true, except for me, I am watertight.
Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...
- Thread starter Mr. Tea
- Start date
-
- Tags
- barf emoji basking perchance childlike tripe craner's been mossad from day one dissensus gets fatwa'd fatwa sex hmt govt hat keinen schwand jamaican voodoo gang from predator 2 knob v cretin linebaugh's balls ground into dust mixed biscuits is a virgin but he has clamydia nastiness new tab for trotsky proxy wars pussyclaat voodoo gang from predator 2 strictly for the consequentialist tea and biscuits the cancellation of stan the fundamentalist core of mr tea the hegel reference the lust to execute oliver craner the mythifus of sisyphus third cares for his okra third neglects his okra third puts okra up his bum underschooled undergrads
true, except for me, I am watertight.
thank you.
dilbert1
Well-known member
Co-workers and family members, sure. Discriminating against left-leaning politics when making friends? Worse than “anti-leftism,” that sounds like computer-assisted sociopathy
droid
Well-known member
Uh... Im honestly unclear as to what groups you are referring to? I thought you meant liberal types who put a flag on their social media and take a few selfies in a keffiyeh, but these are all good examples of actual praxis with potential real world consequences?
There's people in the US currently being expelled from schools and fired from jobs for posting pro-Palestinian stuff online. Mutual aid funds are one of the foundations of social solidarity, and soft-terrorism (not sure what this is supposed to mean, but I assume its referring to civil disobedience, roadblocks etc?) comes with the very real risk of arrest and imprisonment. Thats a lot of grief to go through for not much clout.
Regardless, in any large group of people there's gonna be a wide range of motivations for why people do what they do - its why I mentioned medicine - have you ever met a neurosurgeon? From my experience, they are insanely egotistical, motivated by a god-complex as much as a desire to heal, and yet they save countless lives every year. Given the scale of atrocity in Gaza and the west's complicity in the sheer horror of whats happening I could care less about some vague critique of some nebulously defined group, in fact at this stage Id be more concerned about people who aren't somehow signalling their opposition to Israel.
Most of my friends have left leaning politics. they're still politically liberal morons though. I don't go at them for it though because why bother? It isn't going to galvanise the working class struggle for me to constantly criticise them for acting like gangsta rap fetishists.
And more importantly, their views on hamas are irrelevant. Like some queer and trans people support hamas on twitter, so what? This idea that queer people are inherently revolutionary needs to die. Neither are black or brown people. Being a revolutionary or a pro-revolutionary requires work, not of ratio of effort to profit, but tireless reconstruction and restoration of class doctrine and the ascertaining of the class truth.
which is my point.
Criticism of the spectacle for being the spectacle is like putting your hands in your ears, and screaming 'hello! I can't hear you!'
More pertinent is to ask why the spectacle gestures keep accruing.
Platypus society originate from a school of US leftism which was influenced by the frankfurt school, and some of its later theorists (chiefly Moishe Postone) were soft on Israel. What they wanted, if not a left zionism, was a left Israel.
But they ignore that Zionism is not Jewish theocracy according to the old testament and the Talmudic commentaries, but secular nationalism with its ruling ideology being Jewish ethnic supremacy. But its socio-economic content is just as nationalistas the UK and America. Israel does not represent Judaism or Jewish people, but only itself, as a nation state.
To ask for the de-zionising of Israel would sooner or later lead back to a one state solution, which these people are unwilling to countenance. It's a case of wanting to have your cake and eating it.
I'm not sure if you saw my edit to that post, but I'll paste it in below
The left is history. it is a conserving force. It has exhausted any progressive potential it had. Being anti-leftist is just as idiotic as being anti-technology. Their opinions and their ideological gestures do not matter a jot. They will be swept up by the tide, just as Israel will.
It's no coincidence that many people who sided with Ukraine over Russia have now nailed their mast to Israel. Because they were always on the side of EU, and Scholz.
Hamas will not win this war. let's get that out of the way. neither are they a government, and even calling them a governing authority is a stretch.
They can be accepted as a gang, so long as we concede that the biggest gang is the whitehouse. If that qualification is made, that the biggest gang of them all is the state, then it is perfectly legitimate to call Hamas a gang. Otherwise it is erroneous to say that there is a left capitalism and a right capitalism. There are diverse bourgeois ideological currents, but they must all comply with the same social forces of impersonal domination.
The analysis that hamas wanted to spark a regional war is wrong. If anything the US is attempting to moderate Israel precisely so that it does not invade Egypt after ground invasion of rafah, (why do you think it has been bombing rafah?) which would jeopardise the US's carefully curated diplomatic relations in the region. Even more so now that Turkey, a NATO member, has been mending its ties with El-sisi. Washington would not like to lose even more dominance (much less at the hands of the actions of its own ally.)
