I believe that due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism a revolution is inevitable, and necessary, but it's still not something that is easily palatable. Revolution is certainly romanticized, yet I still question every day whether or not I would be willing to die for my beliefs. My question to my fellow comrades is do you think non-violent form of revolution is possible, or will the state and reactionaries always crack down? I know that in the past those with power and prestige have been reluctant to give it up.
I’m going to pause my guerrilla war in the music sub for a moment:
We can absolutely beat the American military using a protracted people’s war.
Think bigger. Think smaller. Think dialectics and change and transformation and the metaphor of the spark that sets an entire prairie ablaze. The winds are beginning to blow in your favor.
The American military loses every battle after a few years. This is going to apply even moreso inside America.
Think how much recruiting is going to be fucked up when populist guerrillas, who have done their homework and developed base areas of support, start harassing soldiers during training and on the streets? What happens to morale and unit cohesion when Americans are violently harassing soldiers on training?
What if those Americans are also “BLM” and “ANTIFA” and use popular fronts to do popular things like staging liberations of pharmacies and redistributing medicine, liberating apartment blocks by unionizing tenants, preventing police from performing evictions, and so on?
We can do this for a long period of time and still have ever-growing mass support. Mass support is necessary. Maybe we know what we’re doing here.
We have to outlast them with only a few years of escalating antagonism and harassment. That’s it. Protracted. Peoples. War.
Stop thinking of it as primarily a set-piece battle between the rebels and the empire, it’s not, and those thoughts are leading people to the wrong conclusions (counter-revolutionary positions)
Hahaha this is actually a hilarious, succinct, and kind of spot-on counter-point to the argument 'americans could never defeat the american army, because it's the biggest army history has ever seen'.
Counterpoint: what war has the american army ever actually won hahahaha
To be pedantic, but the civil war, and the genocidal war against indigenous Americans. And we can question the various things the US had going for it that led to those victories, but at that point, how can we assign victory to any war by any force, and I'm already doing that by leaving out the war of 1812 and some other ones. Granted the US army hasn't won large series of battles (though it hasn't fought many battles like that since Korea either) that ended in enemy surrender since world war 2 (though there hasn't been a war within the US since the end of the native american wars, so that's a mixed sign.
Pedantic is good. ‘America always loses wars’ is one of those things that’s funny because it’s pretty true, but also couldn’t possibly be wholly true.
You’ve a good point about ‘no war on american soil’. I genuinely fear the american response if there’s ever a war on american soil. I mean, look at how people responded to 9/11. On the global scale, not the hugest thing; more americans were dying every day of covid than died there. But the response was... well, on a global scale.
Imagine if they got properly invaded, right? It’s a nation of, largely, hobbyist soldiers. Everyone’s armed to the teeth, looking for a fight, and extremely fragile. It would be explosive, fast, and very bloody, I fear.
Also, it’s not terribly fair to frame america as having been particularly helpful in WWII imo, which I know is a tired line haha. But, really, it’s like that douchebag in smash bros who turtles all game, only to come in with fresh legs and full stocks, and sweep people at the end, and then claim responsibility and dominance hahaha it’s a bit rich, frankly :P ;)
True regarding WW2, of course there are battles we could pick and say look in this battle resources were this and strategy was that, and it demonstrates victory or whatever, but again it's kinda pointless to debate war like that at point. I think it's unlikely there will be large scale war within the country no matter what, like if there's a revolution in the US either via some collapse of the country or democratic party collapse etc. I think it will be extremely quick. I think it's more likely that happens and sections of the country that resist balkanize, though who knows it could be nationwide or worldwide at that point.
Ya, I think I agree. At a certain point, I think that people, especially in rich places, are... moving beyond war? Which feels absurd to say about america, but I think makes a kind of sense.
As ideas like Human Rights become increasingly entrenched in culture, and as people continue to become, generally, less violent and more... content? I think we’ll see a much lower tolerance for total war. If some states seceded, I don’t think we’d see Civil War II: Baby Come Backaloo. Even as unlikely as seccession is at this point, I think it’s even less likely that it would come as war, if it did.
This is also assuming that many members of the military can't be convinced to defect to our cause, which simply makes things even easier for us.
Think how much recruiting is going to be fucked up when populist guerrillas, who have done their homework and developed base areas of support
How would we get to this point, though? I have a hard time imagining a future where a majority of the country doesn't (a) openly support whatever military dictator we're talking about, or (b) at least go along with it. Where would this popular resistance come from, especially with how easy it is to demonize any left-wing political group that engages in even minor violence?
Can I just slide this question and tell you the abstract truth sparing the messy details?
