#socialist strategy

[truth4ourfreedom]

[workersolidarity]

This is what people DON'T understand about Marxism Leninism

You organize your workplace, your community, your Union, every aspect of your life you organize along CLASS LINES.

NOT IDEOLOGICAL LINES

I don't need to agree with someone on culture war issues to fight the Capitalist Class by their side.

The point of doing this, when you put aside your differences to fight those that are FUCKING you daily, a feeling of comradery begins to form between those fighting against the Capitalist system.

THIS is when you change hearts and minds!

That's why we call each other comrade.

It's a feeling of brotherliness and sisterliness that forms and before long, the very people you thought you'd be fighting against, are fighting by your side to unfuck society.

When you have that connection with a person, it's no longer so difficult to compromise with them, to find levels of understanding that weren't possible before.

But it starts by learning to be mature enough to know when to shut the fuck up and accept people's differences, even their prejudices, in order to turn their attention towards beginning to fight against the Oligarchs, corrupt politicians and bosses fucking us all equally.

Many minds will be changed through this strategy.

And when the Revolution is over and the building must begin, it is then that your Socialists can turn their attention to fighting to build a better world from the rubble of the old.

And if you've worked the class strategy right, all the way till the end, and not got caught up in infighting, you will stand a chance of winning enough hearts and minds to build a new Socialist world and defeat anyone standing in your way.

[resistancemarxistblog]

asking u cuz u seem at least a few notches above ur average tumblr “communist”. what (if anything) works of kautsky are worth reading?

The Class Struggle, The Social Revolution & The Road to Power

Will add that Kautsky made some hard breaks with Marxism through the 1910s and 1920s (this is why Lenin and Luxemburg criticize him for), so late Kautsky and early Kautsky read like two different people sometimes.

Also recommend Mike Macnair's Revolutionary Strategy (he derives a lot of his politics from Marx, Kautsky and Lenin).

[decolonize-the-left]

why do you think everything is propaganda?

I don't think everything is propaganda (math for example) but if someone is trying to persuade you of something with the goal of changing your view/opinion that's propaganda.

It just so happens there is a Lot of propaganda in politics because Everyone wants you on their side so they're Constantly trying to entice you to join them... With propaganda.

And you can propagandize anything.

Voting importance, who to vote for, morals you think people "should" have, etc.

All propaganda:

Another example would be:

Democrats making all conservatives out to be extremists threatening human rights while making themselves out to be the "party of progress"who could stop them even though Democrats were the ones elevating alt right candidates. This strategy is actually why Trump won, but thanks to an amazing propaganda campaign most people don't know that and even if they did, they likely wouldn't believe it.

You know because "Democrats are progressive so that doesn't make sense, you must be lying or misinformed."

Instead non-voters, "stubborn leftists," and Republicans get the blame for the 2016 election. But even republicans are pissed about it- theyre losing their ballot slots to extremists.

I understand the knee jerk reaction to this is "good the Republicans are losing"

But I need you to look around at 2023 and realize the very real contribution and responsibility Democrats have at the elevated extremism.

Look at the effects left in Trump's wake.

Have you ever thought to look at Democrats to blame? No.

That's their propaganda at work.

Democrats are Good at propaganda which is why I call it out. People don't see democratic propaganda as propaganda so they aren't consuming their politics critically anymore.

[jonesposting]

Some better news for today, the Austrian communist party saw a huge increase in votes in last Sundays local election in Salzburg putting them on tack to establish a second communist mayor in a major Austrian city after Graz! They are on this run partially because they are the only real leftwing opposition in the country but also by standing by their commitment against capitalism and, probably most importantly, their commitment to provide local services like tenant organising, minor financial aid and legal advice for tenants!

Organising works!

[nzcronerd]

me thinking about literally any ship from disco elysium: this too is dialectics

[personal-blog243]

People do NOT respond to guilt and shame very well, especially when it comes to political activism.

On one side, people do not respond well to being told that they were wrong to vote for a candidate that wasn’t left wing enough because they didn’t have any better candidate options and don’t have the time, energy, resources, or courage to risk getting arrested or killed for doing direct action. It causes feelings of guilt, shame, and resentment.

