• aaro [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    if we wouldn’t resent our friends or comrades who have different desires, projects or tactics; if we wouldn’t project that guilt onto them—if we could stop doing all that, we would be so much closer to imagining truly revolutionary tactics, liberatory ways of life, abolitionist strategies.

    ...

    there are probably people you know who think that Lenin, Mao, and Stalin were right to call your average lazy workers saboteurs and wreckers, to put them in prisons and gulags, to subject them to public criticism sessions or secret trials and executions for refusing to work. Once we establish the worker’s state you’ll love your job . . . or else. These poor lost souls have rejected market economies only to make the revolution their boss.

    Still other comrades argue that the correct response to work is to organize, or, more explicitly, to unionize. And yet, most of the union organizers I know see their work as an exhausting, thankless, Sisyphean task that nevertheless must be done. My job is already an exhausting thankless Sisyphean task that nevertheless must be done! How will I make my job more palatable by doing a double shift for the union?

    smh my dick head :deeper-sadness:

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Honestly fuck this. You organize around labor because it is your only theoretical hand on the levers of power on the engine of the industrial firm. Capital is in charge of the industrial firm as it exists and produces, and will and has used that historically unprecedented power to drown and marginalize you and whatever non-industrial movement you come up with. It doesn't even have to use violence, though that is always the backstop, it will simply make and replicate more material culture than you until you are up to your ears in it, no matter how loud you scream that you are a revolutionary.

      Its not that lazy workers within a worker state are sabatours or wreckers. They just don't get what exactly is at stake until it is lost, slipped through their hands. Now, we can argue whether or not it was ever in their hands to begin with, but pretending that there never was a chance or project is simply butchering history for western ears.

        • Nagarjuna [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I think its largely a regional thing, I've been in Twin Cities and it wasn't huge, social anarchism was bigger, but in Portland a lot of the regulars consider themselves nihilists. It might be the age of the the anarchist movement here and the proximity to Eugene and Olympia where primitivists and anarcho punks (rather than social anarchists) held down the movement from the end of the new left to the start of the alter globalization movement.

        • Snack_Bolshevik
          ·
          3 years ago

          It doesn't seem to be all that popular, at least in the online spaces that I've been in. Although similar ideas in my experience have been more palpable to people I know irl.