The FBI kills potential organisers shortly after these events. It kills organising and momentum.
Also, the D.C. Snipers were arguably inspired by that line of thinking.
The feds also went after the fascist militias in the 90s, but the GOP and its oligarch backers threw a screaming fit about that so they backed off more and more until the department tasked with that had shrunk to less than a dozen people under Obama before being eliminated completely under Trump.
because individualist acts of terrorism are an obviously bad idea? most people are not that mad. the psyop is massive. try to recruit for terrorists on the internet. go for it.
the people that do make it through inevitably have to confront revolutionary theory that discourages wanton terrorism and violence as an opening strategy to revolution, because it won’t work and will in fact lead to bad things
The Maoist plan for revolution uses soft agitation (fake guns) and mass anti-electoral action as a revolutionary opener.
We have a movement setup to do this. There’s plenty of people in it. And they’re in fact normal people who know that the US left is racist/sexist and useless, and will not actually represent proletarian interests.
They’re not hardcore white terrorists or whatever you’re fantasizing about
Please read Mao. Those campaigns were a result of being ungrounded in theory.
It will actually improve your mental health, your ability to use dialectics, and your ability to critique the American left. It will also improve your ability to identify fascism. These are all good things.
Everybody who is serious about revolution either joins a revolutionary Communist organization, which by the way, are all Maoists, or maybe that person independently figures out that guerrilla war is a good fucking idea. We are not fucking terrorists. We are doing peaceful anti-electoral agitation that will lead to revolution.
You cannot escape Maoism once you realize this. To understand how to successfully wage the revolutionary guerrilla war Mao has described, which has never been defeated by a bourgeois army, you have to study Maoist dialectics.
If you, a leftist in an immense bourgeois psyop tries to understand Rojava, or Chiapas, or the Naxalites, or the Shining Path, or the various historic proto-MLM terrorists in Western Europe without understanding Maoist doctrine you will come to hopelessly counter-revolutionary conclusions, and these are in fact perpetuated in the entire bourgeois superstructure, which has acted to suppress any knowledge of Maoism in the West for over 70 years.
You have been fucking psyop’d by online fascists who were trying to use a faulty and fictitious “Marxist-Leninist” analysis to make you increasingly angry, willing to use violence against comrades, and ultimately counter-revolutionary.
Please read Mao.
I would suggest On Contradictions as a starter for Mao. It's a little dense and might take a few readings to fully grasp (did for me at least) but it informs you of the outlook Mao uses for the world and his writings.
Imagine my frustration! Give me a second.
Zizek has a good book on Maoism. Julia Lovell has a great book that finally just now covers international Maoism. Maoism: A Global History.
Violence means a lot of things.
They gave you the same fucking revisionism the Soviets used to kill the USSR and relied on you to be a big enough chud to not think Confucius would be equal to any of the Greeks
Hope you all had fun spending years of your life trolling Ukrainians with the Holodomor and shit. Thank you for doing no critical analysis of how many guns you actually need for a revolution by not looking at Latin America and not realizing you had way more than enough, because the Marxist who named himself after a Shakespeare character was a scary South American terrorist. Good work leftists
They? Confucius? Holodomor? Shakespeare Character? South American terrorist? What!?
I speak a different language than imperial core leftists and need to take a break. Please read Mao. They fucking did lie to all of you and you are in a goddamn psyop
Like Chapo? Or existence in general? Just telling me to read Mao and rambling for 5 paragraphs doesn't explain much.
Is this some like Maoist "we're actually in the Matrix" shit, or are you just talking about how western media (including social media) is designed and monitored in a way to lull the populace into complacency. Like some Temple Grandin shit.
I'm out of the loop regarding how Temple Grandin's work can be construed to be related to this. Is it because she advocates for a "humane" way to figure out how to conduct the slaughter of animals despite how the ends of mass slaughter/subjugation are inherently incompatible with any claim to value humane or moral treatment of life, and that Western media propagates similar incongruous justifications for perpetuating capitalism/mass disenfranchisement of people?
Wait I think I explained it to myself writing it out :P
gonna be real it’s probably the Temple Grandin thing
from my perspective I’m surrounded by deeply frustrated people who are being lied to by fascists, and those fascists are calling themselves “communists”, again, and they have deceived you for your entire lives about “human nature”, because most of you were raised on the internet by advertising companies, and they are now having you quoting the most reactionary (and pointless) verses of Marx to give even more guns to chuds, who will eventually turn them on you.
Terrifyingly, you not only call me a terrorist and a CIA agent, but you are now so angry that you’re talking about disorganized bombings (are you sure you’re not being lied to by fascists?) that will of course lead to lots of you (and innocent people) being killed.
