Young people have ruined Socialism

10/10

Well put. Edgy cynicism is the cancer of Holla Forums.

Another old fool with his head up his own ass.

Who wants to wager OP is themselves a millennial?

who cares about age, if the young are wrong teach them right.

young people are easier to convince than old people who desperately hold on to ideas

I could believe the OP is a self-hating moron who is so wise to the ills of his generation that all he does is complain about it acting superior because he is "conscious" of it.

When I was a teen, living in a catholic redneck shithole, being left-wing was kind of a solitary activity. I'd usually keep my politics vague around others, avoid the subject with normies and reunite with a few like-minded people to study, talk, debate.

Eventually I got into a big city college and moved out in my early 20's, and the experience of meeting one of the famous "radical campuses" in my country was so disheartening, because I felt everyone was just playing a role. Dudes would come in and completely change the way they dressed and behaved in two months to a more "radical" style, partake in all the college politics thing, with its many useless protests and counter-productive occupations and strikes, and then graduate and start shapeshifting back into what normal society demanded. But the lefties I met in high school all remain active and utterly dedicated.

So get ready for a lot of disappointment. You'll probably keep waiting for these people to become serious and start seeing things your way, but in a few years they will all grow conservative at worst, apathetic at best.

My god, I guess what conservative media says is true. You people are easily triggered.

WAKE ME UP

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This trend is older than millennials but sure. Now leave the thread.

We need to educate not only the proletariat per se, but the soon to be proletariat, so, no, leftism shouldn't be restricted to people over 24. If someone actually wants to learn about Marxism/Anarchism/whatever, we need to be there to educate them and explain shit to them, because, guess what, most people don't really give enough of a shit to read Das Kapital (at least if not initiated in the subject).
It's like if someone wants to learn more about German Idealism, and we just tell them to read the Critique of Pure Reason, without even telling them who Kant is.

No one's going to do that, "the spark needs to be lit".
Also

So this is it, then? This is how humanity's going to end? Because these people are our last hope, like it or not. We need a way to break the cycle.

The only reason I'm not suicidal right now out of how much the world is falling apart and how bleak my own future is is because I feel that there has to be some chance of getting people to make a move before it's too late.

I know this sounds "edgy" and "deep", but I'm serious. I just don't see much of a future for myself or anyone if we don't make destroying capitalism and fixing the environment our first priority in our lives.

Bernie at least gives me hope - it seems to me that, even if the kids in Silicon Valley supported him because of idpol, there are other millennials out there - and lots of them - who supported him because of class. I don't even know where to start, though - most people only paid attention to him because he was a presidential candidate. How do we break the social media bubble?

Capitalists living in a sefdom probably said the same thing. Young people are more open to change. Just get over the ageism.

You think social media is the problem?

this is amazing way to cut off a political movement at its feet

what's next? the only ones that can be Marxists are one's born of a Marxist mother? lol

This cynical and highly patronizing outlook on the proletariat is sure to change things. Who needs workers in a working class movement like socialism anyways? I was born in le wrong generation!

You're a fucking idiot if you think the problems with the left can be solved by telling younguns to wait until 24 to be able to read. If anything that creates another problem where young people look to idpol shit and become woke liberals or stormfags instead of socialists.

t. 25

well said

They already are, you fucking moron. Particularly the ones out there carrying the banner of "Socialism". Their horrible politics, laid out to them by media, entertainment and probably the state, impregnates our own because they, collectively, lack the critical faculties to challenge those narratives.

And you want to make it worse you dumb faggot. Do you think after hitting 24 they'll suddenly realize idpol is full of shit and start reading theory? I hate to break it to you, but a fucking idiot at 20 is likely to be a fucking idiot at 24. We need to go after them with an alternative instead of telling them to fuck off to tumblr or Holla Forums, which will give us more wokefags and stormfags than we already have and ruin any chance of recruiting leftfags.

I look at everyone around me, and they would be open to leftism except for two things: 1) They only believe whatever is shared within their group of friends, liberal ideology makes them disregard anything else as "crazy" and 2) they don't have long-term coherent trains of thought, it's just a constant stream of sensation, one moment they're looking at a meme making fun of "anuddah shoah" and the next watching a John Oliver clip and the next listening to Rihanna.

Maybe this would happen via other mechanisms if it weren't for social media, but social media is how it happens today. What we need is an affinity group structure to infiltrate groups of friends and politicize them. That is, we need people who agree on common ideas to agree "I'll become friends with this group of people, you'll become friends with this other group", etc.

I was a liberal only a few years ago, I know how they think. They think of themselves as rational, but in actuality make subconscious appeals to authority all the time to justify their own thoughts. Just arguing with them straight up doesn't do a thing - they'll just ignore you or, worse yet, say that you're a Stalin supporter or something like that, and go right back to watching Samantha Bee say that the Left and the Right are the same.

