So I agree that the left indoctrinating onto left ideas is naive. My major contribution (and fight) lately is that we dont need people to repeat our ideas we need people to think for themselves, critically and scientifically. If people do that, we will become leaders ourselves and the partybwill emerge from the practical work.

Propaganda in a Leninist sense is essential to the party, and I am a partyist, but asking questions, criticizing my own thinking and others, is what made me a leftist. But in this way, I am skeptical of theory first approaches, probably because I’m so critical of myself.

It does show that leftists start out progressive libs, but that is a structural fact, not localized wrongheadedness. The ambient idealism of the left is one of our nastiest, most liberal adjacent habits. You’ll notice I use the word practical a lot. Attacking the ideology itself as an individual is crank shit. The right is able to attack ideology because of the economic base they already control! This is where your theories just dont match up with Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony, which the right understands better than the left.

Counter - propaganda is worthless without a party or org to carry it out, not just critical words but critical action. In order to convince people of ideas, the circumstances in which people got those ideas has to change. Thats happening now with trump and the feckless Dems, but what it is changing into is decidedly not leftist, and prob won’t bring better ideas without strong left organization to win some shit. This is happening in small ways, Mamdani victory, Sanders pres campaign, George Floyd 2020, Palestine encampments, etc., but we are still in the quantitative change phase, we have a lot of work to do and running out of time to do it.

The right isnt just spreading ideas, they are buying up and getting control of every possible way that ideas spread. They own the platforms. And what do they do with them? Their ideas are wildly unpopular yet they are still winning. It isnt because their ideas are food, its because they are changing the world and making it worse. This is extremely confusing to people who lack a materialist analysis and a clear political direction, and the problem is much deeper than just condemning liberals. I’d rather soften liberal vitriol hoping a few of them dont become repulsed by sectarian leftists; rather than become a sectarian in response to workers repeating the last political ideas that made sense to them, especially when many of them not completely terrible when you remove the private property component. Unfortunately, when we do try and remove the private property piece, the question becomes, well than what will replace it, and we won’t know until we build it democratically.

There’s no horse and cart. There is objective reality and subjective reality and the two are intrinsically bound up together. You can use abstractions to suss them out, but that’s all they are. Confusing abstractions for reality is exactly the problem we inherit from enlightenment - liberal philosophy that creates all these dumb political consequences for the left. We say, “oh we need to make a party like the Bolsheviks, look how well that worked!” And then never bother to understand that the reason the Bolshies were effective in ways that the SRs and Menshies weren’t is because the Bolshies actually went and talked to people, held conferences about their findings, made plans based on their findings, took those plans back to the workers and peasants, made changes – and then carried out those plans. The moment they stopped that, and let bureaucrats dictate how the world worked, the revolution didn’t last 5 good years.

Sectarianism is structural, it’s due to having our movements wiped out and having to start from scratch. Trying to blame people for what is in their brain seems to me an underdeveloped sense of how praxis functions as a object/subject relation. Contextualizing liberalism as a set of ideas and not a structural expression of economic power of the ruling class is, imo, wildly wrong headed. People have bad ideas in a bad structure. Fight the bad structure, make something new, dont be a sucker. Arguing against the ideas created by objective reality isnt putting a cart before a horse, it is the difference between the idea of how a horse and cart works, and how it actually works, having the expertise to do a good job of putting them together, and getting where we actually need to go.

And if all this makes me come off as sort of a crank, you wouldn’t be the only one with that opinion. People are contradictory because conditions are contradictory.

Been absolutely crawling through Black Reconstruction, but it’s extremely well written and informative.

Joe Abercrombe is great. His books only get better. I haven’t read his YA stuff but I’ve read all his other books and love, love, loved every one of them.

If we are going to go forward with this, we will have to agree

Agree completely.

separating the capitalist from liberal ideology

I do not believe in separating the two, I dont believe they are separable. Even beyond that, I tend to de-emphasize economics, for better or worse. I dont think that is an imperative for our movements, but a matter of personal style and experience.