I was never advocating those things, also what reactionary Marx verses? I called you a terrorist? People are angry because innocent people are being shot. There's nothing wrong with possession and knowledge of firearms, do you think gun control is going to solve anything when the police remain heavily armed?
Oh no, gun control will do nothing now
It wasn’t a matter of needing more guns or fighting against gun control, which likely would have saved lives, too late now though.
More guns means your revolution is going to be the best, right imperial core leftists? Since you all care about making sure people don’t get hurt that much
Oh fuck you're the pizza slaves guy, rock on that was the greatest bit of a generation! I haven't laughed that hard in ages lol
I was a pizza delivery guy pre-covid and we used to joke about that shit lol. Also I totally saved that for future use. Already shared in in a Discord and everyone thought it was hilarious. Keep your bit going it's fantastic haha
At this point you practically need a translator.
This is either dialectics, or bappin'. I'm leaning towards bappin'.
This is a wonderful bit. Do you do requests? Mid 80s International Spartacist Tendency!?
I am permanently living in the Godard movie thanks to an accident with mescaline and personal choice
to successfully carry out a protracted people’s war you should start reading Mao on your own to make sure I’m not crazy, contact a Maoist org, and cadres will provide you with a MLM basic and intermediate reading list.
Here’s the one I have:
http://mer-rsm.ca/our-study-course/intermediate/
Lol at thinking the only Revolutionary communist organizations are Maoist.
Shining Path worked out really well, that's why Abimael Guzman is building a workers' state... Oh wait.
Oh and by the way, I have nothing against vandalism either, but if you think smashing paint balloons on people and spray painting on signs builds working class power, you're kidding yourself.
In my experience, there's good Maoists and there's larpers. I'm not a Maoist, but I can respect guys like Bret O'Shea (sp?) and Black Red Guard.
Then there's the Maoists who worship Gonzalo and claim his thought is central even though his theory of revolution didn't work. These are the kinds who assaulted my DSA comrades and who spray paint electoral yard signs with hammers and sickles. Because that's how you start a revolution, I guess?
So yeah, read Mao, but don't read him (or anyone else) as scripture, but as data.
WHY ARE THE RED GUARDS AGITATING AGAINST THE WESTERN LEFT? A question you have not sufficiently asked yourself or perhaps bothered with at all
Your experience is essentially that of an imperial core leftist in a fascist psyop.
all of MLM (the international communist movement, something you are not familiar with yet) supports Gonzalo fully and without reservation (as fucking if, no Maoists do this because that’s not how fucking Maoism works, we don’t even do that to Mao) or upholds him critically (!!!!!!!!)
why can you uphold the DPRK but an indigenous peasant revolution is too bloody for you to think about or learn from? [it wasn’t] how does your worldview make any fucking sense [it doesn’t]
what do you think of the Haitian revolution? John Brown? Use your brain and figure out how this all works please
maybe you’re surrounded by other imperial core leftists in old bourgeois parties that were corrupted by the bourgeois influence way back in the fifties, and now they’re pumping you full of half-baked Soviet theory to turn you into a counter-revolutionary?
You don’t like revolutions, certainly not this one, and maybe this is in fact what has happened?
You think your fellow imperial core leftists aren’t deeply compromised?
Guess who the red fash is this time! You’re the revisionists! You’re the uncritical imperialist “legal communists” that turn out to be no better than Nazbols! You are what Lenin warned us about!
You all really think we can’t detect your fascism? The social-fascists did a nice number on you all, yet again, and have lied to you about the true nature of financial capitalism and fascism. It’s fucking finance.
they all lied to you and I’m truly sorry for what has happened but you have to get out of this ridiculous psyop
you’re even basically saying “that Chinese theory is mere data for the glorious greco-Marxist Western dialectician to pretend to consume” and even accusing revolutionary communists of “reading scripture” - revolutionaries must not have agency! It must be a dangerous cult! The reds have tricked them into revolutionary violence! They’re going to manipulate the peasants and workers into killing us with this Chinese nonsense!
I can tell you must not understand the first thing about revolution.
Maoism is not fucking anodyne data you fascist comprador, it’s a fully-integrated synthetic and dialectical worldview for revolutionaries and the masses, it’s been the worldview of almost all revolutionary Communists for fifty fucking years
“BUT THEY SPRAYPAINTED HAMMERS AND SICKLES ON LAWN SIGNS”
I'm not against revolutionary violence or peasant revolts, dude. I'm just saying a lot of guerrilla movements don't seem to work, and maybe your revolutionary theory needs refining.