We’re already out there working on agitation. We have underground Red Guards and front orgs and everything. Perhaps you saw how we shut down capital in Canada for months by blockading rail traffic? Hi!
The Maoists and the masses are working on it. For real. Out there in radical orgs right now. Did you see the national approval rating for torching a police precinct? We’ll absolutely have the people on our side, all the way.
We’re moving further by organizing and trying to get as many people on the left side of the barricade as possible. Theory and praxis, same as ever.
Did you see the national approval rating for torching a police precinct? We’ll absolutely have the people on our side
There's a massive difference between supporting property destruction from afar and personally going out there with a gun to either shoot someone or get shot. I want to believe you, I just don't see a lot of evidence for it right now.
Also, those pipeline blockades failed. Like they got the MOU signed but I don't think it was really that substancial. The maoist groups fuckthepaintup's referring to are miniscule and not growing, and frankly often the ire of other left groups in the regions they are active in going off statements various indigenous left groups in canada have made towards the ones I know they're referring too, and they were not the spearheads of those blockades to begin with btw. And those railroad blockades resulted in large temporary layoffs for thousands of rail workers, and that lost them support. 65 percent of Canada supported the government forcibly removing them, and more than that had negative approvals of them by the end.
I have more of a philosophical answer than a historical one. I think all moments in history are both violent and peaceful, in varying kinds and degrees. If the people had overwhelming power; say the military and police turned, and almost everyone was on board... holding a gun to the capitalist's head could very well be enough, without having to fire it. Coups have happened in this way.
But that is still violent! But is it? Everything is, to varying degrees, peaceful and violent. Have their been peaceful revolutions in the past? Likely. Perhaps most weren't. Either way, that does not determine the future. It can help us predict, but there is no way to know with certainty if the next revolution, which could very well be The Big One given the unique moment in history we live, if it will follow in lock-step with past revolutions in terms of the levels of violence that have tended to occur. After all, there's never been a socialist revolution in an imperial core--yet.
The way I see it, the very existence of capitalism is extraordinary violence and the revolutionary violence that ousts it (no matter how graphic) is peaceful by comparison.
Capitalism directly chooses to keep millions on the verge of starvation, hoard healthcare, destroy infrastructure, wage imperial war, and imprison millions more for slave labor.
By comparison, a bloody revolution with short term violence that ends the constant violence we all live with is a peaceful option.
Ya! I totally agree. Capitalism and its consequences have killed 10039 garbillion people haha—I’m only just barely kidding. I agree.
But! I also think that, just for basic ethical reasons, revolution should aim to be as bloodless as possible. I don’t believe in revenge killings, or really punishment of any kind; I believe in progress, and reform. So... if it is possible to carry out the necessary revolution relatively bloodlessly, we should try.
I don’t excitedly await my turn to kill a capitalist. And I don’t particularly enjoy glofying the idea of it either, tbh. I would rather avoid the violence altogether, if that is at all possible during the coming revolution.
Of course, if revolution is here and it precipitated war, I would play my part. But leading up to that moment, I would do everything in my power to bring about revolution as peacefully as possible.
I think you're arguing, basically, 'violence is worth it', which I agree with. And I'm arguing something entirely non-contradictory to that; 'violence is undesirable, and should be avoided as much as possible' :) :red-fist:
Well put! Violence isn't good, but focusing on revolutionary violence and ignoring the violence inherent in the system is a common tactic used to discredit revolutions. I mean we've literally seen this during the protests (the "violent protestors" narrative). It's absolutely important to try and avoid using violence, but it's not something that can always be avoided. Especially if you're doing mass action. If a revolution successfully liberates the oppressed, there's a good chance they will want to do terrible things to their oppressors and it's not important to stop that from happening (see China).
Reaping what they sowed and such.
a revolution doesn't have to devolve into a civil war, but those in service of the state (law enforcement & military) will kill to maintain their power, and therefore, have to be killed for the revolution to succeed. it's often why turning the military is the most important step.
I agree with you on the importance of turning the military. But doing that is often more a propaganda mission, right? Like it's rare a people beats their military into submission, or scares them into turning sides with a show of force. It's more about popular support? I'm cloudy on the historical trends; I know in the case of the Cuban Revolution it took very much both war and propaganda to ultimately turn the military.
But once you have the military, isn't it relatively bloodless from there, too? I could see it happening in a way most would call relatively peaceful. Though I'm unsure!
(fwiw, I totally agree that revolution doesn't require civil war, I think history's pretty clear there :) I'm just having fun trying to imagine!)
I personally see it as incredibly naive to think there could be a successful bloodless socialist revolution. The ones there have been are defeated by the reactionaries pretty quickly, although the Bolivarian revolution is still an ongoing experiment. Like you point out, you’re always going to see attempted counter revolution, which has to be fought back in some manner.
