Doubt it, they are likely trying to win favor with China after sending more boots to Ukraine which I imagine Xi gave Macron an earful about. France is always happy to say something that “goes against the grain” but then still fall in line when the rubber meets the road.
Finally someone with a large platform fucking using it
After the word “eugenics” became recognized as a bad thing post WWII, the very large base of eugenicists in science and academia suddenly became “geneticists.”
For a brief second I thought this meant Columbia University and was quite surprised
I think there is a lot to say about the brain’s reward center motivating a desire for post engagement for any social media user, regardless of their size. Him being a content creator who likely has some inner desire for his work and theories or whatever he he producing to be spread would likely only increase the feeling of reward that the average user gets from a like or a share, since for him it might feel like praxis or education or something that would be extra rewarding. You don’t need to be well known or get huge engagements to have a subconscious motivation for more.
I think the problem with the nature of being an online content creator is that is drives people to be polarizing and harsh because that generates clicks. I’ve never been on social media since like 2015, especially twitter, so I get to avoid the results of such a cycle, but when any comrades clue me in on the latest online leftist gossip it always seems to be some form of this type of thing. Ostensibly principled or politically developed people consciously or subconsciously stirring up internet drama for clicks.
Do you, OP, believe there is no such thing as class reductionism?
Sure those things were happening simultaneously but most of those folks spent all their lives organizing with real people who had much more similar class interests to them, and the media dissemination was a part of it. The largest periods of writing and publishing were often in exile from state repression. It was through their actual organizing and life experience that they had the position to be writing and debating such things. A bunch of westerners who have barely struggled for anything in their life, who benefit immensely from systems of oppression and don’t have the same class interests as the majority of workers in the world, and self identify as communists but still choose to spend more time online than trying to organize in the real world, are not the people who will be forming a vanguard which also might not ever actually be formed. There is no promise that a vanguard must develop in any nation, especially the imperial core.
My point is mostly to highlight the reasons why I don’t think you can create such an online space that will be very active, because the majority of people online who self identify as communists have no reasons for a space like this, they are looking to socialize and shitpost with a certain aesthetic. The .0001% of westerners who would want such a space without the casual elements would be such a small community of people that there probably wouldn’t be enough going on in such a space to make it active enough and couching such a thing in a place like lemmygrad or hexbear seems like a better move than trying to remove the casual elements and have a purely studious, serious organizing space online.
Personally I don’t think it’s worth spending the limited energy one has to improve self-identified communist spaces and try to make them more rigorous over trying to organize the masses. Only one of those groups has actual revolutionary potential, and it’s not the self-identified online western communists.
The communists who were doing that in newspapers and journals were on the forefront of organizing, they were actually learning and developing new things to write about. the western left hasn’t even digested the lessons of the past, it won’t be them who suddenly develops into the vanguard of revolutionary theory and ideological innovation.
Whatever it is, we know Juan Guaidó will stop it dead in its tracks.
Could it be that the western left prefers spending more time socializing online than seriously undertaking the construction of revolution because of their inherent foundation in a labor aristocracy which benefits more from imperialism and neo-colonialism than it has to gain from destroying capitalism? With most people so socially alienated in the west, coupled with having limited capacity outside of productive and reproductive labor, it isn’t hard to imagine that westerners would default to commiserating on the internet over using any free time they have to study, be of service to the masses, and improve themselves. For the west, shit posting on the toilet is much easier than looking in a mirror.
He has been given a lot of space on many leftish / left adjacent platforms over the last several years which has given him a lot of credibility. I was very surprised to see Ben Norton giving him space on his channel for instance, someone I typically trust more than the majority of other influencers/journalists.
Michael Hudson is not a based progressive, he is a PB academic with a long background working for banks and other capitalist institutions. He posts his work on the literal fascist website Unz review (which he still does years after being notified it was a literal fascist website in case he was unaware) where the comments there are full of people picking up on his fascist and anti-Semitic dog whistles and running with them. All his focus on “finance capital” is quite interesting when you look at his writing about Jesus being killed by Jewish financiers and how his solution to fight finance capital is essentially empowering industrial capital. What other groups were very pro industrial capital and focused heavily on Jews as a financial elite? Probably some of the ones who are big fans of Unz Review, so Hudson seems to have chosen the right place to voluntarily publish his work online.
He was raised by Trots and his hyper focus on economics allows him to avoid any revolutionary analysis; Hudson is essentially pushing a patsoc/demsoc narrative about “fixing” the US economy by trying to roll back finance capital and do some New Deal shit which is caping for capital, not fighting it.
There may be value in his knowledge as an economist but he’s absolutely not based or someone I would look to for any info outside of very specific economic data that also isn’t super relevant in any organizing arena I’ve ever seen.
As far as Roderic Day goes, I’m not on social media to know about how terminally online he, his posts, or personality are, but I have read a few of his essays which I found very well done and informative.
TBF sanctions have worked really well against Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK just to name a few. Smaller and isolated economies which have not fully industrialized can artificially be set back decades via sanctions, and while those nations still exist, we can’t pretend it hasn’t been an immense struggle for them which is almost entirely due to the sanctions. The US thought their war strategies against the Taliban and ISIS would work against Russia and they thought their economic attacks would work the same - not realizing in both instances that Russia isn’t a literal or figurative island with a fragile economy.