/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

It was a way for wealthy white radlibs who were otherwise gleefully complicit in the Gaza genocide to use the Palestinian people’s desperate pleas to open a second front as an excuse to have drug fueled orgies on college campuses for a few weeks. Not since CHAZ has the western left felt such triumph

>>2898529
Hello CIA
>>2898520
Nothing really just annoyed uni admin and police. Although stuff like this is small it often evolves into something much more…

Typically their actual goals were to get universities to divest themselves from companies that operated in the occupied territories or had links to the Israeli government. Its a limited goal but understandable given the weakness of organized resistance in Western countries.

>>2898520
Some were successful some were not, i think it's better to drill down in to specific examples if you want to glean anything useful.

Virtue signaled a genocide, achieved nothing, and then channeled all their energy into voting for failed Democratic candidates.

>>2898529
>>2898520
they didn't get anything done and were a larp but i think it's weird that you guys are always harsher on the people who fought against the genocide ineffectively than the people actually doing the genocide

>>2898578
>Virtue signaled a genocide, achieved nothing
like what we're all doing on this board right now?

>>2898636
>they didn't get anything done and were a larp but i think it's weird that you guys are always harsher on the people who fought against the genocide ineffectively than the people actually doing the genocide
They're jealous because the "radlibs" in the encampments did actually do more than the average Leftypoler ever did.

>>2898649
sadly i think to actually make a dent in this problem you would need to throw your life away and really dedicate yourself to a highly dangerous and possibly suicidal cause. but nobody is ever "jealous" of that. like i'm not jealous of the doctors without borders who get drone striked trying to save palestinian lives. i honor and respect them… but why would i be jealous of that?why would i be jealous of the people living in rough conditions and fighting US imperialism?

>>2898649
Most leftypolers are radlibs anyways.
>>2898651
True revolutionary spirit can only exist outside superstructural parameters. This is why modern academia, especially Western academia, has produced NOTHING that substantially critiques or agitates true revolutionary thought. If it did, it wouldn’t be part of the curriculum.

>>2898539
>Nothing really just annoyed uni admin and police. Although stuff like this is small it often evolves into something much more…
What do you base that on? What "stuff like this"?

>>2898636
>i think it's weird that you guys are always harsher on the people who fought against the genocide ineffectively than the people actually doing the genocide
They're not though, getting called a complicit radlib is nowhere near as bad as being a genocidal zionazi demon. You see more critique of ineffectual activism, because it needs to be critiqued in order to become effective and it warrents more discussion

It's like that guy that was asking in usapol a while back why people don't tell US soldiers about the evils of america instead of the people in that thread. Well because they are the enemy and they wouldn't listen or care anyway. Their actions warrent condemnation, not critique


>>2898649
>encampments did actually do more
Such as?

>>2898520
It educated some people, some universities closed their programs and collaboration with Israeli institutions. It was noteworthy for a while and got some people riled up. That's about all the effect I can think of the encampments having. It got some people here and there into organizing as well

The problem I think mostly is that none of it was really effectively pushed through in any capacity. No larger organized force was established, the encampments were basically abolished after one summer. Probably due to the overwhelming presence of libs and anarchist types, who did not want centralized organizational structures that could keep things going

A massive failure. A lame attempt at trying to re-start Occupy without having any of the momentum Occupy did. Students were so urgent about trying to stop the war that they allowed themselves to behave irrationally without thinking about how effective their tactics would be. There's a reason the encampments only lasted a few weeks.

>>2898688
But didn’t it slow down the genocide? I remember Netanyahu calling for dismantling the encampments and IIRC the attack on Rafah was delayed

>>2898520
Public opinion on Israel has changed dramatically and it's hard to believe this will have no long term effects.
>>2898685
Nobody seriously critiques radlib organising. Even those who give the appearance of doing so are deeply unserious. They usually suggest channelling their energy into the same organisational forms that have failed a million times before (LARP communist parties etc) just from a position of smugness. There is no reckoning with the total absence of organisational capacity on the left, no desire to learn from the basic competence radlibs show in simply assembling a crowd. The critique is always masturbation by those who cannot assemble a crowd blaming those who can for their own failure, which they were openly hoping for all along.

