/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1850451
>collaborating across national borders
academia do be like that
>>1850478
you also have things like DLR (dlr.de) that basically acts like a huge incubator. they fund research projects likely to result in German patents

thoughts?

>>1850617
I thought Finkelstein was atheist why is he calling on God?

>>1850617
The Fink is still buoyant.
Nothing else to say, he's right.

>>1850617
unfinkable

>>1850331
>damn sex cult. will be in contact o7
Go get 'em tiger
Seriously thanks for all you do

>>1850628
It's a figure of speech. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-but-for-the-grace-of-god.html

>>1850617
So in other words, the “occupy campus movement” is confirmed to be a psyop to make anti-Zionism into something safe for liberals(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>1850644
We've always tried to create broad coalitions as possible around this issue you insufferable child.
If you want to larp as le real leftist hardXcore, then go to twitter which is more than amenable.
Worthless wrecker cunt.

>>1850644
All political activity is a psyop, and there's nothing ever wrong with normalizing opposition to identity politics.

>>1850644
No one buys into your garbage, zionazi

>>1850646
When the Bolsheviks tried that Trotsky was able to coordinate with SR assassins to murder Lenin. Nice try though(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)

>>1850656
>muh bolshevik larp
Don't care. Didn't ask.
Go back to twitter.

12 Arrested Outside NYC's New School as First Faculty-Led Gaza Solidarity Encampment Continues
The first faculty-led Gaza solidarity encampment in the United States was launched Wednesday at The New School in New York City, where nearly two dozen professors and lecturers pitched tents inside the lobby of the university's main building on Fifth Avenue. The encampment is named after the Palestinian writer, poet and professor Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in December. The faculty protest began after the police raided a student encampment at The New School and arrested more than 40 students following a request by the university administration to clear the encampment. On Thursday, 12 more people were arrested outside The New School as the faculty encampment continued inside. Democracy Now! was on the scene and spoke with protesting faculty who denounced the school's ties to Israel and the militarized police response against student protesters. "For the state violence that our students were subjected to and traumatized because of, we could not stand on the sidelines any longer," part-time lecturer Suneil Sanzgiri said. "What we're doing here is calling for all faculty across the country to step up, to risk more and to escalate, because we have to get all war profiteers out of our universities."

>>1850725
Lol, isn't The New School supposed to be THE progressive economics college? lmao

>>1850726
As far I'm aware, this will really turn in to a deep tension with these more progressive/'progressive' campuses.
Especially as other campuses across the globe not in america, whom they hold deep ties with, have started the process of divestment and negotiating demands with relatively little struggle.

>>1850726
Was supposed to be, but bureaucrats ruin everything. 90% of administrators need to be enslaved.

>>1850744
AFAIK the whole point of this college was to offer a heterodox alternative to crusty Colombia, lmao

>>1850725
Is /ourguy/ Shaikh among them?

Norman Finkelstein: Build a Majority for Palestine
BY
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/norman-finkelstein-student-protests-gaza-free-speech
https://archive.ph/T8rtW

I don’t want to claim any kind of expertise, and I have to always be careful of appearing to be condescending or patronizing, or [claiming to be] all-wise in these matters. I would simply say, based on my experience, the most important things are organization, leadership, and having clear objectives.

Clear objectives means basically two things. One is slogans that are going to unite and not divide. In my youth, when I was your age, I was what was called back in the day a Maoist — a follower of Chairman Mao in China. One of the slogans that was famously associated with him was “Unite the many to defeat the few.”

That means, at any juncture in the political struggle, you have to figure out how you can unite the many and isolate the few with a clear objective in mind. Obviously, you don’t want to unite the many with a goal or objective that is not your objective. You have to figure out, having your objective in mind, what is the slogan that will work the best to unite the many and defeat the few?

I was gratified that the movement as a whole, shortly after October 7, spontaneously and intuitively grasped, in my opinion, the right slogan: “Cease-fire now!” Some of you might think, in retrospect, what was so brilliant about that slogan? Wasn’t it obvious?