On the other side, people don’t respond to being guilted into voting for a shitty candidate out of desperation for damage control. It makes you look like a pretentious snob. They don’t like feeling as though they are being gaslighted into praising mediocrity.

[ordingdrublene]

Wartime strategy of Ording Drublene

fill A bucket with waste (bullet casings, escrement, small ruble bits, small people bits, fluids, expired rations) and catapult it at ya enemies

if you don't know what your doing neither does the enemy

Laws of War are more of suggestions

Fear is a good weapon screech violently and often (also crawl around like A fast zombie from half life 2)

[zololacan]

BIng ai Image creator with the prompt being Jean Bauldrairds essay "requiem for the media" and its other subsections as the prompt in different styles

Requium for the media, Enzensberger: A "Socialist" Strategy,Speech without Response,Subversive Strategy and "Symbolic Action",The Theoretical Model of Communication,The Cybernetic Illusion. Art Deco, Russian Cosmism, Anime,

Requium for the media, Enzensberger: A "Socialist" Strategy,Speech without Response,Subversive Strategy and "Symbolic Action",The Theoretical Model of Communication,The Cybernetic Illusion., Cinematic

[yourtongzhihazel]

Striking, marching, even parliamentarism (at specific points) are all methods of class struggle whose primary purpose is to build proletariat class consciousness and worker power. However, they are not a substitute for socialism nor a solution to capitalism and they are consistently hampered by the capitalist superstructure. At a certain stage, these methods of class struggle will no longer be effective strategies and must be discarded in favor of other tactics. Revolutions were not won through marches and strikes alone. The culmination of all organization and class struggle is the socialist revolution. Thus, the ultimate goal of building proletariat class consciousness is the formation of a revolutionary party and its associated armed wings in order to pursue the goal of upending the bourgeois state and the construction of a DOTP.

When is parliamentarism a valid strategy? When the voting of a candidate or policy is materially useful for organizing and agitating. For example, labor unions called for a vote against proposition 22 in california in support of "gig economy" workers, i.e., uber or doordash drivers. This law would classify these workers as "contractors" instead of as employees, barring them from receiving benefits and labor protections (the law passed btw, if you're wondering why I hate california). Another example is when my union voted for a local council member in order to block the construction of amazon warehouses in order to make unionization efforts easier. What are the differences between these actions and, say, voting for biden? These were actions which were directed by organized labor who had clear actions and goals which were directly affected by said legislation/policy/politician.

Remember: the ultimate goal of all forms of class struggle is the socialist revolution and the upending of the capitalist mode of production. Strategies and participation in politics should always be in service of this goal. Beware of opportunists, distorters, and renegades who proclaim themselves to be in service of these goals but whose agitation's only material effect is the defanging and neutering of proletariat revolutionary energy. In the short term, our goal is to build worker power through organizing and unionizing and to build class consciousness through agitation and education.

SN: AZ47

[bimboficationblues]

how is "nationalism of the oppressed" mythological

In a dual sense - 1) like all nationalisms, it relies on central myths, and 2) the idea of an innately revolutionary "nationalism of the oppressed" is itself mythical, not a useful analytical or political tool but basically a way of handwaving difficult tactical questions.

All nationalism is in some sense myth-making - it posits an underlying, intangible unity among a group of people with highly diverse and divergent interests and traits. This is part of the reason why nationalists so often talk in the abstract language of "national spirit" - abstraction is kind of the point. This intangible unity doesn't *have* to be ethnicity, it's frequently (for example) the highly nebulous concept of "culture." But the inevitable slide towards ethnicity - and I do think it is inevitable - is unsurprising.

