cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/604441
Bonus points for implying Parenti is one too.
Another one:
Summarises it better than I could. I used to watch him, along with other content creators, but it’s been a while so don’t remember exact examples. The above hits the nail on the head when it comes to the overarching issue.
The fact Hakim promotes Parenti, if I remember correctly, is one sign of his liberalism. The fact he runs a sub like r/TheDeprogram which is one in a long line of western petit bourgeois leftist meme subs (succeeding MoreTankieChapo and GenZedong) and the fact many of his podcast’s followers there are Dengists is another sign of his liberalism.
The fact he has a (fairly successful) YouTube channel where he makes relatively short, relatively shallow, “snappy” videos, as well as a podcast, is a clear sign of the petit bourgeois nature of the commodity production (“content creation”) he’s engaged in. And I think the fact he has a fairly successful Patreon from which he funds his own survival + the continuation of his petit bourgeois commodity production pretty much by definition makes him a fairly successful petit bourgeois. And the fact it is his political propaganda which directly affords him this class status is problematic to say the least.
E: Please keep in mind that me as well as many others are deriving this stuff from personal as well as collectively experiences and observations. I’m not just randomly thinking oh he’s petit bourgeois so fuck him. I personally spent years consuming leftist content on YouTube and the like and did not learn shit about the philosophy and theory of Marxism or the history of communism. I had a very superficial understanding of things despite spending years watching this stuff and it showed when I started engaging with the sub we’re on right now since people here actually have a more in depth understanding of Marxism. I’ve basically had to start over which is what I’m doing now, I’ve tried to put away all I think I know and started studying Marxist texts, starting from the basics, a few months ago. This is my own personal experience but if you talk to other people here you’ll find it’s not unique at all. Leftist content is legitimately not a good way to learn Marxism, at best if it somehow manages to be devoid of liberalism it’s just an entertaining thing to do in your free time, but even then there’s so little leftist content that is actually revolutionary, exactly for the reasons I described above, that leftist content creators work within the framework and by the rules of petit bourgeois production in the industry of content creation. They are by default driven to produce content that will appeal to western petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats since those are the people who consume things like YouTube and podcasts the most. If your concern is to just consume leftist whatever then okay, keep watching it. But if you want to become a Marxist and an actual communist, i.e. the vanguard of the global proletariat, you’ll have to do better than that.
A life free of the myriad arbitrary stresses capitalism exerts on one’s skull is infinitely more valuable than holidays in Spain or whatever the fuck. The liberals won’t realise this of course, their lack of analysis leaves them with only the fear of losing what they’ve got materially, which in most cases is less than what they’d have under a socialist system.
I think the idea that socialism would make things worse for a majority of “first worlders”, “westerners”, “global northerners”, whatever, is indicative of a lack of grass-touching and typically infantile projection from suburbanite radicals.
Things are really, really bad for the majority of us already. Imperialism is being brought home. Socialism will make worse the lives of exploiters. Amerikan workers may be beneficiaries of imperialism in this way or the other, but the benefits of socialism far outweigh the scraps of scraps the majority of us may be getting tossed.
It’s a dumb idea. It’s unpopular, and should stay that way, partially because it’s so dumb. This image of every settler Amerikan living in a 1500 sq foot house with A/C blasting in every room with Central American immigrant gardeners they pay breadcrumbs to… it’s just an image. A projection.
I think believing too seriously that settlers as a class benefit so directly from capitalism and imperialism is not only misguided but dangerous. It gives imperialism an angle to justify itself, its existence. Contemporary imperialism does not make the average person’s life ‘better’, in the core or in the south or in the periphery. It mostly benefits a handful of people. Its destruction is a giant step in the liberation of all humanity, and life will get better for the vast majority of us.
Socialism is shared wealth, not shared poverty.
Fucking thank you.
Yes, settler contradictions exist here and are violently reinforced by our structures, but shit is not so black and white here. Settler, black, white, Asian, Latino, indigenous, queer, straight… these categories aren’t monolithic in this country and the lines between them have blurred and continue to blur as people continue to live and mate and mix. America is a settler country and settler colonialism is inherently unsustainable. There is more solidarity here than people realize. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the only fundamental distinction between us isthat of bourgeois and prole.