The closest I could see to a bloodless rev in our circumstances is that society breaks down to such an extent due to the failures of capitalism and climate change that there is a collapse of the bourgeois state and a power vacuum into which a proletarian state can rise, however I think in this scenario there would be just as many competing reactionary interests that it would lead to widespread bloodshed anyway in the struggle for power.
I’m not trying to glorify violence or be pessimistic, I just find it quite unrealistic given historical precedent. Especially in the imperial core where the bourgeoisie have everything to lose.
Absolutely. I'm sure that the immeasurably wealthy and powerful people who run our society will peaceably give up all that wealth and power if asked politely.
I mean it depends on the nature of the dictatorship right? Dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (what we live in) are incredibly violent. That doesn't mean there couldn't come a situation where say you get the military to turn on them. It wouldn't be free of violence but if your side was to overwhelmingly hold the arms the other side would be crushed in short order without too much death and protracted fighting. On the other hand look at how peaceably the Soviet Union collapsed, if you want to even call that a "revolution". For all the propaganda capitalists sling about it, it should be telling how it slipped away with a whimper and no violent resistance.
I don't think a communist revolution can be entirely peaceful though because to maintain the new order especially in certain very liberal places you are going to have to do house keeping. Whether you put them in gulags or some other solution involving violence of one type or another you are going to have to suppress using state violence massive swathes of reactionaries, anti-communist liberals, etc who will undermine and destroy your revolution if you do not put them in check as one of the first orders of business. It is not enough to simply intimidate them sadly as we have seen with the west's own success in building color revolutions in countries out of these supposed repressed (until they aren't) people who are just either willing, aware anti-communists or just useful pawns who are easily misled thanks to a lifetime of indoctrination into liberalism.
Allowing counter-revolution is directly contributing to the murder of a hundred million people or several hundred million. Because where counter-revolution succeeds the land is salted for communism for a lifetime or more and in that time the angry bourgeoisie take revenge and plunder and starve.
Whether you put them in gulags or some other solution involving violence of one type or another you are going to have to suppress using state violence massive swathes of reactionaries, anti-communist liberals, etc who will undermine and destroy your revolution if you do not put them in check as one of the first orders of business.
You're right, and you don't leave it at the euphemism "house keeping," but we really shouldn't engage in that sort of euphemistic doublespeak to begin with. If we're talking about putting someone in a cage or even killing them, there should be a good justification for that, and the justification should stand even if we accurately describe what we're planning on doing.
Personally, I'm optimistic about the power of media to deprogram chuds and the rest of the groups you mention. The whole premise of a podcast like Citations Needed (the official pocast of chapo.chat) is that media immersion can and does affect what people view as normal or acceptable. If we change what's normal/acceptable in our media that might go a long ways towards shifting how reactionary the country is.
There is a saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks. The sad fact is a 40-year-old person is much less likely to be able to psychologically deal with rejecting everything they believed in for 40 years in favor of the new paradigm. They are much more likely thanks to priming to just dismiss your propaganda as "commie propaganda" and shrug it off rather than engaging seriously with it. They may even bother to get a surface level understanding of it just to be able to pass in the new society but they will retain their liberalism and wear their communism merely as a cloak in the new order to get by. It's been said before but it bears saying again, America will need a cultural revolution.
Luckily, everyone under 40 has been driven further and further left by disenfrancisement. The oldest Millenials are like 38 now.
They are much more likely thanks to priming to just dismiss your propaganda as “commie propaganda” and shrug it off rather than engaging seriously with it.
That's the thing about propaganda -- you don't have to engage seriously with it for it to be effective. Do you think the Fox News cranks are seriously engaging with that content now? They're just taking it at face value, or passively soaking it up as it plays in the background.
Plus, a great deal of propaganda in this country is subtle enough that most people would disagree if you even called it propaganda (think of shows like COPS, or even local news reports on crime that just reprint police press releases). Re-programming that stuff is just as important, and if someone flips it on or casually reads it in a newspaper it'd be harder to dismiss as "commie propaganda." You're right that there will be some people you just can't reach, but we should absolutely try to minimize the amount of state violence needed to stop them from sabotaging society.
It's only subtle because it is presumed to be eternal and by default. It is only subtle because it is everywhere and has been everywhere for the lifetime of everyone currently in existence. I'm sure liberals thought differently at the dawn of liberalism, had different opinions based on their lived experiences with previous systems. But capitalism has been around so long and so strongly sewn its own narrative and the narrative for its enemies like socialism that even old people telling stories are just telling stories about slight differences in the same system.
By contrast communist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, anti-American propaganda would be INCREDIBLY jarring to people who have spent lifetimes not noticing or assuming as normal the things you're railing against.
