Are we stuck in the 80s?

I feel like the Left has been in a profound, 38 year coma it still hasn't woken up from.

You see this everywhere, from the Authoritarians eager to emulate the Soviet Union as if they could repeat history, the lifestylist anarkiddies that still think their crustie shit shocks let alone transgresses society, to the idpol leftists that act as if shit like feminism or antiracism are revolutionary and uncooptable by the system.

We really haven't changed a bit. From the struggle session maotists, LARP tier communist parties, our entire aesthetic, the same ol slogans.

Its even worse when you realize everybody else has moved on, with an increasingly permissive neoliberal establishment to yin this vulgar, populist right that seems impervious to its own dignity.

And maybe its this that has gotten us into our current political limbo. Where the only choices are socially progressive and socially conservative Capitalism. The only sects of Leftism capable and interested in inciting class struggle are weighted down by the past it refuses to let go. So we are almost stuck like a man trying to finish a story without turning the page.

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I would go even farther, nothing in this country has changed a bit since the civil rights movement ended.

t. guy who read bookchin once because of Rojava (and only because of Rojava) thinks they know everything there is to know about political history and organizing.

what do

I don't really see what point you're trying to make, of course leftism can't compete with fascism in terms of flashy presentation and botnets, unlike them we'll never get stacks of corporate cash.

a problem is that almost all online leftists have a huge library at their disposal, but they don't utilize it effective to propagate. you should start concerning yourself with that

Socialism has a weird generational problem. Many people toy with it in their teens and twenties, start to question the many things that are wrong with how the Left currently organizes and presents itself, then become disillusioned and retreat back to Liberalism instead of staying active in Socialist movements and trying to fix those problems. Then a new generation of young, clueless people come in and repeat all the same mistakes, without many people with experience to counter-balance it or show them a better way to do things.

The result is that being a Leftist becomes basically Groundhog Day. We don't really study our past (how many of these people posting memes where "seize the means of production" is the punchline have bothered studying Socialist history at all?) and people don't stay engaged long enough for it to naturally improve through trial and error. It's just different generations repeating the same slongans, making the same dumb things and doing the same dumb "activism" over and over. Reflecting on those limitations only comes with time and frustration, but time and frustration are pushing people alway from Radical politics, instead of inviting them to ponder solutions, alternatives and improvements.

Does it matter?

I suggest This Is Not A Program by Tiqqun. Can't upload pdf for some reason.

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this is a good post

you realize fascists got their aesthetic and presentation from leftist workers' movements? really makes you think…

Wrong. We now have more idpol than ever and a much more hostile neoliberal shill operation working against us in the form of the media.

the world ended sometime in 1980s and we're all dead and in hell

We need a leftism for the 21st century that is at least in a minor way detached from the imagery and conception of the leftism of the 20th century, re-branded as something new and viable. We need a New Old-Left if you will, like a movement that is based in class struggle and economics, labour, etc. without the overwhelming priority on idpol, which shows how class really shapes these problems rather then a competition of cultures. An actual anticapitalist movement that isn't larping horizontalist bullshit like Occupy and literally every movement that gets coopted by red liberals.

The problem is primarily with shitty steering committees in existing organisations and liberals recuperating socialism as a radical way to present their own beliefs with socialist economics secondary to that and barely getting a mention. The problem isn't with the branding it's that socialists are on the defensive when they should be the ones fucking liberals over and keeping them down when it comes to their own orgs.

If a communism is to be born in america it must be a special type of american communism that suits the american character, personality, and landscape.
Much how mao created maoism instead of just copying the soviets.

Dont laugh when i say this but i think the the person who came close to creating an american communism was actually jim jones Too bad dude was a sociopath asshole too.

The people of the past have a lot of knowledge, but anyone political should be focused on modern times and the future. and their own country.

P.s. the Bolshevik revolution was in 1917

no matter, life and death were always spooks anyways

I meant more shit like PragerU

We're stuck in 1916, to be perfectly honest.

B-but le nationalism!!!!

Ew
Yeah, look where that got us buddy

Also
Kill yourself

I think we need to destabilize the capitalist realist ideology before a real anti-capitalism can be a thing.

