I decided to not be bitter and i followed a liberal influencer for like a week (they dont make political content usually) but today they posted that BULLSHIT about how trump is causing wars as a cover for the files and i had to unfollow. nobody is starting wars over that, theyre starting wars for capital and resources.

what the fuck is a ”eipstein class”? just those guys on the files? are the billionaires who refused or were not invited alright with you?

and of course the religious zealots doing the bit about how eipstein was satan incarnate while churning out money for their pastor to buy a new mansion.

the prolecattleiat is not being elevated to sapience by this situation alone. people have to read theory which is why i encourage them to do so. libs, anarchists and conservatives have the balls to talk about how mao, stalin and other leaders were also pedophiles or ray peests so communism is not worth it either so we just need a matriarchy as if a capitalist system would be fine if women were in charge.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 hours ago

    You are not preaching about labor aristocracy in this thread. You are taking it to some other level where billionaires are revolutionary because they’re Chinese and people living in a trailer park in the US are villains because they voted for a US president. This is not an understanding of class on the global stage. It is a reductionist view of material conditions and contradictions that collapses the worldview into oversimplified nodes instead of broadening in order to be able to work through specific contradictions.

    • darkernations@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 hours ago

      Consider reading it, and you may develop a different view.

      Chareterisations of villains and heroes are besides the point. It is about understanding the science of who may be revolutionary domestically so we can spend most of our limited resources on them. This means carefully, and maybe painfully for some, understanding what it means to be a settler and bourgoisie proleteriat. It is step away from a simplistic dynamism of rich vs poor otherwise end up resulting in the same mistakes of those who Marx and Lenin criticised (eg Proudhon).

      I found Cesaire snd Losurdo’s works useful too. Eg https://redsails.org/discours-sur-le-colonialisme/

      • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 hour ago

        You literally asked this before like it was a serious question:

        Who is more revolutionary: the Chinese billionaire defending the CPC or the white trailer parker family who supported Trump/Biden?

        And have not addressed the problems with it at all. Going beyond “simple dynamism of rich and poor” does not mean defending the rich and characterizing them as more revolutionary than somebody living in a trailer park because they live in a non-settler country.

        It is about understanding the science of who may be revolutionary domestically so we can spend most of our limited resources on them.

        But that’s not what you’ve been talking about.

        You didn’t say, “Here is where you should focus your energies domestically.” You compared Chinese billionaire and white Yankee in a trailer park.

        Don’t say one thing, act like you’re saying another, and then throw reading material at me when I don’t agree, as if this will clarify.

        BTW, I have read the redsails article on brainwashing before, probably multiple times by now. And it is incredibly overrated as an analysis. Here’s a part that stands out to me:

        In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits.

        As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.

        But am I not just worsening the problem, aggravating our hopelessness, by criticizing the critics in a way that suggests that no one escapes ideological self-flattery? I don’t think so. Paradoxically, it brings us all back to a more even and possibility-rich playing field.

        The author almost realizes their own mistake, but then skips on by it and says nah, I’m not making that mistake. But they are. They are being incredibly reductionist in relation to hundreds of millions of people. They go on to double down on the reductionist rhetoric even more:

        Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

        This is a nonsense argument. First, via no evidenced investigation, the author supposes that hundreds of millions of people, some of which are non-white peoples with a much more complicated history than this kind of rhetoric gives them any recognition of, share essentially the same point of view. This point of view is something they implicitly know, yet hide from. So now we have shifted from “they are brainwashed and this explains their lack of movement” to implying “they are a hyper intelligent hive mind who knows exactly what’s going on and pretends not to because it feels good to pretend.”

        It’s the kind of article that reeks of academic marxism. Of trying to “cudgel one’s brains and develop an idea” without going out and investigating. The author encountered a problem, that sometimes people will reject the evidence you give them that challenges their existing worldview, and extrapolated a massive honker of a speculative generalization out of trying to answer why.

        • darkernations@lemmygrad.ml
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          47 minutes ago

          So rather than consider that westerners are acting in their self interests as beneficiaries of imperialism, and that material conditions affects what self-filtering occurs, we should instead double down on the idealistic notion that we should appeal to those who would benefit more from what the imperialist state than anything an actual anti-imperialist movement can offer them.

          So for example in the US, instead of working with say original nation movements and the New Afrikan movements to better the US ML line we should focus on the settler nation folks by appealing to their empathetic sensibilities, which has so far failed for the past few centuries and no analysis about how to go about it differently that isn’t much more than trade unionism and protest marches.

          Fuck that White Noise. Being a westerner is a fucking disease.

          • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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            35 minutes ago

            Me: repeatedly points out that the situation in the US is more complicated than just white people

            You: so you’re saying we should work exclusively with white people?

            I don’t have any patience for this any more. I don’t even know who you are arguing with.

            • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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              28 minutes ago

              Didn’t you hear? Intersectionality is when you work only with white people. They’re already so diverse as is! Who needs any other group?

              Also all Westerners are white, and there is absolutely no nuance to that statement. Now, let me get back to planning my revolution with my vanguard party consisting of three guys and a dog we adopted.

              • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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                11 minutes ago

                Yeah, this whole thing has been baffling. Like you explicitly pointed out diversity in your experiences organizing with PSL, IIRC? In this very thread in response to darkernations? Isn’t that a point of evidence toward the idea that not all western organizing is languishing in targeting white people?

                I mean, I honestly don’t know what some people want. Do they want white westerners to go hit up indigenous nations and the black prison population exclusively for revolutionary organizing? Or are the white westerners supposed to sit on the sidelines because they’re too tainted to organize in the first place? (In which case, they’d then get criticized for letting non-white people do the sacrifice to change the world.) I never understand quite what the goal is. I get the settler issue matters, as does race, but I can remember two distinct times on here, this thread and another user/thread a while back, where in both cases the position was very strong about who to organize with and in both cases, I never got a clear answer on the logistics of actually doing it.