Students in my War and Holocaust course struggle to understand the Nazi Revolution.
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More than fair. Essential. I’ve been like a broken record here on Mastodon when it comes to the need for unified opposition.
No circular firing squads!
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@xankarn @cammerman
Thanks for that! I’ve made that shape of argument about 1933, and it’s reassuring to know I wasn’t totally out of line. -
Caveat: I’ve also been pilloried here by “kollectiva” types who have said I’m blaming the Left for Fascism when I raise this point.
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@xankarn @cammerman
Oh, I know the type, and I’ve received endless crap from them. Some of them even search Mastodon for the names of certain dictators just to jump in the replies! Fortunately I’m well-practiced at blocking tankies. -
@xankarn @inthehands @cammerman I was present when the Mayday people held their meeting in Atlanta after the April/May demonstrations in DC in 1971. There were breakout sessions for identity politics groups, something I hadn't seen before. These groups returned to the plenary with verbal hammers they found on the moral high ground, and I'm not sure I have seen a unified Left since that day, let alone one that can coalition with liberals or even LABOR. Just my take.
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@shonin @xankarn @cammerman
That is interesting! If you have a minute to elaborate, I’d be really curious to hear a little bit more about what those breakout sessions looked like, how they were organized, and what “verbal hammers they found on the moral high ground” looks like. This approach seems important and perhaps reproducible…if we have a sense of what we’re reproducing. -
@inthehands @shonin @xankarn @cammerman
You might be interested in something I posted earlier today:
"It's pretty well recognised in France that the electoral strength of the far right is due in part to confusion on the left (as well as abandonment of liberal democracy by the wealthy and privileged), and the article I think pin-points the central confusion: '“identity politics” as a dangerous distraction from meat-and-potatoes economic concerns'.
"In its most successful electoral years in the developed world, from the 'New Deal' in the US through to the left-and-centre consensus that built Europe's welfare states after the war, and the unifying Keynesian international settlement, the left had a clear political narrative, around raising people out of poverty and precarity and building a better world for our children.
"The rise of identity politics complicated this, in some good ways - for instance exposing the reality of sexism and racism that often lurked behind the mask of working class solidarity - but also shifting the focus from economic exploitation to cultural differences - and also often to discrimination among the wealthy and privileged with little relevance to most people (how to achieve more diversity on the board of directors rather than the fundamentally exploitative structure of the whole company).
"The question is, can the left weave a new, clear and compelling narrative uniting the strands of working class precarity, identity politics and environmentalism ? If not, I fear, it will continue to lose hard-pressed voters to the far right."
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman
I missed a lot of what happened. Was male at the time and there was a demand that someone not female run childcare, so I stood up, to thunderous applause. Also there were big pots to scrape. I'm hearing impaired, so wanted to feel useful during the noisy sessions.
IIRC there were 3, or 3 types, of caucuses: Black, Feminist and Gay. People who went to these reported feeling immensely empowered, and voiced a determination not to go back to a movement
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@inthehands @xankarn @cammerman
centered on, and run by, white males. I don't remember any kind of vocal pushback to this, but the sessions seemed to grind to a halt. Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy was the keynote speaker, and his speech was punctuated throughout, and sometimes drowned out by, competing billows of applause and boos, with the boos in the ascendant.
AFAIK the boos were from the caucuses, and were grounded in a notion that Dr. King's movement was not revolutionary enough.
2/x -
@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.