Moreover, if there ever is a problem which they can't ignore, the first place they look to is the "approved resistance", which is of course just more extreme idpol. This is how everyone hates SJWs and yet they just keep popping up. We need to position ourselves as the alternative. If it means someday doing something violent to an SJW and doing so clearly as a socialist or anarchist, so be it. We want them to call us manarchists and brocialists, to make themselves look dumber than they already do, to have people realize that the divide between liberals and the left is much bigger than the typical sectarian infighting between Marxists and anarchists.

In conclusion, I think millennials have potential to be awaken, in fact we're just criminally bad at doing it. It's right there. You just need to break the social bubble. Make them question all the work they're doing and why. Call out idpol with memes, because rationally arguing against it rarely works. Perhaps most importantly, connect what they already know (1984, Einstein, etc.) to socialism.

Problem is, young conservatives, young democrats, young libertarians and what have you usually respond to "higher authorities" because they understand the necessity of party politics, of politicians and all that. They're not the focus of the movement, they're people taking their first steps towards it.

In the case of the Left, these young people, emboldened by half a century of counter-cultural idiocies and bad socialist theory (what is our movement had no leaders? it would be like … everyone's equal, man!) become an autonomous entity and they start dictating the terms of left-wing discourse. Left-wing politics thrive in undergrad and artsy scenarios, so the dumbasses who frequent them can become the center of gravity of the Left, instead of just a movement's "feet".

Just look at how in five fucking years every Socialist who is not talking about black bodies and internalized hatred of women is being deemed jurassic despite lifelong commitment and contributions to the cause. Three days ago I saw a great Marxist professor who taught me historical materialism boo'd out of a party meeting by retards with colored hair by some bullshit reason that only makes sense to idiots under 21. It's fucking ridiculous. I'll even go as far as saying that there's nothing a "young Left" likes more than to destroy everything Left-wing that came before them, and in my most paranoid movement I believe this is design, not just stupidity.

I mean, I'm sorry, but if you're a leftist nowadays and you don't acknowledge that the Left has a serious problem with immaturity, with false radicalism that appeals to the young and stupid, and too many retarded college-y stuff, you either live under a rock, you're utterly stupid or you're part of those people going through their cute "radical phase".

What is thought but sensation translated into language?

Make any fucking age when people are more likely to be working and paying their own bills and suddenly aware of how political economy and social structures affect their lives instead of an age when they're in college or school and just trying to fit in.

I'd rather try to explain Marxism to a moron of 30 than a moron of 21, because the former at least won't join anti-Imperialist woke twitter if he gets something wrong.

I was working and paying my bills at 20 and Phil Greaves and Molly Klein are above 30. You seem to be mistaking age with material condition.

A lot of young Socialists need despooking when it comes to idpol, sure, however our main goal should not be to try and reshape the left to fit an older demographic, but try and figure out how to get the already existing left to break out of the student bubble.

As a Marxist uni student, this problem is something that is probably bigger than identity politics. Honestly maybe it's just because I'm in Britian but besides this one liberal girl, there's hardly any trace of idpol in my Marxist society. However everything we do is student related, and the second you leave uni it all stops because there are no relations outside of uni.

Worst still I have no idea how you would go about fixing this problem. At least with idpol it's just a matter of making good arguments, this is an actual matter of organization and getting out there.

Where do we start?

You fuckers are misguided if you think this isn't a good thing. Destruction of capitalism isnt going to happen over night and they sure as fuck aren't going to happen in your lifetime, so stop being such a divisionist (made it up, fuck you) and do your fucking role and make them go more left.

Your analyse is correct, but don't blame the young for that. If you let a tomato can open outside of your fridge, it will eventually grow hairy green and white disgusting mould.
Is the tomato the issue here? Is the can?

I'm 19 and I pay my bills with my full-time job. Colored hair Feminists can be well into their 20's. When will you understand this is not about age?

This has nothing to do with the youth than it has to do with the bourgeois ISA.

read Althusser

I think it definitely would, and social media at least allows us to find a little niche where we can make our own input and find an audience.

It's better than the days when Ideology was conveyed mostly through radio, television and literature, and we either had to start prematurely doomed, local, public-access programs that never had more than 50 viewers or hope a musician/comedian with our mentality would make his way into the mainstream and use their platform. Either that or we were distributing pamphlets and making shitty zines.

Social media has democratic potential, we just need to learn how to use it properly. A few people are figuring it out, just look at how big Chapo Trap House and Jacobin have become.

I agree with this and my heart breaks a little whenever I see an Old Guard leftist bending to new trends and pandering to IdPol shit.