If you identify the unifying force of a people, the thing that makes it a "nation," with something like language/religion/culture, those things are fairly fluid both in space (taking a variety of different forms across different places) and time (changing over time for any number of reasons). This is especially the case because those traits are basically "open," at least theoretically: other people can move in, learn a language, convert to a local religion, and/or learn the techniques and style of local cultural production (and in the process change the character of the culture). So the supposed unity of "culture" is very obviously made up. (It's also worth noting that, insofar as nationalism is coextensive with statecraft, we often see efforts to preserve or create a "national culture" or "national unity" that leaves out or represses certain groups and practices; figuring out what constitutes "the nation" is a highly arbitrary process.)

Ethnicity is also fake - it is a "myth of common descent" - but that quality counterintuitively makes it a more stable foundation for a nationalist political project, because it is 1) derived from something in the past, making it harder to contest or observe, and 2) an immutable trait within the myth's context. You can't identify or convert or learn your way into being a part of the ethnos, you either are or you aren't. This makes for a much more stable boundary line around who is included or prioritized within the polity and who isn't.

As for why "nationalism of the oppressed" is mythological: it is not a meaningful historical category. When people invoke it they are collapsing a bunch of different projects and movements, some of which are conservative and some of which are revolutionary. I also reject the idea that nationalism's goodness is contingent on whether it is practice by an oppressed or oppressor group and nothing else - lest we forget that Zionism was once considered a kind of "nationalism of the oppressed."

For the socialist or the revolutionary, nationalism should be considered a kind of tactic; it is not a good in itself. Any revolutionary or liberatory movement is going to have to make decisions about what they want the movement to look like - its positions, rhetoric, propaganda, goals, etc. Nationalism is a historically popular means for doing things like rallying people to your cause, establishing basic principles for statecraft, cultivating a new political and social culture, etc. This is basically Frantz Fanon's argument in Wretched of the Earth - consistent with his arguments in his previous book, Fanon rejects the notion of a prepolitical national unity. He does not want to wade around in the primordial soup for a "true history" for colonized countries to return to or emulate. But nor does he reject nationalism as a strategy for combating colonialism on the field or in the body. Rather, he wants a class-driven national culture that is emergent from within the process of anti-colonial resistance and that ultimately gives way to an internationalist, universalist humanism once its purposes have been achieved. It's an extremely qualified kind of argument. I don't totally agree with it, but it's an argument that I can wrap my head around and endorse in the broad strokes, because above all it is talking about nationalism as a means towards something.

The kind of people who bastardize Fanon and try and recuperate him into their insipid microwaved politics have this entirely fictional idea of nationalism as an innately revolutionary end, that if you put nationalism in the hands of the right people it will automatically gravitate towards liberation and will not introduce the same kind of problems that the nationalism of colonial powers or capitalist countries has. This is just demonstrably not true (*gestures vaguely at cross-pollination between black nationalisms and black conservatisms, the historical relationship between nationalism and liberal statecraft, the success of right-wing religious or ethnic nationalist movements like Hindutva or Ba’athism in post-colonial countries, etc.*), and is basically just weird, idealist nonsense about how being oppressed makes you morally virtuous.

It also has the effect of obfuscating class politics - ironic, since the people that most frequently utter this line are ML(M)s. There are quite a few "nationalisms of the oppressed" that presume the working-class of a country or a group has more in common with its local bourgeoisie or professional-class counterparts (frequently the spearheads of nationalist movements, if we wanna talk about "class character") rather than the working classes and oppressed groups of other countries.

What the "nationalism of the oppressed" myth does is effectively evade hard strategic questions. Instead of asking "how will this help the cause? what problems might it introduce? does this conflict with long-term goals and are the short-term victories going to be worth it?" it just assumes from the outset that none of those questions are worth asking. It assumes that nationalism is an automatically better foundation for a movement than humanism, or cosmopolitanism, or internationalism.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Contrasting toothless reformist efforts to effect change "from within the system" like those exhibited by tepid "leftist" liberal orgs (winning local elections for public office) with revolutionary strategies for radical change and subversion of the existing order by real socialist parties like the black panthers (losing local elections for public office)

[txttletale]

How would you, as an ML, describe/justify Socialism in one country? Doesn’t revolution need to be international?