The iron law of institutions holds strongest on the left. Better to be a big fish in a small pond…

>>2898700
>Public opinion on Israel has changed dramatically
Because of what is happening in Gaza and the sacrifices those people make to show us that, not because of the encampments

>Nobody seriously critiques radlib organising. Even those who give the appearance of doing so are deeply unserious. They usually suggest channelling their energy into the same organisational forms that have failed a million times before (LARP communist parties etc) just from a position of smugness
Well what is an apt critique then? I'm not saying there has to per say be a central committee or a communist party that came out of this movement, but some kind of organizational body with internal enforcement mechanisms, something to move it beyond signaling to organizing, but imo that didn't really happen and that's bad. From my experience it is the anarchist/radlib larp that's "failed a million times", not the communist larp, but I get what you mean.

>There is no reckoning with the total absence of organisational capacity on the left, no desire to learn from the basic competence radlibs show in simply assembling a crowd. The critique is always masturbation by those who cannot assemble a crowd blaming those who can for their own failure, which they were openly hoping for all along
I mean I was there, I was part of the crowd assembled and it didn't do shit, so then what? This is basically just a personalization of the problem. "Well the critique is moot because you're a hypocrite". Nonsense. It's not about blaming people or smugness or whatever. It's about what can actually be effective, what did this spent energy do and accomplish?

>>2898698
It literally had no effect, and to say it did is pure copium.

>the attack on Rafah was delayed
Source?

>>2898553
This

>>2898723
This is a literal retard thread, honestly it's not even worth wasting the time to discuss the issue that seriously. Clearly these mongs just want to feel superior to people who did something and erase any achievements they may have gained for no other reasons but the petty and psychological.

>>2898724
>erase any achievements
What achievements? Could you name some?

>>2898721
>>2898727
76 universities cut ties in spain alone.
You fags are so fucking tedious. Some of the most inane waste of breath i seriously think i've ever come across.

The encampments were politically significant but strategically insufficient, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favors.

<Did they stop or meaningfully slow the genocide?
No. Israel still invaded Rafah and the US continued supplying Israel. There was no mechanism by which a few thousand students occupying university lawns could directly impose a material cost on the Israeli state. The US did temporarily withhold one shipment of weapons in May 2024, but that was a decision of the Biden administration, not something we can honestly attribute to the encampments.

<Did they win divestment?
Usually not, and Brown is a good example. Brown's encampment did extract an actual institutional concession: the university agreed to put the divestment question through its formal process. Then, in October, the Corporation voted against divestment. So if your metric is "did the administration accept the maximal demand?", then no, they lost that fight.

But that's not the same thing as accomplishing nothing. The encampments made Palestine an unavoidable political question inside universities, disrupted the normal functioning and public image of institutions that wanted to pretend their investments and partnerships were politically neutral, radicalized a layer of students, created organizing networks, and demonstrated that there was substantial opposition to the consensus on Israel. That's real political work. But political visibility is NOT political power. A protest movement can make everyone talk about an issue while possessing very little capacity to force the ruling class to do anything about it. And this is where the "why didn't they call a general strike?" question is actually useful. Because who the fuck was supposed to strike?

A general strike isn't something you summon by putting "GENERAL STRIKE NOW" on a poster. You need organized workers, unions willing to fight, workplace committees, shop-floor organization, political leadership capable of coordinating thousands or millions of people, and enough material leverage that stopping production actually hurts the state and capital. American students occupying Columbia don't possess that power. The missing link wasn't more radical slogans. It was the organized working class. If we want something stronger next time, the answer isn't another encampment with 40% more tents. It's turning protest networks into durable organizations, connecting students to workers, organizing workplaces and unions around the issue, and developing the capacity to actually shut shit down. Otherwise we're just going to keep occupying lawns while the people with the guns, factories, logistics networks, and state power continue doing what they were doing before.

>>2898728
I was genuinely asking dude, no need to get your panties in a twist. Spain is a bit of an exceptional situation, but many universities cut ties around the world and that's great, however in a lot of cases it was not approved, later revoked or didn't go through anyway. The question is if it accomplish anything beyond signaling though? Or is that the beginning and end of it? Academic boycotts have happened before in the 2010's, did those lead to anything?

Israel doesn't really have to worry about places like spain and norway if it'll continue to get millions from American institutes

>>2898732
So the encampments can be seen as a moral support/justification on where the workers could stand for a strike. The problem was there was no organized working class.

