Dmytri Kleiner on Tue, 12 Jan 2021 17:31:24 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy 

On 2021-01-12 00:43, Flick Harrison wrote:


Dmitry is really swinging a wrecking ball today!  Representing the
Left wing of the Global Authoritarian Detente.  And here we thought it
was only the far right that would be gasllighting us this week.
So you categorize me with we cartoonish cold war pejorative and envoke Trumo, and yet think you are the one being gasslighted? Well, I guess you are, but not by me, rather by anti-communism. 


You dismiss his life experience living in one of the regimes you
worship


"I lived in east Germany, blah blah,”
"Worship" here is obviously deployed as a strawman, meaning an ackowledgement is "worship" when it comes to "official enemies"
But this clever usage of "lived experience" is a great innovation! I mean, normally, rejecting lived experience would mean ignoring or denying what people are saying about how given experiences form their view, but as Frank said nothing about east germany at all, your version means that making any declaration of being a person and having been born somewhere means your views must be accepted! 

I'll give this a try!
Next time my wife of 20 years, born in east germany, the former territory of which we live, and who along with her family has been publishing about east germany for decades, disagrees with me, on anything at all, I'll say "But I was raised in Canada, Don't deny my lived Experience!" and if she says, "OK, what specifically is it about having been raised in Canada that informs this topic, and why should I expect other who where also raised in Canada to have the same view?" I will just shout "but I was born in the USSR!" and she will then certainly concede to my lived experience! 



... even as you later demand that those living outside these regimes
have no right to so much as comment on them.
No, I said they are not entitled to judge them and denounce and deny their accomplishment. Comment is good, it's part of dialog. 



You are using
hypocritical doublespeak.  And to be clear:  insulting him.  Your
response to him is NOT respectful.  If you think otherwise, you need
some therapy.


I'm a bad person, possibly crazy. Noted.



And of course, you can cry “tone policing” as an excuse for your
behaviour, because you’ve appropriated a few key catchphrases to
stay one step ahead of the people who call you out.
I have no language other that what I've appropriated, and I only write here to excuse my behavior, because I'm bad person. Possibly crazy. Noted. 



I hesitate to join a war of words with someone who seems to buy ink by
the barrel, but Dmitry’s whole argument is sophistic and wrong.
OMG, just used the same ink by the barrel line in my response to Brian before reading this. I even appropriate language before I read it. I think you are really on to something here.
I don't, by the way, buy ink by the barrel. This thread here requires effort I wont sustain for long. 



He tells us that the CCP is doing the will of the Chinese worker but
then tells us we have no right or ability to analyze the very topic
he’s making such bold assertions about.  It’s Prima Facie
nonsense.  Doublespeak.
You have every right to "analyze" if that is what you think you do, you are not entitled to judge, and the strategy of denying and denouncing is a bad one for the US left.
Your analysis should start with a measure of democratic outcomes, such as human development, approval rates, etc, rather than doctrinaire idealism and the framing and stories of the imperial intellegence aparatice.
Here's that lived experience thing again, perhaps its a good idea to check out what the Chinese worker's believe, and I don't mean cherry-picked examples that have cherry-picked and weaponized. 



Bullying people with long diatribes that explicitly deny their right
to any thoughts of their own, while laying down page after page after
page of his own thoughts
Yeah, bullying people with cartoonish characterizations and pejoratives, writing paragraphs about of why they are bad people, invoking trump in comparison, etc is bad. Oh wait. 



All the while insisting that none of the
work any of us is doing in our communities has any value, because we
aren’t… what?  Falling in line blindly behind Dmitry, without
having any opinions?
This is literally the opposite of what I'm saying, just your comical inability to hear what I'm saying.
I'm saying work *with* these communities, at hope and also in the global south, and defer their leadership. 



It’s just a terrible thing to do in a discussion.  It’s in
terrible bad faith.


Projection is a hell of a drug.

Cheers,
What.. There's more?? Inline comments too! Oh man, What happened to being against long diatribes and laying down page after page of your own thoughts, etc. Oh well.. 



On Jan 11, 2021, at 12:35 , Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>
wrote:
MST is certainly not, MST is a direct movement of the oppressed, and
firmly rooted in improving their material conditions. It is you that
seeks to instrumentalize them as a third party to "prove" that your
judgments of China are somehow interesting.


This sounds a lot like your analysis and judgment!  Which you keep
saying are not interesting!
What does? Do I need to be pedantic here and explain that they where attempting to use João Pedro, a leader of MST, against China? They are obviously using a third party logic, João Pedro is not a leader of China, it is perfectly ok to disagree with him about China, without denying his view on MST! Indeed, the soundest position would be to draw about his view of MST while defering to Chinese workers about China.
Also, since the person who posted the quote from João Pedro is also a third party, and not involved with MST, they didn't know that this is not the current view or strategy of João Pedro or the MST, illustrating that it is difficult to know if your analysis is sound when you are not involved, which is kinda the central point here. 



