To defeat the state, we in the core of imperialism need to make U.S. hegemony too weakened for our ruling class to be able to use it to hold back revolution. And to cripple the beast by attacking it from within its heart, we need to take away the social base Washington depends on to be able to maintain its global war machine; that social base being the U.S. working class.
He’s waffling and refusing to give a clear answer, and the only correct answer for a socialist to give is: yes, because without the defeat of the unipolar US hegemony socialism cannot arise or thrive anywhere.
Dualism isn’t dialectic, it’s a patently blatant fallacy.
There’s more than two sides to anything.
Eating the horse to catch the cow…
Meaningless word salad. Give me a clear answer: how can socialism arise let alone survive anywhere in the world today so long as the US empire, unless challenged in the way that Russia and China are currently doing, is free to use its global reach and all military and economic power at its disposal to strangle any nascent revolution in its infancy and slowly ratchet up the suffocating pressure on the remaining AES states? What other alternative is there than for some state or states to take the fight to the empire and actually hit them back and weaken them the way Russia and China are currently doing?
Please, if you know one, tell me of a practical path to revolution and socialism in a world where the US empire reigns supreme.
A lot of leftists like to talk about anti-imperialism in the abstract, but what Russia and China are currently doing is anti-imperialism put into practice. When push comes to shove suddenly opportunist elements of the western left don’t like the way anti-imperialism looks when it’s more than empty rhetoric… because it alienates your liberal friends, because it’s messy and bloody and dangerous, because it requires some amount of compromise, or because the “wrong people” are doing it and that doesn’t fit the idealized picture you had in your head.
These are all vestiges of a liberal idealist mentality that it seems much of the western left is not yet mature enough to have outgrown.
I guess this is exactly where this belongs then, in leftist infighting. My comrade, you are applying a ridiculous purity test to a political figure who has a much bigger scope of influence, audience, and perspective than you do. And you are choosing to give Rainer Shea the benefit of the doubt in his assessment that the PSL isn’t worth listening to despite being shows as a bad actor but not willing to listen to more of Brian Becker to understand where he’s coming from despite multiple comrades telling you that it’s worth the time because Becker explicitly supports the end of US hegemony.
My perspective is that of someone sitting outside of the US for whom the defeat of US imperialism is the primary interest since that is what is making my life worse and revolution in my country impossible at the moment. I don’t know the conditions in the US well enough to say whether what Becker is doing is worth it to attract more people to his movement, but my impression is that he is misjudging the level of support that exists for anti-imperialist and anti-NATO position among the general population. Except that he seems to primarily be addressing a liberal and socdem audience which is why he thinks he needs to add all these caveats and hide his real views.
So your position is ignorant. Got it. Brian Becker used to be an anti-war liberal. He’s been against US imperilaism since he began organizing during the Vietnam war. He understands better than any of us how popular sentiment flows around the US machine, the history of US imperialism, the history of NATO, etc.
Just stop trying to hold your position. It’s unwinnable. You literally have no idea what you’re talking about because you won’t even engage with the content we’re discussing.
Yes, he is trying to remain able to draw in liberals to the far left. This is a far better strategy than focusing purely on far right people just because they like Russia at the moment.