But in fact political slogans are never obvious. There are all sorts of routes and paths and byways that people can go down that are destructive to the movement. It wasn’t a leadership decision, I don’t think; it was a spontaneous, intuitive sense by the protesters that the right slogan at this moment is “Cease-fire now.”

I would also say, in my opinion, the slogans have to be as clear as possible, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, which can be exploited to discredit a movement. If you take the history of struggle, there was the famous slogan going back to the late 1800s, “The eight-hour working day.” It was a clear slogan.

More recent, in your own living memory — for all the disappointments, in my opinion, of the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy — one of the geniuses of his candidacy, because he had forty or fifty years of experience on the Left, [was the slogan] “Medicare for all.” You might think, what’s so smart about that slogan? He knew that he could reach 80 percent of Americans with that slogan. He knew that “Abolish student debt” and “Free college tuition” would resonate with a large part of his potential constituency.

He didn’t go beyond what was possible at that particular moment. I do think he reached what we might call “the political limit.” The limit at that point in his candidacy was probably jobs for all, public works programs, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, abolish student debt, and free college tuition. Those were the right slogans. It may seem trivial, but it really is not. It takes a lot of hard work and sensitivity to the constituency that you’re trying to reach to figure out the right slogans.

>>1850774
Free Gaza, Free Speech

My own view is that some of the slogans of the current movement don’t work. The future belongs to you guys and not to me, and I’m a strong believer in democracy. You have to decide for yourselves. But in my view, you have to pick the slogans which are not ambiguous, leaving no wiggle room for misinterpretation, and which have the biggest likelihood at a given political moment of reaching the largest number of people. That’s my political experience.

I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech” — that should be the slogan. Because I think, on a college campus, people have a real problem defending the repression of speech.

In recent years, because of the emergence of the identity-politics, cancel-culture ambiance on college campuses, the whole issue of free speech and academic freedom has become severely clouded. I have opposed any restrictions on free speech, and I oppose the identity-politics cancel culture on the grounds of preserving free speech.

I’ll say — not as a point of pride or egotism or to say “I told you so,” but just as a factual matter — in the last book I wrote, I explicitly said that if you use the standard of hurt feelings as a ground to stifle or repress speech, when Palestinians protest this, that, or the other, Israeli students are going to use the claim of hurt feelings, pained emotions, and that whole language and vocabulary, which is so easily turned against those who have been using it in the name of their own cause.

That was a disaster waiting to happen. I wrote about it because I knew what would happen, though obviously I could not have predicted the scale after October 7. But it was perfectly obvious what was going to happen.

In my opinion, the most powerful weapon you have is the weapon of truth and justice. You should never create a situation where you can be silenced on the grounds of feelings and emotions. If you listened to [Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s] remarks, it was all about hurt feelings, feeling afraid. That whole language has completely corrupted the notion of free speech and academic freedom.

You now have that experience, and hopefully going forward that language and those concepts will be jettisoned from a movement that describes itself as belonging to a leftist tradition. It’s a complete catastrophe when that language infiltrates leftist discourse, as you are seeing now.

I’m going to be candid with you, and I don’t make any claim to infallibility — I’m simply stating based on my own experience in politics: I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your being manipulatively misunderstood.

But when I was hearing that this slogan causes pain, anguish, fear, I have to ask myself a simple question. What does the slogan “We support the IDF” convey? The Israel Defense Forces, right now, is a genocidal army. Why are you allowed to have public support at this moment for a genocidal state and a genocidal army?

The language doesn’t seem as provocative — “We support the IDF.” But the content is ten thousand times more offensive and more outrageous to any, so to speak, civilized mind and civilized heart than the “From the river to the sea” slogan. The only reason there is an argument about that slogan — even though, as I said, I disagree with it, but that’s a separate matter whether I agree or disagree — is because we have legitimized this notion that hurt feelings are grounds for stifling speech. That to me is totally unacceptable; it’s wholly alien to the notion of academic freedom.

Some of you might say, that’s a bourgeois notion, it’s socially constructed, and all that other crap. I don’t believe that at all. You read the most eloquent defenses of unhindered, untrammeled freedom of speech by people like Rosa Luxemburg, who was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary individual and an extraordinary revolutionary. But being both did not mean she would accept any curbs on the principle of free speech, for two reasons.

