Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations

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The purpose of this community is sort of a "work out your frustrations by letting it all out" where different leftist tendencies can vent their frustrations with one another and more assertively and directly challenge one another. Hostility is allowed, but any racist, fascist, or reactionary crap wont be tolerated, nor will explicit threats.

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Degrowth, drug fetishism, & “anti-colonialism” are used as weapons against the revolutionary cause (open.substack.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This will probably be one of Rainer's most controversial articles to date.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage

Just gonna be candid here. This is not true. We have no coherent vision for decisively challenging the US. Our comrades in the PRC might have something close to a coherent vision that is being developed through cooperation with others in other countries. But us in the US are pretty lost.

Also, and hopefully this isnt too out of left field, but imo these writers gotta think more criticality about these ideas about progressive linear history. It must be pretty convenient to be a prophet of the coming age but it basically serves as apologetics for genocide, not to mention it can serve to actually advance capital by effectively enforcing primative accumulation. This is how the US Empire was built and its how global capitalism reproduces.

I don't see how it's a way forward to building solidarity between proletarians, peasants, Indigenous peoples etc. - which I think is absolutely and fundamentally necessary - by forcing a eurocentric veiw of progress that has destroyed so much already. If we treat this as a zero sum game of proletarian purity and supremacy just to justify our own proletarianization then we alienate other sections of the masses, needlessly make other class enemies, and even strengthen capital.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Big agree with you. Rainer is stuck in a thinking of every action must be "progressive", but fails to see the dialectic of political and economic emancipation in a settler society.

He thinks the American War of Independence was progressive because it broke more feudal systems holding Capital back. Like Marx, he considers it progress on "political emancipation", but disregards the collapse in political emancipation for enslaved Africans and indigenous people. How can the revolution have caused both political emancipation and de-emancipation? Because the emancipation of the settler was at the expense of the emancipation of the slaves and the occupants of desired territories for settlement.

He and the types of this mindset are ready to force "progress" upon the colonized groups. This comes in the form of projects that benefit the settlers at the expense of the indigenous. Like the dams in the PNW that killed off salmon and drowned native foraging land, as well as cultural sites.

The destination of this trend is emancipating the settler nation and doling out "emancipation" to the colonized in the form of us assimilating into their society.