>>2898757
Who is this retard larper pretending to be Felix? Fuck outta here

>>2898720
What is happening in Gaza has been happening for decades and nobody in the US gave a fuck. This is precisely what I mean in devaluing critique: not a personal attack, but this constant cope and reaching to handwave the fact that the dreaded radlib achieved something.

A valuable critique would engage seriously with the question of organisational form and it would do so seriously, reaching new conclusions (since all the old conclusions are clearly duds, or else we'd have a functioning organisation by now), it would go heavy on the "now what?" And skip the "that was pointless, we achieved nothing"
(As it happens I'm also hard on "wow, look at our achievements!" Slop unless it's an accurate accounting of defined goals established in advance with obvious failure criteria… Perhaps the ideal critique would be a leftwashed project management textbook…)

I maintain that the spent energy contributed to getting the US, particularly Dems, to see Israel in a bad light and to bring funding for Israel into question. Americans do not care about outside events but they care what other Americans are saying and doing. This is a fairly small win, sure, but a similar one to the anti-Vietnam war students in the best case. That's 50 years of no real progress, that's bleak enough without having to insist it achieved literally nothing.
(Meanwhile most established orgs in the west achieve nothing more than self reproduction, e.g. actually nothing, not even shifting public opinion, which is a net negative as they suck up resources that could be better spent on literally anything else and bedblock alternatives.)

>>2898776
>What is happening in Gaza has been happening for decades and nobody in the US gave a fuck
The deathtoll of the previous military incursions into Gaza were on nowhere near the scale that is has been in the last few years. It's a totally different reality. Counting them all up from 2008 doesn't even reach anywhere near what we've seen in the first month after oct 7th, let alone in the last 3 years dumbass. That you think this is not the reason for the change in perception and it's actually because some students built some encampments for a couple of months is completely delusional

You don't need to cope about "shifting perceptions" look at the reality instead that yes 50 years was wasted and no progress was made. The vietnam war was ended because it became untenable for the US government, not because a bunch of hippies were really upset for a while in the 70s. Harping on about perceptions also reinforces the idea that liberal democracies even give a shit at all what the public thinks about anything, especially in the american context that is again, completely delusional. Short of an armed uprising or mass movement there is nothing they have to fear about the public's perception. That you think the democrats are questioning their funding of israel because of anything is another also beyond insane, they will continue to unquestioningly fund israel indefinitely because it is in their interest to do so, regardless of what the public thinks about it.

>>2898741
>>2898738
Ah yes, the tried and tested move to 'well yes they did accomplish something but it wasn't enough!'
Like i said, tedious, worthless people.

>>2898795
>tedious, worthless people.
Projection

>>2898798
> Why count from 2008 instead of 1948?
Because that's when Israel "left" gaza and began their current regular mass slaughter campaigns, rather than than what we see in the west bank

> Why did the US media and government freak out so much about the students if they were nothing?
They didn't really, they'll just respond negatively to anything critical of israel at all

>Given your elision of the rest of my points I can only assume agreement. Your post could've got much higher effort reply if you'd recognised that and created the appearance of good faith
I addressed Vietnam, the democrats and your idea about shifting perceptions being some kind of achievement in and of themselves. What else was there to talk about?
Seems more like you ignored my responses to those points, care to address any of them rather than making this lazy and irrelevant three point retort?

>>2898795
Has the killing stopped? Has the displacement stopped? Have either the US or Israel been restrained?
A lot of Western liberal "activism" like this is done simply to score political brownie points against domestic political opponents, not to make any structural critique. It’s the same thing with how the Epstein files were weaponized SOLELY to attack Trump.

>>2898801
Not really, I'll give you the only other thought I care to share: there is more to delegitimising Israel than electoral politics. Culturally, fundamentally, they can no longer be seen as a "normal country", an artist cannot tour Israel without making clear to everyone that they are a reactionary. Israel itself cannot export anything cool. Americans entitled to Israeli citizenship will avoid taking up the offer because it's uncool, and the very Americans who would do such a thing are the best and brightest and coolest, the kind you'd desperately want to emigrate were you Israel. Young Israeli creatives of any talent will flee the barren reactionary desert they find themselves in leaving behind only ugly incompetents. That is potentially more fatal in the long run than any removal of explicit US aid. Every time Eurovision rolls around they can be reminded that they are deservedly a parish state.

