Can someone give me an apt criticism of the Hinkle/Haz/Dore/Greenwald/Mate/Blumenthal/Taibbi pool from a communist perspective? I unequivocally think they’re better for the left than say Majority Report/Breaking Points/Hasan/Breadtube etc but I’m beginning to have a difficult time drawing the line in the sand for myself as what I determine to be authentic reporting and posturing or even praxis at that

Essentially the former partakes in critical support for Russia, the latter doesn’t

Yeah that’s where I get iffy because I get that a lot of their messaging concerns class-based optics and what will garner clout w the right which I don’t have a problem with but its stuff like calling Putin based where it feels like there’s a convenient limit on nuance for them and their messaging tactics

Yeah they’re buying too much into the position

I think an easier criticism of most of those people doesn't really have to do with which power blocs they give preference to, i think it's more what they stand for. I think even people like Haz & Taibbi have good takes sometimes, but they really don't know what they're angling for half the time besides s***ting on opposition. Their views are unclear and very much aligned alongside a mixture of both clout chasing/hot topic chasing (esp Greenwald), contrarianism, and lipservice more than actual ideological consistency. And while there's obv more to anything than just ideology, when your ideology can be largely boiled down to "contrarianism on twitter to whatever the other sects of people calling themselves leftists believe", there's a harder argument for them being valuably part of any type of discourse. That said, it's also largely the rhetoric of trying to represent groups you really have no relationship or meaningful tie to - Haz less so, but Taibbi or Greenwald calling themselves leftists? This is the same thing that happened with people like Aimee Therese or Angela Nagle, which is they care so much about political branding that it begins to coincide with the inconsistencies in remaining part of the spectacle of discourse, and then they move from idiosyncratic political pundits to opportunists with contrarian political branding. That said, don't get me wrong, I'm not keen by any means on Breadtube or on people like Kyle Kulinski, Breaking Points, etc. either (and have lots of critique there too), but someone like Krystal Ball doesn't lie about being anything beyond being a "spicy democrat" essentially. Meanwhile people like Greenwald have that Joe Rogan Boomer "i'm a leftist - but the left has gone crazy!" style cognitive dissonance, and people like Haz fall into the sphere of Aimee Therese of being dishonest about what they represent because they so clearly want to be seen as ideological and stretch the truth for their personal brand and how they're considered by others. It's for reasons like this I don't call myself a socialist/communist/etc on this board despite me participating in these threads - I don't think I'm consistent enough nor wholly representative of that angle to call myself something I'm not entirely representative of ideologically.

tl;dr being hyper-online and trying to connect that to your brand in the space of political discourse is a huge negative which causes cognitive dissonance unless you're honest about your idiosyncrasies rather than saying you're some whole representative/gatekeeper of an ideology

I appreciate this Krishna

With haz its tough because culturally I respect a lot of his anti-liberal cultural takes regarding self-sovereignty, and love when he gets in his psychoanalytic/lacan bag when he makes the argument for why we need patriarchal communism etc. But then he'll go on tangents about how you're a fake leftist if you say s*** like "I stand with the Palestinians" because the Mizrahi's are conservative so you should posture yourself as impartial to the situation altogether.

With Taibbi he loses me with s*** like this below, and when he goes on conservative platforms and calls himself an "ACLU Liberal"

But that leads me to ask: can you elaborate on your point about having a relationship/meaningful tie to leftism? You could target all of the people I mentioned as "having no relationship or meaningful tie to leftism" but I think its unfair to assume that, at the least, they're not class traitors

And in writing this I forgot if it was you or someone else who was talking about Sublime Object but I think Zizek espouses the point you made in your tl;dr fairly integrally.

As a disclaimer, I don't know Haz very well and only learned about him through this thread really before i started seeing references to him elsewhere, so keep that in mind. So instead of Haz maybe a better reference is someone like Caleb Maupin. However, I know of a lot of people in other "idiosyncratic leftist" circles like Aimee Therese or Angela Nagle (or if you want to be pedantic, you could even say the Red Scare girls).

