I’m glad!

This is completely unrelated, but now is a good time to get into shooting paintball guns at pieces of circular glass about 2 cm in diameter.

The political compass exists so that right libertarians can feel good about themselves and call everyone else names. It was created by a right libertarian. It’s really just a “how far away are you from (racist) Ron Paul?” map along two axes. And the vertical axis was invented just to distance them from the Nazis that they inevitably end up supporting anyways and in order to claim to be on equal liberationist footing as anarchists despite supporting the primary vehicle of oppression, capitalism. Right libertarians are not, in reality, libertarian at all. They never saw a CEO’s boot they didn’t want to lick.

When comparing anarchists and Marxists or communists, authority isn’t really a distinguishing factor. It is about theoretical understanding, the goal towards which the group organizes, and what structures are used to advance that goal. Anarchists always have internal authority to deal with, there are always people with outsized impact and decision-making power, and when larger than 10-20 people, there is a need for hierarchy to actually accomplish anything for more than a week.

What is different is a few other things.

One is that Marxists tend to declare a party to be the best apparatus for advancing the goal of revolution, with decisive mass action by that party, while anarchists focus on free association and spontaneous waves in participation. There are aspects of each of these tendencies in the other, but it is distinguishing.

Another is that Marxists plan for a need to defend the revolution against the bourgeoisie both domestically and internationally and that this requires organized industry and a coherent internal politucal program. Anarchists do not always plan on defending the revolution at all, but focus on building communes here and now, during the revolution, and after the revolution. Some do plan on defending the revolution but only in a context where these collectives are primary over organizing industry or oppressing thr bourgeoisie.

When describing those who are “advanced”, just think of it as Marxists being big nerds thst treat revolution as a discipline of study, a science, that is geared towards application: doing the revolution in the best way you can so it is more likely to succeed in all aspects. Just like anyone can become advanced in a science by accumulating degrees and publishing scientific results, the big nerd revolutionary can become advanced through theoretical study and intentional organizing work coupled with constructive self-criticism.

It is those who are advanced in this discipline - not just with experience, but also theoretically, e.g. being class conscious - who Marxists identify as those most ready to lead revolution. And realky, it just makes sense, as a simplified way of saying it is that those with the most exoerience and who are most knowledgeable in a more correct political understanding will make better decisive and have more impact.

The label is also used by contrast. It follows from an acknowledgement that when revolutionaries looked at their real capitalist societies, most people would not have this experience and knowledge. In addition, left formations are often banned or otherwise suppressed before they can gain mass “advancement”. This is where vanguardism cones from, it’s why it exists. It posits that you can function as a suppressed, even an underground, organization to foment revolution by specifically recruiting and developing those who are most “advanced”, which will run a gamut of experiences and theoretical understandings, with the goal of having outsized influence via leadership positions in, for example, organized labor. And this can be done in many forms, including a union leader working with your front group rather than being a member of a Marxist party.

In lieu of this, when people try to organize without leadership by “advanced” members of the working class, you get the same mistakes and failures over and over again. It takes experience, theoretical understanding, constructive self-criticism, and a means by which to retain and use what is learned through each action in order to make increasingly better choices. A lack of “advanced” members or an appreciation of “advancement” is why so many of the US’ left movements spin their wheels and offer only false catharsis rather than material change.

I will leave one final negative example, which is that the most “experienced” person, in this Western context, is often the last person you should listen to. Their experience is usually in failure and often this means they have become resigned to just trying the same thing over snd over again because they have found a way to rationalize failure as a success instead. And because of their experience, they can take up a lot of space for wrong ideas. This distinguishes experience from “advancement”: the quality of experience matters but so does having clear eyes about our own work and the societies in which we are embedded.

BLM is a good example of what happens when you don’t organize with any structure or leadership, actually.

For background, BLM flared up as riots and then protests and people’s occupations in response to racialized police violence, of course. It was a reaction and not organized initially. Organization grew from on-the-ground experience as individuals and orgs shared spaces and developed political programming and actions. But this all happened locally. There was no national group that could legitimately claim to represent BLM, as every city had their own set of orgs and organizers. There was overlap, of course, as many of tge participating orgs spanned multiple cities, but no org or coalition could legitimately say, “these are our demands” at the national level.