Number one, no radical movement can make any kind of progress unless it has clarity about its goals and clarity about what it might be doing that’s wrong. You’re always engaging in course corrections. Everybody makes mistakes. Unless you have free speech, you don’t know what you’re doing that’s wrong.

Number two, the truth is not an enemy to oppressed peoples, and it’s certainly not an enemy to the people of Gaza. So we should maximize our commitment to free speech so as to maximize the dissemination of what’s true about what’s happening in Gaza — and not allow any excuse for repressing that truth.

>>1850776
What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

You’re doing ten thousand things right, and it’s deeply moving what you’ve achieved and accomplished, and the fact that many of you are putting your futures on the line is very impressive. I remember during the anti–Vietnam War movement, there were young people who wanted to go to medical school — and if you got arrested, you weren’t going to medical school. Many people struggled with the choice between getting arrested for the cause. It wasn’t an abstract cause — by the end of the war, the estimate was that between two and three million Vietnamese had been killed. It was an unfolding horror show every day.

People struggled with whether they would risk their entire futures. Many of you come from backgrounds where it was a real struggle to get to where you are today, to Columbia University. So I deeply respect your courage, your conviction, and every opportunity I have I acknowledge the incredible conviction and tenacity of your generation, which in many ways is more impressive than my own, for the reason that, in my generation, you can’t deny that an aspect of the antiwar movement was the fact that the draft lay on a lot of people. You could get the student deferment for the four years that you’re in college, but once the deferment passed, there was a good chance you were going over there and you were coming back in a body bag.

So there was an element of self-concern. Whereas you young people, you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the world. That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply inspiring.

With that as an introduction, to return to my initial remarks: I said any movement has to ask itself: What is its goal? What is its objective? What is it trying to achieve? A few years ago, “From the river to the sea” was a slogan of the movement. I remember in the 1970s, one of the slogans was, “Everyone should know, we support the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]” — which was not an easy slogan to shout on Fifth Avenue in the 1970s. I vividly recall looking at the rooftops and waiting for a sniper to dispatch me to eternity at an early age.

However, there’s a very big difference when you’re essentially a political cult and you can shout any slogan that you like, because it has no public repercussions or reverberations. You’re essentially talking to yourself. You’re setting up a table on campus, giving out literature for Palestine; you might get five people who are interested. There’s a big difference between that situation and the situation you’re in today, where you have a very large constituency that you could potentially and realistically reach.

You have to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message. I understand that sometimes a slogan is one that gives spirit to those who are involved in the movement. Then you have to figure out the right balance between the spirit that you want to inspire in your movement and the audience or the constituency out there that’s not part of the movement that you want to reach.

I believe one has to exercise — not in a conservative sense, but a radical sense — in a moment like this, maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?

Am I problematic for being pessimistic? It's all admirable, but the only possible outcome is violent repression and suspension of students, and then American academia becoming even more reactionary. Student movements have almost never been successful.

>>1850774
>>1850776
>>1850778
>Free Palestine, Free Speech
The unstated benefit of saying this is that it will (1) help to purge radlib elements who would otherwise wreck things in the longer term and (2) expose the contradictions of the "free speech" right wing, for whom the slogan simply means getting to say slurs without consequences. It seems the significance of free speech has been obscured by the lack of a real struggle over the issue.

>I’m going to be candid with you, and I don’t make any claim to infallibility — I’m simply stating based on my own experience in politics: I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your being manipulatively misunderstood.
Strongly disagree. It's actually more prone to misinterpretation, because they will take it as a more explicit demand to remove everyone but the Palestinian people. A Free Palestine - Palestine as a country - is more inclusive, since many people who are currently "Israeli" would live there (not everyone in Israel is a settler ofc, many are native to the land).

It's also just terrible optics to concede to Israel the point about the slogan. It looks weak and it makes their fake concern seem more valid. Surprised Norm would have this opinion tbh.

