Knowing the real history of American radical left-wing groups, this film is far too generous about their capabilities. In reality, they wouldn’t have killed any political figure higher than a superintendent, would likely have set off a bomb that killed a good portion of their members or been shot dead and arrested if they actually tried fighting against an armed resistance.
>>2539918that would have made for a shitty watch. doesn't he take a similar attitude as the filmmakers of the Japanese or French New Lefts had wrt to their countries' movement? I didn't see it btw.
personally I think it's just a good thing that the new left is even being portrayed in popular media
>>2539928Why? they were naive jackasses who no one took seriously
The original novel this is based on is called Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, he’s way harsher in his critique of the New Left
>>2539918>In reality, they wouldn’t have killed any political figure higher than a superintendent, would likely have set off a bomb that killed a good portion of their members or been shot dead and arrested if they actually tried fighting against an armed resistance.All of this actually happened, it showed the full capacity of the Western left for revolutionary violence in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Foster#Deathhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village_townhouse_explosionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army#Police_shootout >>2539941idk, I didn't see it. is it really that bad?
>>2539959The film treats them seriously, IRL the radical leftists were just after-thoughts, RW groups were a much pressing and capable concern for the FBI
>>2539962okay thank you. that didn't really become the case until the 80s, no? like they pivoted because they more or less accomplished their goals
>>2539964It was actually the Nixon-Mao talks that truly ended the New-left, according to the Norman Finkelstein, a not-so insignificant amount of people killed themselves, he himself was bed-ridden for three weeks, Mao was their prophet and and he had betrayed them
>>2539975You don’t get how shocking Nixon Mao dialogues were to literally anyone outside of China at the time, Maoists who weren’t in China didn’t see him drifting rightwards from the end of the Shanghai Commune onward.
>>2539971 (You)
>>2539980You have to understand, these people put everything into Mao and China, the Soviet Union had betrayed the global proletariat but China was fighting the Imperialists and when that talk happened, it killed, it was a massive ego-death, from Norman Finkelstein
>Those not wondering what a Maoist is wonder how I could have been one. It’s a historical moment that has vanished without a trace.>In the early 1970s, when I came of age politically, the U.S. government was raining death on Vietnam abroad and hunting down Black militants at home. The system manifestly required more than a little tinkering to be set right. Anyhow, I had committed myself not just to a reformed world but a world turned upside down. For all its Marxist pretences, Russia seemed to resemble the United States. The grey-on-grey of Soviet-style socialism didn’t exactly fire the imagination. On the other hand, China appeared on the brink of ushering in a new world. Those coming back from Maoist China echoed the writer Lincoln Steffens on his return from Lenin’s Russia: “I have seen the future, and it works.” From Chairman Mao down to the ordinary worker and peasant, everyone seemed to be practicing a simple, austere lifestyle, contemptuous of bourgeois amenities and devoted to a larger collective purpose. I still remember the sense of moral inferiority on my first sighting of a real-life exemplar of this “new socialist man” from China (in fact, a woman, Carmelita Hinton, daughter of famed Maoist author William Hinton) at a left-wing conference in New York. Shamed by my bourgeois baggage, I decided against introducing myself to her.>Maoism seemed irrefutable proof of an alternative to the rat-race existence. To cynics who maintained that creating a society based on non-acquisitive values was utopian, I replied: Look at China! It was even said that petty theft had disappeared. Bicycles weren’t chained up, lost items were returned. While I was taking a nap late one winter’s night in my college student centre, someone stole my brand new work shoes from, literally, right under my feet. Furious at the theft and having had to walk home barefoot in the slush, the next day in my Chinese foreign policy class I indignantly declared, “This wouldn’t have happened in China!” Many of my classmates no doubt silently thought that it served this self-righteous ass**** right.>The precepts of Chinese Communism mirrored my own of a decent society. Prime Minister Chou En-Lai always had pinned to his lapel the button, “Serve the people.” Praising the wisdom and dignity of ordinary workers, a Mao quotation declared that the “workers and peasants were the cleanest people, and even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.” A sports meet in China would open and close with the chant, “Friendship first, competition second.” The eyes of a sceptical female co-worker of mine lit up when I quoted Mao’s aphorism, “Women hold up half the sky.” In one parable I emotionally recited, Mao wrote, “Death can be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to die for the fascists and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”>What clinched my disenchantment was the increasing sterility of Bettelheim’s, and my own, “problematic.” After Mao’s death, his heirs, the “Gang of Four,” were in short order dethroned, and his legacy was dismantled. The theory of socialist transition, on which I intended to write my doctoral dissertation, seemed more than ever divorced from reality. In addition, the rapid collapse of Maoism forced me to rethink many of my beliefs. There must have been a lot more rot at the core of the Chinese Revolution than I was led—and allowed myself to be led, and led others—to believe. What hurt most for someone who thought he knew so much was how foolish he had been. I remember one non-believer telling this true believer that, before I ever got to China, there would be a McDonald’s at the Great Wall. I sneeringly dismissed his “petty-bourgeois” cynicism. (He in turn recoiled at being labelled merely a “petty” and not a full-fledged bourgeois.) Well, a McDonald’s did open for business at the Great Wall while I lost all interest in making pilgrimage to China. In fact, from the day the Gang of Four was overthrown to this day I’ve not opened a single book or read through to the end a single news article on China. The wound runs deep, the pain lingers. For the first three weeks after the coup I could barely make it out of bed. I was later told that Bettelheim had to be hospitalized. Whether, in my case, this was due more to disappointment or embarrassment, I cannot say. In any event, I learned an important, albeit excruciating, lesson: de omnibus dubitandum (Marx’s credo). >>2539975Mark Rudd (a former member of the WU) is a great insight into the mindset of these people, because the mental state that they had created was by misinterpreting the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War, believing that any people could defeat any Army in the world if they had enough revolutionary zeal. The fact that the West had not overthrown the capitalists was because the West had no revolutionary zeal, but they had