Now you might be thinking, “hey, TheOubliette, what about the literal national organization called Black Lives Matter that published demands and spoke to the press?” Well, that group is exactly what you tend to get in the West with a left leadership vacuum: they just asserted they were in charge and started taking credit and raking in donations to their NGO. That national org was full of NGO veterans looking to advance their careers, not on-the-ground organizers. It was essentially a grift / cooption.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to see this kind of thing happen a few times. For example, there was a space that pledged horizontalism but then whoever brought a bullhorn to the next action ended up being the real person in charge. They weren’t selected to do that, few people even knew who they were. But the crowd did what they said and people got arrested due to their bad instructions. I’ve seen other situations where a group declares itself representative unilaterally and begins speaking to the media and making demands or negotiating, and they end up saying and doing things completely at odds with the wishes of the collective. I’ve also seen situations where people tried a bit harder to have some structure, but ended up creating disconnected teams for different domains (press, logistics, action planning, security, etc) but the whole project blew up because one subset of one team declared themselves the only voices that mattered, using self-tokenizing and very inconsistently applied (most people of that identity there disagreed with them) liberal identity politics to justify their power grab. The project ended because they used those shenanigans to throw away leverage and told everyone to go home - it was too difficult to reassemble because communication methods were not solid and most attendees were not in organizations

This is a weakness that arises from having weak, inexperienced, and poorly-structured groups, especially when they create a leadership vacuum. Many things work very well autonomously. Mutual aid and black bloc, for example. But for a larger organizing effort, there are key functions that must be carried out on behalf of the larger group in order for it to actually succeed. There needs to be a deliberation process so that decisions can be made quickly enough without being illegitimate by being non-representative. There need to be people that organize the deliberation process itself. There need to be people that ensure the decision is carried out. There needs to be a way to have some kind of community discipline around some of the decisions - like what to so if a subset of people start doing their own thing at odds with the community decision and putting people at risk. Assuming the organizing effort has external components, like it is intended to change something or confront another party, you need to develop demands and messaging and then have people who deliver and share those things. If you don’t have those things, the organizing effort is vulnerable to the disruptive factors already (and more). Decisions will get made and people won’t understand them and will get very angry. Some people will try to enforce a decision and those who disagree will literally fight them. Without people designated for communication, you will be represented by whichever person gets in front of a TV camera first. Capitalist media is oppositional. With Occupy, they used the fact that the various people talking to them provided about 50 total demands to then suggest that Occupy had no realistic ides of what it wanted to accomplish. There is some truth to that, but mostly this is a consequence of having no media discipline.

Anyways sorry this comment is so long. I wanted to add a lot of context and examples so that it’s clear I’m not being blindly dogmatic, but speaking to the fatal weaknesses of these efforts.

The first source for this claim: https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1895632/

On June 29, 2023, a briefing on arms supplies to Ukraine was held at the UN Security Council at Russia’s initiative. The civil society briefers Russia invited included journalists Max Blumenthal (USA) and Chay Bowes (Ireland).

They provided facts about the Kiev regime using Western weapons to deliver strikes at civilian facilities in Donetsk and to send subversive groups into the Belgorod Region. They supplied evidence that billions of US taxpayer dollars have been invested in the corrupt schemes of fuelling a war against Russia in which Ukrainians are being used as a tool. They concluded that the Western elites and defence industries were the only ones to benefit from the escalation of the conflict.

Oh no, not journalists providing information at a public briefing! Don’t they know it’s time to do baby’s first McCarthyism!?

Unfortunately you have a censor-happy mod that doesn’t like the basic history here being described but if you’d like to discuss that history I’d be happy to continue on another instance.

GOP gives their base red meat. This is because it is compatible with their donors’ interests. This contrasts to Dems, for whom delivering for their base runs counter to their donors’ interests.

What is deliverrd by the GOP is marginalization, of course, but this is still a more direct and materiap response than what the Dems do, which is just PR.

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?

There’s nothing wrong with insulting intelligence.

I was pointing out how it’s funny to make basic grammatical errors while doing so.

Tankies are fucking idiots.

Excellent contribution to the discourse.

It did not contain any misinformation, just basic facts about what was happening in Ukraine in 2014 - Euromaidan, separatist movements, far right consolidation, etc. Things reported on constantly by mainstream Western press for 8 years. There is at least one overzealous mod that is removing my comments, comments that contain no misinformation, and with no requests for clarification or any actual challenge to what I said.

Feel free to ask me this question on a less censorious instance.

Fall for what? Correction on a meme and pointing to basic political history in Ukraine?

Seems right to me

Sorry, what exactly is the lesson to be learned from this election, in which the candidate who more vocally supports the genocide won?

