If you want youth to be involved in mainstream politics ... maybe mainstream politics should mean something?
As an old person I'm tired of reading things about "nihilist" youth. These nihilist youth are much more in touch with reality -- both social reality and the realities of their personal situations -- than the people writing the articles.
Universities, for instance, are supposed to be the last survival of medieval guilds, run by the professors who teach and do research. They do not make sense as institutions otherwise.
An administrator is not a professor. And as Bakunin wrote in a similar context about workers and state socialist bosses, when you make a professor an administrator, they are no longer a professor.
News media have ideals that everyone knows: the editors are not supposed to stomp on stories the advertisers don't like, the owner is not supposed to control what is published. But in the neoliberal era these all became just property and the owner controls the property.
Political partiess are supposed to actually oppose each other, not cooperate on behalf of the wealthy to make sure that the people have no say.
So young people grow up in this society where it is extremely obvious to anyone who is not lying on behalf of their position that no one believes in these ideals, nothing actually works, no one cares about them either communally or individually and they have no say about anything.
Then it's "oh no they are creating some weird Internet cult".
Am I not in some weird Internet cult? It's not because I'm better than any of the people who are: it's because I'm in my 60s and long ago worked out social relationships that keep my life stable (for instance, I've been with my partner for 35 years, hopefully will be for the rest of my life, and have young-adult children who still depend on me for some things.)
Any differences are mostly just accidents of when people were born.
Any version of the left that *isn't* "some weird Internet cult" is fundamentally not responding to the times -- what people used to call the material conditions. There is no future in trying for a respectable social democracy one more time.
/fin
PS: I wrote a whole thread and didn't even get to how every country in the world agreed that we have to stop global warming and how nearly every country in the world is not, and how more and more leaders are saying it's just not going to happen.
Civilization is not a suicide pact! If that's what civilization is then expect to see a lot of uncivilized people.
This thread was awesome, thank you for sharing. Also, for what it's worth, I read "What is to be done" by Chernyshevsky (not the Lenin version) and although some people refer to it as one of the seminal works of nihilism, it struck me as a story that had many positive features. Your analysis about Emma Goldman was spot on as well.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
sauc3
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