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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Lots of places in the world don’t require a baby succ stage and people just get trained in Marxism right away. Why can’t we just do that and skip the cringe stage?
Because we live at the center of the imperial world where the first step is even getting people to think about things like they are an imperial system, let alone how we in the imperial core are getting fucked by that imperial system.
That being said, Day is completely correct here. But that doesn't mean that JT is wrong.
We’ve been trying the succ dem slow pipeline for 200 years in the West and it hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time for a different strategy than slowly “waking” up Liberals with social democracy, because all evidence shows that most just remain social democrats
A multitude of strategies is a good thing. Different tactics work on different people.
Tell that to all the people here who started their journey to radicalization because of
. Also, JT doesn't advocate for succdemery, he explicitly states it's not socialism and actual socialism is what's needed. The fact remains, one of the best strategies for getting people in the core to even begin questioning the water they've been swimming in their entire lives is to meet them where they're at, then go from there.
MMT is social democracy, they are pretty much interchangeable concepts
I admit I don't know enough about MMT and am willing to learn about where I'm wrong. But from my limited understanding, MMT is narrowly just theory about how economics works without anything prescriptive to say about revolution. You can recognize that MMT explains a lot of the things that western "economists" are utterly blind to (and outright refuse to look at) and still be a dedicated Marxist/ML. Doesn't even Michael Hudson talk a lot about MMT? Should we write him off as not worth paying attention to because of that?
I don't know what JT's views are on MMT, and I am skeptical it even matters. But I do know he's not a social democrat, he's a radical Marxist and has openly and frequently said so. If I remember right, even said so here during the last AMA.
Exactly, it’s talking about how capitalist economics work and how to best exploit your working class under capitalism. Keynesian spending is good for capitalists in the long term, but their short term interests are outweighing their long term ones.
I don’t see the utility in convincing a bunch of people in the imperial core that they should be investing more into the long term interests of the western bourgeoisie. That they should be concerned about stabilizing capitalism and reforming it.
I completely agree. I just don't think that the dude who runs Second Thought is doing that. That channel is among the best there is, if not the best, for getting liberals to start considering things outside of their bullshit worldview. The guy is as at least as radical as most people here, but he's cognizant of the fact that the typical western libs aren't capable of going from supporting "the lesser evil" blue team to calling for a protracted people's war against the US. Pipelines are real, and JT as well as the other Deprogram boys have made an excellent opening for people to jump into it, people who would otherwise just scoff at anything that seems to resemble gommulism.
I think communists should not conceal their views or hide their intentions. I don't support the idea of teaching liberals a fake capitalist middleground ideology as a transition to ours. It's cynical and false. It muddles discourse and makes us look duplicitous and like we don't even know our own ideology or believe in it ourselves.
I think all of that is a gross mischaracterization of what he's doing. Have you watched his videos or listened to The Deprogram podcast? None of what you said is required to meet people where they are at. As I said upthread, I think it's best to have a multitude of different approaches. But to act like going immediately from "socialism is when the government does stuff" to "Death to America" is the only correct way of introducing people to concepts and realities that they have been taught to despise and reject since they were old enough to speak, is naive at best. (Btw, they often say "Death to America" on The Deprogram, only it gets bleeped just barely enough that they won't get instantly banned from every podcast platform.)
If a purported Marxist is advocating for MMT, a non-Marxist concept, either that Marxist is lying or confused. Neither looks good.
Alright, like I said, maybe I need to learn more about MMT, but as I've understood it so far, it's a way of understanding the nuts and bolts of what's actually going on with things like inflation, dollar hegemony, etc. It's not contradicting Marxism at all, just delving into the ridiculous cult-religion of neoliberal economics and attempting to materially explain all those things that are taboo to classic western economists. It's not a refutation of a Marxist concept of economy and it's not advocating for social democracy. Do you think Michael Hudson is lying or do you think he's confused, or is what he talks about not actual MMT?