However I think in your analysis you are separating capitalism, the economic base, from liberalism, the ideological superstructure. It reads to me you want to discredit the ideology, which is great, but this isnt possible without affecting the economic base. Unions defeat liberal illusions and create the basis for worker ideology by organizing on economic and verifiable material gains, never has a worker organization been successful by condemning liberalism as its primary strategy in and of itself.

The reason elites and alienated workers adhere to liberalism is because it validates lived experiences, or personally benefits an individual. So the real difference between the two kinds of liberals is economic, not ideological. Its kind of like there is two liberalisms, liberalism for capitalists is freedom achieved through private ownership, or more acutely, power through mass exploitation. All liberal values of equality, human rights, progress, etc., are secondary to the private property question, I think you’ll agree. But to the workers, who benefit materially from peace, unity, solidarity, liberalism is the rights and equality stuff. The dual character hides the private property issue from workers, which is how it subjugates us ideologically. But the basis for the ideology is material, not just ideas.

I dont really see the difference between being openly cold toward leftist definitions like communist and socialist; and being vocally anti liberal toward workers. If you go down to the protest or the picket line and ask a union member their political alignment, they might tell you they are liberal, or (in the USA) a democrat. But there are many conservative republicans who will also fight for better work conditions. This shows that worker politics are material, not ideal; and that political difference between workers is local rather than universal. But if you tell that liberal union member that liberalism is like a fucked up evil ideology, they won’t understand it any more than if you say that they should be communist or socialist. I dont see the distinction except as a matter of perspective.

In order to teach worker-liberals a theory of change we have to convince them first that change is possible. And to do that there needs to be democratic organization of the masses, effective campaigning for change, and to win changes. Once people experience this, it strikes at the falsity of liberal ideology, but attacking the ideology itself is too abstract, too philosophical, as an approach all on its own. I think it is just as alienating and esoteric as terms like “communist” or “bourgeoisie”.

The most important pieces imo are theory of change, and the organization to carry that change out, verifiably. Capitalism is essentially an organizing of the ruling class against the workers, and workers organized against the ruling class has a distinct character that is worthy of a name.

However I concede that I often use commie talk when it might not be effective, or directed at the wrong audiences. So I intentionally I find work where people challenge me for it. It can be a pain, but it keeps us honest.

Also I talk to and work with normie workers all the time and not all of your characterizations are supported by my experiences. Different people of different ages, in different places, at different times can all effect how theyll react to certain messaging. Determinations of what workers will and will not accept must come from evidence and democracy; and the way to determine this is by talking with workers, studying reactions, The last person who told me not to use terms like “socialism” also told me people in her neighborhood lived in $700k+ houses. She couldn’t understand that other workers are actually turned off by being too moderate, and want radical change. Both things are true, but this adds complexity to the work. Her observations were grounded in fact, but she wanted to universalize her local conditions, because her experience taught her incorrectly that her experiences were universal. Specificity is essential to concreteness, and concreteness is essential to develop conditions for change.

I think we make an error if we dont consider the left as workers too. Sectarianism is historic and structural; and capitalism creates socialists. The progressive ideals espoused by liberalism find their practical expression in socialism. Like you said, almost all of us grew up in a liberal milieu, and many socialists start out as progressive liberals. Personally I became a socialist once I realized capitalism could never deliver the progressive values of liberalism, which I believed in as strongly then as I do now.

I might be over emphasizing parts of your arguments so that it appears to me that your focus on ideology is slightly too idealist to be practical. So please correct my miscalibrations. But I enjoy this conversation and deeply appreciate the great detail you’ve gone into describing your positions.

Thanks for describing some of your ideas. The “liberals” I was referring to are more like other working class normies, not thought leaders. My actual political strategy is to split the liberals, like the petty capitalists will have to be split by developing the conditions of struggle, along a material class basis, not with ideas.

Im not defending liberalism, I just think a lot of liberals are working class normies who aren’t as theoretically developed as you are. I’d say you are anti theory from your comments but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. You are contradictory, just like the rest of us, and in contradiction there is the possibility of change.

