You’re conflating ideologues and pragmatists. John Locke and Stuart Mill vs. Actually Existing Liberalism. Kamala Harris believes in nothing, I’m honestly not concerned about what goes on behind those eyes, but it helps to know what the people who do believe in something that are setting the tone for where the state is headed are talking about. FWIW I think the most relevant people to look into for that end are the neoreactionaries, people like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. It seems like Thiel and other billionaires currently setting the course for how America will deal with its waning hegemony are following in that model.
I’m very familiar with the postmodern condition and how power wields hegemony to make reality what it will, what this means for people that are in danger of being defined out of existence and exterminated. That’s an important thing to understand and criticize.
Look, obviously institutional political power and the state are things that naturally lend themselves to oppression. “While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.” Are MLs usually a bit annoyed to argue about this point a lot? Yeah, because when someone who hasn’t read Lenin but is familiar with that quote gets in an argument like this, they start to make a lot of claims like “Lenin just wanted to make his own dictatorship to replace the Tsar” or something similar to that. You start to argue that, actually, it would’ve been best for nothing to have happened because all attempts at seizing power are inherently corrupt and reactionary. I don’t have a lot of patience for that, and I’m not even really an ML personally, I just think that it’s a very privileged position to have that because all states are oppressive the workers ought to just nobly stop having a state at all.
You’re conflating ideologues and pragmatists. John Locke and Stuart Mill vs. Actually Existing Liberalism. Kamala Harris believes in nothing, I’m honestly not concerned about what goes on behind those eyes, but it helps to know what the people who do believe in something that are setting the tone for where the state is headed are talking about. FWIW I think the most relevant people to look into for that end are the neoreactionaries, people like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. It seems like Thiel and other billionaires currently setting the course for how America will deal with its waning hegemony are following in that model.
I’m very familiar with the postmodern condition and how power wields hegemony to make reality what it will, what this means for people that are in danger of being defined out of existence and exterminated. That’s an important thing to understand and criticize.
Look, obviously institutional political power and the state are things that naturally lend themselves to oppression. “While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.” Are MLs usually a bit annoyed to argue about this point a lot? Yeah, because when someone who hasn’t read Lenin but is familiar with that quote gets in an argument like this, they start to make a lot of claims like “Lenin just wanted to make his own dictatorship to replace the Tsar” or something similar to that. You start to argue that, actually, it would’ve been best for nothing to have happened because all attempts at seizing power are inherently corrupt and reactionary. I don’t have a lot of patience for that, and I’m not even really an ML personally, I just think that it’s a very privileged position to have that because all states are oppressive the workers ought to just nobly stop having a state at all.