On the contrary, hamas wanted to ensure that Israel did not normalise ties with Saudi, but this is moot now that Israel has been galvanised to pursue the IMEC.
dilbert1
Well-known member
@thirdform I shared the article because it was thought-provoking, and many of the truths it broaches are taboo. So even though defining a position on the conflict specific to Platypus is of zero interest to me, can you point me to where a member/representative of Platypus has endorsed a two-state solution? As far as I know, voices from their camp have all been pro one state
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
As if this movement wasn't cultish enough already
dilbert1
Well-known member
If so many young people who would otherwise aspire to a liberatory politics are so devoid of principle as to not merely sympathize with Hamas on a moral or emotional level, but champion them as a progressive historical force and aesthetically relish in their image, yes, I’d say that’s relevant for working class politics. For one, most working class people don’t base their personalities around loathing their American identity. One reason being is that they simply don’t have the time. What’s more, I’m not sure how you’ll succeed in making any of these young people see the point of the working class becoming organized, since what primarily animates them is a conceited, half-hearted hatred of Western civilization.
And although it too often appears in such a guise, creating space for thought and ideology critique is not the same as succumbing to the petty urge to chide your personal milieu, by the way.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
It's you that's pushing that line; I think you should demand more of them
that's not my point. the point is the present state of Israel is zionist precisely because that is its raison d'etre. A de-zioised Israel would be something else, it wouldn't be Israel as we know it.
fuck liberatory politics.
Communism is the integration of individuals into a humane and classless society, not the liberation of the person, even if they may be sociologically proletarian.
As Engels said, (petit-bourgeois) cultural elements who teach what they have not learnt can very well be dispensed of by the party. These people chastised by Lash and Cutrin are irrelevant. They already vote for imperialists like Biden and will take part in any sort of parliamentary muck when their leftist friend becomes a member of the senate. Demanding these people get interested in working class organisation is like demanding a copper stops arresting proletarians. It's counter-productive.
Leave that sort of stuff to the anarchists, social democrats and various shades of hipster Stalinist.
I don't have any issue criticising the irrationalism of leftists. That's fine. But when its done under the guise of ressentiment, if the weak shall never inherit the earth, then why is coupon clipper speaking like a weakling?
But that's my point! You can't be like oh the working class don't have time to listen to us when you want your personal milieu to accord with your values. Your political milieu should accord with your values, not your personal milieu. This is a specifically American phenomenon. All this ends up doing is isolating and ghettoising people.
dilbert1
Well-known member
You’re really going to quibble with that adjective? I never mentioned “the liberation of the person,” so what good reason does one have not to think in terms of people being liberated from a class society into a classless one? “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains.” I understand you see me as mistaken and ignorant (sorry your monolithic Bordiga citations go over my head), but that just seems like cheap semantics.
No no I don't think you're ignorant. Mistaken, perhaps, but we all go through this anti-leftist phase, myself included, a half decade ago. But I feel like it is possible to go beyond this and not get trapped in the mind games of the left.
In a general sense you are of course correct that there is a liberation *from* class society, a kind of negative liberation if you will.
But today liberatory politics means the positive affirmation of class society, so long as it can be garnished with knowledge of micro-aggressions, white purity, racist anti-racism, pinkwashing, and, most horrific of all, having people tell you that to liberate the working class all is needed is for us to be not classist and listen to their grievances, like confessing to catholic priests!
In that sense, yes, I do pick a bone with the adjective, because it is completely opposed to the *liberation from* we speak of, which can only then lead to affirmation. To liberate and affirm ones humanity simultaneously within an inhuman society seems bizarrely daft and Christian to me, although it fits in with the prevailing mood of the ruling class to see all political actions as self-improvement. It is the ruling class which has this culture of narcissism, not just its leftist section.
National liberation was precisely seen as a bourgeois demand by Lenin (albeit he did make allowances for communist parties to participate in self-determination struggles if they were organisationally unhindered rather than a mechanical formula) and it is for this reason why national liberation cannot be a liberation from but a liberation to/of.
one of the great contradictions in this domain is that whilst capitalism liberates the individual from the tributary/feudal collective, and presents the individual with a multitude of modulated lifestyle and consumer choices, it also is a machine for ruthlessly standardising individuals. Even in this sense, most politics today, on the left or the right, are commodities to be consumed.
This is what I meant by it not mattering that young people on twitter identifying with Hamas. Not that it is acceptable amongst communists (it isn't.) But first it was the Zapatistas. Then it was the PKK. Then it was the Armenian state against Azerbaijan. It's a market place of ideas, they are picked up and discarded faster than you can say tango.
The right love to speak of moral hypocrisy, but noone expects the commodities they purchase to be of good moral character, which would clearly be absurd.
This is what I meant by it not mattering that young people on twitter identifying with Hamas. Not that it is acceptable amongst communists (it isn't.) But first it was the Zapatistas. Then it was the PKK. Then it was the Armenian state against Azerbaijan. It's a market place of ideas, they are picked up and discarded faster than you can say tango.
The right love to speak of moral hypocrisy, but noone expects the commodities they purchase to be of good moral character, which would clearly be absurd.