What I think leads to the exact scenario you describe is a widespread, persistent and self-defeating tendency among many western leftists (白左), the failure to fully deprogram themselves from the liberal frameworks they ostensibly reject. While they may adopt the language of anti-imperialism, Marxism, or decolonization, their analysis remains tethered to idealist assumptions inherited from bourgeois liberalism: an overemphasis on individual identity over material conditions, a moralistic rather than dialectical understanding of power, and a faith in discourse, representation, or symbolic gestures as sufficient engines of change. This results in a house of cards, an ostensibly radical posture built not on historical materialism or class struggle, but on the shifting sands of liberal morality. Consequently, their “anti-imperialism” often collapses into performative outrage or selective solidarity, unable to grapple with the concrete contradictions of global capitalism, state power, or revolutionary praxis. True internationalism demands more than repackaged liberal guilt; it requires breaking cleanly with the epistemological foundations of liberalism and grounding one’s politics in the real movements of oppressed peoples, not in abstract ideals filtered through a Western gaze.
Some of the real leftists need to set up an org to do a war time style propoganda leaflet dropping but its just annotated copies of the 红宝书 being dropped from drones across major cities and rural communities.
What I think leads to the exact scenario you describe is a widespread, persistent and self-defeating tendency among many western leftists (白左), the failure to fully deprogram themselves from the liberal frameworks they ostensibly reject. While they may adopt the language of anti-imperialism, Marxism, or decolonization, their analysis remains tethered to idealist assumptions inherited from bourgeois liberalism: an overemphasis on individual identity over material conditions, a moralistic rather than dialectical understanding of power, and a faith in discourse, representation, or symbolic gestures as sufficient engines of change. This results in a house of cards, an ostensibly radical posture built not on historical materialism or class struggle, but on the shifting sands of liberal morality. Consequently, their “anti-imperialism” often collapses into performative outrage or selective solidarity, unable to grapple with the concrete contradictions of global capitalism, state power, or revolutionary praxis. True internationalism demands more than repackaged liberal guilt; it requires breaking cleanly with the epistemological foundations of liberalism and grounding one’s politics in the real movements of oppressed peoples, not in abstract ideals filtered through a Western gaze.
The western left would be so much better if they read Mao.
Some of the real leftists need to set up an org to do a war time style propoganda leaflet dropping but its just annotated copies of the 红宝书 being dropped from drones across major cities and rural communities.
Unfortunately Mao was an authoritarian tankie and reading his work will infect you with the tankie mind virus.
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