyed by it turns people into communists.
It's dialectical!
babyhueypnewton posted:What specifically are your referring to? I find it very difficult to believe Maoists in the third world would say this since Maoism was created out of rejecting the comintern saying to do exactly this and the consistent rejection of eurocommunism but it's possible. Regardless, even if the third world told you to do something it would not make it right, that is the essence of Maoism. I was told a few weeks ago that Maoism cannot accept that revolution in the first world is not possible and that's true. But it's also true that if you are going to really embrace third worldism, the terrain of analysis fundamentally changes and the correlates between left and right in the first world are no longer clear (as I said earlier, it may be the lesser evil to destroy the EU). You can't have it both ways and substitute Maoism and the third world broadly for the comintern and the scraps of social democracy for revisionist communist parties.
Hmm I don't know if I agree, but I liked your attack on Marcyism because if you are just going to uphold Dengism then it should logically follow that voting for Joe Biden would be a rational thing to do. It's probably what the Politburo would want you to do (the Cuban one too, not just the Chinese). So I'll consider this post part of that series and give you an upvote.
pogfan1996 posted:Which groups in the global south say that getting Trump out of office should be the main goal of the US left?
http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2019-11-03/propuestas-para-el-plan-de-accion-del-encuentro-antimperialista-de-solidaridad-por-la-democracia-y-contra-el-neoliberalismo-03-11-2019-13-11-08
https://ilps.info/en/?s=trump
Edited by jeantatlock ()
en la última semana de mayo (25 al 30) organizar una movilización antimperialista a nivel global. Consignas: No más TRUMP, no al IMPERIALISMO, Sí a la VIDA.
lol yeah that definitely sounds like Órgano oficial del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba voicing support for the blood-soaked Democrat bourgeois imperialist party that has raped Cuba since before Batista and supported coup attempt after coup attempt in the global South in an attempt to choke their country to death, that's why the fourth through sixth words of that rallying cry are just the sound of a pleasant breeze on a summer's day, signifying nothing
cars posted:en la última semana de mayo (25 al 30) organizar una movilización antimperialista a nivel global. Consignas: No más TRUMP, no al IMPERIALISMO, Sí a la VIDA.
lol yeah that definitely sounds like Órgano oficial del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba voicing support for the blood-soaked Democrat bourgeois imperialist party that has raped Cuba since before Batista and supported coup attempt after coup attempt in the global South in an attempt to choke their country to death, that's why the fourth through sixth words of that rallying cry are just the sound of a pleasant breeze on a summer's day, signifying nothing
you seem tired
i mean you're all correct to some degree or another. there are simply too many contradictions in the corbyn project for it to sustain itself, too many attempts to balance the natural democratic socialism of corbyn with the further left inclinations of his advisors with the social fascism of the PLP with the clusterfuck of conflicting tendencies within the membership with reactionary and racist nature of huge swathes of the voting public. and labour struggled to get a fair hearing anyway against the ferocity of the media campaign and a UK right that has an uncanny ability to shore up its own power even when it's in the midst of fucking up spectacularly. brexit was the result of a botched attempt to settle a social club argument between eton chums and now it's created a radical right wing one party state. if david cameron had meant to do that he would be the Machiavellian genius of our times, yet he did it totally by accident. and while people describe it as a revolt against "neoliberalism", and the corbynists appear to have approached it as such, the two signifiers brexiteers point to as most emblematic of their supposed alienation are immigration and sovereignty, and i don't know how you negate 200 years of white supremacy and colonialist programming in the 6 weeks of an election campaign where the press are slightly less rabid than usual. it doesn't happen. my instinct is labour should have stuck with a soft leave position while coaxing people around with local investment and waited for time to pick off the more hardcore elements.