The Weather Underground(the group he was with) were advised by the Vietnamese Communists to build a broad anti-war movement rather than commit acts of terrorism and WU took that as proof that the Soviets had corrupted Vietnamese, this mass delusion lasted until the Nixon-Mao talks, after which it basically destroyed them all, in their minds Mao had personally betrayed them
>The way other leftists of the early to mid-twentieth century considered themselves Trotskyists or Stalinists or Maoists, I was a Guevarista, a member of the cult of Che. That meant not only putting up multiple posters with Che’s image on the wall in my room during college, but whole-heartedly accepting the theory that a small armed group could spark revolution by actually beginning military action.>Foco in Spanish means nucleus, the idea being that the future revolutionary army would grow around the core of the guerilla band. Along with being called Guevaristas, followers of Che, we in Weatherman and the Weather Underground were also called foquistas. Of course our enemies on the left, which included almost everyone outside of ourselves, called us other names, such as “Third Worldists,” “left-wing adventurists,” vanguardists, “infantile leftists,” “crazies,” and much worse. We didn’t care: we knew we were right because we were with Che.>One thing we hadn’t stopped to notice was that Che, in October, 1967, using precisely the same strategy that we proposed to use, had already been defeated and killed in Bolivia while trying to spark a continental revolution against U.S. neo-colonial domination. Wandering futilely around the jungle, much more alien to the campesinos and indigenous people than even the Bolivian army, his band was isolated and smashed. Che, in 1965, had tried the same strategy in the Congo in Africa, only to be driven from the continent. A guerilla foco in Argentina, Che’s own home country, had been wiped out, as would more guerilla focos in Uruguay, Brazil and several other Latin American countries. Blinded by my love and admiration for “the Heroic Guerilla,” as Fidel had dubbed Che, I didn’t want to see that there was a fatal flaw in the theory. It didn’t work. >>2539918Dogshit movie. Literally just a vehicle for the authors extreme race fetish.
The fuck is the point of this OP, exactly?
It’s Pentagon funded fascist proleslop like every other blockbuster that people pretend is revolutionary like the latest Star Wars crap, what else did you expect? You’re not going to get anything approaching Marxism Leninism from modern day Nazi propaganda
>>2540074holy shit how did you get filtered so hard? you are genuinely a philistine
>>2540209MOVE was not in active armed resistance and so on. To paint them like the WU and such is propaganda of the pigs. kys.
>>2540209Primitivist pedo christian cult that starved children to death because "cooked food is bad" used as an excuse to burn down a black neighbourhood. KILL YOURSLF FUCKING SUBHUMAN REACTIONARY.
>>2539943>>2539943if there is one good thing about this movie it's that it might get people reading Pynchon
Slop film based on slop novel
>>2539992Fucking depressing how tyrants have stolen the noble goal of socialism - a truly better world - to benefit themselves and rape the people they falsely promised to help elevate. Vanguardism is a rotten strategy.
Was the movie actually good?
>>2539992I remember some quote from a Soviet spy who said that he preferred working with Western neo-Nazis and Fascists (to help destabilize the West) rather than western leftists, because the former took their training seriously, while the latter were both delusional and incompetent.
>>2540412>KGB intelligence officer likes people who follow ordersWow
>>2540370I couldin't get past the first few minutes, its just watching Leonardo DiCaprio act like some oligophrenic ALF twat yelling about a revolution doing LARPtivism (yea freeing migrants from cages isn't a revolution bud).
>>2540418The same plot point happened in Eddington, has something like that actually ever happened IRL?
>>2540418FYI I had high expectations for this movie but was completely repulsed, I THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE UWE BOLL'S RAMPAGE SERIES, like come on, what the fuck's the point of getting actors to act like anarchists only to do the same lame shit liberal modern "anarchists" do. I thought there was going to be a whole lot more brutal adventurism not just some cheesy western action like in the cop movies.
I recommend everyone go and watch the rampage trilogy instead, its excellent, you won't be dissapointed, you'll get exactly the kind of edginess that comes with adventurism one would expect.
>>2540425Strength of collectivism comes from unity. Humans are pack animals not some kind of individualist loners living alone in the jungles. Humanity wouldn't exist at all in this form. You can have different industrial workers competing like in the USSR but they still have the same proletarian status in a proletarian country.
>>2540430Love this movie but I'm not a misanthropist chuddie.
>>2540261>Calling Pynchon slopYou are subhuman cattle
its very strange to me that people dont "get" pynchon. people just think its wacky random and critique him for not making sense or being unrealistic instead of pretty explicitly exposing america as a continuation of nazi germany where most of what they think is unrealistic is a allegory for actual recorded history.
>>2540833You can hate America without being cringe and gay, you know that right?
>>2540430>I thought there was going to be a whole lot more brutal adventurism What are you talking about? They do a level of successful adventurousness that no left-wing American radical group has ever come close to achieving.
>>2540799You are a piggy rolling in slop.
>>2541141> was by white and Jewish college students.redundant. you are repeating yourself.
>>2541305It matters If your serious about politics, basically everyone but western leftists
>>2539971Damn, turns out psychologically breaking people down with struggle sessions and incessant “self-crit” really isn’t good for their mental health.
>>2542198Once again, I'm talking about successful adventurism, managing to assassinate Republican political figures and managing to raid immigration detention centres, something no Western left-wing radical group has ever come close to accomplishing.
