#41
hi
Post rating: ~

shriekingviolet posted:

No legal exploitation exists in the first world. The conflicts surrounding these identities of course continue to persist, but merely to facilitate the arbitrary distribution of surplus. *cop distributes surplus bullets into unarmed black man* No legal exploitation exists in the first world. *judge distributes surplus racial minorities into prison* No legal exploitation exists in the first world.

"oppressed but not exploited"

#42
Post rating: +++++
im pretty sure the prison industrial system is sufficiently exploitative to satisfy even the most mindnumbingly useless pedant

#43
Post rating: +
I'm voting shriekingviolet for best new poster/WDDP alt/whatever of the year.
#44
Post rating: ~
after studiously watching 7 hours of hollywood summer hits I must conclude that no one in america seems unduly oppressed or exploited. truly this is a land where anyone can succeed by standing on the backs of poor african blacks

*looks down, sees a slate inscribed with "the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class"*

huh, weird, i should tweet about this
#45
Post rating: +
whats even the point of this forum at this point
#46
Post rating: +
Prisoners are not exploited. It costs more to keep prisoners than anything they can produce.
#47
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
As Krink suggested there is a massive gap between "exploitation" and "oppression." LGBTQ Americans for example, are an oppressed group but not an "exploited" group although many and even most in the group may be considered "exploited" on the individual level. The working class is the only class that is exploited, by definition, and the vast majority (not all) of this class exists in the third world.

Victories for oppressed classes are not necessarily victories for the exploited class. A complete end to racial discrimination in job interviews is irrelevant to someone who can't afford clean clothes and hasn't been employed in three years; that sort of advance would admit some new people into the oppressor class, without ever threatening to end oppression. It makes me wonder what identities will be used to divide us, once the current ones have been accepted and homogenized.

And I don't ever intend to minimize the oppression people are faced with here in America, but there has to be a global perspective included in this. According to this website which does not advocate full and immediate global communism in its masthead, the NYPD killed 221 people in about 13 years, out of approximately 9 million people who live in NYC. In a little less time than that, we've also killed about 120,000 civilians (documented) by direct violence alone in Iraq, out of ~25 million, while polluting the country with depleted uranium. Fairer treatment of Iraqi people, would not change this, because it's not really about whether they are Iraqi.... They just have their butts on our stuff
#48
Post rating: ~
https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/407985532782661632
#49
Post rating: +

Keven posted:

whats even the point of this forum at this point



nice try, but this question implies that there was a point to this forum at any point

#50
political car tune
Post rating: ~

TG posted:

Keven posted:

whats even the point of this forum at this point

nice try, but this question implies that there was a point to this forum at any point

#51
Post rating: +
it doesn't have to be an objectively efficient economic system for it to be exploitative, someone's labor is forced and someone on the chain benefits disproportionately, even if it costs everyone else more. but yeah i agree wrt swampman, an stuff

i just think that The LEft misses an opportunity when it insists on being ideologically pedantic to the point of being so Vigilant against identity politics that an opportunity to say "hey under Real Socialism this racial issue will be addressed, welcome to the struggle" just turns into alienating a huge group of allies just to stroke your marxist ego and say they're Not Marxist And Erase Class. just fucking listen to people and take them seriously, then talk to them? you can protect ideological purity or w/e without shrieking about it until everyone goes away. and im not really accusing anyone here in particular but god knows i see this shit happen all the time. ok thanks
#52
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
I understand the anger at people who are bad listeners. Sometimes I catch myself being a bad listener and really, it doesn't feel good to realize you are not listening to someone else, but here's the thing: we care very much about these issues, and under real socialism they will be addressed. Welcome to the struggle.
#53
Post rating: ~

marimite posted:

Prisoners are not exploited. It costs more to keep prisoners than anything they can produce.


