A bit more about "soft power" (trying to write more of this in my own threads rather than more annoyingly in someone elses): it's a new concept, starting in the US in 1985 and popularized by the late 80s. This is a really significant time and place!

tl/dr: It's a neoliberal concept that was always about treating the remains of ideological competition as if they would continue once the competition was over.

Hero:

https://archive.ph/TZ2Hs

From a recent discussion: what is a "big project"?

A big project is a kind of cause and effect of the state. Why do you need a state? For big projects. Why do you need big projects? To support a state.

Big projects are not things like "science", "agriculture", or knowledge about them. Those are done by networks. Big projects are things like massive tombs, army corps organizations, jet fighter models, nuclear weapons, state law books etc. They are organizational or engineering.

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.

My usual question about left political theory is "what happened when it was put into practice?" This leads to important cautions for anarchism, such as "do not in any way trust or work with state socialists" (who are historically some of the biggest killers of anarchists and destroyers of anarchist sociieties). Anarchist theory that posits a shared left is bad theory.

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Disentangling resistance

tl/dr: While statists can certainly still argue for the utility of the state in the abstract, Democratic partisans in the US should now realize that anarchist criticisms of the Democratic Party were completely factually correct and that the Democratic Party does not intend to resist in any way.

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