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This is just the saddest copium. Like, something similar for Obama would at least make sense. Regardless of politics or how one feels about his politics, major color barrier broken with him becoming president, lots of implications for the politics of race as a result. Oversimplified, but that’s kids books for you. Can’t expect a book on civics for eight year olds to be gramsci-level deep.
This doesn’t work for Hillary because she lost. There were no glass ceiling broken, she faceplanted on it twice. We don’t construct mythologies around the almost-theres, the person before the person who hit the mark. So this is trying to create the feeling of a Hillary victory that never happened.
Dem Whig 2.0 speedrun
Paraphrasing the
line about “if they took the threat seriously, all of these people (Hillary’sKamala’s campaign staff) would’ve been led into a tiled basement with a drain in the floor for this failure”Real time of monsters hours
it makes sense from the perspective of their interests but from an internationalist perspective, it’s very bad form to say “I’m willing to unconditionally vote for you and thus endorse your policies of murdering and impoverishing millions abroad so long as my interests are satisfied by this arrangement.” You will win many fewer friends abroad with this “I will instantly sell you out, without even making real demands of my leadership, if I perceive that I will benefit” mentality, when international solidarity is more important than ever.
so in a certain sense I can’t “blame” them, I understand their motivations perfectly well given the Republican threat, but that doesn’t make the endorsement not shitty and a counterproductive plan in the medium-to-long term, as per Gramsci:
The concept of the “lesser evil,” most relativizing, can be conceived as this kind of apologia. There is always a lesser evil than the previous lesser evil, a greater danger in comparison to the previous greater danger. Each greater evil becomes lesser in comparison with an even greater one, and so on indefinitely.
This turns out to be nothing more than the form taken by the process of adaptation to a regressive movement, such that while reaction proceeds efficiently, the antithetical force is determined to capitulate progressively, in small stages, and not all at once. If it were otherwise, the condensed psychological effect might give rise to an active competing force, or to a reinforcement of it if such a force already existed.
Instagramsci
Jokes aside, we might have better success with Parenti or asking them to watch Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” for a quick primer
I have said this many times: internet memes only helped with radicalizing people, but offered none of the tools needed to help them see where they might overcome the problems.
Therefore you end up with a whole bunch of radicalized people who are increasingly depressed and pessimistic about the world because they literally don’t have the tools to analyze the current state of affairs, let alone come up with solutions.
Only reading theory can solve that. Read your Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao. That’s the only way forward.
You aren’t seeing it because you haven’t been paying attention.
I didn’t write the following, but it is a good summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia especially with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone else naively saying they just didn’t like war in general and this war is just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another, similar to what you’re saying. While it’s understandable to feel that way, given the amount of propaganda you’re force-fed, it is not materialist and it is completely failing to see the bigger picture. The person who wrote the response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net.
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
There’s a reason Gramsci rotted in prison while Mussolini didn’t even bother killing Bordiga.
From NATOpedia:
Bordiga was released in 1931 on the occasion of his niece’s marriage to a fascist. He also posed in a group of Blackshirts and the photograph was published in a fascist newspaper.
What a fucking snake.
This is really the of stuff dystopian scifi.
A somewhat cliched saying comes to my mind when reading this article.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” [1]
Hopefully, there will eventually be pushback against this techno-feudalism and oligarchy. For what it’s worth this seems to always happen in history. Ruling elites (in our case oligarchs and their promoters; the media, economists, politicians) consolidate their power and start to become disconnected from reality.
As a side note, it’s funny that AI-generated videos have themes of dystopia and rebellion against the system.
I’ve seen at least forty different books namedropped since i rolled in here. Most right wingers don’t bother reading even enough theory to tell you that the Communist Manifesto isn’t actually the foundational text of communism, much less know who gramsci is or the title of a single one of Mao’s poems.
Your garden variety internet right winger couldn’t consistently fake being communist if they tried.
I didn’t write the following, but I think it is an excellent summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia specifically with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone saying they just didn’t like the war in general and that it’s just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another, similar to what you’re saying. While it’s understandable to feel that way, it is not materialist and it is failing to see the bigger picture. At the very least, I just think it’s something you might consider. The person who wrote that response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net and I hope they don’t mind that I am quoting them here (if so, I’ll delete).
Edit: I’m putting it below a spoiler tag because it is longish and a little OT. Sorry about that, I’m tired.
spoiler
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
“The West”, “Western Civilization” and “Western” are all loosely defined terms our political enemies use to justify the (horrific) status quo and/or call for even more regressive political policies- to quote this article from Vox:
“Western civilization” has, for the alt-right, become culturally acceptable code for “white culture.” So celebration of Western civilization is really a way to celebrate the cultural achievements of white men. They see ancient Greece and Rome as a starting point for this imagined idea of Western civilization, and later it evolves to include Christianity in the medieval period.
It gives them a unified cultural narrative to draw on.
