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Re: The radical legacy

Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-July-17 00:22:29, Wednesday
In reply to The radical legacy posted by diogenes on 2024-July-16 12:44:54, Tuesday

I know you are not in the market for more reading, especially Marx-inflected stuff (a somewhat surprising antipathy for someone clearly anti-capitalist and "hard left"). But I am currently very enthusiastic about two books:

Michael Hardt, The subversive seventies

and

Wilhelm Reich, The mass psychology of fascism

I am about halfway through the Hardt, and just starting with Reich, which is proving to be a pleasant surprise.

I am also still working through Huntington, which I am finding quite valuable, though Hardt seems to regard him as a shill for neoliberalism (based on his co-authorship of the 1976 Trilateral Commission report The Crisis of Democracy; Hardt calls that report a "lucid assessment of the political crisis from the side of those in power").

One advantage NAMBLA had in the 1980s, when I was active, was that the terms "left" and "establishment" still named opposites. There were socially conservative boylovers but they lacked a political home. NAMBLA's leadership came from the Socialist Worker's Party and/or gay liberation, so a left identification didn't really have to be enforced. Anti-establishment meant left, and few if any suggested otherwise.

This is no longer true. Many of the best thinkers among us today, like SR and LA, identify with an anti-establishment right. Compact Magazine's recent piece on the Trump assassination attempt (linked below) refers to the "establishment left." It would be bold indeed to call this an oxymoron.

Even NAMBLA struggled at times to both welcome BLs of all political views and maintain a rigorous set of demands for real social change. It never challenged the family itself (as Reich does already in the immediate aftermath of WWII). Today the task has become far more difficult.

In the internet age, everyone with a computer has his or her own eccentric political orthodoxy. Building a community of boylovers, much less MAPs (many BLs are deeply skeptical about GL), cannot be done on the basis of a shared leftism, whatever leftism even means today.

I am inclined to agree, theoretically, with your suggested global strategy. (I even question if it is radical enough, given your rejection of Marx and your admiration for Corbyn, whom I have trouble distinguishing from Bernie or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). But today's politics are too diversified to organize our community on that basis. An approach that prioritizes consensus over rigor is probably necessary. You and I should overcome our reservations (since neither of us proposes to stand for a leadership role), welcome initiatives like Mu, and hope for the best. If our (somewhat) shared political analysis is correct, Mu, whether it succeeds or fails, will evolve in a more radical direction, or lead to a successor initiative that does. Hopefully our community will learn from the experience.

hugzu ;-p

ThesisAntithesisSynthesisNormAdjacency
Sex is good
Rape culture
Feminism
Gender
Sex workers
Boys decide
Grooming
Youth liberation
Age
Transboys/Tomboys
No sex police
The nanny state
Anarchism
Identity
RSOs/SVPs

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Pharmakon
  • (https site) Sohrab Ahmari + Matthew Schmitz, Was the Trump Shooting ‘Stochastic Terror’? (Compact Magazine)
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