Poster says, “go underground and shoot a cop” but does their best to make this almost impossible to understand.

Other than the tone of this post being as insufferable and preachy as the people it purports to criticize, something the author glaringly ignores is that for a very large portion of us alterity isn’t a tactical reprieve, it is thrust upon us, and that the mechanisms of control they declare we should be invisible to, don’t care if you’re “one of the good ones”, because they’re already loading the gun to shoot us in the back of the head with.

All in all, I think the author has a point on the time of rational politics to be over, and the need of “the left” to radically change tactics. At the same time, their prescriptions seem to be based on privileged fantasies of gleefully participating as a model orphan-crushing machine operator (don’t worry about race, disability, sexuality or gender identity, though, I’m sure you fake those, too, and it is for no reason violent or destructive to your health to pretend to be someone you’re not, and it doesn’t make you susceptible to blackmail) as long as you work towards its destruction in… Secret societies?

Difference is required to sell, because it doesn’t make sense to buy the same information twice. This is true in entertainment, business, social life, and also in politics, to some degree.

“to some degree” is doing a lot of work here because it absolutely makes sense to sell the same information twice. Selling the same info twice reduces the cost of producing information since you don’t have to constantly produce something new. You can talk about the contradiction of that cost-saving pressure with the desire for novelty from customers, but difference is not a requirement to sell.

He’s so different from the other politicians that an unemployed meth addict from Oklahoma could look at him and think: “Trump is so different than the other politicians and they are so different from me that this guy must be really exactly like me”.

???

Analysts won’t fail to remind you that Trump can do this because his interests align with the interests of Capital, or because something something “Fascism is Capitalism’s last resort”. They would be focusing on the Difference, missing the Alterity completely.

Right. So here is the entire thing. This is not theory. This is someone trying craft a take. Like someone who has nothing original to contribute to the internet discourse industry and is fishing for a new spin on the old “neoliberalism hellscape” brand from 10 years ago. It’s extremely contrived because the author is grasping for that new hook which sets them apart from previous and current takesmiths.

The rest can be summarized: Here is an academic distinction between two types of progressives (which encompasses all of the left for some reason). There are the older, stuffy, monolithic Manichean leftists. They are overly concerned with purity tests and have too small of a tent. That leads to them being easily counted by capital. Then there is the cool, innovative, stochastic Augustinian Left. They are wink-elbow nudge leftists who just focus on results and are open to new forms of action. They get better results because of that. Example? A CFO who leaks company information to expose anti-labor practices is Augustinian.

The solution is to stop outwardly being a leftist because being a leftist isn’t cool. What is cool is getting a job as a middle-manager and then funding a network of eco-terrorists. Sounds cool? Well, never ask yourself why aren’t middle managers doing that. Why aren’t the governments and corporations full of leftists who are doing cool covert politics? Does it have something to do with a middle manager having a stake in the status quo because funding eco-terrorism would possibly destabilize the system they rely on? Nah, see, that’s uncool boring Manichean shit. That’s why you’re no fun at parties.

This whole blog post is an affront to any theory. And if you think it’s just shitting on Marxism, they invoke Anarchism too.

Postmodern nonsense. Playing games with language and symbols, inventing categories–alterity, difference, whathaveyou, has no explanitory power in comparison to class, their movements and relations. What this blog post boils down to is nothing new: a slavish devotion to spontaneity, and indivualistic terror. It is no longer 1840. We have roughly 200 years of accumulated revolutionary experience all around us. That is our starting point. That is what we must take up and synthesize if we are to begin again, and pull this world out of the dark age its been cast into. Forgot Derrida.

be normal@support luigi tldr

inscrutable

Just parsing through your words.

The Augustinian Left, instead, operates through alterity without difference. If alterity is required, but difference is penalized and suppressed, the only strategic option is to maximize the former while minimizing the latter. Any other approach is doomed to remain stuck in the status quo or be countered by the environment. A new system is born when you can afford to operate according to a new logic while completely disregarding the old. You operate as if your system is already hegemonic.

The mechanism of recognition is fundamentally different from the Manichean Left, in which peers are recognized by their statements, their values, their morals, or more often than not, by their aesthetics. For the Augustinian Left, the test is post-hoc: you’re part of it based on the impact you have on the world. What you declare about yourself, what you state about yourself, and what you do are instruments to perturbate the psychoinformational sphere, but they should never be taken at face value. In the Augustinian Left, we recognize each other experientially: real recognizes real. At the same time, disguising yourself in front of society, in front of the Manichean Left, and in front of reactionary powers is fundamental to being able to operate effectively and maintain your alterity, which is ultimately what enables you to create Change.