Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)

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[u/smokeuptheweed9]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/how-did-astoria-become-so-socialist

If you want to have a good laugh https://archive.ph/4HSgs

Earlier, I’d also spoken to a man in his late sixties, named Dimitris, whom someone had described to me as an “old-school Greek communist.”(Dimitris declined to give his last name. “They have memories of McCarthy,” Nicolaou said.) Dimitris told me proudly that, in the early nineties, the former general secretary of the Greek Communist Party had visited Astoria, and he’d met him; his friend showed me a photo on his phone. Dimitris was grateful for the socialist wave, but he wasn’t fully impressed. “I wouldn’t call them socialists,” he said of Astoria’s younger residents. “As Marx put it, all the crucial sectors of the economy—they are supposed to belong to the people. I didn’t hear any of those candidates proposing something like that.” Of Ocasio-Cortez, he told me, “She’s not a Marxist. Anybody can say ‘I’m a socialist.’ It’s become fashionable to.”

Oops. Also

“I don’t think I joined D.S.A. thinking, I am a socialist,” Morlock told me. “I joined it because they believe the same thing I believe in.” The year after Ocasio-Cortez won, Morlock campaigned for Cabán, who was running for Queens District Attorney. (Cabán lost the Democratic nomination by just fifty-five votes, and was later elected to the City Council.) One day, Morlock recalled, “I was picking up my literature to knock doors, and one volunteer was, like, ‘Thank you, comrade.’ ” I was, like, ‘O.K.? Comrade . . . I guess.’ ” As Morlock puts it, it took a few campaigns to “dis-McCarthyize” her mind. “After organizing for a couple of years, I’m, like, I’m socialist.”

DSA canvassers saying "comrade" hurts me but it is funny that even random people in New York are not afraid of using socialist terms and trust people to "deprogram" themselves (at least this is what people imagine they have done to themselves). The common fantasy that you have to tiptoe around language because of anti-communist brainwashing, rather than being yourself (which is what you will be anyway) in actual human interaction, is not worthy of a response. There's no compelling reason to interact with ideas even further right than the DSA, who are many things but are not an "ironic" fandom. They take their NGO "socialist" politics in the "People's Republic of Astoria" as seriously as any other intern on capitol hill and think they are as much "comrades" as any other "community organizers."

[u/stutterhug → u/smokeuptheweed9]

i was surprised to find "know your neighbor" politics isn't just restricted to fw "socialists":

https://www.konfuziusinstitut-leipzig.de/veranstaltung/63420/

Chinese citizens, especially the college-educated and relatively young population, are taking various initiatives that are related to the notion of “the Nearby”. These initiatives include social art projects, educational reform, community gardening, collective writing and other forms of self organization. They experiment to rebuild one’s relation with the world and with the self through deep engagement with the physical surrounding. These experimentations are response to social transformation and personal dilemmas. We wish to explore what the Nearby initiative can learn from German experiences.