No video more than this one sums up the state of the left today in the western world

Why would you do that to yourself?

Because I used to really care and thought we were making a better world.

Past few years have turned me into one jaded cynical fuck though, 2015 and 2016 were especially rough. These past 2 years have really made me give up any hope in the left achieving anything.

This. They snuck the Pepe-wearing pantywaste.

And socialists are the teenagers?

Just give it up comrade. The activism. I'm not some armchair pro leftcom but they're right when they say most of it is basically lifestylism. Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa, etc. didn't waste their time in activism they hit the books and kept in touch with comrades doing the same, formed their own associations and distributed their points of view. When the revolutionary wave arrived they all grabbed a board and went for it. Unfortunately for us communism and anarchism don't so much have a political presence as an anti-political presence. It's all SJW virtue signaling, black bloc smashies, antifa street fighting, etc. There is no movement. So forget that shit and take a break. It'll do you good.

To be fair, Trumpfashs have every right to be edgy, they now control the world.

This board is for adults.

There were Black Blockers out and about, one of them sucker-punched Richard Spencer. If he'd tried antagonizing them instead of those liberals he'd be on the pavement.

I've watched a lot of his stuff and I honestly think his work espouses a pretty leftist worldview, even if he isn't consciously inserting it.

-Luc Sante, My Lost City

That's wrong though. They had been networking and agitating for a solid 15-20 years before the revolution began. They instigated revolution attempts prior to the October Revolution and had been actively building a workers movement. They certainly spent time in their studies while in exile mind you, but they were by no means just waiting around for something to happen.

I ain't fucking comfortable, asshole. Feel free to provide some evidence that activism is anything other than a worthless time sink.

Perhaps you should read the rest of the sentence, but yes, I insinuated too much that they were more or less waiting, which isn't true. It wasn't activism as we know it today, however.

Key word. Most activist circles and protests I've been to are filled with middle class people playing the self-appointed role of loyal opposition. All this activism is done in the public places and the "public" forum of social media and not in the private domain of the workplace for a reason.

I don't know how to describe it but this poster is basically right

there is quite a disconnect between taking up the lifestyle of "activism" and unionizing your workplace, fighting for better wages.

When the bolsheviks hit the streets they went into even reactionary organizations like unions organized by the black hundreds (often considered a proto-fascist group) infiltrated them and won the workers to their cause. They rubbed shoulders with liberals, reformists, and reactionaries when it was something to benefit the workers cause, not simply because liberals were upset a new bourgeois politician was elected who was slightly more conservative then the last.

When they entered parliament it was as the representatives of a revolutionary workers party, not as fools who stand on the sidelines holding signs for bourgeois democratic campaigns and giving support to this or that politician because they think it might take them anywhere without putting their own man in the ring.

Activism is now often a lifestyle or a plaything for the well-off or déclassé

Even the more "smashy" activism that aims to go outside the bounds of the enforced bourgeois democratic oppositional space is now completely incorporated within the spectacle of it all. Ever since OWS, or going back to Seattle 1999, people show up knowing there's going to be rock exchanges with the police, tear gas, minor property damage etc. Part of me thinks that honestly the state tolerates or even encourages this as a safety valve to siphon of popular rage and to alienate the public from the Left.

Why is that cops often provoke crowds first or use agent provocateurs (sometimes used by intelligence agencies not the police directly) to intensify things? Hedges is wrong when he thinks that the state fears non-violence but he's very much right that that's a problem they know how to deal with.

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I get what you say, but I don't think beating up the mentally ill would help.

I'm already at this stage, although I'm not really a proper leftist.

I basically started on the socdem path of "let's make the world a little better!" until the compromises demanded of modern social democracy became too great (retroactively, this was somewhere around 1992, but I was ignorant.), but the contempt for people bred in by knowing election history (among other things.) never vanished, so i couldn't fully take up the idea of any kind of revolution to socialism - i could just read more and more history as to why the postwar-consensus failed to look for the secret to fixing it, so that things would be a little better and so that the sort of illusion of progress that a school stocked with 1970s books (i.e. "we're going to build shit on the moon!" "airplanes in the future will be really cool instead of all generic!" "computers will be really cool instead of generic! (this one from old magazines really)") could be restored, so that at least academically i could see if change was possible.

Reading into the methods used by the anti-keynesians and the sheer bad luck of all the "good guys" in history, combined with putting 2+2 together and realizing neoliberalism means that my own life will be hopeless in the longer term has left a complete void. too disillusioned to be any kind of socialist/communist/anarchist because i can only regard other people with contempt (something amplified when i've tried to share my ideas in person.), but also not stupid enough to buy into fascism or any of the other nonsense in this "marketplace of ideas"

All I want is see the neoliberal house fall down, at any cost. My sympathies still lie with the left, but in a fight between the status quo and the fascist the odds are I'd cheer the fascist.

My faith in representative democracy has been reduced to "Maybe one day someone will lie their way into power, then do nice things once there"
The chatter of those who still have faith becomes maddening. Just compromise and win the election and you can tweak things very slightly while still starving the unemployed because that's what we need to do to win power. Just compromise. Just compromise. Just compromise.

Fuck compromise. Burn it all to the ground. Nothing nice will arise from the rubble, but nothing nice will happen anyway. We might as well begrudge those who ruined it.

How can further generations of activists avoid those mistakes? Can you write about them?

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