ni de aquí, ni de allá

Left Tumblr: The thought police want to KILL me for my extensive rape roleplay cinematic universe

What trade union movement? Even the unions that have been seeing a handful of localized revivals in the past few years like UAW, or the longshoreman’s unions haven’t been able to prevent their national leaderships from trying to curry favor with monopoly capitalists or even outright with Trump and asking for a share in any imperialist ventures they propose. The Venezuela episode was one of the most egregious examples of that. Also when ICE killed Alex Pretti I saw almost no one note that both he and his killer were apparently members of AFGE and the union itself had nothing to say about that. I guess if the Amazon Workers Union ever gets off the ground into a truly national movement maybe this general pattern will change but in general I think the 2010s belief that the revival of the left would come from a new trade unionist wave was misguided. The industries are designed in a way that is structurally hostile to unionization. So we have to aim much higher and broader than that to even achieve the basics

I’m always shocked by just how stale and outdated the China discourse is on here. I guess the slop Dengists have no natural predators to keep them in check or even intellectually challenge them since their opponents are usually lobotomized fandomites whose objections to the PRC come from half remembered decade old propaganda instead of any original thoughts. It’s literally the least interesting political discourse topic imaginable bc the PRC is just a bland merchant state that’s opportunistic in the most predictable ways possible. The idea that they would become an active leader in constructing a new post-Eurocentric global political order should’ve died with their failure to take any kind of leading role in pursuit of a ceasefire in Gaza. If anything people should be redirecting their desire for a vicarious revolution to Iran’s geopolitical maneuvers bc there’s much more innovation and transformation going on there than with anything that China has been doing in the past 15 years

I honestly don’t think leftists get stuck in the past so much as they treat the past like a source of action figures or idols to copy instead of a productive place for reflection and critiquing their own inherited assumptions that impede them from originally engaging with their own time. When people obsess over Lenin and the Bolsheviks for example they don’t so much focus on them as figures of the past tied to a specific historical moment (the rise of mass politics, the consummation and crisis of liberal nationalism in WWI, the exhaustion of imperialist monopoly capitalism’s ability to justify itself as carrying out some universal mission) as toys to play out hype moments and aura. If people actually studied any of this stuff in depth, in other words were more fixated on the past, it would honestly be a significant improvement from what people actually do now. It’s important for people to develop a sense of partisan consciousness and part of it is knowing where they stand in the long duration of history

I feel like the people who get stuck on this are dinosaurs of the 20th century honestly. As far as the original debate I think it was really more like a debate centered in Europe between those committed to an older style of democratic mass politics and the Enlightenment vision that accompanied it (humanism) and a newer generation who were skeptical about what total mobilization did to the nature of politics, seeing an element of conservatism and conformity in it, and wanted to think more flexibly about politics and focus on everyday micropolitical tactics though also often lost sight of the “big picture” out of skepticism (poststructuralists). And ultimately both of these were products of the crisis of the mass party form in the later 20th century and the debates that resulted from it. There were plenty of people who took positions that were associated with one while technically advocating the other. For example Frantz Fanon was a humanist yet he made critiques of Western civilization mostly associated with the poststructuralists, and Henri Lefebvre began as a kind of humanist but then became one of the first of the poststructuralists but did so by following the concerns of his humanist phase. I find these kind of more independent figures to have much more long lasting significance and interest personally although there’s still a historical weight to revisiting the intellectual side of the crisis of mass politics in the late 20th century to deal with the impolitical situation we’re stuck in now