It's a situation that I have been expecting for a while, but I wasn't fully ready to accept it. Specifically it's one of my LGBTQ friends who honestly believes in the democrats will protect them and their partner. I have tried to make the point that both parties are eroding any sort of civility towards all marginalized groups, but fear seems to drive them more than logical observations. They make the excuse that change doesn't happen over night and that the left continues to grow and will have meaningful affects down the road. I fundamentally just don't agree with that idea and vocalize it regularly. More and more it is ending up in a circular argument where I am painted as unrealistic and my rhetoric (leftist rhetoric) is doing more harm than good because it promotes distrust in the only system we have to work with. I try to tell them it's kind of the whole point. We gotta start somewhere if we want to see a better, more representative system, but they are so hung up on the immediate future while simultaneously saying that my idealistic feelings are shortsighted and I cant expect change in the immediate future... The double-talk is wild, I know.
I am trying my hardest to stop from engaging at this point because on the most basic level we agree on a lot of stuff, but they are just way to wrapped up in the fear mongering of the democratic party. They know that the two party system is broken, they know that something drastic needs to change, but they also think that they are powerless to do anything except choose the lesser evil. It pains me because I am watching them do the same shit past generations have done, where they give up on their ideals for the sake of preserving the current status quo that they benefit from. I am legitimately watching them imply "fuck you, got mine" under the guise of civic duty and I hate it. I want nothing more than to be able to finally say "I told you so" without being a smug asshole about it and ruining our friendship.
Thanks for reading my rant. It's probably a bit disjointed, but the frustration is boiling over and I needed to vent to the only group of people that seems to understand the hopelessness of being a disenfranchised leftist.
There's a uniting theme in all of the behaviors he highlights of a sort of moral flippancy, of regarding a decision as basically indifferent and then just picking the option you want instead of picking what is best. It makes sense to call this self-entitled version of freedom, where you are not obliged to act rightly but merely fulfill some set of requirements and then have free reign in the rest of it, "liberalism," because that is exactly what many liberal moral frameworks look like, especially the more politically-involved ones (like social contract theory).
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Yes, there is a theme that is about subordinating personal advancement (a more liberal tendency) to development of the cadre / party (a more revolutionary tendency). But it is still very focused on that attempt to assert discipline over the cadres/party. Some of the advice is actually toxic to follow in other contexts. For example, I know many proto-MLMs that really take the "you better tell everyone when they are wrong instead of talking about it secretly, that is liberal and advancing yourself" thing to heart and they criticize the crap out of each other to allegedly create "unity" but it actually makes people hate each other. They completely miss how to develop constructive political education in the party because they are interpreting Combat Liberalism as Mao's Guide to Party Behavior, but it isn't even that. The meaning of that line is really more like, "hey you behind-my-back shittalkers tell it to our faces so we can hash it out and minimize factions" and not "you should focus on criticizing in full membership meetings and never air a criticism privately or sit in it for a while".
I will admit that the sparseness of the text combined with the distance in time and space means it's not the sort of thing you can just throw on someone's lap like Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but I think we ultimately agree.
Probably! I think it is fun to read and entertaining to quote but I think the main issues in Western left organizing are substantially different. I definitely keep "no investigation, no right to speak" in my back pocket though, which is from a somewhat similar but more widely applicable work. I swear to God 90% of Western leftists need to internalize that and shut the fuck up (not speaking about you or anyone on Hexbear lol). So many problems in left orgs could be solved if the people who have spent less than 10 minutes thinking about a topic just didn't jump into conversations to share opinions and then die on a hill.