cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2331989
I don’t really think he knows this site’s culture at all. No one is dissuading people from reading theory lol
Yey or ney for him?
As someone said in the post
As far as I can tell, he's a guy who spends all his time posting about how all leftists do is post.
And this ain't the first time, Roderick's a bit terminally online, arguing against other based progressive like JT (Second Thought) and Michael Hudson....
I am not sure what taking itself more seriously entails. What would a serious Western left Lemmy instance look like to you? Is there any other website in this domain that you point to for inspiration?
Doesn't specifically have to be a lemmy instance, but any online communist space could be a serious place where anti-intellectualism is not tolerated, and where discussions with proper sourcing could lead to actual debate where certain issues are actually settled. Instead, now you have most people just yelling out their opinions with no sources, not bothering to actually engage with the counterpoints being made, and any criticism is taken as a personal attack and kts substance is ignored. No actual debate is being held, and any issues that come up stay unresolved and get brought up again and again with the same results.
What communists in the past did in newspapers and journals, we should be doing online.
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.
Those communits weren't somehow "at the forefront of organizing" before, and then decided to start publishing articles. They became the forefront of organizing by publishing these articles, having these debates, and putting the things they figured out into practice. This is a centeal thesis of Lenin's What is to be Done?
Yes, the current western left is not going to form a vanguard tomorrow, conditions will still need to change. But at some point a vanguard will need to be formed by western communists, no one else can do it for us. These barriers aren't permanent, and they can be overcome. A part of that includes ideological struggle and debate within communist spaces.
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.