>>2542198Flapjack is an anti-imperialist cartoon because it depicts the very concept of the west as some malevolent eldritch presence
>>2542218Funnily, the CPUSA outlasted all of the new Maoist/Third-Worldist groups despite being on its last legs. By the 1950s the CPUSA had fewer than 5,000 full-time members, a staggering drop from just a few decades earlier when it boasted 75,000. The party had been nearly decimated, with many members leaving due to ideological differences or more commonly general apathy. As labor and housing conditions improved, most of its working-class members shifted to the AFL-CIO, while the more Ideological left-leaning members gravitated toward radical Maoism. However, the CPUSA, by avoiding extreme actions and not completely alienating its base, managed to survive longer than many other leftist groups, which either fizzled out or devolved into cult-like movements and the CPUSA lingered on
>>2542227Because it’s a fucking fed outfit like the Klan and Nation of Islam
>>2542227I mean yeah; that level of zealotry is just completely unsustainable. It can't reproduce itself. It's why I kind of roll my eyes at the people claiming "WE NEED AN AMERICAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION!" when the legacy of the cultural revolution in China as far as I can see it is just a kind of mass hysteria and witch hunting as well as cultural sites being destroyed only to later be rebuilt by the CPC after the zeal died out.
Honestly it's partly why I like it. There's normal people in the party, not some dude who'll write a long screed about how "Normal is an aesthetic category of the bourgeoisie" or some horseshit.
>>2541141Y'know Wolfenstein had the same "Pregnant woman firing some heavy machine gun" thing and I really don't know what people see in the aesthetic. Seems pretty off-putting in my opinion.
>>2542234>I mean yeah; that level of zealotry is just completely unsustainableMark Rudd talks about this
>>2539995 >>2540412 reading between the lines facists love doing drugs and are balls deep into all kinds of debauchery like didding kids, so are easier to control with blackmail, while leftist just are incompetent and argue a lot.
>>2542324
>>2542306
You know you can hate America with being cringe and gay
>>2539918>Knowing the real history of American radical left-wing groups, this film is far too generous about their capabilities.Yeah well sometimes it's good to give people something better to aspire to.
>>2540370No.
>Completely tears out the context of the original book being exactly about the American left selling out after the 60s during the 80s, if not selling out becoming directly compliant with the fruits of American imperialism leading to electing Regan who ironically caused the downfall of it overtime>Replaces it with migration stuff because topical>The revolutionaries are kept intentionally ambiguous and made to seem as ghetto as possibleFurther spoilers don't read the orange don't say you weren't warned
<Removes all ambiguity over if Bob's daughter is his or not<Places a really weird race centric plot that can only be happening in modern America which is billed as the only reason Sean Penn gives a fuck about his daughter at all, as opposed to the original book being about blatant abuse of power that backfires on the corrupt DEA agent<Instead the movies version of this is this super pro army general driving down the road in the middle of an active warzone and lowering his window for the first person who asks him to, he even asks who the fuck it is so it's clear this guy isn't someone he knows from the CA club, and gets shot in the face<Survives this, totally pointless stunt. Gets gassed to death anyway.Apparently it might not break even, even at $200 million box office, so redditors will complain that people went to see capeshit or anime or Minecraft instead of this and how this is what's wrong with society, but the fact is that it's just a really poorly written movie.
PTA got too cocky taking liberties after adapting Oil! I hope the producers don't let him touch the script next time if he adapts Pynchon again. Whom I don't even like that much but every single change was retarded.
>>2542575I'm Pakistani dumbass, I hate America and want it nuked, I hate more then you can imagine but I'm not going to be cringe about it
>>2542578idk ur bein kinda cringe and gay rite now
>>2542580I'm a self-hating first-worlder and this is my post
>>2542581how can u hate amerikkka if you dont even type all the k's
>>2542583>That's another point, the french 75 are far too diverse and frankly 'low class' to be a radical Western leftist group.Well there were black radical militants in the 70s. The Black Panthers most famously but also offshoots like the Black Liberation Army.
I haven't seen the movie, but the most unbelievable thing I read about it is that the French 75 were active in, like, 2009.
>>2539971>Betrayed by le national chauvinist proletarian butcher<No way we could have seen this coming guyzLmao
>>2542324
You sound like your feelings are hurt
Remember
Mao happily chose to shake hands with the butchers of Vietnam 🙂
Remember, it was Mao’s line that the USSR was a greater threat to the world and to China than the American Empire 😂
Maoids will never live this shit down
>>2542595Despite their posturing, the original Panthers were smart enough not to start trouble with the police because they weren’t idiots. The bla's one armed act was semi-notable, but ultimately it was a massive failure and achieved nothing
>>2542632I'm not a Maoist, but you have the same problem, you moralize and overanylize nonsense. The reality is that, in times of conflict, only a capable and pragmatic violent man can seize power. pansy intellectuals like Western leftists never come close. You don’t need to write theory about Mao 'betraying the revolution', he was a pragmatic and violent man, and it makes sense that he acted the way he did. It’s regrettable that the USSR and China came into conflict, but both sides let personal and geopolitical ambitions get in the way
Yeah, but it felt awesome to self insert as a militant with actual power. Pure fantasy fulfillment. I am glad this gem was made and DiCaprio was great in it.
I was mildly entertained but thought it was vapid. Basically like any other hero-against-the-world movie but with leftist aesthetics. The white nationalist cult was funny though
>>2544451Yeah, it's the correct one.
>>2543195
<losing makes you fascist
wot in the naturalistic fallacy
>>2544504He was being sarcastic
>>2544451Always correct, unfortunately.
>>2544786
Just think, if Stalin had agreed for China to join the USSR when the CPC had pitched it to them Mao could’ve kept the course completely off the revisionist road in both places, we’d live in a very different world
>>2544786
The CCP's postilion on Mao was that he was a man, a great man but just a man, he did some good and did some bad, it's regrettable what happened
>>2544629>>2544451So what's the solution? How do you save Western Leftism from being mostly represented by over-educated theorycels who can't appeal with the average person if their lives depended on it? Trump is a literal billionaire, and he can appeal to the working class, yet these upper-middle-class leftists just can't
>>2543119>Pointing out my ideology is opportunistic and incoherent nonsense is moralizing Buddy, reminding you faggots that Mao helped decapitate your beloved USSR isn’t “moralizing”, it’s just pointing out what hollow clowns MLoids actually are, worshipping entirely cynical nationalist opportunists that never hesitated to liquidate every conceivable form of socialist internationalism and basic solidarity with their fellow MLoid countries the second it suited their narrow interests to do so
Genuinely the governments mostly dissolving and rejoining the US dominated world was truly part and parcel with ML praxis dating back to Joseph Stalin himself
>>2545051Trump can appeal to these people because he has the media behind him dumbass, at least moreso than any communist; aside from which, here in reality 2/3 of Americans are not pro-Trump; besides, this just reveals an incoherent, shallow, understanding of how and why revolutions happen, I guess you mostly talk to idiot liberals over reading Marx, but in fact the process of proletarian revolution isn’t like that of arranging a liberal electoral campaign, random Marxists don’t even need to convince workers of a single thing for a revolution to occur, what Marxists can determine is the way that revolution plays out.
