macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]

  • 11 Posts
  • 409 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 29th, 2023
  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.nettoaskchapo@hexbear.net•What do we think of this article, Hexbears?English
    2·
    2 months ago

    I like Palestine Action, they’re doing good work, but they can’t win. If we apply settler-colonialism to say that their acts don’t directly benefit US/British citizens and won’t appeal to more than a fringe minority, their membership can pretty much only go down as they get taken out by the state. Winning has to be done by a group that has something to win, in this case the Palestinian and peripheral resistance. There’s a bunch of climate activism groups that had the same fate (including a surprising amount of adventurism that is so effectively quashed it never gets on the news). Idk, it’s just so pessimistic an ideology that you can’t spread it. Like Lenin was going around bringing people the good news of social democracy - “guess what, you’re part of the mighty working class, here is how we can have a revolution that will improve your life” - and we get to go around and say “sorry I know you’re struggling day-to-day but you are at the top of a global pile of bodies, and once I convince you there ain’t shit you can do about it except wait for a revolution somewhere else.”

    It’s like the same kind of logic that gets you the White Panther Party. I don’t think it’s attractive to the masses to be part of an auxiliary force. But then again there’s a lot of proxy consciousness around, where people say “I like unions, shout out Teamsters” and don’t bother organizing because they figure someone else has got it covered. As far as 40s Germany, at that point Germany had brutally repressed any communists trying to organize, but if not for the state it would be been possible to say, “hey guys I know you like the sound of lebensraum or whatever but you’re going to suffer tremendously under the war” and essentially point to the possibility of the GDR, which was better to live in than Nazi Germany!

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.nettoaskchapo@hexbear.net•What do we think of this article, Hexbears?English
    8·
    2 months ago

    The note on apartheid is wrong. If the definition of apartheid is something with a de jure character (which I would contest, that’s the same argument Israeli apologists make for that country) than that simplistic definition won’t tell you whether whether the working class is split.

    I don’t think it does justice to the settler-colonialism theory, but there don’t seem to be any existing orgs doing justice to it either. In my city, the settler-colonialism folks are ultras who have given up on mass or workplace organizing in favor of ever-smaller groups of increasingly burnt-out activists showing up to fight the cops. That shit is a waste of time, and you don’t have to be a communist to recognize it. The author says something I agree with: if the implication of settler colonial theory is that American workers have no revolutionary potential, and that trying to organize them won’t lead to a revolution, then it is self-defeating as far as application in America. (I left SAlt because they also have a self-defeating thesis: effectively, that Palestinians should lay down and die since everything depends on an Israeli working class coalescing and unifying.) To combat this widespread perception, the folks on the other side need to shout from the rooftops what they think American communists should do. The author should have also examined what believers in settler-colonialism are saying to this effect.

    And remember, fuck nuance (PDF warning). A theory isn’t better the more contradictions it mentions. This applies to both sides of this debate.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.nettochapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Adventurism worksEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    this site tends to be on the vulgar materialist side. But I really do think our spectacular society makes us tend to overestimate the effect of propaganda. The left loves marches, flyering, stickering, blocking a highway for an hour to get on the news, and we reach for these things before collective action aimed at material conditions. Multiple people burned themselves alive to protest Israel’s genocide of Gaza and it did not slow the bombs at all.

    Propaganda of the deed is a little different, you’re supposed to actually do something, but the problem is that killing a CEO actually doesn’t improve anyone’s insurance coverage. There’s no material effect, it all depends on invigorating a mass movement. If it was during the height of Bernie’s M4A campaign I bet it would have done something material. But what’s today’s call to mass action, go kill a CEO? That won’t be heeded by more than a handful of people, and if that’s all that happens there won’t be material change. I would love for this to ignite a popular uprising against private health insurance but that only works in movies and color revolutions. I think that deeds aimed at high-value capital targets, oil pipelines and bomb factories (shout out Palestine Action), are better because if there’s no accompanying movement at least they do get a smidge done on their own. They also lend themselves to propaganda about systemic change, not individual greedy CEOs.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.nettochapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Adventurism worksEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I said propaganda is propaganda. It’s not useless. But it will not win the class war alone. The working class is propagandized, but it’s held down primarily by the state - economic coercion and actual organized violence - and not ideas that somebody has put in our head. Most people don’t kill CEOs not because they believe the ads they see on TV, but because they don’t want to be jailed or killed and there is no movement to prevent that outcome. Propaganda is a useful tool that can help us organize our class, and the organized class is what will carry out a revolution. I think what this guy did was great. But until there’s a mass movement to go alongside adventurism - which can’t be built by lone wolves - we’re just gonna have narodniks.

    If posters on this website aren’t doing adventurism we should be doing mass organizing to create a climate where violence will be more effective. We should use this to call for public healthcare, tell everybody about social murder, etc. Build a huge public force for M4A so that a healthcare CEO killed makes you think “right, M4A” instead of speculation about it being a mob hit or whatever. Calls for more assassinations - although they’d be good news! - are “easier” versions of Twitter leftists calling for strikes. It’d be nice but it won’t work unless we make it possible.