Maos's success has not been replicated elsewhere, and the Soviet experience failed, so maybe we need to take the data from those experiences and synthesize them.
You say you don't treat Maoism as scripture, but then chastise me for daring to call the Chinese experience "anodyne data."
I'm not saying you accept Mao or Gonzalo unreservedly. I'm saying don't reject everyone else in the meantime.
From my point of view, you fail to distinguish between secondary and primary contradictions when you consider every western person a fascist or fascist adjacent. You're cutting yourself off from past revolutionary experience because they're not Third-Worldly enough for you. If everyone's fascist, then you're at war with everyone. Even Mao made a temporary alliance with Chiang Kai Shek. How would you define fascism? What is your view on the Popular Front?
I'm not advocating any particular position, so maybe don't start calling me revisionist. I'm just saying you're automatically denouncing me as fascist without even knowing my positions, so maybe you need to examine why that is.
Never let your cadre be the only arbiter of truth.
Stop trying to find condescending ways to call me fucking brainwashed and read more of your own goddamn theory, then.
I don’t need to know all your particular positions to know what dogmatic ideological mould produces people who say “Gonzalo is bad” and don’t realize they themselves have fallen for rightist propaganda.
It’s bourgeois red scare fear-mongering that demonstrates counter-revolutionary corruption in your identity, as if a revolution, which is fought for earnestly by the masses, who do have every bit as much agency as you could be simply “bad and not communist”
This is infuriating for someone in my position. I have fucking bled for communism and you have quite obviously done next to nothing, and barely any of the reading.
I’m sorry but I don’t have any more energy today to explain to counter-revolutionaries living in fear of the spectre of how I actually read Marx and Lenin and Mao and way more theory and pointless French revolutionary trivia, so maybe some other time. You don’t even know what fascism is! Tell me where it comes from in Das Kapital.
I am very upset with you and done with this conversation.
If you're getting very upset because someone is questioning your tactics (not your resolve, mind you, I believe that you have bled for revolution), then perhaps you should consider if you're as good a cadre as you think.
It is the responsibility of cadres to agitate and educate, not for the "deceived by psyop" masses to automatically accept your leadership.
And if we're going to talk about condescending, maybe reread what you've written, and ask yourself how you would react if someone spoke that way to you.
I'm asking for your definition of fascism because if I'm a fascist, I want to know what you mean. I believe you're wrong, but I'm willing to ask just in case I'm wrong.
If you were in fact wrong and were sectarian, how would you know? How would you submit your theory to scrutiny? You can't even describe what your theory is before you get frustrated and say "Read Mao. All of it." What great teachers of the masses you and your comrades must be!
If you're willing to discuss your views with me calmly, I'm willing to listen.
Edit: unnecessary apostrophe
where infrastructure is targeted but people aren’t
Suffragettes did this with letter bombs.
This post is dangerous. But I will answer your question as best I can.
In the mid to late 1800s, there was a group in Russia called People's Will. Instead of doing the difficult work of organizing, they resorted to terrorism. They did many assassinations, culminating with the death of the Tsar. They figured if you kill the head, the body will follow.
Public opinion turned against them and they were crushed.
The reason why right wing militias work is because they support the capitalist state and want to preserve the status quo. The system doesn't react to them as violently. It's unfair, but we've always been the underdog.
An individual cannot defeat a class. Only an organized class can defeat a ruling class.
Because leftist militias will be actually repressed, whereas rightwing militias are mostly ignored
Yeah, the mistake is thinking the right wing militias achieved this, they were used by elites as a tool to achieve. We would simply be massacred, labeled terrorists, and then videos of it would play on the news for people to clap like seals at.
no alternative left
looks pensively at ongoing climate crisis
Don't be the first
If everyone follows this advice, no one will do anything.
Stochastic terrorism is a great way to turn public opinion against your cause for at least a generation. The 20th century is littered with examples.
On the other hand the suffragettes actively used letter bombs while maintaining a policy of no human harm (only property destruction) which seemed to work out extremely well for them.
That's besides the point. There are countless examples of a violent movement that uses such tactics existing alongside another more peaceful one where both feed into one another in a way that helps successfully reach the goals.
The anarchists in Spain assassinated the prime minister of the country just 20 years before their revolution. It did jack shit to stop the movement. It heightened the state response and certainly tore asunder public opinion but it didn't hurt them.
Let's look at this from a different angle. Instead of coming at this from the pre-assumption that attacks cause movements to fail why not examine history? What examples of historic movements do we have where violent attacks that occurred resulted in the existing rumble of a movement collapsed?