I follow your definition of ideology, it’s a good working definition. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is worth reading if you haven’t. But dont go off YouTube, nobody understands his actual theory. I can send you the essays im referring to, if interested. Only a working class normie, who learned critical thought by criticizing our own experiences could understand it. I’d like to say we have some things in common, I’m no academic and I’m too much of a contrarian to get along with party leaders. Im as self educated a person as youll ever encounter.

But i think there is advantages to being openly socialist, and I think that condemning theory and theorists is a far cry from being correct, especially when someone commits themself to being oppositional and judgemental at the earliest sign of possible disagreement. Intellectual elitism isnt a quality of the working class, its a quality of the bourgeois liberal. Mirroring elitism with “negative” elitism is playing by the same rules with different referees. But also people have to come to it on their own. You can’t convince a liberal to be leftist, something has to change for them, so I think we might agree that there is little use in bending over backwards over them. But I think we can represent a positive alternative, well meaning liberals can be won to socialist principles. But they can also end up disaffected fascists or apolitical bullies. It really takes a party, not an individual; but the party is made of individuals, so there is a dynamic to navigate imo.

I’ve read The History of the German Revolution by Pierre Brouè, so I wasn’t thinking about the spartatacist uprising like an event, more like a 10 year period, so thanks for clarifying. There are a lot of really great lessons from that time, although unfortunately, many cautionary tales. But one thing that I took from it is the necessity (inevitability?) to split the major moderate factions, like the split between the SPD and the USPD, and later, the KPD and the KAPD, into actual fighting forces for the working class. Unfortunately, it shows how crucial education and deep roots in the working class are to success. Maybe if the Spartacists had done more to prepare for the 1917 split then the working class wouldn’t have been so disorganized in the following years. The Vorwards uprising was a result of police agitators taking control of a disorganized movement, Rosa clearly saw the problems with a putsch, and sure enough, the failed action led to the death of her and Liebknecht at the hands of fascist police. If they had survived, the left may have actually seized state power, and Luxemburg’s sharp criticisms of Bolshevism may have lead to a dramatically different outcome in Russia as well – not to mention suppress the rising fascist movement in Germany.

Two questions, you dont think reactionaries are wrong about liberals? What they hate about it are its progressive qualities, by and large they support private property. You reject private property, do you reject communism? And if so, then what?

Maybe you’re right. Why do you think so?

Why are you so hostile? I’m being sincere. I’m walking through what you said so that I’m sure I understand. I asked you to say more, and you did, and I just want to confirm I understood it. You don’t need to come in so hot.

I didn’t mean obtuse like you’re intentionally doing that. But I asked you a question and you answered it with another question that described what you were presumably talking about in the negative. Like I have to figure out your meaning by trying to suss out what you dont mean. Thats what I meant by obtuse. If I “got all that” its because I took great care reading and trying to understand your comment. No one else who responded to you bothered to give a damn about your meaning.

You clearly have no clue what my philosophy is. To be clear, I am someone who has read many theory books, and understands them. And yes, I am a Marxist. But I dont think reading books solves the ideology problem you are alluding to.

Reading theory is something that leftists engage in because we want to change ourselves, and we do this by learning to understand facts. There is lots of leftists that just substitute a new ideology, but I try to keep myself honest. There is no author I’ve read, no org I’ve joined that I haven’t openly criticized, while working to improve the theory or the org.

So when leftists say to “read theory” I think they mean “you should work to improve yourself” which is nice but its a value judgement, it’s more idealism. If I’m doing certain kinds of work with people, then yes I need us to be on the same page with our strategies, tactics and definitions. But I dont usually tell people to read theory, I usually just quote/explain the theory in want them to understand. If we can’t do that, then imo we dont actually understand it either. More idealism, someone “should” do this or that. Thats not leftism, leftism isnt a social club, it is the struggle.for liberation.

My leftism is essentially practical. I believe that people learn by doing with other people, and when people do new things with new people it changes things in the individual and in the objective world. All the books that I’ve read, if you really condense Marx into a phrase, that is it. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it”.

