this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
84 points (95.7% liked)
GenZedong
4308 readers
108 users here now
This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
We have a Matrix homeserver and a Matrix space. See this thread for more information. If you believe the server may be down, check the status on status.elara.ws.
Rules:
- No bigotry, anti-communism, pro-imperialism or ultra-leftism (anti-AES)
- We support indigenous liberation as the primary contradiction in settler colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel
- If you post an archived link (excluding archive.org), include the URL of the original article as well
- Unless it's an obvious shitpost, include relevant sources
- For articles behind paywalls, try to include the text in the post
- Mark all posts containing NSFW images as NSFW (including things like Nazi imagery)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I do think this may be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Since people feel that better things aren't possible they're not trying to work towards them. If we look at the way the right has been organizing, it's pretty clear that there are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the western political mainstream. These people could be educated and recruited into a communist movement if there was active organization happening. The main problem that I see is that a lot of people on the left are rejecting effective methods for building a movement that have been proven in the past as being authoritarian.
Occupy Wall Street comes to mind. It's like a natural demobilizing ideaolgy that grows in reaction to neoliberalism. People get focused on grassroots and bottom up approaches, which makes sense and is necessary. But then they get taken over by astroturfing because their leadership is basically unofficial and nothing more than a friend group that got their first. I'm looking at you David Graeber (RIP). And now the whole "99% vs 1%" rhetoric is all but entirely used by the right wing.
Exactly, and the sad part is that all this is just a rehashing of the exact same arguments that happened at the start of the 20th century. You can pretty much take what Lenin said in What Is To Be Done verbatim and it's still just as relevant today.
Yeah, it's the whole spontaneous movement thing people have been peddling.
I agree to some extent. However, the flip side of the coin is that great organizers often burn themselves out and then stop organizing altogether. I’d much rather western communists take things slow and organize more sustainably. The alternative is to maintain revolutionary optimism even in non-revolutionary times. Unfortunately, I think that’s just a recipe for burnout, idealism, and opportunism.
Yeah, sustainability is definitely an important factor. I think at the stage we're currently at, education is the most important thing people could be doing. I kind of see it as an inoculation campaign. Once you get people to understand the actual economic relations they're subjected to and how they relate to the political system, then they become largely immune to capitalist propaganda. The more people we can get immunized the better position we'll be at when the conditions are right.