• 252 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • You wouldn’t criticize a baker for studying and applying chemistry to their craft.

    It’s fun you bring this up because it’s been a debate for a long time: baker theory and practice beats chemistry every day if you want to make nice bread. Baking and proofing are not exact sciences and in most scenarios, even industrial breadmaking, complete reproducibility is unfeasible. When it’s achieved, it’s achieved at the cost of making terrible bread.

    Mamdani won the primary while identifying as a socialist, the fact you can somehow take that win and twist it into a negative, insisting we should abandon the label, shows that you in fact are the one who has abandoned reality for fantasy, the fantasy that the bourgeoisie has won a decisive battle against communism and our only remaining solution is to retreat onto their terms.

    Thousands and thousands before him ran for mayor under a socialist identity. He won because he built a strong infrastructure, he has good communication, he doesn’t care about intellectuals and theory but actual, concrete problem as lived by people and not as investigated by sociologists. The same is true for Die Linke in Germany: decades of swinging around their socialist identity and no result. Purging the old ideologues stuck in their books and 6 months of building infrastructure for canvassing and they tripled their votes.

    Organized, disciplined class struggle can, and will, break the chains of capital. For sure, but old identities and old practices are repulsive and an obstacle to obtaining such result. Organization is built on relationships and relationships are built on commonality. If people do not identify as socialists and think socialists are losers that keep talking about irrelevant stuff, that commonality is not there and it’s harder to build.

    You know what’s the cool part about this new way of doing politics on the ground? That most people are realizing they can leave behind opinionated communists: they make for worse organizers because they question everything and reason from prime principles, they have no leverage, and they have no positional power. We are just collectively moving on from the need of stale leftists to be involved at all. We will leave you larping on the internet, quoting dead people to each other while we do the work.




  • The opposition was there, but the construction of a shared mass identity for workers was a viable strategy in the face of that specific environment, that now has changed. Political strategy is not a blueprint and just because it worked in a radically different environment, doesn’t mean it’s going to work again and, in fact, it failed over and over in the West for the last 40-50 years.

    Identity is a primary driver of political participation and today almost nobody wants to be a communist: right-wingers because they are right-wingers, progressives because communists lost over and over, and even communist more often than not prefer to identify with a specific sect and present themselves as such. Just because an identity and a narrative worked once, doesn’t mean they will work every time.













  • I live in Germany and I’m not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It’s a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn’t have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

    I’m Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

    I don’t get what’s so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.