I guess I maybe didn't frame it correctly word-wise. It's not that someone needs to have a strong relationship with "leftism" itself (as that's somewhat meaningless to say, as coalition-wise you're really referring to a collection of groups, movements, etc. - it's not as simple as just what you do/don't support). I think it's more that you have to be able to at least disassociate yourself and your idiosyncrasies as a pundit away from the coherency of whatever movements or ideologies you're arguing in favor of - if you instead position yourself as the "gatekeeper of an ideology" or something of the sort, you're essentially saying your idiosyncrasies must be taken as fact as part of the ideology, and thus your hyper-online discourse and your brand begins to eclipse what you're really abstractly arguing in favor of.

Like Haz from what I've seen gets into these holes where he argues with literally everyone and everything possible because not only is he contrarian, but he's dedicated to idealizing his own beliefs as if he's the gatekeeper of the ideology of which he's participating in discourse over - which at first he isn't, but once it becomes internalized, you may as well be, because you're arguing over your relationship to an ideology rather than the ideology itself. Which is fine in honesty, but in a lot of cases, it leads instead of splintering of groups or individuals which should otherwise be coalescing because you're really arguing over individualistic traits rather than caring about the collective nature of underlying agreements.

I don't think many people would have issues with people like Taibbi or Greenwald if they were honest about themselves, but instead they refuse to admit that they're not gatekeepers, and use this as a springboard to start personal drama, and then carry that personal drama into politics. Or in the case of a lot of people in Haz's circle, what they really believe is "I believe in socialism/communism but I hate gay people", which is like, okay, whatever, a lot of third worldism is like that too, but don't be surprised when 75% of the western internet left hates you for espousing that view, it doesn't make you special just because you can repeat old quotes from the 20th century.

In other cases, like again, Nagle & Therese & RS, leftism is used as a springboard to get in touch with the youth but then used opportunistically to pivot to bizarre abstract or legitimately schizo takes which fall in between right wing and apolitical. I think this is increasingly a common problem and people like Taibbi & Greenwald suffer this - esp. when Greenwald is like taking Thiel money but going on daily rants about how everyone is an asset of the billionaire class except him, even people who literally agree with him.

Wouldn't put Haz in the same category as Mate tbh

Mate is actually good

Also Hasan way better than breadtubers tbh

Hasan lowkey cryptotankie

nightmare blunt rotation

MANS GONE DOWN THE GUTTER

Any of you read Post-Marxist works?

what would you define as post-marxist, ive heard different people use the term for different things

I hope dengoids understand how averages work

the cope in the replies to this

people are going batshit crazy at the Amazon union organizer Christian Smalls for appearing on tucker carlson last night

Leader of the DPR being in a pyramid scheme and awarding some guy with neo nazi patches an award for killing Azov soldiers tells you all you need to know about that war

And he didn't even say anything bad about AOC. All these journos just write the same articles for The Nation or whatever that 2 people read and they're mad about this guy who actually helped pull off a historic labor win

I saw the term for the first time wasting time on wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Marxism

Need to look into it more but these two points I agree with and are I think where a lot of Marxists get it wrong
"...for example, it does not see economy as a foundation of politics and the state as an instrument that functions unambiguously and autonomously on behalf of the interests of a given class"

What would then be the foundation of politics and the function of the state?

And what exactly does "unambiguously and autonomously" mean here?

The function of the state is to grow state power as for the second bit I have not read the source so can't provide context

I have to disagree with that, doesn't really line up with all the examples of the state ceding power to capital

What motivation is there to grow power? People dont just desire power in a vacuum

Obviously the role of a state is to grow, enforce, and reinforce its power for the class that is in ownership of it. But class interest must be accounted for. And almost all interest in a world predicated on economic class is economics

As Lenin said, liberalism in a capitalist framework is problematic, because liberalism is driven by the economics of capitalism

Yes people want freedom. But freedom from what? Freedom for who? Freedom to do what?

A state does not exist without a class to use its services against another

The state cannot be a class itself, as it serves classes

The state cannot be abolished before class is abolished, as the state is resultant of the contradiction between class