it provably doesn't! attempts to force socialist revolution in states that do not have their own organized revolutionary working-class movement at best create weak socialist states without mass support that collapse the moment they lose the aid of their sponsor and at worst end in abject disaster and pointless war. the moment a revolution succeeds, a global counterrevolutionary campaign is set against them and they cannot possibly fight that battle in an offensive capacity. history has proven that 'exporting the revolution' is not a viable or sustainable strategy for socialism, and every time it's been tried it's been a failure.

certainly there needs to be international solidarity between revolutionary movements and socialist states, and true communism requires the breakdown of national borders--but while bourgeois states continue to use anticommunist violence, repression, imperialism, and economic warfare to isolate and undermine socialist states, those states must make themselves as self-sufficient as possible and focus on their own socialist economic development for their own survival.

[max1461]

This has mostly disappeared from my corner of the internet over the last few years, but it used to be the case that every once in a while some story would go around about a corporation or a government doing some fucked up shit in pursuit of their self-interest, and people in the comments and reblogs would act utterly aghast that said government or corporation would do such a thing.

This was always baffling to me, and I have only ever been able to interpret it as a sign of profound naivety. Of course, I too think it is awful, sad, and unjust when people are exploited, killed, abused or so on by the institutions of our society. But "aghastness" is not synonymous with these things, to be aghast is to be (or present yourself as) in some sense surprised. And surprise is wholly unwarranted here.

I suppose this is part of my worldview that feels very fundamental, it feels deeply obvious, and I struggle to figure out how to talk productively with people who did not get the memo: exploitation and abuse of others in pursuit of self-interest is in some sense the natural behavior of agents in any kind of competitive context. It requires a lot of effort and coordination to mitigate this behavior. We do not feel "aghast" when someone is bitten by a dog. Dogs bite people, idiot! And corporations exploit their workers, lie, cheat, and steal, unless you work very hard to prevent them from doing so. And governments exploit and neglect their citizens, and go to war and kill and maim, unless you work very hard to prevent them from doing so. Individual humans, as members of a social species for which cooperation is paramount to survival, have quite a lot of specific programming whose purpose seems to be to discourage us from doing these things (empathy, loyalty, etc. etc.), and yet very often we still do them!

I have relatives who have a hard time believing in US atrocities abroad, on the grounds that "Americans are the good guys, and the US just wouldn't do that". This is very stupid! Do you think the US got where it is today without cracking some eggs? Bullshit. There's never been a government or a military in the history of humanity that "just wouldn't do that". I sometimes see posts on here from tankies, defending Chinese or Soviet atrocities on the grounds that these things must be Western propaganda, a socialist government just wouldn't do that. Again, I find this so obviously false as to be essentially beneath engaging with. We don't live in a just world! Often, a very effective strategy for achieving whatever it is you're trying to achieve will involve treating people like shit. It is what it is.

I'm not trying to play defense for injustice here. Obviously I think we should do as much as we can to prevent these abuses. But I think that doing so must start with basic recognition of the following: it is the nature of institutions—being as competition between them is essentially unavoidable, and being as their decision processes are unavoidably removed from the face-to-face social context which is so load-bearing in motivating respectful treatment between individual humans—to abuse people in pursuit of their (perceived) self-interest. This behavior is mundane and expected. It can be mitigated in various ways, ideological and structural, but it will probably always be with us to some degree. To look at it and express shock in any capacity suggests a completely misguided understanding of how the world works.

This is the first and most important thing I ever learned about politics or society.

[decolonize-the-left]

I think there's some cognitive dissonance surrounding progress that I really need you all to accept:

Regime changes are not smooth. They're scary even. And rebellions are messy and scary too.

A lot of you are like "yes that makes sense" and I'm glad because when I say this next thing I want you to Not be reactionary and immediately defensive, but listen and remember that progress means taking risks that make you uncomfortable. Remember that you want progress. Don't blurt out the first excuse that comes to mind like Really sit and think about it. Because you're gonna have to accept being uncomfortable if we want things to change.

