How come leftism is all about student activism and book clubs now instead of workers councils and insurrection

because there was a deliberate and very successful effort to destroy the labour movement. the cult of nonviolence pacified people and did the rest

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it's in the goddamn books that you don't read because you want to kill people with glasses

Because he was right:

Gramsci elaborated and modernised Marx’s notion of ideology. One of the contemporary problems facing Marxists after the Russian Revolution was the need to explain the failure of revolutions in the West. Gramsci proposed that part of the answer lay in the differential character of the state and ruling class power. Adducing as an analogy the centaur, a mythical beast that was half-man and half-beast, Gramsci asserted that ruling classes maintained their position both via state coercion and the consent of civil society. In Russia, because of its backwardness, the repressive apparatus of the state was the principal mechanism of ruling class domination because civil society was, in embryonic form, ‘primordial and gelatinous’. The role of the revolutionary party was therefore to overturn state power in a class struggle that he characterised as a rapid and fluid war of movement. In the West, by contrast, civil society was much more developed and therefore the ruling class could count on consent to a much greater extent, resulting in a class struggle which was much more difficult, slow and different in character. This war of position, as Gramsci called it, had to contend with an arduous struggle within civil society because ‘in the West, there was a proper relation between the State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.’

You need to adjust your weapons to the war you're fighting. In the west, the conditions for revolution are not there. Insurrection already failed in the radical 60's and 70's. The task right now is to create a party that can fight on the Information wars while ressurrecting radical unionism. The task, then, is mostly intellectual.

Lmao. LARPing liberals.

The only country which has legit revolutionary potential is Greece, which is Second World, not First World. That really depends on how dumb the EU-leadership continues to be.

really though, read

Neoliberals hijacking leftist platforms and turning them away from economics to social issues, coupled with a consumerist culture that has made people's reading span smaller than ever.

How does reading a book change the historical fact that the First World has no revolutionary potential?

don't forget ideological state apparatuses, feudal russia didn't have mandatory school.

it changes the fact that you think stupid things because of idpol

Stay mad

Jason pls.

The Eastern Bloc is gone m8.

but idpol never dies

After 1991 the term Second World shifted from a political definition (Eastern Bloc) to an economic one (newly industrialized countries). In Maoist theory it has always been the latter.

Just go kill yourself already

First world doesn't lack of revolutionary potential but of revolutionary movements

Workers have lost faith in socialism after the fall of soviet union. The theory needs to be updated so it can be a realistic alternative to the current system.

You're not being very materialist, m8

Leftism has become the opiate of the bourgeoisie.

Liberals jerking about idpol are not the reason the left is dead, identity politics haven't really harmed the left anywhere outside of the US where leftism has always been villainized.

LOL

Because, for reasons I'll leave for to you to explore, the Left in the First World is popularly perceived as having sold out the working class by taking pro-immigration, pro-feminist stances.

The European working class (predominantly White and male) votes majority populist, because the Greens and the Social Democrats cater to environmentalist urbanites and Muslims, respectively. The populists might promote free market horseshit, but at least they don't tell their voter base that they're evil racists because they're forced to compete with Ahmeds for low-skill jobs and live in immigrant-heavy, high-crime areas where they're victimized by foreigners.

In America, you also have the cucking problem, which alludes to.
A fun read that was posted a while back:
>theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/in-defense-of-unpaid-internships/257000/
Discombulates my jamboree every time.

The global elite recognized communist society as the fucking polar opposite of their vision of the a human society that best serves, and indefinitely enables them to have power. It's not to far fetched to think they might want to completely subvert, and twist any real leftism, to the point where it's neo-liberals marching with soviet flags bought off of amazon. We have concrete evidence the state infiltrates any leftist group planning on physical action even before it takes place (G20/G8 summits).

Nope, sounds like leftism.

That's the real movement AKA communism you're thinking of there, fam.

Im more like libertarian market socialist. It seems to be the only system that could work without millions of people dying from hunger.

But user, the whole problem is that most of the so-called "left" in politics are just right-wing neoliberals, you even admitted yourself that both the "left" and the right are both against the working class in different ways. How does it make any sense to support far-right politics instead of moving to the left? Didn't you notice that Bernie was anti-immigration? That Melenchon was anti-EU? Stop listening to echo chambers full of paid shills telling you that you have to choose between supporting one corporate tool or the other.