On Jan 11, 2021, at 12:35 , Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>
wrote:
so trust them to overcome their contradictions there, while we focus
on the ones here, and that we do not judge them, but defer their
affairs to their leadership with respect and solidarity.


Trust them!  Don’t judge them!  Defer their affairs to their
leadership!

How are we to trust them and defer to them if we are intrinsically
incapable of even basic understanding?  How the hell do you know who
represents whose interests?
This is a very strange set of sentences. Kind of like a zeno's paradox of some sort, or maybe an appeal to ignorance of some sort.
Basically you say something like I don't know, but they need to earn my trust, I can't just "give" it to them until they convince *me* they deserve it, until then I will withhold trust and repeat state funded propaganda denouncing them?
Why are you certain you are entitled to judge them? Why are you certain it's beneficial for you do so? Why are you so chaffed by the idea that you should defer their affairs to them? 



Do you pretend that no one in China rejects the communist party?
No. Why would I do that? Do you pretend that the Chinese people do not broadly support the communist party and approve of the policies of their government? Do you pretend that these same policies have not delivered human developed in line with popular demands? 



While withholding your judgment, your opinions, have you somehow
formed an immaculate conception of who are the “good guys” all
while refusing to even look in their direction, lest you form a
judgmental heretical thought?  Did this happen by magic?
Yeah, sure, in terms of "left strategy" the good guys are those who support what we probably agree are key left policies position, including things like medical care, housing, education. It's not me who is looking for good and bad guys, it's you.
China has not achieved some transendent state of perfect, the chinese workers havenot abolished injustice, class, or even capitalism, and neither have we, but they are a part of the global left, one we should engage in respectful co-operation with, rather than judge denounce and deny the accomplishment of
Anyway, as fun as it is to run through your gauntlet of random insults, fallacies, misinformation, projection, and poorly thought out opinions, I'm out of time, got to run. Maybe I'll get back to this thread, maybe not.
In any case, the reason you are all so furious at me is because what I say is true, you don't know the left strategy or even what that might look like, because you are not involved, and especially not involved outside of the Imperial core, if you want to get involved, look to the methods of Freire and McAlevey, the winning strategy must be a dialogical and internationalist one. 

Cheers,







There’s a lot to slam in Dmitry’s tub-thumper of a thread, but let
me also hit with this:


On Jan 11, 2021, at 07:55 , Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>
wrote:
blah blah both sides


Right here we have such a profound failure of analysis and imagination
that it should be embarrassing.  And again with the childish, bullying
non-rebuttal.

There’s more than two sides!  And as usual, the Marxist take
discards race, gender and any other form of identity as a distraction.
 Or should I say “Blah blah blah racism,” as Dmitry puts it.  Ask
the Uighurs, happily marching into boxcars!

"Did we say death camps?  We meant happy camps!”

I see a number of factions that don’t fit into the 2-node “us and
them” form that makes it so easy to shut off your brain and just
start pounding the faces of the people facing you.

On the one side, we have post-capitalist authoritarianism, as
represented by Trump and co., by AfD, by Brexit and Farage, by Putin,
by Bolsonaro, by Xi, the House of Saud, and by others.  Using the
state monopoly on borders and violence to impose one-culture rule.
Destruction of the planet is a problem for future leaders.

On the other side, we have neoliberal capitalist imperialism, as
represented by Bush, Reagan, in my country by O’Toole and Co., Boris
Johnson, etc.  Using Democracy as a safety valve to solve social
problems before they get too big to handle with force, but of course,
using force when it’s the easiest.

On the other side, we have liberal capitalist democracy, as
represented by Biden, Clinton, Trudeau, Macron, Merkel, et al.  Where
mass movements can be organized and weaponized to keep core safely
exploiting periphery while maximizing the return on human resource
investment.  Antiracism and Feminism as methods of expanding the
talent pool for core leadership and reduce friction in the economic
equilibrium and growth.

On the other side (that’s four so far!) we have Social Democracy
(like the NDP here, Bernie’s more pragmatic supporters), true
believers in identity-based social justice and socio-economic
redistribution who just want to get there without heads on spikes in
the village square, perhaps fatally naive in believing their opponents
subscribe to the same gentle doctrine.

And then we get (while still oversimplifying and skipping steps) to
Communism, Democratic Socialism etc…

But to the hard-boiled communist there’s only two sides: Communists,
and the Bad Guys.

- Flick
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--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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