In my experience a leftist is someone who does the work of liberation, not someone who has read certain books and says certain things a certain way at certain times. When people do the work they often read the theory. Sometimes when people read the theory they do the work, but I’d rather start with the first person than the second. To be honest, I’m much more the second person and its harder to fight idealism with ideas than it is with experiences. So someone who has their mind made up can read theory and it just confirms what we already think. If it doesn’t change the way we act, if it doesn’t engage us in the work, then the theory is just ego, a waste.

As for 1919 I have no clue what you are referring to.

And for idealism and ideology, these are complicated concepts and I dont think we are on the same page as to their meaning. If you’d like to explain what you mean a little better, rather than just asking pointed questions in a way that does not make clear at all what your beliefs are, that would be helpful. You dont talk like any leftists I’ve ever met, so its really hard to determine where you are coming from. Can you just name something that you believe other than “liberals bad”? The way you talk about liberals is not qualitatively different from how reactionaries describe liberals.

Well this is where I need help because I don’t consume very much punditry. I read books and articles written by historians, organizers, and activists, and I talk to people.

You have a way of explaining your idea that is a little obtuse. You’re posing questions in the negative, and I need explicit and concrete.

I asked what you mean by leftists missed the boat on liberalism. You ask how many leftists begin by describing private property relations as the foundation of their politics. I would say, none, except perhaps to say they reject it. Then you suggest, again in the negative, that leftists use the talking points of “leftist elites”, I assume you mean leaders but name no specifics, use talking points from “a hundred years ago” that are ineffective against most regular people’s learned conceptions about how things work.

This leads me to believe that you adhere to a definition of liberalism that is similar to a lot of leftists, where you consider all capitalist ideology to be liberal, so progressives are liberal, but also conservative rightists are liberal because they all believe in the classical liberal principle of freedom and progress through ownership of private property.

The second point you make is that leftists aren’t doing enough to relate to the masses, and we are stuck in the past with our rhetoric.

Are these accurate assessments of your positions?

Assuming so, I don’t think you’re saying anything too controversial. I still don’t know what boat has been missed re: liberalism. Marx agrees with your second point:

the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

And Marx might be an example of an “elite” but he wasn’t peddling in narratives. I would argue that the narratives are our own, perhaps based on the work of those who came before. But the success (and failures) of Marx, Lenin, idk name a bunch of ppl, was their ability to understand and act upon their own conditions. However I don’t like terms like “dialectical materialism” to describe our analysis, its just so clunky and difficult to understand when the theory itself is a fairly natural combination of concepts people are usually already aware of.

My personal view regarding “liberals” is that often leftists like to use one definition of liberal, the private property one, itself borrowing heavily from Stalinist “social chauvinism” theory, to condemn anyone to our right. I’m not sure if you’re condemning per se, but I do think you are subscribed to this very flat theory of liberalism.

The main problem with liberals is their idealism, their inability to distinguish abstract ideas from concrete reality. But this is, as you mentioned in your second point, a problem with the left as well. Also progressive liberals might get a little skittish around maximalist demands like abolish private property, but in my experience they often do not define their own beliefs according to private property relations. We can argue that these relations are implicit in their thinking, but this is another error which causes the left to categorize people rather than convincing them.

Usually progressive liberals define their beliefs as a philosophy that defends human rights and stands up for people who are in harmed, and defends them from the people doing harm. These are leftist principles! There may be structural issues preventing these well meaning progressives from seeing deeper, or affecting change, but their hearts are leftist. And I don’t believe that blanket condemnation of liberalism reaches these people any more than quoting Mao at them. I think leftists are often idealist about liberalism, we think of it as a abstract category rather than a historic social relation.

Whoosh

Say more. What do you mean the left has missed the boat on liberalism?

At first I thought it was whited out but now I think its intentional and tbh I fw this

I have an Irish comrade who is currently doing an AMA on Reddit, and I stg every other question on there is like “why do you love Russia? Why don’t you consider NATO to be selfless defenders of social democracy? You make me sick”

He’s not even pro Russia, he just has a nuanced criticism that also sharply criticizes NATO

What a trip.

I responded with what I thought the actual miscommunication was about, after reading over the thread that you were supposedly referring to.