You don’t need to magically convince the masses that their lives suck, there you go.
>>2544451If the non-western left fails, it's because of western interference. If the western left fails, it's because they're bad
please ignore the fascist regimes killing everyone left of liberals and the decades of infiltration and propaganda from state actors >>2545100I mean what if the Western Left repeatedly failed because at a certain point it began retardedly outsourcing “revolution” to foreign nationalists and opportunists (i.e. USSR, Mao, etc) on the one hand, and on the other embraced opportunism itself (i.e. the SPD, all socdem parties, the socdem wing of the CPUSA, idpolers after the New Left ate itself, etc)
>>2545107>>2545100i think the thing we fail to acknowledge is that in the west if you go past a certain point you essentially are engaging in an act of self destruction, in an environment where that may not even bear fruit. I think that's the barrier we face, we know the powers that be will surveil, identify, and detain or kill anyone who does more than peaceful protest and sometimes even the peaceful ones anyway.
>>2545109That’s also true outside the West, I think the real greatest interests is the inability to wholly surveil the societies of the Third World; but even then, communist revolution was entirely crushed there too and has never resurrected; most likely when, if, it returns, it will need to be a rapid global wave. The good thing is, we know now, because of the decade of protests in the 2010s, that rapid, global, interconnected proletarian uprisings are still very possible.
>>2545098Yep, Deng saved China from more ideological degeneration.
>>2542234>Y'know Wolfenstein had the same "Pregnant woman firing some heavy machine gun" thing and I really don't know what people see in the aesthetic. Seems pretty off-putting in my opinion.Is it portrayed positively in OBAA? A point is made that the same character abandons her responsibilities as a parent (when the daughter is born) to keep figting her revolution.
Obviously portrayed negatively in other aspects after that, such as the affair and being trigger happy.
just watched this movie. the only thing political is maybe in the first fifteen minutes (and even then it's pointless radical cool hip and sexy anarchism), they use the word imperialist once throughout the movie and after the first fifteen minutes it's a retarded and contrived action movie about some nazifascistic cabal and le epic heroes which fight over some racial bs
waste of money
just watch inherent vice
>>2545142Likewise everywhere, yet only a branch gets the finger pointed at it
>>2545142I would like to point out that the man who said that wrote a snitch list to the government and possibly raped someone, so all the sandal wearing fruit juice Quakers are better than him
>>2545828Orwell was complicated, he despised Western leftists, he even despised wannabe revolutionaries who are neurotic nerds but who can't bring themselves to be a real ML, even though that would have suited him.
>>2546090Communist revolution isn’t a political campaign centering a bourgeois politician, I would be troubled if there were a bourgeois politician inspiring such fanaticism in proletarians (Jan 6th was not at all a proletarian uprising, it was a petit bourgeois putsch, the people present had substantially better material conditions than proletarians do, ranging from high paid lawyers to petit bourgeois doctors and various other small time owners, some actual CEOs of medium sized companies, and ex-military and off-duty police; all the force mostly naturally aligned against the proletarian movement to begin with)
The real problem is the sheer amount of leftoids that cannot see in Jan 6 a modern Beerhall Putsch in every conceivable way
>>2546147That’s because the proletariat has not and never has been a political force, only the petit bourgeois has, even Lenin acknowledges this
>>2546312i absolutely believe this guy is PB, yea. probably has a website selling flags and horn-hats.
>>2546312I think we did confirm he is petit-bourgeois. As is the class character of Fascism's base. Whiny faggots who want to be lords of their pathetic little feifdom.
>>2546378A guy who was raised by a single mom and went to community college is petit-bourgeois?
>>2546761Anon stop using terms you don't understand or at least have the decency to look them up.
>>2546312> You're really arguing that of the 1,500+ people who participated in Jan-6, all of them were petit bourgeois?America is a country of hundreds of millions of people, there are literally tens of millions of petit bourgeois individuals in the USA and that is from the specific class of small business owners alone, which is not to mention the millions more from the various other stratum I stated were present; 1,500 petit bourgeois individuals in a single location isn’t even 1% of all petit bourgeois in a like ten states alone
>>2546761Many if not most petit bourgeois didn’t go to college at all, since the main purpose of college is to raise the value of individual labour-powers
Petit bourgeois isn’t a moral term, doesn’t refer to background, and isn’t about your income
>>2546787>>2546147My enemies supporters are actually just petty bourgeois. Actually no Western worker is working class anymore; they’re all 'bleeding imperialists' exploiting Asia and Africa. Oh, but wait, East Asians aren’t working class either, they’re also imperialists too. And then Arabs? Also imperialists. It just goes on and on. Western leftists will overanalyze, theorize, and twist themselves into knots to cope with the fact that they’re unlikable and insufferable and that a midwit billionaire (honestly, I’d call him a complete moron) is somehow more likable than all of them.
>>2546847Jan 6 rioters aren’t “all of Trump’s supporters”, maybe don’t hold retarded assumptions and you can comprehend how 1,500 rioters turned out to be significantly better off financially than the vast majority of Americans lmao
>>2547710shrek was a landlord monopolist over his swamp who becomes reactionary at immigrant inhabitants, and makes a deal with the aristocracy to have them evicted.