so things are pretty fucked. we live in a managed democracy where only one party, floating on an ocean of oligarch and city of london blood money, can ever feasibly win another election. you might say it was ever thus etc but it truly feels like there is no way out of this cul de sac now. and call me a filthy electoralist if you want but this really does matter, cos whatever trade deal we can scrape together with the yanqui will be largely dependent on how willing we are to let them asset strip the NHS and get behind whatever the next imperial horrorshow they want to embark on is. and the ripple effects of this abroad are going to be truly horrifying (i posted a while back about the role we are playing in yemen, and the 100s of 1000s of dead and dying there is only gonna be the tip of the iceberg if brexit is as bad as the forecasts suggest and the tories need some fireworks to distract her majestys fearful subjects). i truly don't believe that would have happened under corbyn.
but just observing the uk left these last few years has been instructive; imo far too many people seemed to be sincerely under the impression that the british imperial apparatus would actually allow us to elect socialism. believing that labour were running on a genuine socialist manifesto and not a fairly basic tax and investment platform designed to bring our rotting infrastructure up to eye level with the euro capitalist core was silly, and people who wanted to see a labour gov and should have known better were too willing to play along with this. that's not to say the state was fine with corbyn either; i have no doubt there were all kinds of coup and assassination plots being formulated in case the unthinkable happened, because this corbyn movement was supposed to push us towards if not full communism, then at least a more egalitarian and equal society, messy and sometimes perplexing an attempt as it was.
i know this is a bit all over the place, i'm still adjusting. atm i'm mostly sad for my parents, who rely on the NHS, social care and social housing, and are probably going to be in real trouble soon.
Edited by ghostpinballer ()
jeantatlock posted:you seem tired
you need to lurk more
cars posted:jeantatlock posted:you seem tired
you need to lurk more
shut up man we used to have literal fascists round here
cars posted:jeantatlock posted:you seem tired
you need to lurk more
please cars, show some manners to new posters. new posters means new posts, thesis leads to antithesis, etc. what is the great sin of jeantatlock? the mildest defense of new western socdem movements? i think we can deal with that...
cars posted:far-right schizophrenics trading their personal information in DMs
Hmm sounds pretty typical. So how'd you drive off the fascists
Curious to know because I read the old threads since there are some good ones but then I'll see someone with a Yockey avatar. I'll search for "Trotskyism" and "Rhizzone" and there's fun stuff like babyhuey frantically waving a Makarov around. Yockey anyhow wrote a book called "Imperium" in the late 40s when everything seemed to be coming up communism and the capital of the Third Reich had the red banner flying over it, so he tried to burble a bunch of third positionist stuff about the Soviet Union being good... for fascists. But I'm not fooled. Actually saw a copy of that book going for about a grand in the rare / antique section of a used bookstore. Pretty weird. I think some old Nazi died and his family hawked all his stuff
trakfactri posted:cars posted:far-right schizophrenics trading their personal information in DMs
Hmm sounds pretty typical. So how'd you drive off the fascists
Curious to know because I read the old threads since there are some good ones but then I'll see someone with a Yockey avatar. I'll search for "Trotskyism" and "Rhizzone" and there's fun stuff like babyhuey frantically waving a Makarov around. Yockey anyhow wrote a book called "Imperium" in the late 40s when everything seemed to be coming up communism and the capital of the Third Reich had the red banner flying over it, so he tried to burble a bunch of third positionist stuff about the Soviet Union being good... for fascists. But I'm not fooled. Actually saw a copy of that book going for about a grand in the rare / antique section of a used bookstore. Pretty weird. I think some old Nazi died and his family hawked all his stuff
i mean, what you have to keep in mind is that german joey (blessed be his name), our prometheus and the previous owner of the site, basically just left after a year and just paid the bills, so we didn't have any way of enforcing anything except by moderators, who would also leave for months. also, the original vision for the site was a replication of LF from SA, where there were a ton of idiots, weirdos, and fascists who posted, and self-moderation would basically be yelling at them enough until they broke under the pressure of the immortal science; however, posting was too anemic here to ever replicate that effect.
elemennop posted:basically be yelling at them enough until they broke under the pressure of the immortal science; however, posting was too anemic here to ever replicate that effect.
