Holy shit the defeatism in this thread!

For all this talk of fascism, I must have missed the brownshirts marching. I did see the largest ever protest movement in US history this summer, and it was/is an antiracist protest movement. And it spread across the country from big cities to little towns, white kids in Kentucky marching around yelling Black Lives Matter, a physical manifestation of how fast consciousness is shifting with capitalism tumbling into crisis. Outnumbering right wing protests and counterdemonstrations by probably 100 to 1.

This is prime time for left organizing, and I don’t see how we’re going to be successful at that if we can’t soberly assess the balance of forces. There is a huge, sympathetic audience for our message. There were polls showing, before this historic crisis of capitalism we find ourselves in, that something like 50% of the people under the age of 30 in the US feel more favorably about “socialism” than “capitalism.”

The failure here is ours: it is the failure of the political left, to effectively organize what amounts to a massive shift in consciousness. A failure to provide some kind of political leadership, because what is needed is a path out of crisis and an alternative to capitalist politics of all stripes offering no way forward.

Defeatism lets you off the hook—tasks that are difficult begin to seem impossible, and you act as if they are impossible. Events are unfolding so fucking quickly that they are piling on top of each other. It is the time for bold ideas and bold organization, not fighting off the back foot.