>>2542234>not some dude who'll write a long screed about how "Normal is an aesthetic category of the bourgeoisie" or some horseshit.Bruh all the local CPUSA people I met IRL are exactly that. I'm not kidding, they all became nonbinary and are a part of a massive polycule that is expanding into other local orgs.
>>2547759After Gus Hall, the CPUSA fell apart and really hasn't recovered.
>>2547759>are a part of a massive polycule that is expanding into other local orgs. Seems extremely irresponsible.
>>2545100>>2545107>>2545109See, this is what I mean, as a third-world socialist, the reason we don't like you is because you over-hype yourselves so much. You all talk about 'beating up cops' at some protest or how you're politically repressed, but you're not. You don't realize what actual political violence is like. My professor's friends were all arrested and murdered, their children were threatened and a relative of mine was beaten so badly in an anti-Zia protest that he's brain-damaged and crippled. That's the reality for most of us. That's why we are more cautious. When we see you talk about your alleged leftist oppression, we lash out because you don't get it. You were never a threat to any institution of power, to anyone on this planet. Your lack of success is simply because you're all unlikable and that's it
>>2542227>>2542234>betty bourgeois social fascist reformist party survives in a petty bourgeois social fascist country:O omg it must be because it's such a great communist party
>>2550192you're like the psychos on /pol/ replying to everything with "YOU WON'T DO SHIT", we have described a problem we face and at no point said it's a worse problem necessarily. If you want to feel superior then please do, I don't care, but fuck off if you are just going to fling shit and not be constructive.
>>2550278Calling me a /pol/tard for pointing out that Western leftists won’t do anything substantial, yet believe they’re fighting some major war, is pathetic. What I’m talking about isn’t about feeling superior, it’s about accepting reality and working within your actual limitations. Socialists in my country know what we have to do to survive, we were forced into these conditions. We are China shills now and our politics mainly focus on getting our nations to have deeper relations with China, We work with local reactionary and corrupt parties, fully aware that they’re reactionary, corrupt, and openly ethno-supremacist, because they’re the only popular ones that aren’t Islamist. And even then, we remain careful, there are subjects we will never mock or comment on because we know we could be arrested or murdered. We do this to survive while Western Leftists continue their LARP sessions.
>>2550192>>2550816An imageboard isn't the place to find actually sane socialists in the imperial core. Not really sure how to diagnose the weirdness of the imperial core but overall it's pretty fucked. I don't know the whole society is just pretty surreal and maddening. We kind of live in the clown-world of the bourgeoisie where everything works on upside down logic. You go too far into that you just get into Baudrillard nonsense though. We kind of live in a simulation of capitalism. We're relatively unproductive due to imperial spoils so it's more like superstructure than material base. A soldier in an army can scrub toilets but he's still a soldier. Likewise, an overpaid barista in the core is still in the superstructure. However, class relations are still reflected in the superstructure. The barista is still a worker the same way drafted infantry are workers and the officers are capitalists. So we live in an unproductive/superstructural simulation of the capitalist/material base which much of has been offshored to the semi-periphery and periphery. It just gets really confusing. That's my take on the whole madness.
>>2550947I've met Western leftists IRL and I think many of you mean well, but you're just disconnected from the world, In both your own societies and others. The only advice I can give to Western leftists is to just try to be normal. And don't over-anylize why you can't connect with people as some natural result of capitalist production. You're all genuinely kind of 'weird' and off-putting to a lot of people. I've worked with many Americans and Europeans in my line of work (which is unrelated to my activism), and these are just regular guys. I can have a conversation with them, talk about everyday things. I have rarely had a similar experience with a leftist activist, with some notable exceptions most of you just seem "off" and this extends to all of you, to black western leftists, to white western leftists, to asian western leftists, your all just kinda off-putting in a way that's hard to describe.
>>2551061>You're all genuinely kind of 'weird' and off-putting to a lot of peopleno idea what kind of leftist exactly you met or how many, but this seem like a pretty retarded generalization. I've met plenty of "normal" people in the radical left
>>2551061>>2551131It's probably a lot of it that a lot of people interested in socialism in the imperial core are just really bitter and angry people. I'm definitely one of the dysfunctional types. I'm a little self-aware of it and try not to make it other people's problems but it's definitely true that normal people aren't so involved in real leftism in the imperial core.
This website is definitely going to disproportionately feature the bitter and angry sorts though.
>>2551061Weirdo suburbanites being part of the left isn't anything new
>>2551262I think that's a good first step. But again, all of us in the Third World who are serious about politics self‑censor. For example, I know a lot of people who are likely atheists and they know I'm likely a atheist, but we will never bring up the idea of dismissing religion, we know what will happen if we do. It's not the same as some conservative writing an opinion piece; we would be murdered by a mob for it. This extends to a lot of other issues, if you insult even a local politician, he'll send men to beat and kill you and your loved ones. So the only way to survive is to be in the good graces of another corrupt politician who will only aid you for ethno‑supremacist reasons. These factors almost create an evolutionarily pressure for us to establish an environment that is alter and favors normality
>>2551367See the problem with "Why can't Western Marxists just be normal?" is that historically it hasn't worked.
I don't know what's wrong with the West. Shit's fucked. But being normal in the West just gets shit watered down and incredibly chauvinist. The dogmatism and revisionism and just general assholery hasn't emerged from nowhere. There has to be a better way to deal with these issues than being a cultist or a crackpot definitely.
>>2551367Nah this is retarded, at the end of this path lies the USSR's end where no one actually believes in anything resembling Marxism and it's in their material interest to sabotage and dismantle the state to sell out to foreigners. No Marxist should fetishize proletarianization or careerism, the "norm" of capitalism is one of slavery, bending to it puts you under it's spell and allows it to subsume you entirely. Then your entire worldview becomes self-reproducing because you can just boil any princpled stance against capitalism to someone being "weird" and "not normal". Stop peddling bourgeois captialism normalization, I think people in the first world absolutely have massive fundamental issues but this ain't one of them chief. The revolution will only spring from the nations most advanced in capitalism and the patriarchical communal structures that exist in the third world will eventually be broken down by capitalism like it has in the first world. It is an inevitable end, so instead of trying to normalize such behavior accept that what is progressive for thirdies and firsties is entirely different owing to the different stages of development. Your advice on this matter is not needed nor is it useful.
