spacegaucho posted:

I'm fresh as they come (this is my soft opening post) but want to put in my two cents after lurking a couple days that this place is a great resource/funny but kind of a downer too, in all honesty.

that's why we have a subforum called "drink yourself to death" where we share tips and tricks on how to drink yourself to death and where posting about not drinking yourself to death is not allowed

ialdabaoth posted:

that's why we have a subforum called "drink yourself to death" where we share tips and tricks on how to drink yourself to death and where posting about not drinking yourself to death is not allowed

I'm a shadow of my former self in this regard.. Hardly drinking more than a couple times a week. Sad! Will work on this, if for nothing else than for posting purposes.

Petrol posted:

hark, noobs! everyone here is a grumpy weirdo sometimes but as long as you havent come here to preach straight up anticommunist nonsense, you'll be just fine. please keep posting. ganbatte

Thank you, sir! Will try to limit myself to occasional non-sense, but never anti-communist.

BOFAnshen posted:

https://newspunch.com/military-employees-donated-more-bernie-sanders-than-trump-biden-combined/The u$ military seems to love Bernie Sanders, probably because he genuinely has helped veterans in the past, but probably also because they understand through whatever lens they look at the world through, that the style of u$ imperialism with hot wars, SS on the ground and forth right disregard of international law hasn't really been effective since like Panama, and the soft power imperialism that a Sanders administration would default to would benefit everyone involved. With the notable exception of the workers and peasants of the third world I suppose. Orange man bad ig.

i appreciate this as a counter to the dumbass "this means the military rank and file will prevent sanders from getting allende'd" takes I've seen based on this data but in both cases you're making a lot of hay out of the fact that sanders has reaped fourteen cents in donations from the average active duty troop

thirdplace posted:

BOFAnshen posted:


https://newspunch.com/military-employees-donated-more-bernie-sanders-than-trump-biden-combined/The u$ military seems to love Bernie Sanders, probably because he genuinely has helped veterans in the past, but probably also because they understand through whatever lens they look at the world through, that the style of u$ imperialism with hot wars, SS on the ground and forth right disregard of international law hasn't really been effective since like Panama, and the soft power imperialism that a Sanders administration would default to would benefit everyone involved. With the notable exception of the workers and peasants of the third world I suppose. Orange man bad ig.


i appreciate this as a counter to the dumbass "this means the military rank and file will prevent sanders from getting allende'd" takes I've seen based on this data but in both cases you're making a lot of hay out of the fact that sanders has reaped fourteen cents in donations from the average active duty troop


living in the future! feeling wonderful!

Yeah probably true, I just wanted to try the take out, give it a spin, do a few donuts etc etc.

stegosaurus posted:

what is the point of a place like this and is it useful politically?

I found this place when I was just discovering politics for the first time in high school. I think I was on a trajectory and in an environment to become a DSA pervert at the time, but reading the discussions here has allowed me to begin developing a communist worldview. Maybe I'm just totally ignorant of some hidden communist underworld where this stuff is commonplace, but I don't think there's any other publicly available English language forum where anti-imperialism and class analysis are discussed with the depth that they are here. There's nowhere else where the things that are taken for granted here don't have to be argued from the ground up in every post.

There's also the "reading list" that this place has created through a not insignificant amount of transcription work. I read Settlers because of this place. Anyone who I've shown Settlers to has read it on the site this place created. Unlike most other lists of leftist books you can find which tack on anything vaguely related to the topic, the collection at readmarxeveryday.org is cohesive and everything in it is highly relevant to leftism in the anglosphere (imo). From the Soviet Union to primitive accumulation and patriarchy, to the black liberation movements of the previous century, the suppressed history in those books is mindblowing to someone who never knew any alternative to the mythology of imperialist capitalism. All of those books also have a good amount of discussion already recorded right here on this forum, so a reader can be connected to discourse and context that can be hard to trace back on your own for books like this.

Again, maybe I'm just unaware of some other way everyone gets this base of knowledge, but nobody around me in real life is aware of it either then cause most of the things I've learned here end up being brand new to people I discuss them with. That's another thing that makes this forum very valuable to me. I'm still an absolute beginner with these subjects. Everyone here has read and experienced more than I have, which gives you all a much more sophisticated understanding which I can learn from. However, in real life almost nobody I know has such a consolidated understanding of politics. Of course I learn a lot that I wouldn't be able to learn here from the people I know and through political practice, but when it comes to revolutionary theory, this is the best place I know. For instance, my local Palestine solidarity group is filled with brilliant Palestinian organizers, but even though their families are subject to some of the worst crimes of empire, many of them also take leading roles in solidarity groups for Syrian "rebels". At a national level, this organization places Hong Kong rioters and Venezuelan class enemies in the same category as the Palestinian struggle. They're doing genuinely good work on Palestine, but there's no systematic understanding of imperialism. Through this forum I have a connection to other people who are trying to develop more advanced theories of class and imperialism. That connection has helped me carry the conversation forward locally whereas otherwise I would be too ignorant to do anything at all in the face of the liberal tendencies that dominate.

stegosaurus posted:

ill be honest if the new peoples army or representatives of the cuban government or the plfp or any other mass communist formation with an actual political existence told me a vote for bernie sanders is required of me i'd just do it.

to me though that’s like people from countries suffering under U.S. imperialism going on far-right radio/podcasts in the U.S. because their hosts will allow denunciation of Washington’s foreign policy in suitably extreme terms in front of a larger U.S. audience, it’s recognizing, from a perspective outside that country, that U.S. elections, U.S. reporting, etc. are closer to where worldwide policy is set and trying every possible means to influence it as a matter of survival. most communist organizations anywhere wouldn’t do that, but who knows, maybe it’s happened and it certainly could happen, and i’d recognize the strategic or tactical thought behind it even if i disagreed with the act.

and 1) i don’t think that means socialists in the U.S. should do the same thing in imitation, 2) i don’t think Bernard Sanders getting elected will actually alleviate suffering under imperialism or improve things for socialists abroad under siege. I think that’s highly unlikely not only by the evidence of Sanders’s record in Congress and the DSA’s record dating back to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, but because of structural defenses that prevent Democrats from breaking rank and are currently being used to place literal “intelligence community” agents into elections as Democrats.

those same things are issues even if Sanders doesn’t win, because endorsing bourgeois-party candidates that talking heads are chatting up all over media, entrusting engagement in politics to the allowed representatives in “mass” media discourse, has a way of sucking up people’s energy and setting expectations extremely low before destroying them. look at the despair among radical Corbynites right now.

idk what to say about it if and when socialists outside the U.S. think otherwise, except for, that position still seems to be incorrect for a lot of demonstrated reasons, and it’s not scientific or wise to ignore evidence just to establish third-worldist bonafides, it does no one any favors. even when U.S. domestic groups do it, people who have a lot more leeway to be theatrically opposed to bourgeois parties if anyone thinks that’s the attitude that prompts opposition to those parties, I still can’t agree with it.

since what i think probably doesn’t matter much, maybe a better way to see it is, there’s room for a variety of complementary approaches from within and without. like if you want to look at it in terms of the most influential politics discussion site on the World Wide Web, PSL in 2016 both told people to vote for Sanders and ran their own candidate, and swampman overruled the winning “don’t vote” endorsement thread ballot but had the front page endorse La Riva instead of Sanders, presumably because he thought whatever amount of pull this site had should be used to raise the profile of socialists, not Democrats. imo that’s fine even if the discussion suggested we host a harsh critique of the 2016 election instead.

swampman posted:

the la riva campaign paid me $65 for that endorsement

let’s go open-bid this time and see what happens