Maybe it helps point you in some worthwhile direction.

I read through the thread linked above. You are confusing “conservationism” with “conservative” Like we have to conserve, and so we should be “conservative”. Not a terrible mix up.

In any case, the debate on the left is:

Planned degrowth vs. Eco-modernism.

And I think it is correct to prefer a strategy of conservationism, that is degrowth, vs " keep building “productivity” which is eco-modernism.

If in fact you are more attracted to the degrowth model, look into Jason Hickel. if you wanna research the other side, or feel affinity toward eco-modernism, you might check out Leigh Phillips. Here’s a primer for the debate.

If you repost your arguments I will try and answer them. I have mucho respect for Cowbee but he is just one comrade. I’ve gotten into it with him over a few disagreements, one time that stands out to me he accused me of being an imperialist stooge or something.

If that was my only encounter with him I’d have a negative view of him too, but luckily we’ve had lots of really good conversations too. We are both Marxists but come from different traditions so that can create a little friction. Despite that I believe he is someone who does real work beyond his commitment to educating himself and people he meets online. That practical basis makes all the difference in people imo. Even the best groups suffer from internal contradictions, and we all gotta learn from somewhere.

Try and give people a break. Also I’ve found that sometimes people with a lot of questions are able to ask every question except the one thing that is bugging them, and its hard for us to really suss that out and make the askers feel as though their question has been heard and addressed. Asking questions is really hard, especially concerning social movements whose core principles are suppressed by the media, and whose history has been distorted and misconstrued in order to make the colonizers and exploiters appear blameless for their role in violence.

But seriously if you have any questions about history/socialism/marxism you’d like to work through, I’d be happy to try and address them.

Yeah I guess when I mean “being critical of abstraction” I mean like theoretically critical, not anti. I’m against abstractions being used incorrectly. An abstraction can be neutral, good even, but if misapplied it creates all sorts of problems.

My main criticism isn’t people using abstractions to understand, its not checking to see if the ones we are using bear out in real conditions.

I think there was a time when almost no one thought in terms of abstraction. And now its like the only way that most people think. Well like in said I have a lot of work to do

Being critical of abstraction is kind of my thing these days. IMO most people are more concerned with making or adopting abstractions that convincingly pass as real, because the abstractions validate people’s lived experience, rather than dig into the actual concrete conditions.

The real mindfuck comes when we realize that people can be totally idealistic in their understanding, and simultaneously very effective at certain kinds of organizing because they have more experience with a domain of practical work than they do with theoretical understanding of that work. Because people can be kinda negative its obvious to us that people can have seemingly good theory but really bad organizing instincts, but the other side always stands out to me as well.

Anyway, always good talking to ya comrade

“Look at the asteroid” is what a tankie would say /s

I think about the stuff he wrote about Italian theater every time I think about live nation and ticket master.

I think another thing I deeply appreciate about Gramsci’s writing is that given the fact that his prison notes never had to like “bend the stick” the way other leaders did. I think it gives an unusually long tail of relevance for his work, because he was working with abstractions, which reemerge over and over throughout struggle, and not messy revolutionary conditions.

But its incredibly sad what happened to him. Anyway thanks for your insight, I have an urge to help clarify these theories – it seems like 90% of the analysis of Gramsci I’ve read has come from Neolibs and reactionaries who can only comprehend his theories cynically (the other 10% coming from DSA’s very good Mountain Caucus). But imma need to sharpen my pencil a bit I guess

Sees an asteroid hurtling toward earth

don’t worry about that, the real problem is craters, which is caused by unicorns

Asteroid getting closer

Fucking unicorns creating disinfo about the cause of craters. Asteroids are indifferent and couldn’t be responsible for catastrophe, proving craters are caused by unicorns

Society becomes divided into two camps, an asteroid cult and people trying to stop the asteroid

the asteroid cult are a bunch of loons but the anti asteroid people are falling for unicorn propaganda, therefore are themselves morally equivalent to malicious unicorns

Asteroid hits earth, leaving a giant crater

Fucking anti asteroiders and their shitty craters.