>>2552021I mean I think "be normal" is bad for the imperial core but I think the USSR was historically progressive in the main. If "be normal" works for Eastern Marxism then it works. But it really just tends to lead to social fascism to in the West.
>>2551983>>2552021>>2552041Do you all hear yourselves? This is exactly what I was talking about. You will not appeal to anyone outside a small handful of educated leftists with this rhetoric. Outside the West, Communist and Leftists faced/face actual political repression that has resulted in death and imprisonment (not just a bunch of Hollywood writers losing their jobs), we’ve learned to be pragmatic. Our political views aren’t driven by what's trending or what we feel is more revolutionary or debate which is more progressive. they’re shaped by what has allowed us to survive, what has kept us from being murdered, jailed, or having our families threatened. This doesn’t apply to all Third World socialist parties, but it does for most, We work with ethno-supremacist parties who are moderately socialist (we know these parties are corrupt and violent). We are 'China shills,'(e know that China isn’t fully communist) and yet we do it to further our aims. So, seeing Western leftists face none of our constraints and still fail time and time again due to your own neurotic nature offends us. It offends us that you’re so politically useless and naive, retreating into academia and then LARPing like you’re fighting some kind of war.
>>2552204And I'm telling you that being pragmatic and compromising with social Democrats has led to fuck all time and time again.
Your main problem is being shot. Our main problem is chauvinism. It's a very different situation. I wish I knew a strategy that would work in the West. But "just be normal" isn't it.
>>2552204>So, seeing Western leftists face none of our constraints and still fail time and time again due to your own neurotic nature offends us.My dude you're retarded.
I dont know why it has to be either/or. CPC and Bolshevik parties both won with less than 1% of the population actually being party members. You dont have to water down your own party to be in a coalition with others
>>2552366We work with ethno-supremacist, corrupt racists who have taken part in ethnic cleansings and probably read their kids the elders of zion. If we can do that, you can comprise as well.
>>2552548The Bolsheviks won 23% in the first Russian elections. More importantly, they had established a popular base within the Tsarist Army, recruiting soldiers, low-ranking officers and then later forcefully conscripting higher-ranking Tsarist Generals. Without these decisions, they would have lost the war and been crushed, a footnote in history. A Western leftist party is nowhere near that popular, and the idea of them having support in their nation's military is as unrealistic as monkeys flying. The CCP started out really small and would have been irrelevant as well, but by that time the Soviet Union had established itself and was willing to aid the Nationalists if they formed a union with the Communists. During this period, they would proselytize soldiers and peasants alike, creating an entire left-wing faction within the KMT, numbering in the hundreds of thousands from virtually nothing. This left-wing would become the basis of Mao's CCP. All of this was the result of pragmatism and political common sense.
>>2552204>We are 'China shills,'(e know that China isn’t fully communist) If you know this, why do you use this tactic? I can understand using "Mao Zedong Thought" as a basis with the intent to pivot towards a more effective socialist strategy later on, but holding up China instead of charting your own course seems self-defeating.
>>2552598>work with>won 23% yes but were they party members?
you say to be normal i think that is good. you say to self-censor. so you dont talk about religion on specific politicians.
this is fine. when people bring up religion ambiguously refer to religious values that align with your politics and say something about regular peoples material needs. you dont need to say hail satan 666 tip your fedora and say god is dead. if people bring up a politician dont criticize him, offer a positive example of something you would like to see. people dont want to see a raging troll say fuck that guy he is a capitalist pig bring on the guillotine etc and if they do want to see that they wont respect it.
>>2551983>watered down and incredibly chauvinistwhy does it have to be this way? being normal doesn't mean agree with reactionaries.
>>2552021>No Marxist should fetishize proletarianization or careerismYou cant find comradeship and pride in doing a good job and helping build a society together? You can't commiserate with colleges pushing papers that you wish your work was meaningful and helped people?
>It is an inevitable end, so instead of trying to normalize such behavior accept that what is progressive for thirdies and firsties is entirely different owing to the different stages of development. What makes you think they are saying something else?
>>2552204>You will not appeal to anyone outside a small handful of educated leftists with this rhetoric. Well they wont anyway because theyre being defeatist and dont go outside. But inside /leftypol/ or in party recruiting you arent really trying to appeal to the masses. It seems like your advice is for individuals, not parties, and I would say that that sort of rhetoric probably wouldn't be in a party platform. But thats sort of what I mean, their outward facing posture should be like you say, normal. They should follow democratic centralism and propagandize according to the consensus and not inject their weird internet hyperfixations into public facing discourse.
>yet we do it to further our aimsYeah that is what progressive is, well depending on your aims. Some people who are liberal think progressive means having the correct social ideas. I think it means bringing us closer to communism which is done through building productive forces and working class organizing. So working with people who want to build infrastructure is progressive, because it gets infrastructure built, even if the people doing it are corrupt. Your goal isn't getting the corrupt politician into the party, its getting schools or hospitals or whatever. Starting a union and bringing workers together to demonstrate collective power is progressive, even if the workers are backwards and reactionary. The goal isn't the workers joining the party, its creating a collective body that can exercise working class power.
>>2552366>being pragmatic and compromising with social Democratscompromising to complete an objective with a coalition group is not the same thing as compromising your principles or changing the party platform to get votes
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch06.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm >>2552600Like I’ve explained throughout this thread, politics in modern corrupt countries is a web of maneuvering and political tactics that can be literal life and death. Although these countries hold elections, they aren’t true democracies in any simple sense. Right now my country is governed by an alliance of two entrenched corrupt parties and a military junta. You can’t meaningfully campaign against them or even publish criticism, people who speak out will have thugs show up at their homes to beat them and their families, while the police look the other way. That has happened in the past and it’s happening now. And I know some will call for armed resistance, but that’s far more difficult and dangerous than many outsiders realize. This is my biggest issue Western leftists, you misunderstand war and conflict on comical levels, they assume the Cuban model (or similar conflicts) can be reproduced by adopting the “right” politics, as if there were a universal key. In reality, any semi-competent military can crush most insurgencies unless the insurgents are exceptionally capable and the state is deeply incompetent and or already collapsing from other problems.