Okay that makes sense. I vaguely remember LF because I was on the forums for a bit around then, and how it was initially a Ron Paul fan containment zone / GULAG that turned into a bully chamber of said Ron Paul fans, or something like that
elemennop posted:plYease cars, show some manners to new posters. new posters means new posts, thesis leads to antithesis, etc. what is the great sin of jeantatlock? the mildest defense of new western socdem movements? i think we can deal with that...
What we have here are problems of left and right deviations. The right says to vote for Bernie Sanders. The left says to not vote for Bernie Sanders. But if we think about it as a properly inter-penetrative collision of opposites... then the solution is that some posters would vote for Bernie Sanders, and some posters would not vote for Bernie Sanders! *rimshot*
Petrol posted:He usually does
post the DPRK trip report
elemennop posted:self-moderation would basically be yelling at them enough until they broke under the pressure of the immortal science; however, posting was too anemic here to ever replicate that effect.
idk about that later on though, we brushed off ticks like Prospero and swirlsofhistory that way, even conec repeat-IFAPing them had little effect until everyone started owning them whenever they came back. after their sort of influence disappeared even goatstein’s posting persona calmed down. that goatstein still has an active account here is maybe not the best thing for getting certain former posters to post again given his Posting Past, but it’s at the very least evidence that we don’t have to okay left-liberal Democrats for them to post here. i mean, either we’re so rude and aggressive that we brook no dissent or we’re so lazy and do-nothing that we allow it, it cant be both, right?
otoh I think we have a mechanism to crowd-source good politics and the blackjacking of problem posters without even IFAPing them, it’s appointing thread monitors and imo it doesn’t happen enough. most newer posters probably don’t even know they can ask for that power or be given it. everyone should imo get acclimated to surviving probations again, those same younglings probably don’t know that we all used to get them so often on here that tpaine was able to carry a running joke about it from the old country to our ash-blighted shores without spilling a single drop of posting nectar along the way, Mashallah.
Христос се роди btw man, hope all is well
cars posted:elemennop posted:self-moderation would basically be yelling at them enough until they broke under the pressure of the immortal science; however, posting was too anemic here to ever replicate that effect.
idk about that later on though, we brushed off ticks like Prospero and swirlsofhistory that way, even conec repeat-IFAPing them had little effect until everyone started owning them whenever they came back. after their sort of influence disappeared even goatstein’s posting persona calmed down. that goatstein still has an active account here is maybe not the best thing for getting certain former posters to post again given his Posting Past, but it’s at the very least evidence that we don’t have to okay left-liberal Democrats for them to post here. i mean, either we’re so rude and aggressive that we brook no dissent or we’re so lazy and do-nothing that we allow it, it cant be both, right?
otoh I think we have a mechanism to crowd-source good politics and the blackjacking of problem posters without even IFAPing them, it’s appointing thread monitors and imo it doesn’t happen enough. most newer posters probably don’t even know they can ask for that power or be given it. everyone should imo get acclimated to surviving probations again, those same younglings probably don’t know that we all used to get them so often on here that tpaine was able to carry a running joke about it from the old country to our ash-blighted shores without spilling a single drop of posting nectar along the way, Mashallah.
prospero and swirls were outright banned iirc. we only managed to drive conec off the forums after like 3 years. goatstein has calmed down a lot, and hasn't posted anything reactionary in like 4-5 years at this point. also, we can absolutely be both. we can be rude enough to drive tentative posters, but without being committed enough to have driven off the stubborn reactionaries. the last couple of years, we've had a much more active administration, so i'm pretty much fine with everyone who's active on the forums. i'm not opposed to bullying, just like hold back a bit if the poster is new and is otherwise polite.
Христос се роди btw man, hope all is well
damn, you follow the heretic gregorian calendar, i'm ashamed. yeah, i'm good i guess, hope everything is good with you too
cars posted:i mean, either we’re so rude and aggressive that we brook no dissent or we’re so lazy and do-nothing that we allow it, it cant be both, right?
well i was thinking of another contradiction, to your point in the past that social democrats / DSA types love punishment, yet these forums like to dish out punishment. i think you need to, kinda, contain that in a sort of reactor, like posting fission, that can power the forums. the thread monitors are like engineers who can adjust the control rods when necessary. it's science