There is an irresolvable contradiction between the well being of workers in the imperial core in the Global North & the Global South, and between any kind of productivism & ecology, at least in the short to medium run, so how does one work around that ? https://twitter.com/thecpluc/status/1312079383922987008
Upheavals always cause falls in standard of living & so on. The only thing that will improve the global south is an end of the hegemony of the Global North. That is also the first stage to any mass radical transformation of the latter.
While state led reformism in the global North meant to improve the standards continually of the GN, has to turn the global south into a sacrifice zone—resulting mass losses of standard of living & destruction of ecology.
Respectively these can be seen somewhat as MLM in the former case, & social democracy in the latter. These are self consistent mass political positions that cohere w/ world facts. Of the 2 I’m more sympathetic to the former but I endorse neither bc I don’t endorse mass politics
Alternatively one could just go full reactionary nationalist & not concern themselves but that’s not emancipatory anymore. or become some sort of utopian voluntarist except that probably wouldn’t succeed at its plans for change.
These are, in my estimation, the four self consistent, coherent formulations of mass politics,that coherently address the facts of the world, that take the existence of the ‘masses’ as do they take either/both of some unified bounded ‘revolution’ or ‘continual reform’ for granted
They also each take either or both the existence of the state, and secondarily ‘nations’ & nationalism for granted as irresolvable facts. But do so in different ways.
For example, left nationalist reactionaries take the existence of the state but not capitalism or markets for granted. The voluntarism take markets but not the state for granted. SocDems take both for granted at least for the time being. Of the four Only MLM looks beyond them.
Except MLM takes the state etc for granted in the short term. This is why the description of MLM as ‘anarchism for people who want to use the state to kill people’ is an accurate description of the more unflattering representatives of the ideology (tho not its original intent).
Alternatively one can cut the Gordion Knot presented here & step outside the ouroboros of politics that take the masses & state for granted, and which often (but obviously not universally) hew toward productivism, nationalism, reformism, extractivism & juridicalism in practice
—Some Silly Backronyms I Coined in a Thread that I Deleted, but which Help Illustrate Two Broad Sets of Political Styles & Forms of Theorizing & Praxis—
While I enumerate the Backronyms below, for space I put the descriptions in this note. Since the backronyms are silly & im forgetful, without the context of the note they will look even more so. Also read the notes/caveats on the tweet above.
On the one hand we have what I Called MV3PS (to avoid calling them MAPs lmao)
M: Mass
V: Vanguardist
P: Product
P: Policy
P: Programmatic

Based Politics (lol)
On the other side—of course I gave the ones to which i am sympathetic the better backronym, & I forgot one of my letters oh well lol—PICARDs:
P: Process
I: Insurrectionary
C: Critique
A: Anarchist
R: relentlessly
D: Demanding
—Some Positive Examples in a Table—
—Some Alliterative Examples Meant to both Illustrate the Terms but Also Address Apparent Contradictions & Complex Combinations using Bordiga, Blanqui, Bakunin, and Bob Black (AnPrim lol)—
As is probably clear, I am a fan of politics focused on
processes, not products—politics as a never ending activity, and theory as its reflective adjunct, that doesn’t focus on end states, but paths to new ones, that climbs ladders & immediately kicks them away to climb again
demands, not policies—whatever it is, prison abolition, ecology, wages for housework, reparations, open borders, etc, these are *demands*—a policy wonk will always be supplied if we demand strongly enough, & they’ll always be insufficient, so we keep demanding
critiques, not programs—it is easier to point to what is wrong with the world, with our shared universal sufferings & pain, and with what we don’t want a society to look like, then to find a common ground for what we all want or to predict & build the future from the ground up
autonomy & anarchism, not vanguards & visionaries—the goal is to become ungovernable & expand ever outward in horizontal fashion between linked people of a shared world, not to focalize behind a counter sovereign who coopts our dreams to recuperate them
And the most controversial one, probably:

Insurrection & the interstities not Manichaean mass movements & Machiavellian manipulations—freedom is a verb, anarchy is a lived experience, & there will always be evils to fight & spaces within them to escape. This is guaranteed, but
But the ‘masses’ are an artificial construct that reifies contradictory social realities, while simultaneously adopting the states view of politics as a clash of friends & enemies, good & evil. This requires several contradictions
1. The masses contain contradictory social formations that can’t be papered over—while said social reifications are necessary for social science & politics, they are as limited as their contextual basis & capacity for instrumental intervention
2. The unceasingly changing & socially diverse collections of people resist being reified because every such reification has real productive effects that change & ~*deterritorialize*~ them, before the previous act or construction is even complete
3. The Manichaean view of politics creates an antagonism where the sovereign defines/ is defined by its enemies, & must strive for their final destruction, but such a final destruction is either impossible or if possible & completed nullifies its own conditions of possibility
4. Between the ceaseless neverending notion of politics & sovereignty embodied in either or both of the friend/enemy distinction and non teleological dialectics with the reifying Static, teleological & eschatological mass politics
5. Between the fact that while the state needs to enemies to create friends, both internal & external, the mass movement seeks to make friends (sometimes of former enemies) to make & fight enemies.
In less pedantic language, mass politics requires a form of reification, social construction, homogeneity & end goals that are in tension with its conditions of possibility, reality, & the idea of a final battle of good & evil.
—Ultimately, however, there is one set of key advantages of the modes I am discussing, which I will enumerate before returning to the first post, productivism etc—
The main reasons I prefer one set over the other is flexibility, consistency & subsumption, Namely:
1. The static conceptions forbid the concepts & tactics of the dynamic ones, but the dynamic ones allow the concepts & tactics of the static ones
2. If the dynamic ones turn out to be ‘wrong’ & the static ones ‘right’, and/or if the static ones achieve their stated goals, the dynamic ones would:
A. Allow Cooperate in the process & outcome
B. Be happy for the world
While the reverse isn’t true
I.e. is a mass Vanguardist revolution really does overthrow capitalism & wither away the state through class struggle, autonomists & anarchists would participate where they can and would be happy for them. The converse isn’t true, however.
3. All of the static ones can be seen as steps, stages, tactics, experiments, moments, etc in the ‘kitchen sink’ approach of the dynamic ones—they allow pluralism, but the static ones do not.
This alone makes them superior, because any advantages the static ones have, the dynamic ones inherit, by virtue of the above (this is relatively easy to show in a logical & probabilistic sense), but any advantages the dynamic ones may have are lost to the static ones
Unless you’re full of absolute certainty (which in my view is naive anyway), and cannot name a single fact in favor of the other camp, this means that, definitionally, one set beats out the other
I.e. wherever information, knowledge & capabilities are incomplete, uncertain, unknown, erroneous, and/or asymmetric, the more dynamic, general & broader ones win out, independent of any evidence for either beyond that.
But since I think there is independent evidence & theoretical reason to believe in one set, which, on net, imo, outweighs the same for the other set, i have reason to believe it Anyway.
Which means I think the more dynamic sets have:
1. Independent theoretical & empirical reasons to support them
2. Relative theoretical & empirical reasons to support them
3. Reasons stemming from knowledge, uncertainty, error, probability & logic which support them either way
—Back from abstraction and the sublime to the concrete & ridiculous, or returning to the original subject—
I wrote this thread in the way that just the intro part can be read, and one can skip all the theory to the end here if they’re interested, but so that the theory & its elaboration are available on the way.
Returning to the first point, the fact is that the interests of global south & north are antagonistic & contradictory, even for laborers, lumpen, dependents, the poor, the marginalized, etc, let alone within them
This will remain the case until something occurs which undoes this—
1. mass successful revolutions in GS
2. their achievement of parity
3. The creation of open borders, and end to state & imperialist means of primitive accumulation, repression & unequal exchange
4. Upheavals in the global south that transform it—catastrophes would do the trick, but we don’t want those lol
5. A global war or conflagration
6. Rapidly self perpetuating ecological collapse
7. The rise of authoritarianism nationalism & conflict of great powers
8. The Global North saying fuck it and turning the global south into a sacrifice zone
9. Some mass voluntary change in consciousness that voluntarily leads everybody on the world to cooperate independent of material change
10. Creation of a world state
11. Simultaneous revolutions everywhere or in the GS but assisted in the GN by obstructing the state
12. Accelerationist intensification of capiralisms contradictions & it’s catastrophist show down w the nation state
13. The creation of a global network of liberal constitutional social democratic nation states federated together at multiple levels in multinational regional state coalitions like the EU,federated perhaps up to global level w Kantian or Rawlsian cosmopolitan principles
14. Some mass movement of global exile & secession and or voluntaristic mutualist cooperation
15. A showdown between one & the other
16. Magical emerging technology, science, social science, institutions, culture, knowledge, resources & practices which allow the irresolvable contradictions to fade away with the end of material scarcity relative to satiation but w fair distribution
17. A mass conflagration of anarchist or autonomist or council com or leftcom or whatever else mass movements, perhaps joined together as internationalist intercommunal platform, that coordinate & overthrow state & capital everywhere
18. Committed anarchists & communists ceaselessly struggling against the state & capital everywhere, creating ungovernable spaces, networks of affiliation, & staging insurrections, tactical strikes, social experiments, secession, illegalism, propaganda of deed, & cooperation
Several of these are just subvariants of the 4 consistent schools I mentioned. Some are either denials of or exogenous changes in the conditions of possibility for them. Some are just hopefulness. While some step out of it entirely & embrace alternative politics. Others are a mix
That gives us a lot of options to manage the contradictions in the world either thru mass politics or outside of them, which either keep emancipatory politics or don’t. I know which ones i prefer.
—Some other thoughts on the original tweet & my response—
—On Productivism—
As someone said before i wrote my thread, one of them has to go, and that would be productivism. I agree with that on top of everything else I said. But getting rid of productivism isn’t a rebuttal to OP so much as stepping outside of it
There are many critiques of productivism, from reformist degrowth ones to radical degrowth to active challenges to the war machine to more critique not program approaches to civilization
But what all of them share is stepping outside of these artificial categories like self interest, growth, the masses, commodify production, alienation, and so on.
But when a growthist or productivisr hears a degrowther or anti productivist saying we need to step out of reified quantified approaches to material self interest, what they hear is “i want to lower people’s living standards”
Of course this just isn’t true, and, if actually implemented, due to the gains in equality, development, freedom, leisure, sociality, sustainability & the Commons, even materially reified & quantified living standards rise on mode & for most places on mean
But, nonetheless, this is how growthists think. So, while i agree with the critique of productivism being relevant, it doesn’t work without my secondary critiques & considerations At least implicitly.
—On ‘Falls’ in Living Standards & Self Interest—

Another point I want to make is that all true revolutions will result in falls in living standards st least somewhere, for some time, especially in our global economy
Especially given global supply chains & all the rest, a mass upheaval in the global north would, first of all, cause falls there due to the state’s violence & use of military but also because of how much means of life depends on the state & capitalism currently.
They hold us hostage. Secondarily, it would cause falls in the global south as well, because of the export, trade, investment, IP, and credentialed professionals. However they would be able to adapt over more easily & quickly in such an event.
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