As for our relationship with China, we understand its current complexity. Regardless of what we believe to be the best path(whether it’s Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, or some form of folk socialism unique to a particular party) we all support China. Their acknowledgment of us is the only reason we’ve survived this long. The CCP itself was a minor party in the beginning, but it became the official Communist Party of China at a time when the Soviet Union was a major power, and the Soviets forced the inclusion of communists within the KMT ranks. From there, they proselytized among soldiers, peasants, and bureaucrats, hundreds of thousands of men and women. This leftist faction of the KMT later became the foundation of the CCP. Regardless of what happened afterward, the CCP grew into a major political power within China, and that’s our aim as well.
>>2551061>>2551113>>2551262>>2551983>>2552204I think being "normal" is mostly about having your own house in order (the problem is that this can be very difficult for a lot of people for reasons outside of their control, especially when things are becoming more expensive), and also having a life outside of politics to some extent. Like, I need politics to take care of things that I need, but I don't need politics to be my identity or personality so much. You need to be able to relate to your own context and environment. Like just being a worker among working people, not one of these kids fucking around on Discord on his phone.
A lot of leftists in my experience that you'll encounter online anyways here in my country tend to treat leftism like it's a music subculture, like being a punk or goth or something. There's a certain "fuck these normies" attitude with some of these people. But in fact the dominant ideology is all about acting like an edgelord, look at Elon Musk. He's the richest man in the world and acts like an edgy teenager.
>>2553058>And I know some will call for armed resistance, but that’s far more difficult and dangerous than many outsiders realize. This is my biggest issue Western leftists, you misunderstand war and conflict on comical levels, they assume the Cuban model (or similar conflicts) can be reproduced by adopting the “right” politics, as if there were a universal key. In reality, any semi-competent military can crush most insurgencies unless the insurgents are exceptionally capable and the state is deeply incompetent and or already collapsing from other problems.True!
>>2553058I will admit this though, our pragmatism and more importantly China’s pragmatism, often leads us to ally with or even empower far-right, third-positionist, and Fascist movements. It 's possible that in this century, the first truly popular Fascist parties could emerge with support from China, Russia, and Iran.
>>2552598>>2552612I support the compromises you need to make for your situation. I agree that some people are very weird and that much of it is counterproductive. People way overcorrect for this. But it doesn't entirely come from nowhere given the history of the imperial core and the consistent chauvinism and opportunism of its organizations. It's just a strange situation I don't know how to fully explain.
>>2553272It is also true though that most Western activists are LARPers or social rejects.
>>2553274Like Christ, we have a common problem with dickass capitalists exploiting us, can't we just solve the problem without being weird about it?
>>2550192How could you claim to be from the Third World but still post fucking worthless Standpoint Epistemology dogshit that was created on American college campuses? Because you act like you’re from Cambodia or something but talk like you’re a graduate of (insert american university); like “I am X identity so understand Y” is what college radlibs believe, not Marxists
>>2553272From my own readings, post-WWII you guys (especially in America and the UK) seem to be the exact opposite of chauvinistic and for some reason, you consistently support the least popular and most irrelevant third-world leftist movements rather than the actual popular ones.
>>2553498I come from a family of dirt peasants not too long ago. My grandfather joined the Army as a young man for career purposes, which got his family access to housing and education. He later helped his sons join the Army as well, but this time as officers. I grew up in a military middle-class household. When I was a teenager, my dad got a well-paying job through someone he knew and suddenly our family became upper-middle class. (and I’m not blind to the fact that I’m incredibly privileged in my country.)
During my time at university, I was deeply involved in activism(and that's where I met many Americans) I had a lot of naive ideas (though perhaps not as naive as some of the Americans) that were eroded through the reality of politics in my country.
Now, I work in a field unrelated to professional activism, but I still keep in touch with my old colleagues. Their cynicism seems to grow by the day, yet they continue the fight, and I have tremendous respect for them.
>>2553552Then your reading is very wrong. Or we are talking past each other here.
As the other guy mentioned, it's not something that is quite explainable in the abstract.
One of the pastimes I engage in from time to time is look at how much more Trump is tethered to reality than most westoids. And he is of course famously chauvinistic.
>>2553584I was talking about specifically Leftists, obviously I wasn't referring to the RW
>>2553587My point, such as it is, being that it almost doesn't matter. There is a nominal left wing and a nominal right wing here. The basic assumptions don't differ enough to make a difference to me.
The higher-order principle ordering their thinking is the same.
>Paul Thomas Anderson is less revolutionary than Paul WS Anderson who has made countless Resident Evil movies about the evil of mega-corporations like Amazon that are destroying the world. His hot wife Milla Jovovich doing karate kicks to fight mutant dogs is true world-historic proletarian culture(Infrared Haz) "facts"
>>2539943>Pynchon's book Vineland is way harsher in his critique of the New Left>>2544451>The thesis of this thread [is that western left are decadent for some unexplained reason]Marxism 101: our material conditions determine consciousness.