(The only amendment I’d make is that this term, “Western Civilization”, has a longer history as a dog-whistle for white supremacy than just its use by the alt-right as the article suggests, and that the alt-right has since been mainstreamed and reabsorbed into the right wing proper in the anglosphere since the time that this article was published.)
Since almost everyone on this forum is some form of Leftist opposed to the unjust hierarchy’s imposed upon us by Capitalism, Imperialism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, naturally we would be suspicious of anyone who would seek to adopt these terms, since we oppose those very things and would like to see them torn down. I think maybe there’s been a miscommunication?
Hegemony/ imperial hegemony refers to ideas elaborated upon by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he describes the mechanisms for how capitalism supports colonialism as a means of extracting labour/wealth from the global south.
Cultural hegemony is a further elaboration of those ideas by Antonio Gramsci, focusing on ways that the ruling class impose their values upon their subjects through culture. White supremacists invoking “Western Civilization” as a sort of mythology is an example of that.
Imperial core is a term from World Systems Analysis by Wallerstein, which is a further development of Lenin’s work in Imperialism (ok, this is a gross oversimplification but I don’t want to spend too much time on that) in analyzing the mechanism’s of how capitalists in the global north extract wealth from the global south today.
You’ll of course note that Latin America is marked in the the “semi-periphery”. The map measures flows of capital, based on trade, which is empirical data. Yet all the countries marked orange on the map (barring Japan, and even then) are the ones that our political opponents would say are the heirs to “Western Civilization”. This is deliberate.
When our political opponent’s invoke “Western Civilization”, they’re almost always doing so as a defense for the current hegemon, the United States, to maintain it’s current imperial status in order to justify the continuing plunder of the global south and the accumulation of capital in the global north. This project is intrinsically linked to white supremacy as a justification for the continuing plunder, for reasons too numerous to get into here.
When we (Leftists) point out that our political opponents won’t consider Latin America as part of “Western Civilization”, we’re not trying to downplay the historical role Latin America played and will continue to play, or it’s many struggles- we’re just pointing out that those whose hands are on the levers of power are the one’s who get the decide who is or isn’t in the club, and it just so happens that those hands are overwhelmingly white. Don’t shoot the messenger.
That sounds like a form of the Cultural Hegemony that Gramsci talks about
My experience is that focusing on convincing anarchists of anything is a waste of time. Anarchists are difficult to convince because they’ve already formed strongly held beliefs, and they’re typically actively antagonistic towards communists. Meanwhile, both anarchists and communists combined represent a tiny fraction of the population.
The real focus should be on convincing people in the mainstream who are becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system, but haven’t yet formed strong political opinions. These people are much easier to convince and there are a lot more of them. This is the demographic that the messaging needs to be tailored to.
What Gramsci argues might not be terribly helpful for convincing anarchists, but it is a useful argument to explain why communist approach is the one that can achieve tangible results to people who haven’t yet formed strong opinions of their own.
Why are you posting memes, liberal? This is a theory instance.
Drop down and give me 20 Gramsci recitations from memory!
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” - gramsci
Hope the people of Africa are sufficiently organized to take this opportunity and run away with it, this seriously could turn into a chain reaction.
Same thing happened in Vietnam. In fact, public opinion only really changed after the politicians started saying that it was ‘time to scale down US involvement’ or whatever, which only came years after many people in the Whitehouse realised the war was unwinnable. In the meantime, and despite all the famous protests and anti-war marches, the public was pretty happy to follow the official line that America was the good guy and that communism had to be stopped.
You could do an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using Gramsci’s idea of Cultural Hegemony as a framing device.
I saw a video of Charlie Kirk quoting Gramsci’s prison notes the other day to call someone a cultural fascist.
The comments were all jerking him off for being so incredibly smart and well read.
You have entered a Marxist community, not an anarchist community. Members of this community are expressing their frustration with the ever-growing swaths of anticommunist and antirevolutionary liberals who describe themselves as anarchists, but who have little to no actual engagement with anarchist ideology. They have expressed that this frustration is derived from these people’s refusal to read theory and to educate themselves on the history of anarchism. They are not criticising anarchist ideology, they are criticising people who claim they are anarchists but refuse to actually learn anything about anarchism.
You are making broad, sweeping statements condemning the Marxists in this community for their beliefs, and seem to be reading their frustrations as personal attacks and attacks on anarchism. Perhaps you should re-examine your standpoint here and go read some elementary anarchist and leftist theory. Here are some recommendations:
Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman
Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engels
An Anarchist Programme by Errico Malatesta
No, critical support for Russia is anti-imperialist.
I didn’t write the following, but it is a good summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia especially with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone else naively saying they just didn’t like war in general and this war is just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another. While it’s understandable to feel that way, given the amount of propaganda we’re force-fed in the west, it is not materialist and it is completely failing to see the bigger picture. The person who wrote the response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net.
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
I made it up lol, but its from gramsci, I think he used countercultural hegemon or something.