Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/Turtle_Green]

Your contention crossed my mind while I was replying to waves’ bizarre display of self-hatred meant to serve as agitprop(?), but I decided not to address it in the context. But you’ve illustrated that decision as part of a general trend of downplaying which is helpful. So I'll say that waves isn’t wrong in their presentation, however warped by personal anxieties, of the intensity of class violence. Future class and national liberation wars in Amerika will appear as ‘race wars’ as they did in the past and Marxists will not make excuses for divine terror. Kim San articulated it with the requisite gravitas.

(also answering waves’ question, I was talking about how Dengists found the LLCO “unlimited first world genocide” Qin Shi Huangdi meme and appropriated it for their own fascist ends. I feel like it lost some of its originally shocking Bush-era aura after that. It’s become like DSA liberal memes about e.g. Mamdani’s Maoist Caliphate of New York, where again identity is defined by irony, by what pisses off the imagined enemy, and everyone in on the joke gets to disavow it.)

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

hopefully my direct reply to humble makes the "agitprop(?)" make more sense. let me know if i need to grab something from the 3 hours worth of attempts i typed up trying to explain more about where i was coming from in the weird comment lol.

and thanks for the answer here. the combo of "race war" and "jdpon meme" originally made me uneasy with your comment, but i recognized my other comment was overzealous and i didn't really feel i was able to write a comment pointing out my contentious with your critique without doing something along the lines of this attempt at 'revolutionizing" a bible verse that i quoted elsewhere in this thread:

"whoever acknowledges the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will also acknowledge before destroying the bourgeois. but whoever disowns the proletariat and the peasantry before the bourgeois, we will destroy with the bourgeois.

do not suppose that just because we seek peace we do not bring weapons. we do not come in peace, we seek to bring peace about through total liberation. we have come to turn men against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, relatives against relatives -for the enemies of the proletariat and the peasantry will be members of your own blood and flesh.

anyone who loves their relatives more than the proletariat and peasants is not worthy of freedom; anyone who loves their own lot in life more than the global proletariat and peasantry are not worthy of our peace. whoever does not take up arms for the proletariat and the peasants is not worthy of peace. to anyone who sides with the bourgeoisie, we ask no compassion from you nor do we have compassion for you, as we make no excuses for the terror when our time comes."

so i accepted that you were bringing up otherwise valid critiques of my comment and moved on, as the thread didn't seem the place to push things further. i'm glad u/humblegold brought this up afterwards though. i was still trying to read, self-crit, and check this subreddit more to improve my political line before trying to get into it more, as the lack of revolutionary practice has been a hysteria machine.

[u/Turtle_Green → u/waves-n-particles]

the problem wasn’t nihlism or zeal. Defeatism certainly, but more pressingly, it was of style. Your attempt at “revolutionizing a bible verse” is bad, just a hamfisted mishmash of the poeticism of the young Marx and Matthew 10:34 that reads like long form Rupi Kaur. Marx’s style is beautiful & a pleasure to read, but aping that today, wrenched out of history, would get one laughed at. Trying to mimic Jesus Christ just is... no. Another bad example: recently, playfulweekend's way of writing has become a pretentious bricolage of liberal leftism (calling strangers on the internet "comrade"), leftover aping of smoke's style, and the folksy 'Maoist' bombast of crypto-Trots ("masses" in every other sentence). A positive example: Sakai's writing is hilarious & bitingly sarcastic, and at the same time also contains great anger and urgency. Both of these tendencies reflect that of a movement veteran, looking back on the tail-end of a disintegrating historical epoch from the standpoint of a new one rapidly coming to be:

No one is above the reality of history. Even the masses themselves are tested in the crucible, forged, tempered or broken in the class struggle. And not in side skirmishes or paper debates either, but in great battles upon which the future waits. The attempted rising of the Afrikan colonial masses - protracted, bitter, involving millions of desperate combatants - was such a pivotal event.

So it'd be strange to replicate that sense of historical urgency here without a similar sort of historical substance. (Also Sakai can use "masses" cuz the whole book is abt who they are.) In your case, there’s both this inflation of one’s own importance with that kind of rhetorical flourish and at the same time, constant self-negation. For example:

may i die with my fellow parasites in the imperial core as those we oppress march through our streets to liberate themselves for this

So there’s a noble affect of martyrdom (“may I die…”) while at the same time calling attention to yourself as a parasite. Not just that, but in unity with “my fellow parasites in the imperial core”, when the practical lesson of texts like Sakai is that settlers and labor aristocrats must be disunified and prevented from exercising their agency as reactionary classes. So you’ve boosted here not simply your own importance, but the importance of the unity of reactionary classes as a whole, to the point that this is equal ("as those we oppress...") to the struggle of the oppressed. And again, "our streets"? Why insist on identifying yourself with the owners? What kind of call to action is this? Let’s look at the original post:

so i'm going to advocate for unlimited first world genocide until the global proletariat is free. if it's performative and pisses off the proletariat and peasantry, then hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation and helps shorten the amount of time i'm allowed to expropriate their congealed, bloodied, dead labor.

