Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Ho ho ho. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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French left wing commentators will never stop fighting to maintain the illusion that we are not living in a class dictatorship. Cops have been absolutely unhinged for the last days and all they do is compare it to “the authoritarian regimes” more often referring to Russia but probably with China at the tip of their tongues.
All they do is reinforce the idea that “we the civilised west aren’t supposed to be like them authoritarians”. They genuinely think they are convincing everyone to resist, but you cannot correctly analyse either the problem or the solution if you implicitly deny that the imperial core only has bourgeois dictatorship and never had democracy except for small instances like the Commune.
At the end of the day, capital is unchallenged because people breaking stuff will never be like people arming themselves with powerful foreign allies.
They don’t represent the French proletariat.
True, but unfortunately it’s because it’s the other way around. Living in a heavily saturated mass-media society, the proletariat tend to bless media figures with their trust and base their worldview on theirs. They don’t represent the workers because they are the ones deciding what the workers think. It is very hard to escape this. This is why I think that the prime contradiction in the West is colonialism, because as long as unequal exchange bribes the workers they won’t stop drinking the media kool aid
I disagree.
After reading Foucault and learning about the modern financial colonialism that all Frenchmen benefit from I’ve become incredibly prejudiced against the French.
Although the protests are aesthetically pleasing, they happen so often it seems like it’s just another way to reinforce capitalism, by letting the proles take out their anger every few years there’s no room for true revolutionary sentiment.
You nailed it. This is fueled by the edgy new left and syndicalism promoting the idea that displays of violence will be intimidating to the government. This is a complete misconception of how revolutions are made that is deeply rooted in the rejection of Marxism-Leninism in the name of utopian idealistic integrity