Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 5:18 PM Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net> wrote:

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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