Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

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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