/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov speaking at the UN General Assembly just recently. Pretty good speech imo. What do you think?

theory background, skip if you wish
In the cold war the Soviets had a closed media ecosystem with state censors etc. The materialist reason for that is, that their media production could neither match the quantity of output nor the level of technical sophistication of western media production.

The functional aspect of Soviet censorship was doing protectionism. The repression of expression-freedom of soviet citizens was not functional, it likely hampered the development of the means of media production. It likely worked only because the boost from protectionism more than off-set the drag from repression of expression.

This is what most ideological analysis got wrong. What matters is the structures that transport the information and the type of social relations that create the interaction with people. The specifics of the information never mattered.

In feudalism the information structure was the church. The specifics of religious faith, didn't really matter for the functioning of feudalism. The change from feudalism to capitalism changed information from a indoctrinated believe, into a object that is consumed.

We lack any concept of what the socialist information structure could be like. We haven't really thought beyond changing the information content. When the printing presses automated writing, capitalists printed information on paper squares arranged as either news-papers or as books. Socialists only ever did the exact same paper-squares with different words on it. Same thing for every subsequent media technology. That's why socialists have always been on the back-foot. It's like if the bourgeoisie had tried to edit the ten commandments in the bible. Instead of replacing the church with modern media.

Now for the juicy bit
The west is ramping up attempts at censorship. Ranging from deleting content up to attacking the people that make it, as well as attacking capitalists that own means of dissemination. The West has/had a relatively open media ecosystem as well as very high production media quality, and that is the combined reason why it's media structures have absolutely dominated the world.

For unclear reasons they're now trying to throw out the winning strategy and close off the western media eco-system. If it succeeds the global audience would get alienated out of it, and then western media power will shrink from influencing ~4 billion to maybe a few hundrPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Femicide in Turkey is on the rise. Yesterday, a person (aged 19) killed two women in one day, one of them was killed by cutting off her head and throwing it down from the top of the historical city walls in Istanbul, and then he committed committed suicide. What is your opinion?

I was recently researching the public housing projects of fascist Italy. There's been entire books written about how early fascist regimes mirrored New Deal policy that is now considered "far-left" in America. Italian fascists dramatically increased public housing that existed prior.

In a way though, this potentially makes contemporary America maybe even more right-wing than fascist Italy in practice for the average person. US is certainly not more than right-wing than Nazi Germany was, but it may be moreso than fascist Italy.

Here in the USA, we've more or less abandoned the idea of ensuring that people aren't underhoused. This can only be achieved from public housing. Housing is a basic human need on par with food, as participation in public life and even reproduction are very difficult without it, especially with accompanying cultural values which portrays life as a game to collect points to afford housing.

Glenn Greenwald is asking some really good questions lately.

One retarded thing the left does more than the right is watermark memes with ownership. By placing who made it in either a corner or watermark. If a meme is good don't try to own it just let it free. It's supposedly about the idea, not about you.

Prostitutes, camgirls, e-whores and the like are lumpenproles at best and petty bourg at worst
There is no such thing as "le sex work", only redditors and radlibs think so, and their justification for it is always some idealist idpol riddled nonsense like "womens empowerment"

ORANGE MAN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/07/13/donald-trump-speech-shooting-latest-news/

First of all this is incredibly based and God bl3ss them shoot R.I.P To a real one but this is fucking bad news politically. He's gonna win for sure now and this will cause a reaction upswell we haven't seen in a hundred years not only in the US b UT globally. This is terrible news and propaganda of the deed is fail3d as a political strategy.

Was Bordiga right?

I have to admit some of his arguments are compelling. It certainly does seem to be the case that an unprincipled "popular front" just leads to liberals taking control of your revolution and directing it away from anticapitalism. At the same time history seems to have been very unkind to his strategy. Every time he split his support got smaller and smaller until he was ultimately pushed out and marginalized by those with all the power. Bordiga seemed very satisfied in interviews towards the end, that he had remained ideologically pure throughout his long life. Unfortunately it also seems like he accomplished very little after his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party in 1930.

Maybe there's no effective answer to the problems he identified? Are we supposed to just kick back in our armchairs and wait for capitalism to devour itself in the end?

Is the administration of things no different from anarchism?
The claim that anarchists "wouldn't let a person be the captain of the ship" allegedly "because that's a hierarchy to them" is reductionist and wrong. In anarchism freedom means to have take responsibility for one's own actions, therefore they allow people to take up such positions on the condition that they do not use them against the interests of other people. If the captain of a ship is to use his role to take the passengers hostage then the passengers must act accordingly. That applies for any sort of society. The point is that they would in fact allow a person to be in "charge". There have even been Anarchist Federations (are there likely still are) with a general secretariat. If it is to be considered a "hierarchy" then the idea of only being opposed towards oppressive hierarchies would allow it.
Anarchists in general want society to play a part of the managerial role, rather than a selected few - because it seen as a guarantee of incompetence and disconnect from the working class by solely being the managerial forces. If the working class themselves take up the managerial role, then that is fine by anarchist standards. The only criticism that anarchists should accept is that commodity production cannot and should not exist. If there is commodity production, if there is trade, barter - that leads to a market. Markets eventually lead to the accumulation of commodities which reinstates capitalism. Bordiga correctly points out that capitalism is inherently connected to commodity production. It is therefore the task of anarcho-communists to abolish commodity production and instead adapt decentralized planning, such as participatory economics and exterminate all reactionary elements of society.
I think that leftcoms generally misunderstand anarchists, especially with the fact that so many of the self-proclaimed "anarchists" nowadays are not anarchists at all - they are just liberals engaged in identity politics. The principled anarchists will only engage in class struggle. It is as Malatesta wrote over a hundred years ago in the text - Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles.
I am a part of an Anarchist Federation myself, I encourage my comrades to read Marx, Engels, Lenin and above all - Bordiga. Our AF also does dialogue with the leftcoms of the group "Lotta comunista". We can find ourselves agreeing on everything except the demand for a party established on the proposed Post too long. Click here to view the full text.