good thing the 19th century is over

#54
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
I think there's kind of a false conflict here, where us communist dorks can not stand the abuse of identity politics to complain about like, "Oh they're making a Dr Pepper For Men! Boycott Dr Pepper until it is gender neutral!" but yes, once we start splattering poop at a target, the poop is going to get on lots of nearby targets, like actual feminists who can't contribute to the MSH comments section because they're running domestic violence shelters, or girl scout troops who are not active in MSH comments section, or something
#55
Post rating: +
If you're expressing confused sounds like abuh wuh? no ex-exploited first worlders? awhoo? *cocks head to one side* @ the basic tenants of the most correct and extremely good of political parties, maoism third worldism, then there's a disconnect that I cannot bridge. We will part ways here.
#56
Post rating: +
I get the mtw party line, but what value is there in phrasing it in a way that guarantees everyone who isn't mentally ill will immediately stop taking you seriously? why not get clever and challenge/subvert first worldist propaganda and culture instead of just wallowing in it. even if you have no hope for the first world it's wasteful not to work on leveraging them appropriately to support the Cause. figure out What Is To Be Done and find a strategy for engaging in dialogue with groups beyond "bicker with trots and trans activists and feel righteous about how you are too hardcore" to build a mass movement

if you're right you don't need to keep proving it to yourself, go out and be right and do right. pick your battles and work on polemics that people will actually listen to, recruit people to send money and guns to naxalites, do what lenin did and trick the trots and anarchists into doing the gruntwork for you.
#57
Post rating: +
*casually cleans nails and picks at teeth with a matchbook cover*
#58
Post rating: ~

shriekingviolet posted:

I get the mtw party line, but what value is there in phrasing it in a way that guarantees everyone who isn't mentally ill will immediately stop taking you seriously? why not get clever and challenge/subvert first worldist propaganda and culture instead of just wallowing in it. even if you have no hope for the first world it's wasteful not to work on leveraging them appropriately to support the Cause. figure out What Is To Be Done and find a strategy for engaging in dialogue with groups beyond "bicker with trots and trans activists and feel righteous about how you are too hardcore" to build a mass movement

if you're right you don't need to keep proving it to yourself, go out and be right and do right. pick your battles and work on polemics that people will actually listen to, recruit people to send money and guns to naxalites, do what lenin did and trick the trots and anarchists into doing the gruntwork for you.



MTWs are like a step below bronys and trans-ethnics on the scale of retarded internet subcultures likely to be politically effective in the next 10,000 years

#59
Post rating: +
post on rhizzone
#60
Post rating: ~
I mean, we probably still need the white Brooklyn left or whatever, because they take jobs in things inaccessible to others like publishing, journalism, etc. it would be useful if there were good leftist people there, doing work that obviously workers can't do (like cover fight for 15 today or we).

of course in exclusion these people are nothing, without stronger labor they have done very little to stop the rollback of workers rights for example. but I don't think that saying it's either one or the other is that useful...
#61
Post rating: ~
I see lol. Once I was the innocent kitten, now I am the wizened old tom.

#62
Post rating: +++++

shriekingviolet posted:

I get the mtw party line, but what value is there in phrasing it in a way that guarantees everyone who isn't mentally ill will immediately stop taking you seriously? why not get clever and challenge/subvert first worldist propaganda and culture instead of just wallowing in it. even if you have no hope for the first world it's wasteful not to work on leveraging them appropriately to support the Cause. figure out What Is To Be Done and find a strategy for engaging in dialogue with groups beyond "bicker with trots and trans activists and feel righteous about how you are too hardcore" to build a mass movement

if you're right you don't need to keep proving it to yourself, go out and be right and do right. pick your battles and work on polemics that people will actually listen to, recruit people to send money and guns to naxalites, do what lenin did and trick the trots and anarchists into doing the gruntwork for you.



well it's not feasible to send money and guns en masse to the naxalites, or even the naxalbari, as the former are banned by the indian government and the latter are under state observance. it's not really possible to have an "invisible children" style simpering heartstring-tugging song-and-dance about the naxalites in a country where the bulk of the diasporic indian community is at best sort-of-benignly nationalistic and among whom capital development is viewed as a good thing. what, posters saying "STOP PRANAB" everywhere? adorable lil armed nepalese child hugging some lil dalit duder, both packing heat and the little red book?

in addition to the indian government shitting bricks, indian expats would shit bricks. there are at-best-incremental changes to this outside of the diaspora- like 1/3rd of the music videos for slow songs i saw coming out of south india had themes of oppression of peasants, etc., and there was a movie last year that portrayed the naxals in a sympathetic light, but they're still not the rule.