Which is one reason why I support MMT policy proposals outside of a specifically anti-capitalist, leftist framework. MMT seems to me to expose the arbitrariness of capitalism, exposes that the private sector (typically considered "real capitalism") is fundamentally dependent on the state and prone to disaster, it exposes that money and markets are not fundamental to reality but rather a social creation we find ourselves in that we don't treat as such. All without reverting to any actual connection to the historical left, it just presents itself as a neutral economic theory. Even the notion that the deficit is largely unimportant, or that taxes don't pay for government services. I feel like politicians or pundits actually acknowledging that on television would cause people to suddenly feel like they live in some weird lie. You're telling me that the government is just the MC for capitalism? That all of this bullshit about "where will the money come from" is just a totally baseless excuse to shuffle wealth and power over to the rich?

Daily reminder that the 80s was the most hopeless, depressing, and superficial decade in recent modern times

Until midnight.

watch Black Mirror

The problem originates in subscribing to things like "the Left", "communism" and "socialism", which have degenerated into pretty ideas every bougie humanities student subscribes to, whereas what people ITT talk about("anti-idpol leftism" etc) is roughly speaking a wage-labourer movement.
When you forget about socialism and communism, which implies forgetting about the states sent to the trashcan of history and third world shitholes opposing the US and instead favour of focusing on other wage workers, homeless or people facing eviction, the question of knowing what to do solves itself.

This. It is completely absurd to think you can just import a revolutionary programme from another time and place without making some effort to appeal to the sensibilities of the local population. Americans are not Russians or Kurds or Spaniards. Marx underestimated the importance of national identification - this was a cause for dispute with his friend Moses Hess would thought that race was more important and went on to found Zionism. Okay don't be a Zionist but point being, national identification is important even if it is in the service of internationalism. Proles find the flag much easier to rally around than a stack of Marxist tomes. The biggest obstacle to Marxism taking hold in the US is decades of anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda that causes the ideas to be rejected outright. And Marxists sabotage themselves by a foolish over-attachment to materialism, underestimating the importance of actually selling your idea (which the capitalists understand too well, with trillions of $ spent on advertising). The irony of it is that if you want anti-capitalism to win, you must *sell* it. That means taking into account the subjective identifications and fantasies which are imprinted on proles by the imperialist capitalist system itself, and creating propaganda specifically to undermine and redirect these identifications and fantasies in the service of material change.

This. This so fucking much.

Is this the worst timeline.

Are you talking about nationalism here, or about the specific consumer identity people are marketed?

Both to some extent. Obviously the worst aspects of nationalism and consumerism must be challenged by this propaganda.

The entire communist programme is just programme of abolishing the exchange value, what exactly must be bent in it "to appeal to the sensibilities of the local population"?

Identitarian dribble

The idea of abolishing exchange value is utterly strange and foreign to people who have known only such a system since birth. You have to coax them and warm them up to it, and to do that you have to appeal to their sensibilities. You can try slapping them in the face with Marx's Capital, but I don't think that will be very effective.

Yeah but grease them the right way. Like how Capitalism is incompatible with democracy, or how Capitalism plays on racial tensions to divide workers or why have private owners instead of democratic ownership

This concept of "Socialism with American characteristics" sounds incredibly fucky on how it could be twisted any sort of way. Just like how liberals harp about intersectionality because class is apparently out of touch in the most unequal decade since the roaring 20s.

As I expected, instead of "The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself." has been replaced by "The emancipation of the working class must be the work of very smart people who inject proper ideas into those subhuman proles."
Instead of the more conscious part of the working class pushing the more apathetic part into action when the entire group finds itself in the economic peril, you present the the plan of injecting the proper "ideas" into "the people". Where is the self-activity of the workers in this analysis?

Both intersectional liberals and anti-communist Americans betray their own value commitments. By giving class short shrift, liberals fail to be intersectional enough. And anti-communist Americans fail to live up to the liberatory and universalist potential in their founding documents and ideals by insisting on American exceptionalism and imperialism. Yeah these things sound silly to materialist Marxist ears, like why even bother with something as ideological as intersectionality or nationalism. But I think you have to, because its part of meeting people where they're at, and where they're at is ideology.

No wonder Abbie Hoffman became manic depressive and killed himself

It's been like 150 years since Marx wrote that, where is this supposed self-emancipation of the working class? It didn't happen, and that's why the Frankfurt school and others like the Situationists (roughly) theorized that the proletarians had been inundated with capitalist ideology and there must be a culture war to dislodge it. Of course those schools of thought have issues themselves, but I think they are basically correct. Workers are for the most part willing slaves of capital. And they will stay that way unless the ideas that seduce them into slavery are forcibly yanked away. Then their self-activity might become a thing, but for now all I see is that their self-activity is directed towards turning themselves into a one-person enterpreneur of themselves, where they readily exploit themselves so that their boss doesn't even have to coerce them into it.