>Whereas you young people, you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the world. That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply inspiring.
I think this doesn't get pointed out enough. 2020 protests happened globally and sort of proved the concept that people could mobilize globally for a cause like that. These protests are putting that into more realistic practice with stronger organization. These developments, regardless of the degree to which they mitigate the suffering of Palestinians, bode extremely well for the prospects of the workers of the world uniting. Not least of which because for most of these people there is near-zero immediate tangible self-interest in supporting Palestine. While global solidarity has long-term self-interest involved, many of the struggles that constitute a global revolution would not yield immediate tangible benefits to workers outside those immediately affected. These protests demonstrate, if nothing else, the capacity for a global class consciousness to motivate an international proletarian revolution.

New map of European encampments

Cracking down on the college campus encampments seems to be driving protesters to spill out to elsewhere. The opposite of containment.

>>1850831
>Surprised Norm would have this opinion tbh.
Norm didn't say in his speech that the slogan "from the river to the sea" was comparable to "we support the IDF" in terms of the content, even though he disagreed with the slogan, but whether rightly or wrongly, he doesn't seem like he supports any slogan that implies destroying Israel. I wonder if that's more for some strategic or political reasons (more on that in a second) than, say, opposition to a single democratic Palestinian state that includes Jews and Palestinians living in the same space (I somehow doubt Norm would disagree with that?). That would be the end of "Israel" but with a different outcome than someone who interprets "from the river the sea" as driving the Jews into the sea.

>It's also just terrible optics to concede to Israel the point about the slogan. It looks weak and it makes their fake concern seem more valid.
I think the bigger problem is that Israelis in the main don't think it's a fake concern and will react with such hostility to it that they'll fight you. They'll fight you harder. You think it's fake, they don't. Now, this belief might be "false" as ideology often is, but nevertheless I believe it has a real force. You can say, well, so what? They're crazy, irrational, or just way too deep in their own sauce. Maybe they are all of those things. But it's genuinely believed by Israelis of all classes that anyone who says "from the river to the sea" is a genocidaire in waiting, and when lots of people chant it together, pogroms are on the way. If you wander into the crowd of people chanting that while wearing your kippah, icy hands will clasp themselves around your neck as a thuggish face stares at you, his eyes burning with hate, before throwing you into the nearest body of water: "from the river to the sea!" Ayeeee!

Or actually not.

I might be wrong, but I think the problem is the flip side of "unite the many," which is to "divide the enemy," is being left out of the strategy. Norm didn't say that part and I'm not sure if he was trying to get at this, but it does follow from his Maoist logic. You unite as many people as you can on your side, but also do politics in such a way to split the enemy (so one divides into two). But there's no split in the Israeli camp on the fundamental question here, at least not at the moment, they feel like their backs are up against the wall and are reacting like an animal would.

"Free Palestine, Free Speech" though does create an interesting contradiction since all the people who don't want to free Palestine have been saying they luuuuuv free speech for years. But NOT THIS KIND OF SPEECH NO WAY and here come the stormtroopers to bust up the students…. who must be stopped before they start converting to some militant martyrdom ideology and begin strapping suicide vests to themselves and blowing up their history classes! People believe that, can you imagine? It's a total delusion about who these people actually are: Columbia University students. "Don't you see how they're training in military-style tactics???" (Linking arms and de-arresting their friends.) But I think there are a lot of people who don't really care about Palestine that much or place it that high in their list of priorities who find the police repression to be galling, and those are people who can be united… I think.

>>1850912
People used to think the Soviet Union was going to do a secret coup and install Paul Robeson as the USA's Stalin.
People, Fascists, Americans, believe insane things and always have.

>>1851021
sometimes i wish that the stupid bullshit rightoids think was actually real like this would actually be so great and so would joe biden being a secret communist

>>1851024
Yea, comrade General-Secretary of the North American Socialist Republic Paul Robeson honestly would have been the best timeliness.

>>1850891
>I think the bigger problem is that Israelis in the main don't think it's a fake concern and will react with such hostility to it that they'll fight you. They'll fight you harder.
Yeah but that makes them look bad because it validates the claims about the irrationality and violence of zionism to onlookers. It's the kind of behavior that will make more people move from neutrality to siding with Palestine or from siding with Palestine to actually doing something.
>they actually believe it
No they don't lmao. Do you not know anybody with this kind of batshit nationalist ideology? White people don't actually believe the white genocide narrative either. They just know that they can use this sort of imagined threat as a justification for violence against people they don't like. Vid related. It's just about establishing pretext.