So quite frankly you don't understand. For younger people growing up after the revolution it would be easier but they'd still have older people selling tales and lies about how things were different or better under capitalism. To get to the point we are now with capitalist propaganda not even being noticeable would require the first generation who grows up under socialism to have kids and die themselves and possible for those kids to also grow up and die to sever the memories and propaganda of the old.
By contrast communist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, anti-American propaganda would be INCREDIBLY jarring to people who have spent lifetimes not noticing or assuming as normal the things you’re railing against.
It'd be different, but that doesn't mean jarring. If you do a quasi-documentary in the style of COPS but focused on the worst parts of our legal system, the format will be familiar enough even if the content is focused on how fucked up things are, not on watching pigs crack skulls. You can already find stuff like this, and it's even easier to find purely fictional media in this vein. No one is screaming "commie propaganda" at The Shawshank Redemption. It can be done, and it has been done -- the only question is how far you can go with it.
So quite frankly you don’t understand.
Neither of us has a crystal ball here.
Good comment, and to add to your last point, allowing a counter revolution to succeed in our epoch doesn’t just mean the bourgeoisie taking revenge on whatever proletarians it can get its hands on, it means inevitable climate catastrophe. We’re talking about a choice between crushing our class enemies or the end of widespread human life on this planet.
“They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. “ Engels, On Authority
Of course. Allende came very close to peaceful revolution, and if something similar were to happen in a nation less susceptible to pressure from foreign capital (say, the US itself), it might have a good chance of succeeding.
A state will never capitulate to a peaceful movement, because it simply has no reason to do so. A state will never capitulate to a violent movement, because admitting the legitimacy of some other group's use of violence damages the fundamental basis of statehood. However, states do sometimes capitulate to peaceful movements that have the same goals as violent movements, as this pacifies the violent movement without legitimizing their use of force. This can be seen with MLK and the Black Panthers, or Gandhi and Indian revolutionary movements.
I mean, sometimes they capitulate to violent movements. You know, when the movement has more guns and is pointing them at their face.
Hah, yeah. Violent movements can succeed, but success for them is replacing the state outright (and this is probably the origin story for any given state).
You don’t necessarily need more guns. You won’t ever have more guns. You need the masses. The masses are brilliant and will weaponize everything they touch.
In the Peruvian example, the guerrillas were able to start rolling blackouts as they moved towards Lima. Most of the guerrillas were poorly armed, and used liberated dynamite from mining operations as a primary weapon. They were vastly outgunned.
How did they do this? An epic gun battle at the power company? Commando raids? Nope. The technicians themselves were supporters!
So the only possibility of a bloodless revolution lies in a revolutionary movement so strong that there is a universal acknowledgement on the part of the old state and the bourgeoisie that they will not be able to effectively oppose the assumption of state power in any way.
This sounds like my (poor) understanding of the end of apartheid.
The beginning of the American Revolution was this way. We threw out British magistrates and governors and effectively ran the towns ourselves. It was so peaceful that it spooked Edmund Burke. It wasn't until the British sent in the troops that it became violent.
Consider this quote from Burke:
Some provinces have tried their experiment, as we have tried ours; and theirs has succeeded. They have formed a government sufficient for its purposes, without the bustle of a revolution or the formality of an election. Evident necessity and tacit consent have done the business in an instant. So well they have done it, that Lord Dunmore–the account is among the fragments on your table–tells you that the new institution is infinitely better obeyed than the ancient government ever was in its most fortunate periods. Obedience is what makes government, and not the names by which it is called; not the name of Governor, as formerly, or Committee, as at present. This new government has originated directly from the people, and was not transmitted through any of the ordinary artificial media of a positive constitution. It was not a manufacture ready formed, and transmitted to them in that condition from England. The evil arising from hence is this; that the Colonists having once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages of order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they had appeared before the trial. Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths, we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts. We were confident that the first feeling if not the very prospect, of anarchy would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable.
Consider this video about Edmund Burke vs Thomas Paine from the Zer0 Books channel.
The Soviet Union fell without any widespread violence (which suggests it wasn't actually that oppressive, at least towards the end), so it's not unthinkable. In the U.S., there hasn't been anything so comprehensive, but there have been pretty radical, positive shifts in how we treat minority populations and how we handle drug policy. None of that has gone as far as it should, of course, but it's come without anything resembling a violent revolution.
That was a counter revolution not a revolution. Also I wouldn’t call 600 casualties “non violent”.
Note that I said "without any widespread violence." A brief armed clash is not really the same as a violent revolution.
And whatever you call it, it was a fundamental change in the government of a superpower. It's relevant.