If such things were really going to do considerable harm to the movement don't you think the state itself would just fake their occurrence?
Narodnaya Volya
Why view this as a failure and not instead as part of a series of events that eventually led to the revolution? Did their membership not go on to form the Socialist Revolutionary Party with over a million combatants? I feel like if that's the best example of a failed one then it's an extremely weak argument against it? One factor in these events isn't necessarily to build support but to force exposure of an issue. I mentioned the Spanish anarchists in particular because they were incredibly violent for many decades and I feel like that violence, bombings, and so on was a significant amplifying force in actually making people learn what their bloody ideology was. Today everyone thinks "haha anarchy = chaos" and that's the entire extent of their understanding of the ideology. That will never change without some factors involved that force wider public to understand what anarchists actually are and I keep coming back around to the notion that the only means anarchists have to do that are through forced exposure events.
To begin with, the movement already has low general approval from the populace. Fox News spent years and years priming their base for this–uppity blacks and academics lashing out because they hate ‘freedom’ or what have you. A good part of the populace can watch people get killed by cops, again and again and again, and say “well they had it coming” or “being a cop is hard, so they should be forgiven.” Liberals just wring their hands and say “can’t we all just get along” and do little else. The movement, anyway, is disorganized, without leadership or logistics or long-term planning, and wouldn’t be able to fill any kind of power vacuum.
I'm really not just talking about America. I'm not American. It bothers me a bit that everyone in Chapo is so America-centric. I feel the same in just about any country. Is this just a larp for people? Buy guns but don't ever use them? What are you getting ready for? When? Everyone here loves maoists like the PLA in Phillipines but then is totally anti-violent activity within their own country? It strikes me as the remaining existence of liberal anti-violence brainworms.
If a dude yelled “black lives matter” as he ran into the RNC and detonated a suicide vest, BLM would become public enemy #1.
Good job I said nothing about doing that then? What even is this example? Communists should never advocate suicide. This feels like a massive strawman and I'd like to ask you to actually respond to the things people say instead of making up their positions. I didn't suggest that at all.
it’ll just take Trump or some other politicians giving the word and the hunt will be on.
I think you're waaaaaay overly pessimistic about the response. You could say exactly the same thing of any state in history ever. Little is different in terms of response. The effect of similar events throughout history has been to propel movements, not to deflate them. They don't win anything by themselves, but their lack of existence in any movement is a strong sign that there is a long long way to go for that movement. Until these begin I would not place any potential real historic possibilities within even 20-30 years of now. When they begin I will start looking at situations in a country as heading towards real outcomes.
The American left has no logistics, no infrastructure, no leaders, and no forward-looking mission. You have scattered groups from all across the spectrum (monitored, of course), all with different ideas. At this point, leftists are arming themselves defensively, and for little else (as much as they may dream otherwise). The military and police are notedly right-wing, and thus the militias that recruit from them have a direct pipeline of ex-soldiers trained in tactics, comms, fortification, and combat, as well as having contacts in law. The left has no such pipeline here.
I think you're grossly understating the left's infrastructure and grossly overstating the right. The right have zero ability to mobilise, they are trying to mobilise right now and mustering nearly fuck all people. Meanwhile the left is actively mobilising people every single day. They're barely even getting handfuls of militia to come harrass leftist protesters and they're only achieving random assaults on isolated protesters far away from/after the protests. Yes the police are large but they're the state, no surprises there, combining the police into what the right can actually mobilise is very false. The best mobilisation they ever had was charlottesville and they've never come close since. They have no ability to mobilise in the short-term and can only mobilise a few thousand via months and months of organising. They're legitimately quite pathetic
I don't think it's right to overplay what the right's abilities are and I don't think you should underplay what the left's are. The left has a real habit of mistakenly mixing the state, the fascists and the liberals together to make the enemy seem much larger than it is. The right don't leave their homes, they are cowards, the left does.
(As an aside, I just realised now I meant NPA not PLA, I just need to correct that.)
also, you posted about it online, so you're kinda being watched.
no argument. but then, when the fasch do it, they're usually just individuals running around shooting some people or blowing up buildings. you don't necessarily need an organization for that?
I actually share a lot of your frustrations. But nobody wants to do anything other than stream debates with 15 yr old Nazis on twitch. Even the SRA which should be an alternative to the NRA or the 3%ers ends up being neither and in my opinion a dud. At this point it's got to be a cultural problem with the American left.
