Serious question for the comrades here.
It feels like the objective conditions for capitalism's collapse are just screaming at us every single day. Economic crises, ecological breakdown unprecedented scale, mass alienation and atomization as the baseline state, political dysfunction that borders on parody, imperial decay… the contradictions are so obvious a child could point them out.
Yet, despite all this, there's no coherent, mass movement building critical power. We have scattered struggles, localized resistance, theory posting, and… well, mostly just watching the whole rotten system unravel in slow motion. Historically, shouldn't these blatant contradictions be fueling significant class struggle and revolutionary organization on a much larger scale?
Are we just stuck in a cycle of commentary and theory without effective action? What does meaningful praxis even look like in an era of hyper-fragmentation, digital distraction, pervasive state/corporate surveillance and control, and the decimation of traditional working-class sites of power? Are we missing something fundamental about how change happens in the 21st century under late-stage capital, or is this just the long, drawn-out decline we're witnessing, with no revolutionary break on the horizon?
Interested to hear genuine thoughts and analysis, not just doomposting (though understand that too). What's the materialist analysis of our current incapacity despite the system's obvious decay?
>>2289262>>2289262There's no anti-capitalist force because nowadays communists are communists because of hype moments and aura. They're communists because of hype moments and aura (soviet union). The thing is, that fascists have the better hype moments and aura because they got a lot more money.
Communists must abandon that "hype moments and aura" in order to become lame but a lot more focused on labour issues in of itself. This is, instead of having soviet union profile pictures, just have a profile picture of something you like (the anime profile pic strategy), or instead of discussing the soviet union everytime because people bring it up, if brought up, just completely dismiss it saying that that is not the matter of the discussion. Communism isn't the Soviet Union, communism is the future.
The revolution, aside from not being televised, will need to also be lame as fuck, but effective.
>>2289273It is fucking depressing how many lefties are obsessed with the past
That time is over. Those people are history and so are conditions they operated in
If you are not analysing history to understand conditions under which previous lefty movements operated in, thinking about how and why they succeded or failed under those conditions and comparing it to the PRESENT NOW. NOW. Then you are wasting your time, man
>>2289273>We can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion. >The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation. When the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organisation, began to take shape (and the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses) the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. >However, the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions, through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class. The proletariat’s conquest of political power is a gigantic step forward for the proletariat as a class, and the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of communism” and a preparatory school that trains proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people.>Further. In countries more advanced than Russia, a certain reactionism in the trade unions has been and was bound to be manifested in a far greater measure than in our country. Our Mensheviks found support in the trade unions (and to some extent still do so in a small number of unions), as a result of the latter’s craft narrow-mindedness, craft selfishness and opportunism. The Mensheviks of the West have acquired a much firmer footing in the trade unions; there the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, and petty-bourgeois “labour aristocracy”, imperialist-minded, and imperialist-corrupted, has developed into a much stronger section than in our country. That is incontestable. >This struggle must be waged ruthlessly, and it must unfailingly be brought—as we brought it—to a point when all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and social-chauvinism are completely discredited and driven out of the trade unions. We are waging a struggle against the “labour aristocracy” in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging the struggle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side. It would be absurd to forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth. Yet it is this very absurdity that the German “Left” Communists perpetrate when, because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the trade union top leadership, they jump to the conclusion that . . . we must withdraw from the trade unions, refuse to work in them, and create new and artificial forms of labour organisation!>This ridiculous “theory” that Communists should not work in reactionary trade unions reveals with the utmost clarity the frivolous attitude of the “Left” Communists towards the question of influencing the “masses”, and their misuse of clamour about the “masses”. If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses”, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders” (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are in most cases directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations—even the most reactionary—in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found. The trade unions and the workers’ co-operatives (the latter sometimes, at least) are the very organisations in which the masses are to be found. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch06.htm Unique IPs: 17