Stop voting for Democrats and pressuring everyone else to vote democrat. They signed an agreement with Republicans saying that they denounce socialist policies (good welfare programs) in an era of late stage capitalism, poverty, and severe climate change. They intentionally platform extremists to help themselves win (and in fact this strategy backfiring is exactly why Trump won in 2016)

Democrats are not a party of progressives who are trying to fix things. They're literally trying to replace Republicans with extremists on ballots just so ppl feel obligated to vote for them. Democrats are intentionally scaring voters with an alt right & fascist candidates for votes.

If you have ever said "vote blue or else-" or "vote Blue and we might be able to save (state)" then this strategy has worked on you.

If you want Actual progress then you gotta vote for people who are promising you progress. Progressives, independents, green party.

Democrats keep promising that the fire won't get worse, but they've been fanning the flames the whole time cuz they love the heat.

Quit voting for people who prefer that your house be on fire.

And yeah it'll be scary to vote for a party without as much support and yeah maybe it does cause a swing vote.

......But maybe it doesn't.

Maybe we end up with a president willing to do more than compromise our rights with transphobic Republicans. Maybe we get our rights codified & even get a process for handling fascist politicians like trump & Desantis. Maybe we get a president with a personal and genuine interest in the betterment of us not just our economy.

And it starts with you doing something just a little different than usual.

We cant have change if you're too afraid to create it.

[sprintingowl]

Positioning, Market Dominance, And Having A Conversation In A Loud Room

So I'm reading Middle Earth Roleplaying 2nd ed. It's part of giant stack of tabletop I got from a publishing friend---and one of many systems I probably wouldn't be reading if I hadn't gotten it as part of a giant stack of tabletop from a publishing friend.

MERP 2e was released in '93, by Tolkein Enterprises, and is a pretty thorough book. It's packed full of nice B&W art. It lets you play as everything from a hobbit to an olag-hai. It uses a d100 system that allows for success with a complication. It's a book that feels intensely and simultaneously like it's ahead of and behind its time.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

MERP 2e has an alignment system, much like dnd at the time, but with twelve axis instead of two. Everything from whether your character is a metaphorical thinker to whether they're a literal thinker to whether they're a socialist or a libertarian is tracked.

Similarly, MERP has a classic six stat spread, but the explanations of the stats are all like "Strength(ST): Not brute musculature, but your ability to use your muscles to your greatest advantage."

And MERP has classes, called Professions, that each come with a little parenthetical explanation after their title. The Warrior's is (Fighter). The Scout's is (Thief). The Animist's is (Cleric).

What you might notice is that this is an officially licensed Middle Earth game *aggressively* defining and contextualizing itself vis a vis DnD. "Here's how our stats are different. Here's why our skill rolls are more granular. But don't worry, you can still play the same party roles. We promise we're not unfamiliar, just different."

Now, I don't know how intentionally-as-a-market-strategy the designers and writers were doing this---DnD's headlock on the industry was certainly less intense then than now---but it's reflective of a kind of design pressure that not only hasn't gone away. It's gotten way more intense.

DnD is roleplaying games. Anything that's not DnD might not be roleplaying games. Or at least, it's suspicious, it might taste weird, it might ruin your ability to have fun or speak english forever.

So in order to be a roleplaying game, you have to ask yourself "how do I fit into DnD?"

A critique I've seen leveled at indie systems sometimes is that they don't properly represent all of the three pillars of DnD. The three pillars is a modern creation. It's a 5e thing. It's specific to DnD. But DnD is roleplaying games, and to be a roleplaying game you need to be DnD.

So you get games as chameleons. You get endless "DnD killers" hoping that what people like about DnD isn't the name but the mechanics, and if you can just do the mechanics *more*, people will like you better. You get five hundred 5e splats. Power Rangers and GI Joe and Stargate all trying to fit into the same engine about swinging at and then missing a large rat. You get Adventure Time throwing out its original system and self-converting into a 5e hack because the market doesn't want things that don't look like DnD---even things that already look like DnD.

And back in '93 you get MERP 2e telling you don't worry, we still have the Thief, we just call it something different in our house.