We actually let Comrade Dallas be a guns-out leftist agitator and look at how that went over, can we all learn from this
You should read up on the "Green Scare", the period where the FBI put environmentalists at the top of it's priority list and kept them there for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare
i have a cool zine on writings the black liberation army and weather underground wrote its pretty dope what the larger context of these movements were, and i agree its interesting to see the lack of these sort of groups today. not so much open terrorism or anything, just the kind of openly revolutionary groups. might make me feel saner if i was talking about plotting the downfall of the us empire in an abandoned warehouse in brooklyn w some cool communists
Individual adventurous acts of terrorism offer little benefits and many downsides. Blowback of public opinion and inviting more severe state repression would hurt the left more than it would gain. Organized collective action is the only path forward.
They will jam you up for expressing rhetorical opposition to fascism. They murder people in the streets daily. What more severe state repression are you imagining?
If left-wing terrorism actually became an issue in Amerikkka you'd see DHS straight up disappearing people or "preemptively detaining" activists. It definitely can get worse.
Left wing terrorism has historically not been effective at winning political power - although it would be extremely cathartic, not gonna argue there.
you know if you don’t want to throw bombs at people you don’t have to, that’s the nice thing, leftists are not actually brutal psychopaths
theres a bit of a skewed narrative here i think about these organizations, im not a proponent of "terrorism" but this is the same narratives thats applied to people who loot or riot or burn stuff
Lol, define again what the pre-modern Weather Underground did again? Why were the Panthers ambivalent to some of the shit WU was pulling? And how about where prominent WU members now reside?
You keep talking about what you feel, and what you want. If you want a moment of catharsis, by all means go out and become the martyr you hope to become. Unfortunately, it's clear that the majority of people you're feeling angry on behalf of, especially black folks, aren't at that point yet. Agitators like MLK, Malcolm, and Newton were killed for not even getting to the point you want to get, and you think some nerds on the internet have a chance? That's why I brought up the point about WU, whose high ranking members just casually entered bourgeoisie society after having done some bombings. How in the fuck is Awlaki's son being killed OK for tangentially having relation to his father's work, but Bill Ayers can get a job at UIC and now collect retirement money?
It's not about "snide and literate" debates. It's about what people have at stake. I come from a country where people still don't riot despite living on a dollar a day, and in some of the worst slums you could imagine. What concept of consciousness do you think those people have? Fuck, I had no concept of anything outside of capitalism until I hit 25 years of age, and that only occurred after I'd finally gotten a decent job where I could pay rent. When I was broke down bad, I wasn't thinking about Marx, etc. Now you have a place like the US, which despite its internal issues, still gives people the illusion that they can hold economic power with no strings attached.
Just to give you some sense, I live in section 8 housing currently. 70% of this building is black. Many of these people participated in the protests and riots, but there was also a huge chunk of them that didn't. Some were apathetic to it all, some believed BLM was a psyop. Some of those that did protest were devoid of any real understanding of the issues, but had the right heart. Some of them were radlibs or older folks who told people to vote. And some of them were just looking to go out and rob some stores and stick up opposition gang members. Getting all of these people on the same page to go out and riot is an achievement, but how do you propose a fractured unit like this to eventually reach a general strand of Marxist thought (including people virulently opposed to socialist thought), and in a short period of time, too?
If you're looking for hard and fast solutions, you're out of luck. I could sit here and give you the same spiel about grassroots mandates and all of that, but I'm sure you knew all about that. But that's really all we have. The left in this country has zero power, and its biggest avatars continually get captured by the same system they want to resist. I'm not at Mark Fisher levels of capitalist realism yet, but it's bleak. The only thing I can say is that the chances of trying a violent struggle session right now would be completely pointless. We'd get fucking demolished in the blink of an eye. We're stuck, and all we have is the long game. Unless you can predict something that will wake the masses from their slumber in one of the most polarized societies in history, I don't know what other route there is. I wake up everyday feeling the same as you do, until I go next door and look at my neighbor's kids and wonder if he'll join me in that type of struggle. This is why I brought up the example of the Black Panthers being cautious with WU. Could they have afforded to be so radical in their approach at the stage they were in? And they were more advanced in their consciousness than America as a whole now. Kwame Ture felt the full ire of the FBI and had to dip the country. Should he have just stayed and become another martyr like Huey? It's a hard question to ask of someone. What do you suppose happens to us?
If I came off as condescending, my bad. I'm not looking sling shit for the sake of it.
Never implied that you had a death drive. If you went out and got killed today, it would be understandable, even if it might not accomplish anything. There's legitimate frustration behind it due to understanding the current paralysis we find ourselves in. Bit different from not wearing a mask to own the libs
