Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

I'm really glad this fascinating thread led, as I see it, back to the "net" in nettime (with Dmytri's comments about punditry being second to tech stuff). I generally believe that this list is at its best when we (many of us, at least) are reckoning with/leading with our positionality as tech workers. Sure, identifications are many and varied, and I assume some here also sustain livelihoods as academics researching subjects or policies, discourses, whatever, of this or that regime or directly through publishing, i.e. as commentators.

I agree that it depends on what part in a building process one finds oneself in, as a group or as an individual involved in many group formations. There is a time to seek inspiration and to learn from and with others, which involves some degree of assessment, perhaps in the form of "do we have something to learn from X, or not?", and it appears the quibbling began there and made it difficult to think bigger as a group.

Then there's the American moment in which, as Brian points out, "it would be insane to let fascists take over as a point of anti-state pride". I feel that there's a lot to grapple with in that the part of myself that is awakened less frequently, the part that isn't normally seeking defensive strategies from fascist coups, knows that it is time to call in the state - demand impeachment, imprisonment, etc.. I wonder about the effect it's having on my offensive strategies that are only anti-statist by way of anti-militarism, but entirely devoted to grassroots organizing around building and spreading tech meant to create ongoing means to oppose class enemies who are also the biggest polluters and climate-wreckers, nationally and internationally.

There's a lot of good work to be done in the realm of building small-scale, alternative economic circuits that garner resonance and support from lefties internationally because of the fact that we face some of the same megacorps and similar mechanisms of repression in organizing (however that looks for a particular group/context). It is possible because we, as disgruntled precarious workers, need some real way of supporting and caring for each other that doesn't rely wholly on money and we also need to do this social coordination voluntarily, mutually, and meaningfully, and these core requirements check a lot of boxes for a lot of different people who are essentially international class allies despite a host of differences in identity and way of life. Some folks we connect with are in intentional communities or otherwise with land and food management needs, prompting collaboration on ontologies that otherwise would not have been created by those of us for whom land ownership or management are totally foreign relics of our parents' generation American dream. OpenAg, Regen network, Basyn, and others using the Just Transitions framework come to mind.

So, from my vantage point in the southern U.S., there's fighting fascists using state apparati, in a sad "protect us with your guns cause we sure don't have 'em" way, a defensive strategy that selectively acknowledges state-based institutions worth saving, and there is building capacity for organizing given the collective will to route around corporate, workplace, and other surveillance, and the use of said organizing forms and tech to care for each other more effectively (e.g. "offers and needs", p2p/multilateral barter and credit networks, some "crypto" projects). It's always a big question whether or not any entity or actor with lots of capital P power will really give a shit about these efforts, and I see a mix of sensibilities ranging from "we are a threat to the elites" to "we will be applauded for filling in small-scale economic gaps".

Then finally there is the building and sharing of tools and knowledge to be used in response to, and ideally mitigation of, climate change. As time goes on this will increasingly overlap with more immediate and direct care efforts, maybe even eclipsing them. But at present I see these relating to many different scales, some to sustainable lifestyles, some to bioregional strategies, some to adapt patterns of relating to Earth at, say, the scale of a land trust or similar size project, some to track and/or find ways to throw stones (or boulders?) at criminal polluters, etc.

Obviously these are pretty broad overview strategies, but I think things are happening.

Peace, friends, and thanks to all the great voices here.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 5:43 PM Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net> wrote:

On 2021-01-12 04:38, Frank Rieger wrote:
> Dimitry, just for the record: I don´t speak for the CCC here.

Hey Frank, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that you did, just brought up
CCC because it's such a great community, there are very few like it, and
as such, there is much to learn from it.

Sorry for the the late response, I was away from my computer for a
couple of days.

> And the
> "both sides" strawman you are creating is just trying to obscure the
> problem that "the ends justify the means" is not a long-term viable
> concept for both ethical and practical reasons.

[...]

> Idolizing an
> imperialist and oppressive state like China just because it makes
> shiny socialist sounding propaganda is certainly not "left". I would

The admonition of third-parties does not come from me, it comes from
Freire and McAlevey and many others who are deeply involved in "left
strategy" what this thread is allegedly about.

Describing it as "the ends justify the means" is not even wrong, as they
say. And of course regurgitating chauvinstic propaganda like
"imperialist and oppressive" and fallacious absurdum like "idolizing" is
frankly just verbatim CIA bad faith framing. No ends are being
justified. No "idolizing" is being suggested.

It's sweet dialectic materialism all the way down, sib.

Anyway, probably that's my fault, and I'm not explaining it well.

It's also possible that some here don't want to hear what I'm saying,
because erudite judgementalism has been so key to the kind of
art/academic punditry found in this joint. And I don't separate myself
from this, I have been sporadically part of this community for decades,
and have been just as guilty of punditry as anyone else here, so put
down the black book of communism and let me try again.

One lucky break I had is that because the punditry has always been
secondary to the tech stuff for me, eventually my work in tech and being
an open communist led to building relationships with people involved in
the global south. They where not looking to learn about communism from
me, but rather about tech, but they trusted me because of the communism,
unlike others in the hacker and media art scene who loved to denounce
their movements, leaders, and countries. These relationships have
significantly broadened my horizons and impacted my practice.

Somewhat serendipitously, these practices had strong similarity with
what I was developing on tech teams.

Freire's dialogical, problem-posing approach, with it's obvious roots in
the dialetics described in Mao's "On Practice" also manifests in a
domesticated form in software delivery, from the foundation of Shewhart
and Deming's plan-do-study-act, we have Lean Startup's Build Measure
Learn, as one example of many, including in the military (observe,
orient, decide, act), Make/Think/Check in UX design, etc.