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It's the material conditions which ultimately lead to revolution. Marx didn't foresee the welfare state, he didn't foresee outsourcing and neo-imperialism, he didn't foresee fascism. I'd say if fascism in Europe and the New Deal in America didn't happen, we'd be living in communism right now. But it did.

If the First World didn't even have a revolution during the Great Depression, when will it have it? Germany was in the Great Depression and got fucked over by war reparations, and also had the largest proletariat in the world. Yet the "revolution" didn't even made it past its fetal stage. I can't imagine more suitable situations for a revolution than the Weimar Republic, but we know what happened. Your appeals to Gramscis idea of cultural change and ideological movements are sheer idealism.

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In any place when strike or other workers' revolt happens, the militant and non-militant workers become one revolutionary group, at least until unions and the parties(le representatives of workers) negotiate small pay rise and tell them to go back to work. It happens in many places in the First World, we just do not see it.

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Yes.

What do you think tends to get more coverage in the news: workers' strikes in some company or college students protesting in NYC against that evil fascist Dolan Blumpf?

When I say "Left", I mean "normie-left", i.e. the Social Democrats and Greens, not Communists. Those people are the #1 enemy of Communism because, yes, they discredit Leftism in the eyes of the people.

Most people can't conceive of the world in terms of economic systems which exploit them. Their assessment is this:

Theory is all well and good, but people want solutions to their daily problems, and quickly. Present day Communism is not attractive to most people because it's proposing abstract-sounding solutions that do not obviously connect to the issues people are facing in their day-to-day lives.

Why do people react by moving further to the right instead of moving to the Left?
Because they want Islamic hordes out, because they want the SJWs shut the fuck up, because they want better wages, because they want a sense of control over their lives. People want the proximate, not the ultimate causes of their problems addressed. The solutions that naturally offer themselves in such situations are protectionism and xenophobia, not talk about hanging the Capitalists, no matter for how many of our problems they are ultimately responsible.

Well now… Bernie made one comment about immigration being a Koch-policy (which is true), but then he quickly kowtowed to the liberal orthodoxy.

t. Jason

I know you don't want to hear this, but the Soviet revolution discredited Communism in the eyes of the world. People saw the Cheka, the mass murder, the desecration of churches, and decided they'd be having none of that shit. Also, the top brass consisted almost entirely of Jews.

That was why the Freikorps successfully suppressed the November Revolution and was celebrated as heroes afterwards.

So the First World is actually a boiling pot of revolutionaries and we can't see it? Unions and workers strikes are fully integrated into the capitalist system, there is even a legal framework for how you long are allowed to strike, in what jobs you can strike, etc. It's just part of the welfare state which exactly keeps the proletarians from evolving revolutionary potential. In France, an overwhelming majority voted for Macron, even though having the most determined and violent strike culture in the West.

Not in the 20s it didn't. That was mostly the result of Cold War propaganda. Plus liberalism as a ideology ("you can't hurt people, man") wasn't as established as yet and people saw vigilant violence as a legitimite tool.

As I said, economic crisis in the First World tends to lead to fascism, not socialism. It's the not Jews which were the reason for Germanys turn towards fascism, it was the material condition which caused resentment towards Jews in the first place.

That is so, but people still didn't want to get fucking killed. Their objection wasn't to the violence in the abstract, but to the prospect of that violence being done to them. The October Revolution was seen, not as a workers' revolt, but as an assault on Christian civilization.

Cold War propaganda was already kosher. In the 20s, opposition to the Soviet regime came from two quarters: from Socialists who had become disillusioned with the reality of a Communist revolution, and from anti-Semites who saw the revolution as an assault, by Jews, on a White civilization. This belief was largely fostered by exiles from Russia who spread the news of the Cheka's barbarities (and the Cheka's ethnic composition) in Germany.

When the guy in charge of mass executions is called Abramowich, people don't just see him as a Cheka boss, but as a Jew.

Because futile regulations surely keep people happy. The smiles are fake, the hopeless hatred is deep seated.

I actually agree with your critique of Unions, but when it comes to strikes, then I can't fully agree. Take wildcat strikes for example, they contain that revolutionary spark maintained until the workers are forced to by their beloved union to stop.

revisionism and idpol, maoism sure is cancer.