BONUS - The Coming Post-Left Insurrection w/ Erin Hagood
Added 2022-03-16 10:00:05 +0000 UTCAndy and Sean talk more with Erin Hagood of Platypus about our political horizons. Do we still need a Leninist party? Do the global wave of uprisings point towards revolution or the Democratic Party? Is Antifada Post-Left?
Platypus debate with Benedict Cryptofash - https://platypus1917.org/2022/02/01/the-left-is-a-concept-but-social-revolution-is-not-a-response-to-benedict-cryptofash/
Song: Yo Gotti - Crypto
Comments
thanks for the correction!
The Antifada
2022-03-29 13:14:59 +0000 UTCI think alot of people here want to FEEL like they fought the cops and won. But sorry that didn't happen, even in MN, yes the burned a precinct but so what? The cops have a stronger hold on city politics than ever before and they didn't even use their true resources. In the future they may be able to go lethal with their repression of these events, simply because they are stronger than ever before. The strengethend legitimacy is the direct result of actionism and targeting businesses for destruction. Yes you the marxist on a podcast might think ah finally a response! But the lady who lives in the neighborhood is pissed and scared that the place she gets close for her grandkids just got burned down.
Taz
2022-03-28 13:33:39 +0000 UTC“Bc yeah ppl get fed up w the way they live…but is it really better that there’s a nationalist leader as opposed to a pro-US or pro-Russia leader in Ukraine in terms of socialism, in terms of the horizon for freedom in politics? For the people of Ukraine, honestly? It doesn’t make a difference. Really. We’re talking about the working masses of Ukraine. They’re going to be exploited by the nationalist leaders the same way they would’ve been by the Russian leaders the same way they’re exploited by the NATO leaders.” If one is going to claim the tradition of Marx and be aware of his journalistic work it seems to me v ironic to leave the analysis at this level of abstraction, without any mind to assessing the concrete. The necessity for a ‘revolution in permanence’ is no excuse to make a hash of the unevenness of bourgeois rights in that region or internationally. Far be it for a Platypode to raise the problem of say the Russian state’s deeply reactionary social turn and how say anti-LGBT laws affects the lived experience of gay Russians who are part of the working masses (and if you want to be instrumentalist about it, impedes their ability to openly organize) to take one big example. Also can someone tell me how Trump beat BLM to the punch re the anti-carceral wave? The same proposals in the First Step act were made yrs prior in bills that stalled, and the decrease in fed prisoners since the act follows a downward trend already (see below). More importantly, no one can honestly say reform was at the core of the uprising’s initial, in many ways sustained messaging - we’re talking about a different conception of anti-carceral politics entirely and anyone who elides that is disingenuous or not paying close enough attention to ‘the IDpol woke mob’ or whatever they want to dismiss it as. Domestically or internationally, note the groups that consistently get short shrift if any attention by these ppl. Bc “that’s not politics.” Why Not Trump? Why Not Putin? Can’t wait for Cutrone’s guest column in Compact. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/what-first-step-act-and-whats-happening-it
Mike
2022-03-24 22:37:16 +0000 UTCPosadists r somehow more coherent than this Platypus group
Turtle Bugg
2022-03-21 15:51:36 +0000 UTCThis was by far the dumbest shit she said & that's saying alot
Turtle Bugg
2022-03-21 15:45:26 +0000 UTCAlso, it’s not very relevant to the main subject but as someone who’s spent the last few years researching Dada I feel duty-bound to point out that the ‘story’ about Lenin responding to Dada with the ‘radical as reality’ line is just not true. That quote comes from a conversation on the subject of pacifism and the question of why Lenin wouldn’t declare himself in opposition to all wars. The only connection to Dada is the fact that he said it in Zurich in the vicinity of the cabaret Voltaire, but the conversation was on an unrelated topic! Lenin never commented on Dada, but he did say that he wasn’t interested in newer contemporary art movements in general, his tastes were pretty pedestrian by all accounts. In literature and blog posts on the subject the ‘radical as reality’ line is often cited in close proximity to the speculation that Lenin may have encountered Dada in Zurich – the guest here appears to have converted this into a story where he was asked directly about Dada and said ‘it made me think we need to be as radical as reality’… which would have been a cool response I guess, but it didn’t happen.