If it must be fully spelled out, it is that you cannot rope people whose politics is premised on empathy into supporting genocide and you will lose unless you demand better. If you want to fight against the forces of reaction, you cannot triangulate towards them, you have to actually have a semi-principled political program, not one premised on tokenization and “vote for us or the other guy will kill you even more”.

Every fucking thing she said was scrutinized […]

You are saying this in response to people saying they wouldn’t tolerate genocide.

That’s cool, you got what you want now and Gaza is becoming Israel new beach front.

There have been no policy changes. This is your ghouls running the show, 13 months of unconditional support for genocide. If any part of “the electorate” owns this, it is yours. You did not step up and say, “no more, that is too far”.

Though of course the party does not care about you and they are thr ones making these policy decisions with donor input.

I hope you meet a Palestinian that got family killed someday and tell them that you didn’t support a genocide supporter.

I already know many Palestinians that have lost family. I organize with some of them, their views are my views on this. You clearly aren’t embedded in this community because you assume everyone else is just as detached.

That’ll make them feel funny inside.

Palestinians are not your rhetorical toy to play with when you run out of ways to handle your cognitive dissonance for having sold your soul to support someone that lost anyways. Please take some time to do self-criticism now that you have objective proof that you were not being strategic or smart about this, as you clearly gave up on being morally correct.

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So let me get this straight… Your position is that instead of being a pawn of the Democrats who are at least pushing back against Israel

That is not what is happening. It is the exact opposite: Democratic politicians presided over and supported this genocide with near-unanimous agreemeny with one another. Israel, again, receives unconditional material and diplomatic support from the Biden-Harris regime.

I think I was clear on this, so you are really juat revealing your own lack of familiarity.

I should instead be a pawn of the Republicans

Am I telling you to use Republicans’ thought-terminating clichés? Am I telling you to vote for Republicans as if they are a lesser evil?

Maybe you should ask me more about what I am saying because you are taking serious liberties.

Israel knows if they just cut loose, they would face repercussions from the rest of the world,

Israel already cut loose. They are ethnically cleansing Gaza, reinvading and bombing parts of the West Bank, invadjng and bombing entire neighborhoods in Lebanon, and trying to pick a fight with Iran. The “rest of the world” is nearly unanimously against Israel on paper, with the process held up by the US and some of its lapdogs, though of course Europe also wants in on the imperialist action.

You are already seeing what the rest of the world can do when Israel cuts loose. It is shamefully little, but we should also take inspiration from those who do stand up. From the Palestinian resistance. From allied grouos in Syria and Iraq. From Iran. From Hezbollah. From Yemen. And from South Africa for doing nearly all of the work re: the ICJ.

The US is the dominant superpower and it supports Israel to the hilt. Work to undermine it so that the scakes can be tipped.

What do you think will happen to Palestine as a country

Palestine is not internationally recognized as a country. Palestine is an invaded and occupied regikn, with its people facing settler colonial genocide by ethnic supremacists.

if Trump succeeds in removing all the guardrails

What guardrails? Again, Isrsel has unconditional material support from the US. They recently murdered an American in thr West Bank and the US is giving is the “investigation pending” slow walk. None of “the rules”, even the unwritten American exceptionalist ones, apply.

and gets to fulfill his wet dream of being a dictator?

lol that’s not going to happen. I will bet you any amount of money.

Oh my, my type? Goodness, you know, I didn’t see your type either now that I think about it! When I went to protests and meetings in my community

Speaking about this as if they are over and not something ongoing says a lot. I’m leaning towards this just being a lie.

, I’m afraid I didn’t see you there, I only saw people who we trying to actually help people, you know, the ones that knew they were between and rock and a hard place, but actually tried to not hand the government over to a blood thirsty racist, while making sure the community was informed in what steps to take should he win and are now continuing to rally and make their voices heard instead of “not VoTiNg fOr GeNoCiDe” which, you know, kind of got us here.

I have never seen a pro-Palestinian protest with that message. That just sounds like you projecting your armchair liberal takes onto other people.

The people who organize pro-Palestinian protests are socialists and allied Palestinian groups, occasionally JVP. And while JVP is milquetoast and weak, even they aren’t that mealy-mouthed.

But perhaps it’s scary to stand for a belief off of the internet, but I’m unfamiliar with the feeling because my mom didn’t raise a removed.

I wonder what slur you used while calling yourseld a good person.

Don’t worry, we’ll handle it, sport. You just stay safe inside, okay? ♥️

It id also telling that this is the only part of my comment that you replied to.

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