Ah yes, hegemony, ideology and other things focused on superstructure first and foremost. How did they work out? Of course it has failed, there are countries where communism isn't a dirty word and ultimately this amounts to almost nothing because they're undergoing the same socio-economic processes as the US despite more retards saying "baww capitalism is shit".
The workers will be keep being "slaves of capital" until they will not be able to reproduce their existence through wage labour anymore, your petty ideological fights will amount to nothing because people won't start killing his employers en masse because they were ideologically inspired by a shitposting retard on Holla Forums.
Fascinating, you're saying we're actually undergoing a process of reversing the socialization of labour in favour of many one man companies, do you mind explaining how can everyone turn into a such company and how this state of affairs can become permanent?

I agree with this sentiment. Red everywhere and hammer and sickles scare people away. It also attracts larpers. It'd be for the best to have new imagery but it's not going to happen.

It'd be best to forget about the imagery in general, workers' movement is not an aesthetic movement and this symbolic shit usually pops up on its own anyways.

Its the only thing that can happen. The Left is a rotting corpse stagnating in shallow waters, stuck between cancerous additions that have led it nowhere, and old elements that burden it.

8ch.net/leftypol/res/2193678.html

I feel like the culmination of the 80's was breaking the Berlin Wall by basically The Punks.
The difficulty today is that everything is just appended by punk without questioning, 'What's next?'.
Cyberpunk was just a response to the Cold War. Now that's over, and we can't seem to move on from the aesthetics.
Unfortunately Crustie Vegandude is the fulfilment of punk, and autrightists have tried to claim the mantle. But we need to start becoming sensitive to what is going on in /our/ world in /this time/ and letting it impact us, and responding through all different kinds of /our own/ media i.e. NOT twitter and facebook. It's already pathetic that in the age of Superhero films, we can't get one character that goes through the basic Hero cycle and cathardically releases our emotions & lives the whole life of the generation.
My solution: Independant Media Co-ops, under the umbrella of radical anonymous reformed unions.

That's not how you link you little cock. Also
It was dead before it started.

its not making an aesthetic for an identity its for a nonsectarian rebranding of the left in general

You completely miss the point of the hammer and sickle

Absolutely, its time to stop dragging around this corpse. Worker liberation speaks for itself and doesn't need to be dressed up in Soviet memorabilia. Learn from the past absolutely, but the left needs something of a house cleaning.

No if the left doesn't make any effort to "rebrand" itself, we're going to keep recycling the same tired Soviet imagery that was compelling 100 years ago but now just comes across as creepy and outdated. Classical marxists are going to cling to their faith in materialism, that things somehow take care of themselves, while the worker's movement languishes. No, fuck that, you have to take destiny in your own hands, and no movement ever succeeded without a compelling and socially relevant aesthetic.

Uh it may seem obvious to do, but what are you actually >implying to do with homeless/workers? You want to 'focus on them', does that mean set up oh say camps where you can concentrate better? You want to forget our isms, do you just want to give them money? how?

Do you hear screaming? Guy Debord is suffering in hell, the demon tormenting him showed him your post.

wht fashy goys are getting paid?
they do it for free


You dont study ANY past
reducing your analysis of history to materialistic viewpoints just blinds you to your own mistakes

what is media? a medium. artists use mediums. there have been tales of the hero cycle for over 6,000 years. there are archetypes hiddenin the human mind that get expressed and which then shape culture, t. every civilization ever.
I didn't say there needs to be a new consumer good, a new market, anything. Just people allowed the space to freely express and define their own values.

Put focus on expressions of "communistic" activity directed against the wage labour and capitalist, like strikes, but not only that.
wat
I'm just taking to the extreme a concept of moving away from -isms that can easily get mangled by retards into something like "programme points".
I mean, you see the difference in saying
and
It's not that the latter isn't connected with the former, but the former is more concrete and not infected with showing how virtuous you are by having such and such opinions

lmao have you just read capitalist realism? 😂😂😂

I didn't say we should focus only on superstructure, only that it shouldn't be ignored. There is a complicated relationship between base and superstructure, its not as simple as "the base determines the superstructure, therefore we can focus only on the base and ignore the superstructure." Even calling it superstructure is misleading. That may be true in other countries that more people are unplugged from capitalist ideology, so the base is more important to focus on, but where I live in the US that is not the case at all, so it is difficult to imagine building solidarity with other workers when basically they take the boss's side because of ideology and hegemony.


