cucumovirus

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

What he expects is for the western left to take itself more seriously if it's to have any success at all, and dodging critique by hiding behind "it's a site for memes" isn't doing any good to anyone that actually wants change.

Not "expecting too much" from a link aggregation site is like not expecting too much from any western communists. The masses are online and online spaces are not separated from "real" life like that. No one is saying we can't have any fun, but at the end of the day If we don't take ourselves seriously why should anyone else take us seriously.

While I do find lemmygrad a bit better than hexbear in regards to this, it also still has an abundance of low effort meme posts and a lack of serious discussion.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

Doesn't specifically have to be a lemmy instance, but any online communist space could be a serious place where anti-intellectualism is not tolerated, and where discussions with proper sourcing could lead to actual debate where certain issues are actually settled. Instead, now you have most people just yelling out their opinions with no sources, not bothering to actually engage with the counterpoints being made, and any criticism is taken as a personal attack and kts substance is ignored. No actual debate is being held, and any issues that come up stay unresolved and get brought up again and again with the same results.

What communists in the past did in newspapers and journals, we should be doing online.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

It's not about individual comms, and there is, of course, a place for being silly. The problem is that the "silliness" "spreads" to the entire site. Look at how people are "arguing" against Roderic's point on the hexbear thread about it, in what's supposedly a comm for critiquing bad takes. Most of the comments are random jokes, and most of the actual written out ones are blatant lies, strawman arguments, or similar (some of the really bad ones did get removed as far as I can tell). The same exact tactics anti-communists regularly use to shit on AES states or our ideology in general.

The actual origin of it is western anti-intellectualism which we have to overcome in our organizing. Of course hexbear won't be a vanguard, but we're not doing our job as communists if don't fight against these tendencies.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

Those communits weren't somehow "at the forefront of organizing" before, and then decided to start publishing articles. They became the forefront of organizing by publishing these articles, having these debates, and putting the things they figured out into practice. This is a centeal thesis of Lenin's What is to be Done?

Yes, the current western left is not going to form a vanguard tomorrow, conditions will still need to change. But at some point a vanguard will need to be formed by western communists, no one else can do it for us. These barriers aren't permanent, and they can be overcome. A part of that includes ideological struggle and debate within communist spaces.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

In today's world, socializing online is not some distinct separate thing, it's an integral part of daily life for basically everyone.

Yes, the western masses benefit from imperialism, but they are also exploited and it's the communists job to successfully link the struggles against this exploitation with wider anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World.

It is easier to just sit idly in the status quo, but do you find that to be an acceptable level for communists to be at? We're not talking about the masses in general here, we're talking about self-identified communist spaces. I want and expect more from them, and a critique of their current errors is a first step to changing them.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

Lemmygrad is a more serious site, I agree, and that's why I use it instead of hexbear. However, I do still think we can improve. I've noticed a decline in the frequency of the type of theory discussion posts that I really liked when first coming to lemmygrad, and an increase in low effort posts, probably coinciding with the reddit exodus last year.

One thing I really like here is that certain matters are considered settled in the lemmygrad community. For example, each time a new "is Russia imperialist?" thread pops up, prople quickly link to past threads with excellent answers or post another version of those answers. I just think we could do that sort of thing - debate, come to a conclusion, adopt it as our stance backed by our arguments and proper sources, and present it when asked - with many more topics which still just "hang in the air" somewhat.

cucumovirus , 2 months ago

The GPCR is, of course, exaggerated in the netflix show. Here's a twitter thread about it, and check out this screenshot for a more direct critique and comparison to the Chinese version.

You can also read the CPC's own critique of the GPCR in this thread. (original source)

cucumovirus , 7 months ago

In pretty much every post here and on hexbear that's defending Hakim's post I see at least one of a few assumptions taken as true which aren't.

Firstly, no one here is criticizing the Palestinian resistance and the forms it takes. We're criticizing Hakim's post. Hakim has positioned himself as a Marxist educator and taken on the role of spreading ML theory. With this come some responsibilities, namely to share actual Marxist analysis. When he departs from this, he'll get rightly criticized for it.

He can be religious and do what he wants. No one is criticizing the fact that he's religious. We're criticizing the fact that he brands himself a Marxist educator with Lenin as his picture and then shares idealist analysis like in this post.

Secondly, that his analysis is not idealist, when it really is. This has nothing to do with Islam specifically, it would be true of any religion, but stating that a religion is what's driving resistance is simply idealist. As Marxists we know that it's the material conditions that are the primary drivers of both the zionist settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance. We, of course, don't neglect the superstructural aspects, with ideology and religion among them, but we don't make them the primary drivers of resistance. We begin with the material.

There have been similar resistance movements throughout history, some religious and some not which have persisted just like the Palestinian movement. As Marxists we understand why that is, and that, while in each particular case the particular ideology had an impact, ideology as such is not the driving force behind revolution.

As Amílcar Cabral said

always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for things in anyone's head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better lives and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.

What we (Marxists-Leninists) should be spreading are works through which you can learn about settler-colonialism and resistance to it in general, and works about the specific conditions of Palestine. No one's even saying we should totally ignore religion, but it cannot form the basis of our analysis, and we cannot center it above the material.

