To defeat the state, we in the core of imperialism need to make U.S. hegemony too weakened for our ruling class to be able to use it to hold back revolution. And to cripple the beast by attacking it from within its heart, we need to take away the social base Washington depends on to be able to maintain its global war machine; that social base being the U.S. working class.
I don’t take anything Shea says at face value. I’ve listened to the part of the interview in question and find Becker’s answers to be weird and contradictory. As I’ve explained in another comment, he answers the question “is it good that unipolarity has been challenged?” and his answer is in essence no because it seems like he just argues against some multipolarity in general without considering the material reality of today’s world split into the west and the rest (with China on top). His answer implies that today’s multipolarity is like that of pre-WW1 which is in contradiction with his stance in general.
He’s answering the question. Multipolarity, in a vacuum, does not immediately lead to socialism. Socialism must be present along with multipolarity.
He’s waffling and refusing to give a clear answer, and the only correct answer for a socialist to give is: yes, because without the defeat of the unipolar US hegemony socialism cannot arise or thrive anywhere.
I guess this is exactly where this belongs then, in leftist infighting. My comrade, you are applying a ridiculous purity test to a political figure who has a much bigger scope of influence, audience, and perspective than you do. And you are choosing to give Rainer Shea the benefit of the doubt in his assessment that the PSL isn’t worth listening to despite being shows as a bad actor but not willing to listen to more of Brian Becker to understand where he’s coming from despite multiple comrades telling you that it’s worth the time because Becker explicitly supports the end of US hegemony.
My perspective is that of someone sitting outside of the US for whom the defeat of US imperialism is the primary interest since that is what is making my life worse and revolution in my country impossible at the moment. I don’t know the conditions in the US well enough to say whether what Becker is doing is worth it to attract more people to his movement, but my impression is that he is misjudging the level of support that exists for anti-imperialist and anti-NATO position among the general population. Except that he seems to primarily be addressing a liberal and socdem audience which is why he thinks he needs to add all these caveats and hide his real views.
Yes, he is trying to remain able to draw in liberals to the far left. This is a far better strategy than focusing purely on far right people just because they like Russia at the moment.
So your position is ignorant. Got it. Brian Becker used to be an anti-war liberal. He’s been against US imperilaism since he began organizing during the Vietnam war. He understands better than any of us how popular sentiment flows around the US machine, the history of US imperialism, the history of NATO, etc.
Just stop trying to hold your position. It’s unwinnable. You literally have no idea what you’re talking about because you won’t even engage with the content we’re discussing.
Dualism isn’t dialectic, it’s a patently blatant fallacy.
There’s more than two sides to anything.
Eating the horse to catch the cow…
Meaningless word salad. Give me a clear answer: how can socialism arise let alone survive anywhere in the world today so long as the US empire, unless challenged in the way that Russia and China are currently doing, is free to use its global reach and all military and economic power at its disposal to strangle any nascent revolution in its infancy and slowly ratchet up the suffocating pressure on the remaining AES states? What other alternative is there than for some state or states to take the fight to the empire and actually hit them back and weaken them the way Russia and China are currently doing?
Please, if you know one, tell me of a practical path to revolution and socialism in a world where the US empire reigns supreme.
A lot of leftists like to talk about anti-imperialism in the abstract, but what Russia and China are currently doing is anti-imperialism put into practice. When push comes to shove suddenly opportunist elements of the western left don’t like the way anti-imperialism looks when it’s more than empty rhetoric… because it alienates your liberal friends, because it’s messy and bloody and dangerous, because it requires some amount of compromise, or because the “wrong people” are doing it and that doesn’t fit the idealized picture you had in your head.
These are all vestiges of a liberal idealist mentality that it seems much of the western left is not yet mature enough to have outgrown.
Please tell me you don’t really believe those genocidal libertarian hard-c crackers are actually anti-imperialist; as opposed to using a cute little photo op to launder their reputations. If that’s really what you believe, you’re more lost than I ever thought you to be. It is not compromise to work with the genocidal, it’s actively endorsing suicide.
I don’t believe that they are, no, i think they are a mix of delusional idiots, contrarians and cynical opportunists. But results matter more than motives, and i see that they are among the only ones actually agitating against NATO and against the war and actually gaining some traction among the population. And i see that there are some sections of the left, such as the PCUSA, that have made a judgement call that it is worth to piggyback on this despite the contradictions present. I would love nothing more than to see a popular leftist movement against NATO and against the lies and propaganda that the West’s support for this war is predicated on, that way there would be no need to share a platform with reactionaries. But instead, much of the western left has chosen to side with the imperialist position on this conflict in order to stay in the good graces of the liberal establishment, and are doing so under the pretext that to support Russia or to refuse to support Ukraine is tantamount to siding with reactionaries.
Instead of attacking those who reluctantly piggyback on the libertarian platform because they have nowhere else to go if they want to be anti-NATO, why doesn’t the part of the left that is also critical of NATO build its own platform for this purpose? This is a rhetorical question because i know the answer: the left isn’t given the same freedoms and leeway to be critical of the liberal establishment that the right is. We have already seen communists persecuted and jailed for taking a pro-Russia stance. Unfortunately this is the environment that exists in the imperial core today, and it is in no small part being enabled by the more opportunist elements of the left which have chosen to side with the imperialist narrative and demonize pro-Russian communists as “tankies”, “patsocs” or “Putin puppets”. This leads some of us to conclude that, however distasteful it may be, the only choice that anti-imperialists have left is to use these dubious platforms because that is the only way to get the anti-imperialist narrative out to the people.
What good is tailing the right gonna do. Ukraine isn’t going to do better or worse thanks to a couple more people protesting. There are a lot more praxis that US left action should be going towards. All I’ve seen come out of RAtWM was radlibs getting evidence that we tankies are just fascists in red.
Do you really think we have any more of a hope of getting radlibs to switch to our side than we do people on the right? I think both are more or less the same level of brainwashed to be anti-communist. If you can turn one you can turn the other too. Or if you’re a pessimist you could say both are hopeless. Or to put it another way, do you think that the communist revolutions in Russia and China didn’t also include people who had reactionary biases? Didn’t the Chinese communists work with the nationalists against the imperialist invaders?
Of course that doesn’t mean we should tail the right, quite the opposite, we should unapologetically continue to advance our own progressive and revolutionary views. And we can do that better if we do not cede the anti-war and anti-imperialist position to the right. We need to be on the front lines of the anti-war movement since it clearly has great potential to gain popular support as most people are instinctively against such proxy wars abroad that for them serve no purpose and only come at a social cost. The only reason they continue to passively support them is because they are so propagandized and because there is no alternative presented to them.
And yes, it’s true that we can’t do anything to really help either side of this conflict directly, but what we can do is undermine the imperialist narrative about this conflict which will have the effect of slowly but surely depriving the imperialists of the social basis they need to maintain the support for the fascist Kiev regime even as their own countries slide further into crisis. The ruling class is not all-powerful, and though it may sometimes not seem like it, they do rely to some degree on the implicit consent of their populations.
Why else would they invest so much effort and resources into controlling the narrative? They have banned all pro-Russian media and are even imprisoning people in some countries, not even for being pro-Russian but simply for refuting the lies that are being told about what is happening in Ukraine. So if they consider it that important to keep the population propagandized about this conflict and about Russia (and also about China of course), then it follows that we must do all we can to break through their narrative control which they are petrified of losing, because that is the only thing we can realistically do to influence the outcome of this conflict.