No but ideology does help prop up the system and its contradictions are accelerated when that ideology is undermined. Otherwise why do you think the capitalist system bothers so much and expends so much resources on bourgeois education/media/academia, do you think it likes throwing money away? Ideology isn't everything but it is one major pillar propping the system up. And yes the powers that be do view things like leftypol as a threat, they are systematically cutting out platforms for speech against the system, whether it is youtube, twitter, facebook, google, or what have you. No leftypol won't cause a revolution by itself, but I think it is overly cynical to think it makes no difference whatsoever.


No I'm saying that this is how workers are encouraged to think of themselves, they are still employed by corporations, perhaps only on a temp basis, but their identity is that of an entrepreneur. And their product is themselves, their labor. They have to take on the functions of marketing and branding their labor (resumes, getting employer's attention), investing through constant education (human capital) etc. It is toxic to worker solidarity and this identity has to be assaulted.

The left needs to get over its obsession with mass. Asymmetric warfare has been favoring the weaker side more and more as technology has developed.

The logic also applies to economics - the means of production are getting cheaper and cheaper while also getting more flexible and more powerful. Giving a shit about numbers or a mass movement is counterproductive when its no longer necessary to upset the class structure

Yeah because one side has the numbers while the other just has expensive toys that are designed to fight large standing armies that also have similar expensive toys.

People will naturally move towards an image, and a unifying symbol is important. Yes, in an ideal world this wouldn't be necessary, but don't underestimate the importance of imagery please, that's very naive.

Yes the ultra-left just won't fucking die.

The socdems are unironically encouraging, and you have to be an idealistic leftcom to think otherwise. It's as far as the west is willing to go.

I'll agree with these too. If there was any window of opportunity for a socialist movement, I would have most everything outside of the actual philosophy changed. New aesthetics with just a little hint of the old Soviet avant-garde, non-partisan organization, maybe a new name (sadly, communism is just plain too memetically tainted), keep old symbols and aesthetics out (the hanner and sickle might as well be the pinnacle of design, but alas, it has just too many negative connotations), promote one-on-one dialectics because COINTELPRO has rendered protests, marches and the like not only useless but even counterproductive, make it very clear we're not Stalin's heirs but the opposite etc.

well, Communism was a more serious force in the past because the Soviet Union could back revolutionaries so as to expand their sphere of influence. Who would play this role nowadays? China? the easiest way to get a revolution going would be to get China or Russia to give you a lot of money to cause chaos in the US. however other countries are so dependent on the US economy that they probably wouldn't be all that interested in such an idea.


this is where the identitarian turn began, with the whole Jewish/Black dynamic, sexual revolution, Vietnam protests, students as the revolutionaries, etc.

i have this crazy idea… what if we built secondary power structures and started to encircle the state rather than bitch about literal fucking icons like byzantines

they didnt. leftists in general have shit taste for some reason. probably the over reliance on theory and navel gazing

Also does anybody have that webm about the falangists stealing shit from the CNT?

literally every Nazi gathering is a complete ripoff of May day.
People marching and standing in solidarity in arms promoting symbolism. Ring a bell?

...

Is that why Hitler was marveled by the discipline of the Social Democratic movement in Vienna as several hundred thousand strong marched through the citycenter all clad in matching uniform with their own slogans, paraphenalia and gestures? Is that why mussolini, who spent WWI in Milan, took note of the ubiquitous presence of the socialist workers' movement there, with its social millieu, clubs and activities that encompassed the whole of the workers' lives? Or why the Fascist black and brown shirts took cue from the liberal nationalist "shirt movements" of the 19th century, namely garibaldis redshirts (the same garibaldi who supported the Paris Commune?)

Nope. you're full of shit. If you read some scholarly works on fascism like stanley payne or roger griffin you'd know that the influence of the socialist movements was undeniable and appropriated toward nationalist ends.

Pretty much all political progress on the fringes apart from liberal idpol has stopped gaining ground since the Civil Rights era between Cold War propaganda squashing the left and lingering anti-nazi sentiment squashing the right. The closest thing to a renaissance that any political faction has experienced is antifa and the "new right" and while they talk a lot of shit their real-world chops are fucking pathetic all around.

It's even worse. The "left" in Sweden hasn't had an original thought since 1968.

If you want two examples of "Fuck you, the 60s is over, fun will be postponed indefinitely"-tombstones, see Sjöman's Curious-films. Try to not see them with the "aww shucks, it was such a great battering ram against the censorship in Boston". Because if not these films, it would've be some else. Just try to see them as they are.

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