Tulley
2022-03-21 01:49:15 +0000 UTCwhich gets down to the question of revolutionary subject and revolutionary agency (and my question about dictatorship of the Party, because how else would this be accomplished without the class!)
The Antifada
2022-03-20 18:41:32 +0000 UTCMore than would have been accomplished if everyone had just assumed defeat and not bothered, surely? Is this what you'd have said to an exiled Paris Communard in 1873, 'isn't the French state more repressive than ever? What did you concretely accomplish?'
Tulley
2022-03-20 13:42:35 +0000 UTCThe question ‘what’s the political content of burning down a police station’ is sort of hilarious to me, such a direct and unmediated attack on ‘legitimate’ authority, practical and symbolic at the same time, in that moment what better action was available? Were they supposed to call a general strike or...? Pouget wrote that direct action is so powerful because it does not sacrifice the present for the future, or the future for the present – which is exactly what this guest falls into with her questioning “what then? what next?” Jeez if nobody ever lashed out in open revolt until they knew the answers to those questions, there would never have been a single revolution in history.
Tulley
2022-03-20 13:22:25 +0000 UTCThey were unique in that people fought the police and won, not just in one city but in many. I think all the examples you cited were remarkable but dont come close. Moreover this one was "lead" for lack of a better word by black youth. Its true that on their own and with no follow up things go back to the status quo. However this is no reason to say the protests had no political content. You can't say a popular movement that the defies the state in the way that it did, intersecting race and class the way it did. The criticism should be place in those of us, orgs, etc who were caught off guard by the uprising and perhaps not able to grow something more defiant that could remain after the wave dies.
Guadalupe Romero
2022-03-19 16:32:48 +0000 UTCYour point about what the Floyd Uprising accomplished is true for pretty much every uprising or large scale protest for the last 50 years. The earlier BLM protests during Obama, Occupy, the anti-Iraq war movement, the Seattle WTO protests, and so on going back to Vietnam war protests and further back to all the protests during the rest of the 60s all over the world. Yes it radicalized a whole new generation each time and then it repeats a generation later again and again. What does it concretely accomplish? With the George Floyd protests, aren't cops now even more well funded?
ChapliKababHat
2022-03-19 14:41:02 +0000 UTCErin is kinda insufferable here to be honest or too high up in the clouds. While its true that in the 2020 insurrection we didn't come out with something like a complete overthrow of the system or some huge concession from the state she misses why the insurrection was so important. It showed people that the police are not invulnerable, you don't have to comply, you can fight back and win. Losing this fear/veneration for police and taking agency is definitely a necessary ingredient for any world where people are emancipated. It showed people don't need no party, ngo or scholar to rise up. Additionally it radicalized a whole generation of people. None of this people have gone away and if they already reject the state they are in this downtime reflecting on alternatives to the carceral system and making the connection btwn, police, racism, poverty, etc. And this whole generation will for sure have more episodes in which it will become a protagonist.
Guadalupe Romero
2022-03-17 20:01:52 +0000 UTCI agree with you, I think that people in these organizations kind of develop their own academic-y language that also doesn’t translate well outside of their groups though. My most charitable idea is that Erin is trying to say that something doesn’t have “political content” unless it is making a positive demand, rather than negative (anti-/abolitionist) demand because instead of taking power you are still “working within the system.” I don’t agree with that idea, or in fact that organized people around BLM were not making positive demands either.
Fellow Worker
2022-03-17 11:40:21 +0000 UTCThe idea that the content of George Floyd was getting Democrats elected is INSANE. Cutrone says the same thing. The Democrats themselves and their supporters in the media participated in a nationwide counterinsurgency operation against uprisings in the months following George Floyd. At one point it looked like they ceased caring about the 2020 election altogether and just wanted to quell social upheaval. The condescension from her about that was unbearable. It's a shame too because I enjoyed much of the first interview.
dusted
2022-03-17 09:37:12 +0000 UTC