Can you admit you're both exceptions? Phil/Molly are particularly retarded, and if you're browsing Holla Forums you're clearly not the type of person I'm talking about.

Going to break this to you, but it hasn't. Before the last 50 years it was typically old pseudo intellectuals who were behind leftism. Your issue now is that you are experiencing the end result of a KGB operation to spread communism to America, along with Rockefeller Foundations tampering with the education system, and oligarchs desire for complicit people who will merely do what they are told without thinking.

Truth be told leftism only flurished in the early 1900s because it was the only ideology offering the capacity for regular people to fight against their tyrannical governments.

In the 1800s it was academics who pushed for leftism and before they would demand sections of a country to carry out their experiments on. Always ending in failure.

The regular masses simply do not want leftism because leftism only emerges in urban centers where people don't have to struggle to survive. If you look at Maslovs hierarchy of needs you'll understand why. You go tell a farmer who barely makes it by that he's going to have to share his crop and he's not going to be interested. You tell a construction worker, a coal miner, a sewer work that he's going to need to redistribute his wealth and he's not going to be interested. The fundamental problem with leftism is that it lies on the idea of theft and while the majority may agree with some principles they have in the history of any nation never fully embraced the concept except for youths who get it passed only for the country to end up like Venezuela or Mao's China.

Your opinion is shit, you are uneducated, and no one will take your opinion seriously in this thread from now on.

No, because there's a lot of "exceptions" out there for working class kids you dumb faggot. If there was a decent leftist effort to recruit then rather than exceptions these would be the rule, but unfortunately between dinosaur parties and unorganized smashies these potential socialists will only see woke liberalism or stormfaggotry. Establishing an arbitrary age limit only makes this worse.

Anarchism was extremely successful in Spain precisely because it did the exact opposite of painting leftism as "sharing is good" and instead did so as "fuck that rich bastard, take back what's yours!"

Property is theft, profit is plunder. Think about that motto.

nah nigga that just the self fellating vanguardist theorists

Yeh lets narrow down our tiny movement even more with entirely arbitrary age limits

Yeah, no.

Yeah, well this could be argued but in essence no. The majority of working class folks wouldn't see Marx as one of them but as a parasite who sits in good chairs doing intellectual work, a bourgeois activity at the time.

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Eat shit, shit-eating faggot, and then kill yourself.

But how do you actively grow the base? With Jacobin, their base grows in waves - whenever something bad happens, another section of further left-leaning readers at The Nation drop off and come over, never to come back. This grows it, yes, but it also creates a long term problem - when all the class warfare people leave, what you're left with within liberal circles is Huffpost SJWs positioning themselves as "the Left". We need to create a program of actively spreading ourselves.

Social media is actually massively flawed as a democratic platform because, rather than encouraging discourse, it encourages people to retreat into their little section of comfort and jack off about how everyone else has it all wrong. Remind you of anybody? First and foremost, we here at Holla Forums must break out of this trend and "island hop" between various communities.

If you care so much about the identity of the writer (pro tip: it doesn't really matter), then read Nechayev or Proudhon or Connolly, some left-wing writers themselves from the working class off the top of my head.

No one's saying that Marx himself is a proletarian because /it doesn't matter/. Unlike you, we've moved beyond that level of argument. It's entirely beside the point.
topkek

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. I'd also like to add that American society has been this way for a while, there are many, many adults (and senior citizens, even) that also live in their own bubbles, and behave just as immaturely as a young adult. They can be both petty and dogmatic just for the sole reason that the television or media told them to be petty and dogmatic.

Can anarcho-communism be considered the synthesis between anarchism and communism?

I don't think you understand how dialectics work. It's not just "take two things, smash them together, get a mix". The point of some of the memes about it is making fun of that, which understandably creates confusion for those who don't already get them. The idea is that a system develops internal contradictions which gradually become more and more untenable until the system collapses under its own weight and forms something entire new and previously unknowable.

Communism isn't just Marxism. Anarcho-communism is its own thing, although it does share in common a taste for economic and societal analysis. I left Marxism-DeLeonism for anarcho-syndicalism (which basically repackages and reworks anarcho-communism into an industrial society-focused form) because I disagreed that dialectics were applicable to a materialist worldview, instead preferring Kropotkin's mechanistic pragmatism-based view of things and use of actual biology, along with the critique of the state inherent in social anarchism.

What I should have said is that it gives anarcho-communism a more defined praxis for industrial societies.

Age isn't important. We wouldn't be drowning in idpol shit if self-styled socialist parties actually had a policy of not taking people from the fucking ruling class as members. People who work have less time on their hands than fucking landlords, take a guess who can easily attain meetings and events and make plans for a party career.

and giving it to the tycoons in the glass towers, as Marx would have wanted. Yes. I wonder who is behind that sort of education you display here.
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