I do think this community needs a bit of a cultural revolution for its own good. It wouldnt hurt to slap this image around more often, I think the guidelines are really good.

The "dirtbag left" is dead, and "bullying works" should have always had ROEs. I do think there is going to be a socdem future for the western left, and instead of being mad about all the liberal bullshit that's going to happen, it is far better to encourage that growth. This does not mean "vote blue no matter who", or forgiving accountability to the socdems when they lib out.

Take the Michael Brooks approach: "be kind to people and hostile to systems".

A historical materialist analysis should make it clear that "very cool revolutionary shit" is not gonna happen in highly industrialized economies (maybe the West isn't "highly industrialized" right now? Open to that discussion). The priority needs to be for the imperial interests of the West/US to collapse and/or contract as much as possible so that decolonial movements can flourish.

The US civil rights movement is likely the template that will need to be followed in the information age. A massive anti-racist/Anti-imperial/pro-social juste/etc... movement led by true Democratic Socialists with a smaller militant movement working in parallel. This movement will need to grow until it can force institutions to react, and channel public opinion toward supporting militant action when it responds to institutional failure to respond to the demands. The DemSoc side can also organize labor action, and build class consciousness that way too. I think a primitive version of this is happening right now in the Palestinian liberation movement, far less organized but the mechanics are similar. I think institutions will be forced to respond in the upcoming election cycle (which will prove my hypothesis right or wrong).

I don't think it is possible in the west to somehow build a revolutionary movement without a large social democratic (demsoc if we get lucky) movement working in tandem. I also think the revolutionary movement will play an important role, but is unlikely to be successful in its objectives.

This doesn't mean all is lost for the left, it doesn't mean that we should simply "redistribute the imperial spoils more fairly" and call it good, my intent is to angle for the most effective tactic to build the global socialist movement from my position on empire-occupied Salish/Chinook/etc land. It is a dialectical process, and while I understand the "rage against the machine", I think it needs to be chanelled into productive political organizing at every level rather than beating up on people for being wrong online.

There are many members of this community who forget to be hopeful for a better future, and I think we are in the darkest times right now, every day will be brighter from here (unless the US cancels elections, then global left might actually be fucked)

I try to engage with liberal progressives as if I am engaging with my own younger self, because I was one of them 10 years ago.

That doesn't necessarily mean being nice, because niceness wasn't what convinced me, but it means being patient and fair.

There’s an effort post I want to write eventually. I haven’t yet, partly because I worry it is too trite, and partly because I’m not certain about where to place the emphasis.

Marx summarized it well:

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”

The premise of the post I want to make is the relative importance of, on the one hand, critique and understanding of what is given, capitalist society; and on the other hand, construction of a totally new thing.

Because the critique forms the necessary basis of the construction, most of the effort reasonably goes into the former. But culturally the latter is almost absent at least in the western leftist spaces. Maybe people are so afraid of utopianism that they forget that the point is to build things.

Marx’s statement is a truism about social psychology. The masses intuitively understand that they are exploited, even if obfuscated through contradictory liberal frameworks. The mechanics of exploitation are relevant only to a leftist who has already committed to learning. The missing ingredient is the concrete alternative. When an alternative gains reality in the mind of the average person, then revolution ceases to be theoretical. It becomes a question not of abstract possibility but of will.

Edit: adding what I wrote in a separate reply

Books like Constructive Criticism are exactly what is necessary for those who want to build. How can communists have any credibility or authority to speak on societal change, if they cannot work out how to change themselves? By improving our selves as individuals, with conscious intentionality as described in Theses on Feuerbach, we demonstrate that concrete alternative I alluded to in the previous comment. The point of this development is not for moral high ground, but to shatter the distinction between the theoretical and the practical.

I think if youre reading this and have not read Constructive Criticism, you should read it now. Skip the first section if you wanna get right to the meat, but the first section is historically interesting, but also repetitive and dogmatic.

And, read the manga! Non-Violent Communication by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. Legion's work is based on it as she was Rosenberg's personal assistant.

NVC is a kind of communication that is developed to fix broken relationships, rather than being a set of word tricks, it is a way of explaining our own subjective experience concretely (not confusing it with objective observations, also not confusing different kinds of observations), and luring out the subjective experience of others, like helping them articulate their true feelings, thoughts and observations in a concrete way. The two works are complementary to each other, Rosenberg's framings and exercises imo do a better job at describing the fundamental concepts and practices, while being a little too light on political difference. Legion's continuation includes a long l, imo skippable, introduction to western academic new-left Dialectical Materialism primer, that reads like a "how to get your book published by the CCP during the cultural revolution as a late 60's American ML/Maoist."

But her practical manual is absolutely required reading, and has been making its way into the intro reading lists of national orgs, branches, chapters, all over. NVC is a fundamentally dialectical-materialist method of comms, albeit one with its class analysis carefully manicured. Fortunately, there was, at the closest levels of collaboration, an excellent contribution to both the Marxism and NVC.

Good thread

Another rule of thumb: it's good to give people an out, i.e., be respectful and charitable enough that they can leave the conversation at any time without feeling they need to defeat you to save face. It's as much for your own sake as theirs. If they feel like they have to defend themself by attacking you, then suddenly you're in the same position of having to defend yourself and no one has an off ramp.

Sometimes easier said than done, but it's never too late to deescalate even if it does start to get heated. It's just harder.

It also helps with persuasion. No one wants you to be right if it hurts them. Respect and patience gives them emotional space to consider your ideas, whereas hostility gives them an incentive to shoot you down reflexively as a way to defend themself.

OP! Great recommendations for being concrete

"Not everything needs a response"

"Don't ignore incorrect ideas or bad behavior"

Not everything needs a response if you're a LIB am I right? I NEVER , and you can't make me!

Kidding. Like a real leftist I have theory about how to be nice and comradely. I know we're all libs down here, but maybe one of us will scrape and claw our way out of Plato's cave of liberalism and read our way into being the one true leftist.

🥰

This looks good on theory, but when I see a smug and ignorant libshit who won't hear what I will say, I can't stop myself from insulting them.

I've found that for years leftists on the internet have struggled with the idea that the types of values they think they should uphold in a party or professional environment should also apply to unaccountable strangers/wreckers online. If someone is being intentionally obtuse, divisive, contrarian, anti-communist or uncharitable, they are not owed any respect and are themselves choosing to reject the type of comradliness we would all prefer to see in the world

be patient and polite; don't alienate; don't ignore bad behavior;

doesn't comport with site culture i'm afraid.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video