It's all about the loops.

Then you have Freire's Fanonian commitment to understanding the
oppressed from the view of the oppressed, which also has its hackneyed
reflection in software design; user-centered pratcices, user empathy and
observation based practices, etc.

It's all about problemization.

Curiously, the path from the dialectical materialism of Mao and his
predecessors through to the critical pedagogy of Freire and the earlier
work of Dewey, and to the radical labour practices McAlevey writes
about, and even to the tech-conference-style agile development
rigamarole, all seems to flow through the orbit of Jane Addams's Hull
House, where Viola Spolin developed Neva Boyd's pedagogic games into
Improv Theatre while William Z Foster was not far away working with the
Chicago Federation of Labor while down the way, the Ecumenical Institute
was developing what became the ICA's "Technology of Participation," an
early form of the kind of sticky-note party many of us know well. These
global socialist practices seem to have crossed paths and intermingled
in Chicago.

This is the left strategy, always has been, and it works very well, and
it's influence is everywhere.

The issue is the embedded left in the imperial core has been bullied and
gasslighted away from these practices by McCarthyism, by anti-communist
propagada, and by the hipster synthetic left punditry that we see here
so often, the kind of third party doctrinaire idealism that goes
nowhere, that sits in judgement of both sides, more worried about being
perceived as being right and being smart than achieving anything of
consequence for the oppressed, especially globally.

To change course, the western left needs to re-embrace problem-based
loops and we can start to imagine a genuinde strategy.

A strategy is not just making a list of what you want, or even what you
think needs to happens, and it is certainly not a set of third party
judgements and observations.

As Deming loved to demand, you need to first ask "by what means?" By
what means will you make what you think should happen actually happen?
With no means, you will will not accomplish what you intend.

If we are talking about "left strategy" then the strategy has to start
with the oppressed themselves, this includes the oppressed in the
imperial core, as well as the workers of the global left.

By denying the accomplishment of the global left with cornball hollywood
tropes like "dying for ideology" you support suffering and death. That
kind of thing is word-for-word the position of the US state department,
and the propoaganist frame is Nazi derived, and it is use to justify
aggression by the imperial core countries. Aggression which has
causalities.

Meanwhile the Chinese workers do not agree with you.

Our best strategy is to trust in them.

As mentioned elsewhere, it's idiotic to hold China to standards we have
not achieved in our own countries. Neither China nor Germany has
abolished injustice. Neither China nor Canada has abolished Capitalism.
Neither the China nor the USA has abolished class.

However, our countries, founded on war, colonialism and slavery, are the
global hauptfiend. Any attempt to "both sides" that is just like
reactionary counter-complaining, "reverse imperialism" is just as
incoherent a concept as "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism." Domination
only has one direction, and its systemic. Just like "reverse sexism" is
a sexist trope, and "reverse racism" is a racist trope, "reverse
imperialism" is a chauvinist trope. And when this is called out it
triggers the same white rage and fragility the other two do, as we've
seen in other parts of this thread, tho thankfully absent in your
(Frank's) response.

And while the global left countries have not abolished injustice,
capitalism or class, they have made great strides in human development,
and enjoy broad support from their people, and have achieved these
things in the face of aggression from the global hauptfiend, namely us.

Any "strategy" that involves us judging each other rather than trusting
each other is not the left strategy, it is not dialogical, and it is
doomed to fail.

The left strategy must be dialogical and internationalist, this means we
turn our weapons against the class enemy at home, we fight to improve
the conditions for our people here, and we fight to oppose aggression of
our governments abroad.

This is true whether we are fighting against MegaCorps and Corporate
Oligopoly, or censorship and disinformation, and isolation, or against
war and militarization, in every fight we must turn our weapons against
the class enemy at home. Der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land.

And yes, we must retrieve the best tradition of marxist dialectics to
get there, this is only possible here if the hip embedded left get over
their white rage and fragility when challenged on feeling entitled to
judge the countries, leaders and movements of global workers in terms
handed down by imperial propagandists. So long as they can't make that
leap, they are not part of the left in any tangible way, but are hapless
instruments of the right they claim to oppose.

And yes again, facing concrete problems is always the best way forward
for the left, concrete problems where you are actually resident, where
you are not a third party propagandist, but you have insight and stake.
Problems and loops. That is dialectical materialism. If it's not
problems and loops, but judgements and punditry, it's doctrinaire
idealism, and more than likely whack-ass doctrinaire idealism.

The practices you promote in your response are exactly correct, and tho
you are not speaking on behalf of CCC, are also evident in it.

Federated small groups with voluntary structures that analyze and
iterate. Building alternatives, experimenting, replicating. This has
always been the left strategy, and if you step back and take a wider
view, you see that it's everywhere, and that we're winning.

The trouble is the western left has mostly abandoned this strategy in
favour of third party "advocacy" or "mobilizing" or other punditry and
doesn't want to be on the same team as the global left. This is why this
embedded left is synthetic, it is not an organic emergence of small
groups iterating on real problems, but a creature of pundits, many of
whom work for the key institutions of the imperial core, it's media,
intelligence and education apparatus. They keep their jobs if, and only
if, they do their part to ensure that the western left does not want to
be on the same team as the global left, but denounces them and denies
their accomplishments, and only if they sheepdog them into ineffective
practices rather than anything that is a real threat to the elite.

So that's where we are and how we lose. They are a misleadership class.

A dialogical internationalist strategy is how we win.

Hope this pandemic lets up eventually and we can have a beer together at
stammtisch again soon, thanks for the discussion.

Best,

--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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