this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Rainer Shea is a patriotic socialist who made a hard turn to condemning the PSL at every opportunity after they failed to support his "anti-war" rally with Tulsi Gabbard, Jackson Hinckle, and the Libertarian Party USA.
Brian Becker is one of the most principled communist leaders in the west, and is so frequently portrayed as a "Russian asset" by liberals that the underlap with Rainer's claim here is just funny.
That sounds like some red brown shit
liberals call donald trump a russia asset. just because he is called that doesn't mean he meaningfully support's russia's anti imperialism
I appreciate your input.
It is so utterly incorrect as to be nigh unfalsifiable, but appreciated.
Rainer once "decolonized" a government building by raising a PRC flag over it.
His understanding got better, and then obviously far worse. What you say about Becker and PSL are simply untrue, and you can listen to any Socialist Program episode where they discuss Ukraine/Russia or read any liberationnews article about the subject as proof of that.
So this is just another one of those "sit down shut up and toe the line" paternalist screeds, then? One of those "I don't care if these people we're working with are known to agitate for the 'destruction' of your kind" sorta things? You're sounding mighty settler-like there, homie; you know I don't fuck with that. While I back the special operation, there is not a-- I don't give a damn if Kwame Ture himself came back to life to up these Mises Caucus crackers, there will never be a day where I trust anyone repping RAWM to do anything more than get subjects-of-empire killed.
It must suck to be so unpopular that you have to talk about yourself in the 3rd person
Actions speak louder than words, but imo its disingenuous to say that the PSL failing to support RATWM is because of PSL disliking those lolbertarians.
I've spoken with Rainer about this, and while I don't agree or like with everything he says, his point was that RATWM would expand the core message out to a broader populance, and that he doesn't like associating with the Lolberts and likened this to the Bolsheviks working with reactionary trade unions and groups. Obviously not the same situation, but the general message is the same.
We didn't fail to support the event. We rejected the event emphatically. It was a right-wing event.
The general message is not remotely the same. There is a difference between organizing workers in an imperial country where all non-explicitly-communist institutions are reactionary to some degree, and organizing with the fascists self-consciously responsible for making it that way. If you're genuinely confused about that, you have a lot of reading to do, because even the democrats are better at recognizing their enemies.
The libertarian party is both fringe, and the most ideologically anti-worker organization in the US. It's impossible to be further away from union organizing. You think they want to end the war and spend that money on healthcare for workers? They are literally repealing child labor laws. Some of them think slavery should be legalized.
You have good points in your final sentence. I was going to say that many of the audience at RATWM are probably led astray or misinformed by the establishment and not directly part of the capitalist oligarchical leaders, but now that I think about it, Tulsi Gabbard being there isn't a great sign. You're mostly right.
I mean, most of any audience is going to be workers, they're 99% of the population. That's never going to be sufficient for determining whether an action is worth supporting. This event was paid for by GOP-aligned billionaires. You couldn't pick a less favorable environment for worker outreach. You could go up to random people on the street and ask them how they feel about the Ukraine war, and you'd have a more serious anti-war movement than this in a month.
Y'know what this is reminding me of? That time Chelsea Manning went partying with libertarians, paid for a ticket to their function, then turned around and tried to say she was 'gatecrashing'. Got a lot of people lately who just wanna party with the enemy and try to reframe it as 'coalition-building'.
Except that the people in RAWM are most certainly not "the fascists responsible for making it that way", those fascists are sitting on the Atlantic Council, in the RAND corporation, at the State Department, in the CIA, in the White House, at the Federal Reserve, at NATO, and other institutions of bourgeois imperial power. What power do a bunch of libertarian nobodies have? Not to mention that reducing RAWM to just the right wingers is dishonest, afaik it's a broad tent coalition and includes people from the left too as well as a lot of otherwise fairly apolitical people who are just sick of wars.
Of course i don't think that the libertarians will support labor organizing or social spending. But that's not what this is about, this is about one thing only and that is opposing NATO and the US empire's proxy war on Russia. You can support that part without agreeing with the ideological viewpoints of everyone else in the coalition. It just comes down to whether you think it's acceptable to put aside differences over domestic policy for the sake of preventing possible nuclear war and WWIII, because that's where we may be heading if NATO's escalations are not stopped.
I thought the same thing, that libertarians aren’t the most powerful group for reaction, but that doesn’t mean they are highly ideologically anti-worker and anti-communist. Libertarianism declined as a force once the rich realized they could get their same ideology in the mainstream through neoliberalism instead. It doesn’t make the more fringe form less bad.
Libertarian backers have immense wealth from both the fracking boom and silicon valley. The difference between neolib and libertarian is basically non-existent. The Libertarian anti-war stance is opportunism, and their criticism is just that their PMCs should be hired for more imperialist ventures.
Middle income Americans trend reactionary on political-economy because the bourgeois narratives work for them and their livelihood is secure, and the state does often end up helping them out.
America is an exceptionally bourgeois country, especially considering the colonial question. The proletariat is outnumbered and we really need to stop trying to pander to the settler petit bourgeoisie, they already have state power.
Libertarianism is basically controlled opposition. They’re just another far right party with billionaire backing, but they can pretend to be against the establishment because they have no hope at gaining electoral power. They can keep radlibs that might have hope of going left by talking about freedom (including social “progressivism” despite not having power to influence those issues on the right side or even trying to) from.
Yeah but their freedom slogan isn't anything unique, it's the core of Liberalism. The freedom slogan works for radlibs because like Libertarians they most likely lived a middle income life, which in America is very wealthy in global standards, and they only think about the state in terms of limiting their Liberty to get what they want, or not doing enough to protect their ability to get what they want.
Their overwhelming interests (needs rather than wants) are being served by the bourgeois settler state, in the same way as the ML AES's proletariat's interests are served by the vanguard and DotP.
I think the anti-establishment politics don't really exist outside of the worker's movement to take power. All bourgeois ideology is establishment.