Recommend them The Red Pen or Dessalines instead. Western Marxism is better not receiving any traction at all. Fucking dogmatist Piece of shit!
Recommend them The Red Pen or Dessalines instead. Western Marxism is better not receiving any traction at all. Fucking dogmatist Piece of shit!
There are underground ML orgs in the US already. The problem is, the workers are still disorganized. And with gig economy growing in the share of the whole job market, the problem is only getting worse.
I do agree that you need a strong cohesive organization and for that you need a clear political line. However this habit of ideological purity fetish that is common to all ML, Trot or Maoist orgs has also led to an immense fragmentation that made organizing in the mass scale impossible. Even worse, it made the Marxist parties irrelevant in the dispute over public subjectivity.
While I don’t question that Lenin’s methods worked in Tsarist Russia, specially because they achieved a revolution there (praxis), we need to understand that at Lenin’s time political organizations (even bourgeois ones) were strictly forbidden. It means that carrying activities underground was not simply a choice, but a response to their historical material conditions. Even Lenin, before building the Russian social democratic party, participated in an adventurist org before so he also had experience in doing so. Today, even though we can’t let our guards down because repression by state forces is still a very real thing, the conditions are not the same.
I see a lot of orgs trying to replicate the Bolshevik’s physical newspaper, and even though I think this kind of effort has its merits, nobody reads physical newspapers anymore. So most of the time see purists as HEMA practicioners trying to hone their swordsmanship skills based on old manuals. The problem is that HEMA practicioners don’t take themselves very seriously (and they know it’s a historical re-enactment, not a practical skill for today’s needs) while some purist orgs still think they are doing the real thing.
Instead of just thinking on replicating what the Bolsheviks did, why don’t we instead think on the objectives we want to achieve? The real merit of Bolshevik organization was that they were able to create a big network of Bolshevik chapters around Russia, and create an organized propaganda and information gathering apparatus. Not only that, but they were able to fund their operations to a point were people could be dedicated revolutionaries, not simply amateurish voluntaries whose revolutionary work was the fourth priority in their lives.
So even though the Bolsheviks strived for a very clear political line, I disagree with the view that they were extremely factionalists. After the 1905 revolution they even became more open and accepted more proletarian members, they didn’t stick with just a small cadre of die hard intellectuals. And they had to do this otherwise the other orgs (Memsheviks and SRs) would become more important than them.
There needs to be at least a scientific approach, a statistical deep dive of which sub-demographics to target of who is going to be most fruitful for targetting? We are beyond simply targeting a general labour class in the 21st century when the west as a class acts as the bourgoisie against the global south; the labour aristocracy/bourgoisie proleteriat is so ingrained into the imperial machine you need actual data to know were to begin. You need anti-westerners. For a flavour, look up probablykaffe on twitter for a start on what I am talking about. The PSL has nothing of the sort to offer.
I disagree with your POV. Don’t idealize the non-Western working class, because people outside isn’t progressive, revolutionary or extremely class councious. What makes them revolutionary is their material conditions and the work of some existing organizations which are disputing their conscience. For example, the Brazilian mainstream media is more pro-Israel than the US media. If you ask Brazilian people about Muslims, most will associate them with terrorists, and even so we have seen some growing support for pro-Palestinian movements.
So I completely disagree, you need the same effort of propaganda and agitation work even at the core the empire. The working class is very fragmented, we have very specialized professionals in tech with entrepreneurial views, the office worker who becomes a drag queen at night, the bigoted factory worker, the gig worker that does not have a stable job, and many different others. They all can be revolutionary, conservative or reactionary. Organizing a very heterogeneous class is challenging, but there’s no other way. And while promising revolution is good, most people have immediate needs that need to be addressed. In order to effectively organize you need to keep an eye on the now and on the future, and try the best you can to make both those views converge.
And keep this in mind, if the existing political work is not producing fruits is not because your workers are inherently bad, but because our existing analysis, strategy or tactics are wrong.
I didn’t. You need to consider learning from where organisation has been successful not where it has not. The whole reason I said we need a deep dive statisitical analysis is because of the complexities since workerism and trade unionism isn’t cutting it.
None of the rest of what you said is what I am saying so I don’t have much else to add. Westerners in the imperial cores have distinct class characteristics against the Global South that needs to be tackled. Brazilian politics overemphasises the non-favelas over the favelas (to generalise) rooted in colorism/anti-indigienous/anti-black politics based on relative class characteristics + their own comprador bourgoisie demographics and own colonialism - the islamophobia is USAmerican politics bled over (as it is the world over).