u/KiaKaha posted a link to Stalin’s 1901 work The Russian Social-Democratic Party and its Immediate Tasks a couple of days ago.
Obviously it’s a dangerous game to start plucking strategy and tactics from previous epochs and trying to apply them to our current situations, but god damn there are some passages that could’ve been written yesterday. Definitely some stuff we can reflect on. I pulled some choice quotes:
The Socialists had no roots among the working population and, consequently, their activities were abstract, futile. The workers, on the other hand, lacked leaders, organisers, and, consequently, their movement took the form of disorderly revolts.
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in addition to their immediate enemy, the capitalist, [the workers] have another, still more vigilant foe—the organised force of the entire bourgeois class, the present capitalist state, with its armed forces, its courts, police, prisons and gendarmerie.
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Unfortunately, the Russian peasantry is still downtrodden by agelong slavery, poverty and ignorance; it is only just awakening, it does not yet know who its enemy is. The oppressed nations in Russia cannot even dream of liberating themselves by their own efforts so long as they are opposed not only by the Russian government, but even by the Russian people, who have not yet realised that their common enemy is the autocracy.
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Street demonstrations are interesting in that they quickly draw large masses of the people into the movement, acquaint them with our demands at once and create extensive favourable soil in which we can boldly sow the seeds of socialist ideas and of political freedom. Street demonstrations give rise to street agitation, to the influence of which the backward and timid sectionof society cannot help yielding.3 A man has only to go out into the street during a demonstration to see courageous fighters, to understand what they are fighting for, to hear free voices calling upon everybody to join the struggle, and militant songs denouncing the existing system and exposing our social evils. That is why the government fears street demonstrations more than anything else. That is why it threatens with dire punishment not only the demonstrators, but also the "curious onlookers." In this curiosity of the people lurks the chief danger that threatens the government: the "curious onlooker" of today will be a demonstrator tomorrow and rally new groups of "curious onlookers" around himself. And today there are tens of thousands of such "curious onlookers" in every large town. Russians no longer run into hiding, as they did before, on hearing of disorders taking place somewhere or other ("I'd better get out of the way in case I get into trouble," they used to say); today they flock to the scene of the disorders and evince "curiosity": they are eager to know why these disorders are taking place, why so many people offer their backs to the lash of the Cossacks' whip.
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the whip lash is rendering us a great service, for it is hastening the revolutionisation of the "curious onlookers." It is being transformed from an instrument for taming into an instrument for rousing the people.
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even if street demonstrations do not produce direct results for us, even if the demonstrators are still too weak today to compel the government immediately to yield to the popular demands—the sacrifices we make in street demonstrations today will be compensated a hundredfold. Every militant who falls in the struggle, or is torn out of our ranks, rouses hundreds of new fighters.
Some stuff to think about, and a little bit of inspiration (if that isn’t too strong a word...) in those last couple of passages. It’s a very short read if you wanted to check it out.
It is super interesting, but I think most peol that have read some theory or are familiar with history have a good idea about these things (I didn't , but I'm a noob). But from what I gather the problem is that it's very difficult to materialize leaders that won't get got by the state real fast, and the state over the last decades has become insanely good at coopting and subversing such movements, sowing division etc. Until there is a good solution to these issues, or the conditions deteriorate so much that the state can no longer use these tactics, things will remain the same.
The tsarist secret police were actually very good at catching the leaders of these groups, the thing is they would just be exiled to Siberia where they could essentially just walk off one day when they felt like escaping, especially if they were decently connected like Lenin and could get sent somewhere not too bad. Or they’d get kicked out of Russia and just go to Switzerland and write propaganda for a few years.
Nowadays the punishment is death, or being locked in some horrific part of the prison industrial complex, definitely more challenging.
Every so often I ponder about Foucault’s idea of the panopticon - where the point isn’t that you are being observed at all times, but that you could be being observed at any time. I wonder which side of that coin we’re closer to, because of course the second option leaves some gaps to operate in, even if it is risky.
I just find myself mulling over the fact that we all just innately know our particular states (we mainly talk about the US but this I assume applies to most of the west) have complete surveillance over us. But of course, that’s entirely what they would want us to think.
The capacity of those surveillance states to operate in a situation of open revolt in their home territory hasn’t really been tested either, although the US has made a total shitshow out of doing that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not a one to one comparison obviously.
You're currently carrying around a surveillance device. Even if you're not, if you're outside there are a dozen people near you who are. The panopticon is here, they just haven't leveraged every single bit of metadata and passive listening, yet.
i think it really made me scared for years to drift any further left for fear of being flagged. many of my old right-libertarian beliefs were basically "signal noise" to make me seem like less of a threat to the state. ive been through the system and i think it PTSDed me significantly