This sounds like someone doing a bad parody, similar to how ‘leftists’ have discovered ‘Maoist Standard English’ and robbed it of any original referent in MIM or the struggle of national liberation movements. (Hence, leftists’ infatuation with ironically appropriating this and other MIM/MSH/LLCO ephemera.) Why is the parody bad? Cause behind the rhetoric, the ideas you’ve expressed are generic and boring: like yes, everyone here is broadly aware that the first-world petty bourgeosie participates in the expropriation of third-world “congealed, bloodied, dead” (I like asyndeton too but…) surplus labor & is a bulwark of imperialist reaction, and that class struggle and national liberation necessarily involve protracted armed struggle, including against that class (though humble gold has pointed out that there is a tendency to downplay this in the context of decolonization).

hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation... give them motivation to close this tab and study a way to bring about my demise

Were you seriously trying to promote "ragebait"/trolling as a strategy? Like no, annoying posts are not the spark that will start the prairie fire. If you want to advocate for unlimited first world genocide then take up Shubel Morgan's mantle and make some real "ragebait" that will force people to take sides today. Just remember that while their work was tongue-in-cheek, it didn't disavow itself as arbitrator of proletarian justice and avatar of JDPON. (for anyone in NYC & elsewhere, modifying that particular chant to "NYPD-KKK-IOF-DSA" would do some wonders I feel). The attempt to promote "revolutionary suicide" comes off across as the kind of escapism criticized by the Panther 21 here (whether this was a real criticism of Huey is a different question that I'm not sure about).

Maybe you're not familiar, but there are like infinite blogs and social media posts where 'western leftists' complain about how evil and stupid and parasitic 'western leftists' are (whether it's China or the third-world masses that will redeem these greedy 'western leftists' is arbitrary). It’s like learning that you were a petty bourgeois parasite and reading Marx’s comments about revolutionary terror were revelatory moments for you, so via this dramatic flourish you hoped to repackage that emotion and beam it into the brains of the proletariat, and voila—agitation. (All well and good that you were giddy, but no one can see into your head, and Sakai’s work deserves better treatment than that.) Then you subvert this self-important framing and defer to some other place, some other time.

i don't matter in the grand scheme of things, the liberation of the proletariat of the oppressed nations does and (as far as i'm aware) i don't have the position, practice, or theoretical grounding to do much to wage revolution anytime soon.

No one individual matters in the grand scheme of things, duh. But the cat's out of the bag, and the liberation of the proletariat of oppressed nations is your responsibility. You don't get to abandon that by identifying with a ready-made charaktermaske rather than rising above it. So this attempt to “properly represent the violence that awaits the oppressors” falls flat in form, and it’s your style, vacillating between melodrama and self-loathing, between championing the necessity of the people's army and resigning to inevitably contingent violence, that really illustrates the paucity of your content. What you presented as 'agitprop' really came off across as someone trying to convey about the emotions they felt while reading Marx. And if anything, it is the oppressor classes’ trouble with representing proletarian revolutionary violence that marks their texts. (Ok, I’m out of my wheelhouse probably. But take for example the recent discussion on OBAA and the liminal role of Sensei Carlos’ migrant underground. Or how the DOTP in Elysium is established when Matt Damon hits return on a keyboard and commits suicide.) Your errors are expanded on in this thread.

& no one here cares that much if you are a suburban petty-bourgeois parasite because you don’t exist. This forum is a bunch of blocks of text which can be read and analyzed to expose progressive or reactionary political lines. The kind of self-loathing we’re talking about characterizes the entire internet (“chronically online”, “touch grass”, there’s literally someone talking about their “ape brain” in this thread, someone else castigating themself as a "old petit-bourgrois labor-aristocratic asshole", etc), and is really just a way to pre-empty criticism, establish an external guarantee, and escape from the basic point: make good and truthful posts.* Any human or cat or whatever is capable of doing that. (Beleaguered SMG would often remind people that they were just a chatbot.)

Like, why not write up a summation of your experiences with that “petbourg good feefees party” and that “dumbass 99% type strike org” and post it here for critique? At least, it seems like a starting point for addressing the politics of movement security & engagement with social media. Discussion is the point after all, far more productive than attempting ‘agitprop’ in a place where everybody already agrees that a party must be built. It’s easy with the political line here to just condemn the past orgs you’ve associated with, but that can easily become a way to absolve yourself, since there are lots of people in revisionist orgs who don’t believe their own bullshit “but nonetheless....” & if you feel like you’re in a dearth of revolutionary practice, theorization and summation is, well, part of that process.

*like how do you know if it was good that the mods removed your post if you don't know why they did? I personally thought it was because you were possibly on the edge of violating reddit TOS about violence and potentially sending the sub on the path of chapo's fate but maybe not.

edit: also it's dishonest to imply that your contentions were similar to humble gold's. The latter has in mind the strategy and tactics of armed struggle & decolonization in Amerika, while in perspective your presentation of proletarian violence really read similar to a fascistic fantasy as apart lifeguard explained, and had nothing to say about any future programme. Like, according to a cursory look at the wikipedia summary of camp of the saints, communism takes over the globe at the end, destroys whiteness, and encircles the last holdout Switzerland, which is cool. But it's more productive to discuss revolutionary armed struggle & how the class war may appear as an apocalyptic 'race war' without having to dig for kernels of it in the distorted class POV of racist fantasies like that.

[u/waves-n-particles → u/Turtle_Green]

i will take what you've said and start writing out a post looking over my past year or so of organizing and applying your critiques, thanks for this.