• JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
    ·
    9 months ago

    you need support of the community, like the irl community where you're going to be violent to get away with it and have it not totally undermine the thing we want.

    actually blowing up a pipeline would turn people against environmentalism better than years of propaganda ever could

    the mckinley assassination lead directly to the creation of the FBI

    regardless of how adventurous your adventure is you need some way for the action to lead to some outcome and the last time i can think of that happening in the US is the fucking weather underground getting a cop statue removed from a public park.

    • BigHaas [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      And like don't we need a strong vanguard party before making any moves? The christofascists will happily take over any revolutionary movement. Adventurism is decades away from being something to even consider.

        • BigHaas [he/him]
          ·
          9 months ago

          We could get very far with just food banks and free after school childcare and things like that. The Russian Revolution wasn't thoroughly compromised by glowies and a surveillance state. Crimes are not feasible in 2024.

        • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Honestly, I don't know. It's possible that violent direct action in the tradition of American civil disobedience would be popular. Burn down a bomb factory when nobody's there to get injured, stuff like that. People felt inspired by pulling down racist statues in 2020 and that practice spread widely even though those wins are solely symbolic. The problem is that these things are difficult. If property damage type "adventurism" was easy, individual-scale, and not too risky, it might be something that atomized Americans would take to. On the right we have stochastic terrorism, because doing a mass shooting of random innocents doesn't take much planning. But that's incompatible with leftism, and besides it's the product of well-funded right-wing media and not a self-sustaining movement. I also doubt that, even if the American consumer could somehow do leftist adventurism on a whim, that that would be able to grow into the eventual mass movement we need for lasting change.

          I also do think that like, a strike or protest that turns violent isn't adventurism. Yes if it's a small cadre that planned to fuck shit up, but not if it's just cops attacking peaceful events as usual.

      • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
        ·
        9 months ago

        by ML/M way of thinking yeah. anarchists presumably have a different framework for how to get from here to there but i've never seen a case study of it on the level of the BPP.

        i think some small-time adventurism is viable in the west today, maybe a mob going after a slumlord, but not anything that fundamentally threatens the state.