Students in my War and Holocaust course struggle to understand the Nazi Revolution.
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman
My take, after a day of child care (great kids, a little wild) half listening on a PA system (IIRC), was that the caucuses were both in the right as to what needed to be addressed in order for there to be a human rights revolution, but that demands as the day wore on seemed to move the goal posts -- experienced (white male) movement leadership was effectively silenced --
3/x
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman
-- with no equivalent leadership coming forward to bring unity. All the available "pure enough" people were cantankerous, so far as I could hear.
I was left with the impression that the conservative element in the nation -- which had jailed me and many others repeatedly in order to carry out its agenda in the world -- had won. This was about the time that "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" appeared. 4/x
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman
After that, I joined a Quaker commune for awhile, then headed across the country to take part in a Syndicalist forestry cooperative, then, about 1986, reluctantly re-assimilated into society.
The cooperative had the same policy fights, internally, as Mayday. How we were able to muddle through them, with 300+ people, was one person one vote, Roberts Rules of Order. If our enterprise was valued above purity, some of us had to stand aside sometimes.
5/5
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@GeofCox @inthehands @shonin @xankarn @cammerman this is a really important point. The left needs to connect economic concerns with all its other concerns in a compelling package. The demographer Simon kuestenmacher observes that the rise of the AfD in Thuringia actively feeds off economic and demographic decline, using scapegoating to avoid the real issues, which are basically intractable. It’s a flywheel: the worse the economy gets, the more disaffected this makes the electorate, and the more willing to blame marginal groups. The far right is strongly incentivised to make the economy worse, and to thrive on the crisis. This presents a dilemma for the left. They think politics is about improving things, but the demographic decline is very hard to fix. Meanwhile the right blames them for their failure. The left needs strong economic wins or it’s in serious trouble.
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@writingslowly @GeofCox @inthehands @xankarn @cammerman Promises of even moderate improvement will tend to be hard to fulfill as we approach an EROEI of zero with finite (except the sun, for our purposes) resources and weather we can expect given so many tailpipes. Thus there will likely be a rosy prospect, in the near term, for accrual of power to the cruel. After which, is anyone's guess. Ammunition is not tasty.
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@shonin @xankarn @cammerman
Thanks for this accounting. It is interesting. It’s the trouble with all utopian thinking: if your goal is to visualize perfection, there’s always something more perfect — if only you’re willing to shed a bit more of your coalition.Organizing sure is hard work.
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman What I found most satisfactory was to organize a livelihood. It focuses people.
In the coop we had farmers who wanted piecework so they could make hundred dollar days and pay mortgages. But we also had city-bred idealists who wanted hourly because they could not keep up with the farmers. Saving grace was, you had to have a minimum crew headcount to work on the contract. So the low-rollers were needed. We devised a 1/2 & 1/2 pay scheme and it passed vote.
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If you look at left political wins - either revolutionary or electoral, the fact is that they tend to follow catastrophe... the Russian and Chinese revolutions would not have happened outwith the World Wars; FDR in the US would not have been elected, or acted in the revolutionary ways he did, without the Great Depression; the left governments in Western Europe that built their welfare states came out of fascism, war, holocaust... Even in more settled times, say the Labour governments in the UK in the 60s, which were pretty radical (Equal Pay Act, Comprehensive Education, Open University) came out of the social disruption of the 60s counter-culture, civil rights movement, 'women's lib'...
So I think we can expect things to get a lot more hairy before the left (other than an impotent centre-left) wins the power to actually deliver strong economic wins.
But I also think that if you step back a bit things are very much in favour of strong left/green wins. There are no answers in the political centre (continuing the status-quo with a bit of tinkering) nor, for long, on the right (scapegoating minorities, more oppression and exploitation, warmongering) - although that will unfortunately come/continue in some places in the short term. But in the propitious alignment of left and green thinking (capitalism is at the root of the problem so we have to transition to new economies and lifestyles) there really is the prospect of building a better world for our children.
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Jump The Electric Shark ♪🌻🥥♫replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands
What a sad existence that must be.
@xankarn @cammerman -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Writing Slowly last edited by
@writingslowly @GeofCox @shonin @xankarn @cammerman
There’s a lot to this, although it easily wanders into the territory where “economic anxiety” becomes a euphemism for racism. Yes, economic concerns matter — but they’re also not the whole picture, and we paper over bigotry, xenophobia, and supremacism at our peril. -
@GeofCox @shonin @writingslowly @xankarn @cammerman
Sheesh, if you’re regarding the Russian and Chinese revolution as •wins•, I’m afraid we’re living on different planets. I take them both to be dire warnings to future generations of leftists. -
@shonin @xankarn @cammerman
People are so hungry for a sense of purpose and meaning. -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Jump The Electric Shark ♪🌻🥥♫ last edited by
@TFFPrisoner @xankarn @cammerman
Sometimes all you’ve got to give you comfort in this word is constant, unceasing fuel for your belief that everyone else is wrong