>>2898804
Israel doesn’t care about any of this. If anything, these "wins" inadvertently help Israel, as it leverages these meaningless and performative forms of protest to portray itself as a victim.

>>2898804
>Not really
Then "I can only assume agreement"

This stuff about the bad vibes of Israel and whatever is irrelevant and I already addressed it by explaining that is because of what has happened in Gaza and the efforts of the palestinians to show us, not really because of the activism here

>>2898805
Nobody believes it to be a victim, however. Hence the plunging opinion of Israel in every survey of public opinion.

>>2898806
Believe what you want to believe, you're irrelevant and I'm confident leaving judgment to third parties capable of reading what I have written.

>>2898807
>Hence the plunging opinion of Israel in every survey of public opinion.
This is deliberate.

>>2898822
If it is, it hasn't gone well. The Iran war has been a comical catastrophe and the US has hardly been spared blame.
(Connecting this to Israel's ongoing gaza-related plunge also requires assuming more joined up thinking than the US currently has.)

>>2898823
>The Iran war has been a comical catastrophe
Too early to tell. The US also hasn’t committed nearly enough resources in Iran than it did when it annihilated Iraq twice.
>US has hardly been spared blame
Hard disagree. American imperialism has been absolved almost entirely, with the focus exclusively shifting to imagined "Israeli control" of US foreign policy.

>>2898700
>no desire to learn from the basic competence radlibs show in simply assembling a crowd
It’s pretty easy to assemble a large crowd of liberals when you have the financial backing of JStreet, ActBlue, Open Society…

>>2898807
I believe the palestinians are responsible for shifting the perception of their cause and not people setting up tents on university campuses in the west yes. My own relevance is also not relevant but nice cope lmao

>>2898835
Most of the blame went to Trumpf. Once he's gone and the next democlap is back in office, all will be hunky dory again with liberalism.

>>2898802
>REEE THE ENCAMPENTS ACHIEVED LITERALLY NOTHING
<Here is an example of them getting their demands
>DIDN'T END THE BOMBING THOUGH DID IT? REEEE- REEEEEEE-
I hate how this website has become a holding cell for the eternal contrarian and the mentally deranged. So arrogant in your dullard ways.

>>2898835
>The US also hasn’t committed nearly enough resources in Iran than it did when it annihilated Iraq twice
That was several decades ago when the US-led world was still in its unipolar era.

Also excuse me for bumping.
Shit liberal/neofascist concern-trolling thread.
Saged, reported, exposed, thread hidden.

>>2898913
What demands did they achieve? Getting Mamdani elected? Lmfao kill yourself.
Tanking Israel’s image to absolve American imperialism from being the true terrorizer of the Middle East is precisely what the ruling elite wanted (and successfully achieved partly thanks to these radlib protests).
>>2898916
The US is still in its unipolar era (I’d argue it has been in the unipolar power since 1945, but that’s another discussion). If anything, the US is more powerful militarily than it was in 2003. Multipolarity is a cope.

>>2898935
What the fuck are you talking about Mamdani you unironic fucking spaz? Can you even point me to the American campus protest who's demand was allegedly 'Mamdani as MayoR!'? Or are you simply off your meds?
>>2898728
>76 universities cut ties in spain alone.
Also probably in your country too, and others.
The fucking state of you people. It's beyond embarrassing.

>>2898935
Did I say "multipolar"?
We're objectively in a "bipolar", global imperialist system, due to the rise of social-imperialist China since the 2010s.
Baathist and Bolivarian countries were leaning on United Russia primarily, not China.
None of the regional countries that chose subservience to China are being rolled over but rather are explosively outperforming expectations. These are Myanmar Tatmadaw, Cambodia vs Thailand, Pakistan vs India and Iran vs US. As we speak China is lapping the US in terms of the heights of computer technology research, even AI, and setting the stage for popping the US economy (which rests on US AI company hype) into an economic crisis, taking the OECD countries with them for x years. Last time that happened, China's economy continued unscathed while benefiting immensely, due to its different macroeconomic approach that's more resilient to FIRE sector instability. But you knew this, I'm sure.

>>2898913
despite complaining about armchair leftcoms these people will always be butthurt over anyone of any political persuasion doing anything so they can continue being a contrarian who genuinely thinks they're better than everyone else for being an anti-social shut in. typical imageboard pathology with some marxist jargon sprinkled in if we're being honest.