it's easy to say "build a mass movement" but the reason for much intra-group western bickering is that these (semi?)successful maoist mass movements occurred under brutal rural oppression the likes of which do not exist in the west, and in conditions of relative ability to operate away from state control (conditions the likes of which do not exist in the west). people aren't sure what transpositions of this to the west are possible, if any at all, and this is the part that's getting talked about from those who aren't straight "Hate AmeriKKKA Beat"ers.

so, you said

Figure out What Is To Be Done


and some people are trying, and maybe they'll succeed, who knows. that said i'm pretty sure that

why not get clever and challenge/subvert first worldist propaganda and culture instead of just wallowing in it


or, in other words, Adbusters Redux, is not going to be it. you can't go

paraphrase posted:

step one: smarmy social commentary but somehow different this time
step two: armed covert people's war


and reaching out to groups that don't have insurrection in mind is going to be no different than the bickering with those into exclusively first world queer feminism, or trots, or whatever. the reason why maoist insurrection worked(ish) in regions of india was that the populace in these regions immediately saw the need for armed combat, and they weren't all "god fuck the guomintang, and mao's poetry rules too" (though some were) but rather "along with the police our headman takes more of our crops than we do, thank god someone's got guns and bombs and hates him like we hate him." inclusionary politics only really apply under these conditions if we're talking about armed insurrection.

but you're right about the rest, i think

Edited by palafox ()

#63
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

I must admit i don't quite understand the point here: Why would a magazine like Jacobin (or anywhere in the media for that matter) want meaningful contributions from working class people any more than women's magazines would want to start offering meaningful coverage of 'plus-sized women'? It would completely undermine their brand.



If anyone wants to know what "contributions from working class people" look like, trying checking the editorials section of your local right-wing newspaper

#64
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~

acephalousuniverse posted:

MTWs are like a step below bronys and trans-ethnics on the scale of retarded internet subcultures likely to be politically effective in the next 10,000 years



*watches as Brony membership increases tenthousandfold with each passing year*

#65
[account deactivated]
#66
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#67
[account deactivated]
#68
Post rating: +

discipline posted:

I went to a talk the other night and asked a question and then silvia federici said my question was the best she's heard in a long time and I was so happy my heart grew three times that day



Sorry doesn't sound very revolutionary to me... Talking...to first world women? *spits in disgust*

#69
Kurdt
Post rating: +
Hi khamsek. Hope ur doing well .
#70
Post rating: ~
For their part the Naxalites have been positive about solidarity stuff. This was their statement on the solidarity conference in Hamburg last year.

http://www.signalfire.org/?p=25582
#71
Post rating: +
I can't take discipline seriously when bhpn has an opinion to the contrary. Erases classs and such
#72
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +

discipline posted:

I went to a talk the other night and asked a question and then silvia federici said my question was the best she's heard in a long time and I was so happy my heart grew three times that day



Her answer?: "Because u touch yourself at night"

#73
Post rating: ~
marxism has made "emotions" obsolete
#74
[account deactivated]
#75
[account deactivated]
#76
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

Superabound posted:

discipline posted:

I went to a talk the other night and asked a question and then silvia federici said my question was the best she's heard in a long time and I was so happy my heart grew three times that day

Her answer?: "Because u touch yourself at night"

This is what you're crippling your forearm to type

#77
Post rating: ~

discipline posted:

the dude from the north star showed me some gossip on a secret facebook group about this thing I wrote here and this one dude was all like "working class people are FAT and LAZY and are the REASON WE DON'T HAVE COMMUNISM"


yeah I saw some shit talking about your article on one of Doug Henwoods doofy posts. the smugness of those people...

#78
Post rating: ~
jon stewart, in making fun of fox news, consistently erases the lived experience of the working class
#79
[account deactivated]
#80
Post rating: ~

Lessons posted:

For their part the Naxalites have been positive about solidarity stuff. This was their statement on the solidarity conference in Hamburg last year.

http://www.signalfire.org/?p=25582



keep in mind that this isn't the statement of all naxalites, but rather one of several (three? four?) major semi-aboveground naxal parties, although it is the largest and most important- in other words, it's the one with the most international presence and relations, and thus has the most stake in international solidarity concerns. you probably knew already, but there's a plethora of both tactical and ideological differences within the movement, often along regional lines.