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He got me to read the Manifesto and would have hours' long debates with our social-democratic roommate and now this. It's really shaking me up a bit.
He is on the whole defeatist 'nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick the wardog with better domestic policies' tip. I want to get through to him but I am getting stuck.
For example:
i also refuse to not vote my conscience but i figured this time its not like doing this abstract process to pick if id prefer -100 points vs -200 points is gonna matter that much if i genuinely believe itll even be slightly better under kamala i might as well
Heh, that’s nothing. My mentor, one of the best Marxist theorists in the country I grew up in, is now a reactionary who spouts right wing conspiracy theories lol. He got me into Marxism some 25 years ago and was one of the most progressive activists back in the days. Also we’re not from a Western country.
I honestly think that failures after failures of left wing movements globally since the 1990s have broken the brains of many who used to be at the forefront of left wing activism. It also coincided with the period of neoliberalism being spread to the Global South in the form of overseas educated professionals returning and joining social democratic/democratic socialist parties en masse and brought Western liberal ideologies into traditional workers parties.
I sense that many here are probably quite new to the whole socialism/communism thing. It’s sometimes discouraging to think that in another 10-20 years, probably half of your comrades would be fighting you on the other side of the struggle.
This was true for every single revolution (the most tragic example being the Irish Revolution), but as they say: the struggle continues.
assume you mean the easter rising?
i get sad about the civil war most days but i would say in terms of historical knock-on effects / timelines diverging the german revolution is the most tragic.
After watching the survivors of the failure of Amerika's civil rights movement and who they align with, I've come to accept that this will be the case until the heat death of the universe. No one is immune to minstrel-ing out for the crackers.
im beginning to think there's something sinister in the concept of practicality
I don't think it's practicality itself, because practicality dictates, to summarize by a lot, communism. No, I think they're doing the same thing they do with "logic" and "reason": kill them, and taxidermy them into little rhetorical totems they can wave around to give their mad pronunciations the illusion of weight. How many times have we all seen fascists say some ridiculous, out of pocket psychosexual shit and then just say the words Logic and Reason to try and justify it? Now Practicality has joined the pantheon of flayed concepts, not the real practicality of rational empathy and cooperation but the nihilistic, insectoid zero-sum Practicality™️ of genocide.
pragmatism for sure has a strong association with fascism.
Explain?
We must do what is practical, what is "practical" happens to be compromising with Nazis, that type of logic etc...