drwhat posted:

what the hell is a shoutbox

let me talk to her

cars posted:

another thing i think about, except it's every hour of every day, is about how the in-game story of Unreal Tournament is that the tournament was started by the state and a mining company to make money by televising fights to the death between the company's workers, and it's a sequel to a game where you play as a convict who escapes their prison when it crash lands on a planet, and you have to help the locals fight off invading colonialists who are also trying to set up a mining operation, only to get captured by the Marines who want to conscript you to recover weapons technology, and then you win the game by killing all the Marines either with guns you stole from them or by 9/11 crashing your spaceship into theirs. now, in 2018, we have no Hope, no Jobs, and the top search result for "unreal" is a Lifetime show about psychopath TV producers.

Lately I've been thinking about how the last boss of Unreal Tournament is a corvee worker (robota) who led a revolutionary proletarian uprising against the company that started the tournament, and in an act of superexploitation, the company had him captured and reprogrammed as a snuff-TV prize fighter.

blinkandwheeze posted:

I think about this music a lot. see yall on the private rhizzone server

elias posted:

but joining the bad orgs is individualist lifestylist Marxism

kamelred posted:

sincere question: is it better than nothing?

I think that depends on context. Even if a mediocre group isn't going to accomplish anything meaningful, it's always good to develop skills, knowledge, and connections with other leftists. If the organization is mostly harmless and there's nothing better available in your area, then why not?

If they're doing things that are actively detrimental to leftist organizing and causes (trots, lots of DSA caucuses, etc) then use your judgement but should probably give those fuckers a pass. You're not going to fix them and unless you have a very specific goal in mind (like peeling off good members so they can join a better org instead) best case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and effort.

Naturally, we are prone to seeing only one side of things and people. If we judge a comrade, almost always we see only his good or his bad side. We must see both, without which it would not be possible to have cadres in organizations. In political practice, the unilateral method of judgment leads to sectarian . If we encounter an adversary belonging to a reactionary organization, we judge him by his bosses. Yet, he is perhaps only an embittered, discontent employee, and we should not judge him like a fascist boss. Likewise, we can apply this reasoning to bosses and understand that, while they may seem bad to us, it is often because they themselves are dominated by the structure of society and, under different social conditions, they would perhaps be different.

If we keep the interpenetration, the unity and struggle of opposites in mind, we look at things in their multiple aspects. We see then that this reactionary is, on the one hand, reactionary, but, on the other, he is a worker and in his case there is a contradiction. We should look and find out why he has joined this organization and, at the same time, why he should not have joined. In this way we can judge and discuss his case in a less sectarian manner.

In accordance with dialectics then, we must consider things from all the angles which we can differentiate.

elias posted:

but joining the bad orgs is individualist lifestylist Marxism

it's not, though. it's bad, but it's not that. what that is, is pretending that all organizations are bad, and it's a lame excuse.

karphead posted:

prove it

karphead posted:

Populares posted:

Immortals have a major stake in the welfare of the planet, do you really want to spend eternity on fascist hell world?

mods?

1. Feudalism was the negation of the slave state.
2. Capitalism is the negation of feudalism.
3. Socialism is the negation of capitalism.
4. I am never going to die, ipso facto, i don't need to join an org.

Possible but it could also be an insufferable form of socialism like fabianism or posadism. If you don't join an org you take risk of this happening.

shriekingviolet posted:

I think that depends on context. Even if a mediocre group isn't going to accomplish anything meaningful, it's always good to develop skills, knowledge, and connections with other leftists. If the organization is mostly harmless and there's nothing better available in your area, then why not?

If they're doing things that are actively detrimental to leftist organizing and causes (trots, lots of DSA caucuses, etc) then use your judgement but should probably give those fuckers a pass. You're not going to fix them and unless you have a very specific goal in mind (like peeling off good members so they can join a better org instead) best case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and effort.

came here to post this.

i think what's important isn't the fetish of "getting organized" but whether the particular orgs you engage with bring you any closer to actual struggle, in terms of building class consciousness and conquering political power, or basically contribute positively to those struggles in some small way. the parties (trot, cryptotrot, or socdem) largely aren't those things, even if there are competent organizers or worthwhile campaigns in the short-term.

anyway, fwiw, the extent of my support or sympathy for the red guards (or any maoist collective, for that matter) is basically that the development of those collectives potentially presents a road out of the decrepit, NCM-style party-building orgs that have accomplished next to nothing for the past 20 years. their potential is mainly a matter of actually applying MLM ideology and highly contingent on the (re)formulation of a revolutionary political line for the U$.

Vibeo Game.

blinkandwheeze posted:

red_dead's thread was clearly very critical of the red guard currents in every respect besides a basic admission that they seemed to be decent at recruiting excitable young members to their particular dead end. understanding these discussions as posing the red guards as a desirable alternative party or whatever is a really bizarre and shallow understanding of what was talked about here.

nobody on this forum has ever tried to convince anyone that the red guards weren't uniquely terrible in their own ways, there was really nothing in red_dead's thread that could be understood as an argument for joining the rga instead of the psl or whatever. strange post c_man

The post i responded to was discussing joining orgs and the red guards in the context of red_dread's thread, and i responded within that context. You dont appear to have a different take on the red guards than the one that i posted so its clear you dont disagree with my assessment, so im not sure why you think its a weird post.