Most Americans live depressing lives. Yeah, we get cheap consumer goods, so what? Our mental health is shit, our food is poison, our cost of living is ludicrous, most of us can’t afford to get sick, we’re working multiple jobs, theocrats are constantly sabotaging any progressive efforts, we can’t go out to eat without worrying about some crazed nationalist shooting up the place. And our media is constantly working to gaslight us that all of this is “fine.” Yeah, many buy into this gaslighting and that’s a major impediment to revolutionary consciousness, but that doesn’t change the material circumstances that USians are subjected to.
The US ruling class siphons wealth from the world, but the majority of us are not the aristocrats we’re made out to be. We have nothing to gain from imperialism.
Came here to comment along those lines too. It’s so unsettling to hear so many Northwesterners talking about their own “cushy middle class lives” but then when I ask they’re drowning in student debt, won’t ever own a home and are afraid of going bankrupt from illness.
Besides having some cheaper non-perishable goods (mostly electronics), I’m pretty sure a majority of Yankees have nothing to lose (but their chains).
And as the USA loses its grip abroad, I have a hunch that the “imperialism brought home” aspect will accelerate quite a lot. Kinda like that other imperial power that lost its international influence.
They’re essentially buying into the USian bourgeois propaganda that capitalism is good for you if you live in the US.
But don’t you think that a substantial part of imperial core workers are being made more indulgent and moderate by imperialism? Imperialism allow those nations to have a disproportionate amount of tech workers, managers, marketers , salesperson etc compared to the countries that are being exploited for their raw materials and industry.
Seems like one big reason why people aren’t revolutionary there is that a critical mass of workers aren’t in the mines or the factories or the fields. Sure as you said most people aren’t rich but the reason they don’t consider change beyond voting for their local Mr Radical-Left is that they don’t experience much violence in their lives. I’m pretty sure that if a people in the core had to farm, extract and manufacture everything they would be more inclined to consider violence since their daily lives would be appallingly harsh to sustain profit at this level of falling profit rates
That’s true, but there are still a great mass of people who are struggling in the US. It’s decent for the average Trump voter, but not for most people. Most people are illiterate and barely able to afford rent, let alone an emergency expense. The US is just a master dampening revolutionary consciousness. Through red scares, bread and circuses, dividing people, and spectacles.
Yeah the US is a hell hole. I was more thinking about Western Europe about the pacified proletariat thingy. Maybe the material conditions of the US will allow a revolution before total economic collapse but as you said, the ideology is insane there so to me it’s uncertain
Maybe so in Western Europe. They do seem to be shifting solely to the right in most countries, while at least the youth here are socialist. Im not hopeful about a revolution here before a “total economic collapse,” but if we have another 2008 and there is no Obama to bail the banks out there may be a revolutionary situation.
I believe the European social-fascist states like Norway/Finland rely extensively on the core to compensate for their own otherwise lacking international influence.
The rest can hardly be accused of attempting to pacify the proletariat in any meaningful way in recent years, embracing neoliberal austerity programs and near limitless privatization.
There is violence everywhere. French police brutalized people who were fighting for their right to retire at a healthy age.
Greece is on fire. The UK’s social safety nets are disintegrating. I have been all over eastern Amerika and saw the same thing everywhere I went. Violence. Poverty. Drugs. Homelessness. Decay. Big cities, small towns, all falling apart at the seams.
Collapse is occurring in all imperialist states. When the octopus is decapitated, the tentacles will readily wither thereafter. Some will take longer than others, some may devise new diabolical ways to retain the triumphs of their plunder. Regardless, they are fated to the same outcome. It is socialism or barbarism. It’s already pretty fuckin barbarous from where I’m standing.
Thing is, the people who get beat up by the police in France are still liberals in the sense that they aren’t working to overthrow anything they just “demand” very loudly and are ever so surprised when they don’t get heard. This violence to them is a “democracy problem”. They still think that they live in a democracy that shouldn’t be overthrown or it might get even worse because, yknow, “stalinism animal farm 1984”. They think that the current bunch of politicians in power are just being the worst they’ve ever seen, that it’s not normal, and that if they scream loud enough things will be “back to normal”.
