>>483656All those political repression mechanisms mean that lefty-thought is brewing under the surface for a comeback.
Also if you look at the economics, the censorship industrial complex is funded by imperial super-profits. It will weaken with imperial decline. Imperial decline has been sped up by the neocon imperial policy which combines excessive aggression with general incompetence. There is considerable lag in the system tho, so it might get worse before it gets better.
Another problem is consolidation of online-media into corporate silos. But that is not only a problem for us, it's a problem for everybody. Even the most harmless a-political content is beginning to suffer intolerable interference. The big silos grew by being neutral and very open(read non editorialized), since they are turning their back on this, a dispersal tendency will grow, and eventually tip over into rapid de-consolidation. They're becoming the ossified legacy-media now. Gotta figure out what become the new media.
Another aspect is that big corporate online silos, are partially feudal in nature. In the historic medieval period feudal rulers took grain from the feudal subjects. The data the corporate silos are collecting from people is a similar economic relation. If this relation was capitalist, users would trade data in exchange for money. Another feudal aspect is the other side of the data-economy, the big corporate silos are charging a toll for accessing commercial services build on user data, similarly feudal-rulers demanded a toll for accessing the market-place in the town-square. I think the identity-terror might be people trying to establish feudal-cast titles. The feudal period had a tendency of language-tyranny related to those titles, that reminds me of this.
It's unclear to me in which direction this will go, it could move forward and become more capitalist, but could also be retrograde. Data-serfdom could become data-slavery. At least theoretically it is possible to build socialist economics on the basis of labor-time calculation, but you probably need a very powerful enabler that can protect it from getting strangulated in the crib.
The direction towards capitalism would be the web3.0 stuff, projects like Futo and a hole basket of other things. This direction is somewhat favored because most of the rest of the economy is very much capitalist. But it is also hampered by the lack of widespread "fully real money" (what Marx would call a
universal commodity) in the digital space. For example, in 1800 you could exchange a coin for a newspaper, without intermediaries, without record-keepers, without gate-keepers, and most importantly without entering a relation with continuous commitment.
We could use "Tankie" to express praise, we'd have to change it from a noun to an adjective tho.
There is a lot of what you might try to label "lefty young-male content", it's just that leftist masculinity rejects all self-categorization, and mental boxes invented by other people. So don't bother that label is never gonna stick.
>how the left will crawl backWhat do you mean with back ?
In the imperial core the left has always been heavily repressed. The imperial super-profits allowed the bourgoisie to weather labor-strikes, because they could extract surplus value from labor in the periphery.
The only period where the left had leverage was the post-ww2 socdem period. For 2 reasons:
- Labor strikes could controle primary energy with strikes in the coal-industry.
- The Soviet-Union was dismantling the colonial imperial structure by arming every national liberation struggle with industrial weapons.
If you are an alien anthropologist that is observing earth as a "primitive developing civilization", you'd be concluding that economically most of it is moving towards the left. Obviously the parts we call "the west" is on a rightwards trajectory, but that's 15% of the world civilization.
The imperial bourgoisie is in a bind.
If they want to have any chance at using hard-power in geo-political struggle, they have to embark on a dramatic re-industrialization spree, and that means labor-unions and old-school class-struggle comes back. They also have to nationalize arms-production. Private weapons contractors absolutely will not design efficient mass-producible battle instruments. They also will not maintain temporarily unused production capacity, so weapons production cannot be quickly restarted. They want to build small quantities of high margin weapons systems that look impressive on paper, and tickel a sort of consumer-fancy in military procurement, but are not really practicle for the realities of actual warfare against technological peers. The privatized weapons design was very effective at intimidating low-tech opponents, during the period of large technological disparity. That period is gone. While nationalizing weapons production will fix all those problems, it will cause the profit-rate to go down.
If they don't re-industrialize and nationalize arms-production, the imperial core will shrink and as countries find them selves outside, the political tendencies of the periphery will begin to affect them as well.
The neo-liberals finally figured out that offshoring all the industry to China, gave China a lot of leverage, took them over 50 years to figure out Deng. Now they want to offshore to India instead, somehow expecting a different result. Leaving aside that Chinese workers received a lot better education, infrastructure, health care etc than Indian workers. So India-shoring will also be a lot harder than China-shoring was. Obviously there is the option to invest into industrial production in the west. But it seems that hiring workers to produce a thing in a factory that's like sun-shine to a vampire, and all the neo-libs would combust into flames or something if they had to do that.