>>1850891
>but also do politics in such a way to split the enemy (so one divides into two). But there's no split in the Israeli camp on the fundamental question here, at least not at the moment, they feel like their backs are up against the wall and are reacting like an animal would.
That's not really true, there's the issue of the hostages and drafting the Hasidics. There are multiple points of fracture within Israel proper, although externally there's not really much to work with when dealing with Zionists.

The thing about fascists is that they can change their ideology whenever it's convenient, which makes it easier for them to cohere together. You only see them start to split when it starts being a matter of material interests diverging. Right now, the Christian Zionists vs the Jewish Zionists for instance might have major ideological schisms, but their material interests remain aligned (upholding western hegemony), so you aren't going to succeed at driving a wedge there.

If you want to succeed at splitting up the Zionists, you probably should start with the more liberal progressive ones. One of the talking points you see a lot about this is the "this is why Americans don't have healthcare" argument. That kind of argument at least, personal material interests, is where you could make progress at dividing the enemy.

>>1850912
It's amazing how much music does. Anons with editing skills should add it to an adorable cat and puppy video to point out the disjointed tone.

Whatever you need, we're doing what we can. It's all hands on deck right now. We're spinning up things on all angles, trying to spread the word across the web and beyond.

We are living in those weeks lads.

>>1851140
>sensitive info
>gmail
Fed

is big tech hiding the campus protests under the rug? I feel like there was large and sustained momentum regarding the movement but recently it's as if nothing is going on at all. the protests haven't seemed to die down significantly, so what's up? who's paying Elon to prevent anti-zionist hashtags from going viral?

>>1851597
lots of people are busy going outside instead of posting

>>1851052
>Yeah but that makes them look bad because it validates the claims about the irrationality and violence of zionism to onlookers.
That seems to be the case yes.

>No they don't lmao. Do you not know anybody with this kind of batshit nationalist ideology? White people don't actually believe the white genocide narrative either.
Well, I'm not sure… some of them probably do. But I don't think the white vs. non-white framework is easily transferred to this context.

>They just know that they can use this sort of imagined threat as a justification for violence against people they don't like.
Well this is an interesting discussion because it's about ideology, but I suspect it can be both a retroactive justification for violence against people they don't like, and genuinely believed in. The ideology has a force of its own. That is what is scary about it to me. To use an analogy, early on as the Syrian civil war developed, it didn't really seem like the rebels had been fully consumed by ISIS yet, but the government treated people as if they were already. Was this just an imaginary threat used as a justification for violence? Or maybe Assad and his senior people also really believed that everyone who was out protesting him were terrorists and therefore had to be met with maximum force.

has anyone else become really militant really fast? I have been dealing with bad faith actors and crazies the past few days because security sll quit, and I am kinda coming into my own. I dealt with a particularly weird dude who came and startled all of us late last night at the meeting. People are thanking me and shit. feels good.

it is great to see the chillens advancing, but I am not optimistic rn

>>1851597
its after finals. all the petit bourg in training have gone home

>>1850889
>pic3
She wore it better

>>1851834
The encampment movement is fizziling out because it is campus centric and most colleges are ending their semesters this week or in the coming weeks. People need to organize encampments outside of colleges,especially because most students are moving back to their parent's town over the summer.

>>1852578
yes, I am aware of all of those things because I saw them first hand

>>1850817
stop concern trolling, we are literally seeing their successes right now

>>1852938
So did I. We really need encampments at public parks in cities. I think that is the best step forward maoanon.

>>1852941
Oh yeah, undoubtedly! We are hoping to get something going on some other front and just keep the momentum. Total contiguity, we will be out there again tomorrow

cheers o7

an update: we ended up taking the most recent counter-proposal. I was disappointed and abstained from the vote, noting that the word "Palestinian" is not even used in it. I didn't wanna crush the chillens spirits too much though, and honestly, I think that even though there was a lot of demoralization, people see that we are just a small part of a much larger movement that is seeing success most of us never anticipated.