And I thought Reddit was bad…
I want to preface with this: 1. I’m not western. I don’t think anyone in this world would consider my country part of the west or the imperial core. I’m from the global south and working class. 2. I’m young and only a couple of years ago started engaging with marxist theory and as a consequence the online western left. And 3. Everything here is my opinion and some details escape me due to the fact that I don’t follow the discussion on the internet 100%. While I spend a lot of time online, most of that time is not wasted on Twitter or Reddit or what not. That being said, this is an insomnia induced rant aimed mainly to my american comrades, but anyone else in the western/anglo sphere also can take something useful from here. I don’t know.
I started following western/internet leftists on twitter recently as a consequence of me making a twitter account. I’ve come to the conclusion that the western/western adjacent left (ie. All the anglosphere) is completely useless staying on the internet in any capacity. American and european communists debate the dumbest possible shit and reach no useful results. Motherfuckers agree on 99% of things and start attacking each other like rabid dogs for the stupid 1% in which they disagree. I wouldn’t even call it infighting because that would compare it with the debates and disagreements of the historic left like the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were debating and discussing actually important thing while actually doing something, while going to the people and organizing. Imbeciles do jackshit and pretend that by attacking someone else on twitter they are achieving something valuable or reaching to the people and making a change. Their “propaganda” is garbage. While the people that actually do something to bring about the revolution aren’t concerned by their idiocy. The example of this are the “discussions” that a lot of “leftists” have had with Ben Norton recently and that is what compeled me to write this rant.
In my opinion Ben is the best journalist out there. Both with the ideological conviction and the actual ability to do the job of journalism with integrity and courage to denounce the capitalist rulers, and his work clearly shows it. Similar to the people at The Grayzone but actually a communist. And by the way, it is clear that that is the line along which he “broke” with Blumenthal.
Ben, having seen with his own eyes the hell brought to Latin America by the United States (living in Nicaragua), naturally empathizes with the struggle and the outlook of the people towards the US. But people on twitter still attacks him or disagree with him on completely delusional matters.
One example: Noah from Midwestern Marx. I love Modwestern Marx. Carlos and Eddy are some of the best propagandists you americans have right now. But twitter really damages any possibility of reaching the masses significantly. his disagreement with Ben is about the US flag. Ben is on the opinion (rightly so), thay the US flag represents terror, war, imperialism, death, to the people’s of the world. And that US communists should NOT use a symbol like that to rally the people. Noah disagrees and says that using that symbol has been democratically elected by the people (?). Not only that, he states (without a grain of evidency and clearly not even listening or reading what Ben actually says) that Ben is “reading too much Sakai and not enough Lenin”… WHAT THE FUCK?! And then he doubles down and defends the use of that flag by some indigenous people in the US. Needless to say, but I’m saying it anyways, colonized people holding their colonizer’s flag doesn’t make it a good flag.
Some others, like Xiangyu of all people, post stupid shit like “Oppose the Nortons” (mf you are not Mao) or call Ben a radlib, and being rude in general. Straight up infantile shit. And oh, while also self righteously calling people that disagree with him “degenerates” all while saying he laments Dugin’s daughter assassination (a whole other can of worms).
I hate that that is the state of the left in the US and adjacent. And I hate that I saw that shit willingly. If you american communists don’t get to work and do a revolution soon, the rest of the world will, with or without your support, and things will get ugly, like, really ugly. For us, but specially for you.
I post this all not because I think the details matter, they don’t. But to illustrate the point that as long as you keep falling to the trap of social media like twitter (it makes you angry by design), you won’t achieve anything. And the people that will do something will be the worst elements of the western society, either on the right or pretending to be left (coff coff Maupin). The west, and specially the US, have a way of shaping your mind that I have seen too many times, both online and offline. Shake that shit out of you. It is making you inhumane and ineffective, and the bourgeoisie is winning thanks to that.
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“Dumb dumbs should read more theory” isn’t winning any ideological battles, comrade.
Not attempting to put words in your mouth but the sort of line that I feel is related – the ‘telling people to read is ableist’ take – is laughable, reactionary and services no one but the bourgeois state and I wouldn’t be surprised if their think tanks are behind the scenes pushing this narrative hard to prevent people from understanding even the most basic of concepts. Reading is hard but understanding is paramount. Practice without theory is petty-bourgeois, no masters no bedtimes radicalism. I used to believe more strongly that the ‘advanced masses’, that is proletarian eclectic leftists, had mostly good ideas and that a focus on pushing further Marxist education was not necessary, that it was more pragmatic to tail them basically. But we see with the most widely successful revolts in the U.S. like CHAZ, Occupy and the pseudo-corporate Black Lives Matter groups, these movements are/were led by hilariously inept opportunists who have absolutely no idea what they’re or why they’re doing it, and they were co-opted almost instantaneously. They utterly refuse to learn from historical and contemporary revolutions for fear of being labeled authoritarian and glom onto anarchist “theory” and focus on individualist, non-systematic approaches to revolution like mutual aid, property destruction, and consumer activism. You only have to look so far into how so many of these “revolutionaries” view the very basic question of authority and class – all authority is bad and class is relatively unimportant. Childish! This shitty line has been destroyed over a thousand times over a hundred years. The most advanced and passionate sections of the proletariat are going to need to study, even if it’s hard, otherwise they’ll keep making the same idiotic mistakes over and over and over. This is not to say that they’re stupid, or “dumb dumbs”, just that actively dissuading people from reading theory because they can ‘learn it in the struggle’ or gleam a general gist from synthetic leftists online is a very bad idea.
Mao’s little red book was required reading for BPP iirc. Reading, even just basic stuff, is how you prevent people from becoming ultras, pat-socs and anarchists, and how orgs prevent the aforementioned from infiltrating the party. It’s also a means to foment revolutionary thinking and deprogramming peoples deeply propagandized and anti-communist impulses bred into them by bourgeois ideology. Remember, “mass literacy programs are a key component to ebil communist regimes!!!” Libs say this stuff unsarcastically. Read it in Braille, or fuk!n listen to an audiobook, the point is to become familiar with the literature and theory, not to be a bookshelf.
Obviously the idea of encouraging a genuine engagement with theory is too much for some. My comment has been deleted.