And those people are the biggest leftists, they often are working in difficult conditions, yes, but not difficult enough to start organising in a mass org that is actively preparing to install a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The reason I am being stubborn about it is that if we consider that ideology in the imperial core is just so strong that there’s no need to accommodate workers just enough so they don’t reject liberalism as a whole, then we’re lost. People still trust the media about AES, if it’s just because the media have found the ultimate secret to make propaganda unbeatable then what’s next? I prefer to think that after the collapse of the imperialist economic model, thanks to national liberation movements and the new world order, then the material conditions will allow for the total rejection of liberalism by the working class
Wtf. “Don’t even try to make westerners like communism because their interests are aligned with imperialism so fuck them all.” What kind of third worldist nonsense is this. Never heard of a class traitor?
They want to post pamphlets about how you suck and are evil but if you suck their leaders dick then the microcell might make an exception for you. Dont you want to be in our revolutionarry club?
What’s their club? Are they sakaists or even more abscure?
They all read settlers in order of most melanin to least melanin. The one white member who claims to be Indian forces the white members to appologize when they get to a part describing oppression.
They stick to the line that Marxism is antisemetic.
They sound exactly like stereotypes of what patsocs think we decolonial Marxists are. What’s their group called?
They were in the DSA for a while but they all left when they wouldnt expell someone they didnt like. They have an unnamed club. They tried to join and dominate a mutual aid group i had, but they left when they couldnt persuade everyone to kick me out for being a racist. Their unofficial leader had a habit of making herself cry and then her friends dogpiling you because how dare you bully her.
I was interested in their ideas before they attacked me, but the act of asking questions such as “where would white people go?” made them think i was a klansman. They would not explain their ideas amd amy question put them in full debate mode.
I actually feel like my ideas were very much in transition at the time and that had they just been friendlier id have developed different politics. Not complaining, since i obviously like my ideas, but it is something ive noticed about myself.
They currently share photoshopped pictures of me on social media accusing me of being a nazi for working at a coal mine and destroying the environment.
Yikes, that sounds like wrecker shit. In terms of “where would the white people go” it’s a relatively easy question to answer if you don’t act combative about it. How do they expect to carry out any of their goals if they’re gonna be this sectarian?
I read that and I have the following questions -
- If white people are not mass deported or made into serfs, and it refers more to reparations, actual equality in city planning and other areas, and affirmitive action, then how is that different than how normal communist goverments did things?
- If it is not different, then what is the advantage of framing it that way?
- Why are the terms so deliberatley divisive and offensive to white people when as far as I can read they really don’t need to be because they aren’t that threatening.
- Why are there so many irl people who actually do act like right wing caricatures? There are other ideologies that have this problem, such as black nationalism. It is interesting to me when black nationalists talk about the Nation of Islam and how it is not the same thing, so that is why I ask you. In fairness, there are people with my opinions that act like caricatures, but in my mind I think I understand why they act that way. People have understood my ideas more when they realize I am not a uniform collecting trust fund baby and that I do actually work a “working class” job and lifestyle.
- I have thought of the concept of a settler as a named group of people interesting, because it does describe USA, South Africa, and other places well. In your opinion, what are the advantages to this classification other than just being accurate? While being accurate is obviously a good goal in and of itself, what are the tangible benefits.
- How do these benefits outweigh Communism framed in more dumb language especially considering the similarities and the intense negative fearful reaction both the terminology and certain wreckers bring?
- How would you respond to someone who told you that they have never met an Indian in their life and don’t want to frame the entire nation around a tiny minority? If your response is hostile, then you are hostile to most regular people. I imagine that this means your response would not be hostile because activism has probably taught both of us that this style of hostility is not productive. This dismissive reply represents how I imagine the “everyman” in my rural part of the country would respond even if he liked you. Because he liked you, he would tell you this with the expectation that you would have a good answer. Without sarcasm, I imagine that answering this is one of the major talking points of your ideology. For example, a very common question I might have to answer from a working class person is “What if I like my landlord and don’t want to be in charge?” It’s important that I have a good answer for that which isn’t just calling them a bootlicker.
I chose the bullet point format to be consise not confrontational. This is designed to save you from reading a novel and save me from writing one being careful with language that would come more natural in spoken form.
I like to think that Sakai would tell them to fuck off.
Explicitly revolutionary content isn’t posted on Youtube because it violates the terms of service. This is why Hakim recommends further reading as part of his videos… If you didn’t do the further reading when watching his videos that’s on you. Explicitly revolutionary content isn’t allowed on Reddit either for that matter, where this poster is originally posting.