The post-WWII imperialist privilege of these "labor aristocrat" baby boomer workers turned them into complacent liberals who were the vanguard of the neoliberal counter-revolution cheering individualism rather than collective struggle:
https://gnosticpulp.substack.com/p/we-are-pynchons-fail-sons-and-thot<While there were real revolutionary actions occurring in the sixties, such as the anti-Vietnam War effort and the black liberation movement, a fictional contingent of which (Black Afro-American Division (or BAAD)) visits the hippie counter culture who is occupying a campus where they have formed a sort of temporary autonomous zone known as The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. PR3, in its search for allies, reaches out to BAAD who sends a small party to the seaside campus. BAAD’s arrival cuts a stark difference between themselves and the hippie students. Their discipline and commitment to the movement is immediately evident, for they arrive wearing matching uniforms of “Shiny black Vietnam boots, black-on-black camo fatigues, and velvet-black berets with off-black wide-point stars on them” (230).<BAAD enters into a long debate with the students, who they brush off as “children of the surfing class” (230), that is to say, unserious. The New Deal, one suspects, was quite purposefully not for everyone. It successfully played on race divisions, a favorite move by the good ol’ US of A, by elevating the white working class to a new level of comfort and security, while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.<BAAD sees the students as cos-players rather than revolutionaries. They laugh off the idea that they are on the same side, saying “The Man’s gun don’t have no blond option on it” (231), and in the end they leave with the keys to a Porsche 911, given over by Rex, one of the most outspoken members of PR3, in a desperate effort to prove his radicality.>>2545100>please ignore the fascist regimes killing everyone left of liberals and the decades of infiltration and propaganda from state actorsthat's literally what Pynchon's book is about!
>>2540430>Uwe Bollevery Hollywood gore and violence-normalization psyop creator like Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi is a Zionist or funded by Zionists. These degenerates are GLEEFUL at the idea of (sexual) violence and broadcast it on all forms of media to indoctrinate young people.
Please stop normalizing fascist culture and start rejecting Zionist psyops
>>2539992>de omnibus dubitandum (Marx’s credo)Apparently Finkelstein never stopped being an idealist pseudo-intellectual radlib? He still is a lecturing pseud who rejects historical materialism for his preferred PMC gibberish that is laughably out of touch with the proletariat. Imagine being such a shithead that you feel betrayed that Chinese people want clean water and hospitals more than some childish utopianism about doing "friendly sports" and not having to lock things up lmao
>>2553559>Privileged upper middle class academic former liberal activist whose family rose up by directly aiming their guns at the proletariat shilling for nationalism and telling you how heckin privileged you are as a poor person tens of thousands in debt because you live in the West (POV: the person your arguing with literally grew up rich and is still rich)Funny as fuck to confirm you are a liberal after that gay standpoint shit
>>2553552There's some very weird overcompensation for the historical chauvinism here. In particular, you have the whole Settlers and Maoist Third-Worldist stuff which paints every (white?) worker in the imperial core as an exploiter. Settler-colonialism and imperial spoils are real but the whole history of whiteness and the labor aristocracy as a structure is something that has a history and whiteness is very temporary and fragile. So specifically in the USA, you have settler land-grabs, then you have imperial spoils and the New Deal and it is really around the 1970s and neoliberalism that the whole structure really starts to breakdown as jobs are outsourced. The trouble is that some people think we're still in the 1950s and drastically overcompensate.
>>2547759Jesus. Yeah I've seen some weirdos in the org but its my first time hearing about that.
>>2553718A Western leftist calling anyone a 'liberal' is funny, throughout my posts when did I ever advocate for liberal democracy and capitalism? we don't advocate for democracy, we know it doesn't exist here and is more of a concept. If we were naive idiots like a certain demographic, we would make a big show about how we're going to tear the system down and get arrested, tortured, and killed while our loved ones are buried in ditches. We build real political power, as small as it can be in the most difficult positions.
But I will make one thing clear, when liberal democracy does fall and the world is ruled by strongman caudillos, China will work with them, even if those government are basically Fascist and are openly removing an ethnic group or two and we have learned to accept living under that. It's not easy, but when true violence happens you will become like us, whether you like it or not.
>>2553718like intersectionality, standpoint theory is a recuperation of marxism. marxism is standpoint theory from the perspective of the universal class in capitalism, the proletariat. and intersectionality was originally that identity is reflected through the prism of class. you are the liberal for ceding ground to them
>>2554099So you want people to be 'pragmatic' i.e., opportunistic third-positionists with broad ideologies that are just some mix of socialism and nationalism?
>>2554099>>2555505In inter-imperialist war and politics, communists should fight for revolutionary defeatism. The urban workers should fight against the Democrats and the rural workers should fight against the Republicans.
>>2553552>seem to be the exact opposite of chauvinistici wish they were, but this has never applied to them from what i've seen. whether it's supporting an irrelevant "pure theory" movement of 3,5 people that has existed for 2 weeks best or supporting popular reactionaries, leftcom style "long live the butcher hitler" done unironically they were/are chauvinists through and through
>>2544451>>2545051>>2551061>>2550192For whatever weird reasons, communism tends to appeal to social outcasts in the West. It's simply the reality that communism is popular among the weirdos and not popular among normal people. It's sort of like lumpenprole and lumpenbourg but not in an organised crime sense. Anyhow the reality is that the lumpen left must engage in class suicide. It's no different than how the petty-bourgeoisie in the periphery must commit to class suicide. To an extent, it's the opposite of the Amilcar Cabral stuff.
>>2557084This is just a consequence of western culture’s violent hatred of the proletariat; most of the “weird commie outcasts” are actually just poor
>>2557118>most of the “weird commie outcasts” are actually just poorMy friend, the new left has been dominating academia since the 1970s. I'm pretty sure the problem isn't that Western communists are "poor"
>>2557710I didn’t say anything false, New Left political ideologies and third-worldism have dominated Western social sciences, and they’ve produced exactly the kind of neurotic men those ideologies would be expected to produce
>>2567634>A protest of 7 million wine moms…100% true. Making it a meme doesn't make it wrong.
>>2567634>Did you hear that speech from Jill Stein? Me neither.what dat mean
>>2540833truth nuke
>>2541117not an argument
yes people need to listen to michael s judge deaths corner.
there was a really nice academic looking breakdown of i think gravitys rainbow but i cant find it among all the bs literary "themes" analysis
It's a good movie, their anarchist org kinda sucks
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