An example of a better (in my opinion) post about Palestinian resistance right now is this thread by Roderic Day.

Also, as Marxists, critique is what we do. No one is beyond critique, and especially not our fellow comrades. Such critique and discussion is how we arrive at correct theory (and practice) and consolidate around it.

cucumovirus , 11 months ago

He asks the question "How can we make radical change in America by saying ‘Vladimir Putin is our leader?’, which is a very salient point. He goes on to say that we should strive for socialist leadership in all of our countries. What is so off about that? Seriously?

Nothing is wrong with that in general, but who is he saying it to? Who are these people that only want multipolarity and simp for Putin? His call for socialism is good, but ignores the material reality of today's world in which new socialist construction is not possible without first the decline of US hegemony.

I don't like Shea and think he's quite problematic, but your comment about what Kim is saying is, I think, not a good portrayal.

but just thinking about it for like 20 seconds, this obviously wouldn’t mean supporting reactionary states against the US for the pure sake of it. Would Kim il Sung have supported Hitler? Obviously not.

The USSR and China did ally with other capitalist and imperialist forces against Japan and Germany in WW2. And today's world is largely split into two camps - the US and China. Critical support given to Russia (which while being reactionary still currently plays a progressive role globally in the struggle against US hegemony and is allied to the world's socialist countries, though only out of necessity) is not the same as "supporting Hitler". Putin and Russia today are not equivalent to Hitler and Nazi Germany.

As Losurdo puts it:

we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.

cucumovirus , 11 months ago

I wouldn't say anyone here is attacking the moral route to veganism, especially on an individual level, but I think we as Marxists shouldn't rely on it. The materialist argument is much stronger and more widely applicable. Moral veganism can also turn into a form of chauvinism directed towards various societies, especially in the third world, which do consume some animal products but aren't part of the capitalist meat industry and get all those products from animals they keep or hunt locally.

That to me forms a big distinction. On the one hand, denouncing all animal products as bad and, on the other, focusing the problem on the capitalist meat/animal industry. The moral argument doesn't lead to useful practice because it implies problems in individual choices of consumption and not systemic issues stemming from the production side. Many of us do come to communism for moral reasons initially but then we learn the proper materialist arguments for it which turn communism from utopian to scientific and inform practice.

cucumovirus , 1 year ago

The Lenin quote given at the start is taken entirely out of context. It looks like he just searched for a Lenin quote that would fit his flawed analysis.

Here are a few more quotes from the very chapter Rainer takes his quote from. Note that these are quotes from '"Left-wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder' which was written after the revolution in 1920.

About the necessity of the struggle against the reactionary leadership of trade unions:

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. The struggle against the Gomperses, and against the Jouhaux, Hendersons, Merrheims, Legiens and Co. in Western Europe is much more difficult than the struggle against our Mensheviks, who are an absolutely homogeneous social and political type. 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. Political power cannot be captured (and the attempt to capture it should not be made) until the struggle has reached a certain stage. This “certain stage” will be different in different countries and in different circumstances; it can be correctly gauged only by thoughtful, experienced and knowledgeable political leaders of the proletariat in each particular country.

About working where the masses are:

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.

Rainer's idea of allying with the movements he proposes is flawed in two parts. First, he doesn't call for the struggle against the incorrect and harmful ideas of those movements. He points out some flaws in some of the socialist parties in the US which do exist but his analysis here seems to favor the reactionary parties over said socialist parties. To me it sounds like he's just trying to send "the masses" to these reactionary movements without considering the level of organization, class consciousness and political involvement of "the masses". The situation is not the same as at the start of the 20th century or at the end of World War 1. The working class then was a lot more organized and various communist and reformist parties existed with actual mass support. Today, especially in the West, this is not really the case.

Second, he doesn't really talk about reaching the masses. He talks of allying and supporting these reactionary movements which he just assumes have some mass support already and he assumes that the support they have is from working class people. Neither of these can be taken for granted.

The movements he wants to support are not actual reformist movements, they don't propose any significant reforms to the system, they barely even propose particular policies that they want to adopt. Reformist movements, while flawed, have historically had genuine mass support. The support of the working class that had at least some consciousness and wanted to systematically improve it's conditions. These types of movement can be useful for communists but again, a proper strategy needs to be made. Blind support doesn't lead anywhere.

Movements like RAWM also aren't working class movements. They fall into a group of astroturfed movements that are supported by various right-wing elements. I don't know much about Cornel West specifically, but from what I saw since he announced his campaign, he isn't really supported by the working classes of the US and I don't think he's really connected with them either. He's a (relatively) privileged life-long academic and is now attempting to approach "the masses" from above. "The masses" didn't choose him so they won't be radicalized when his attempts at "reform" fail. As far as I can tell, he also doesn't really have any reforms in mind, just calls to empty phrases like "truth", "justice", and some calls for policies like "a living wage" which aren't elaborated on at all.

Two very timely short threads by Roderic Day on this "purity fetish" phenomenon:
Thread 1
Thread 2