Like, sorry for obviously doomer posting. Sorry if this sounds like a fed-post to deter people from protesting/organizing - which I don't mean to do by any means. But like... honestly, how is anything going to change? Materially. Logistically.

We're living in a country and a time where you can literally have your life ruined for simply taking your phone with you to a protest. Sentenced with fines or imprisonment. Or at the very least charged with all that shit, and having your life completely fucked over by it. Idk about the rest of you, but I don't think my job would keep me around if I didn't show up one morning because I was arrested at a protest, much less because of the stigma of "unprofessional behavior" that has. And it took months to get the job in my field I have now, and I'm just barely getting by - and this is as someone privileged to have some help from parents and no dependents.

On a larger scale, how the fuck is any protest or action by anyone gonna change things? Anything that ideally would be influential enough to change things (ie [REDACTED] style things) would probably be prevented the moment anyone even considered it, the feds descending on those involved the moment any email sent or plan spoken aloud. How the hell can anything change in this country short of an all out intervention by China or some sort of a unified South American socialist coalition? How can any movement on the ground in the US change shit at this point from inside the oppressive police state we live in? How is any sort of "organizing" or protesting done right now any more effective than electoralism? I mean, remember 2020? Literally shit all came from that.

I just feel so hopeless and conflicted. Is it really worth it going on on the street to a protest and getting my shit rocked by a cop in the fucking juggernaut's armor with a metal baton and bean bag gun, or run over by a pickup truck chud plowing through an intersection if nothing will change like it didn't with 2020 or Ferguson? Is it wrong to have thoughts in my head worrying about the conflict of wanting to have some sort of successful artistic career VS abandoning any sense of bourgeois societal participation and spending my time and what little money I have solely focused on "revolutionary" organization in a country that will ruin me if I do anything besides silently hold a sign, alone, in a public park between the hours of 9am and 5pm?

How do we/I find hope of winning when we live in a literal country-wide panopticon?

I wish this was a fed post. I wish I was getting paid for this. I wish I didn't feel hopeless. I wish I was one of those evil, ghoulish fuckers toasting champagne rn over their hegemonic control as they repress us more and more each day. Instead this is a cry for help from someone who literally doesn't know what they should be doing or risking as we sink deeper in the shit.

    • SadStruggle92 [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Perhaps I didn’t write well, but what I was trying to point out is that the left today (at least the Western left) has no strategy at all.

      I often feel very similarly myself, though in fairness this may as much be a function of my own disconnection from any real center of serious political activity. In any respect, I think that at least some of this is to do with the fact of the internet, and of the material reality of American Consumer-Identity as being the primary mode/filter by which we as political subjects can understand ourselves socially. In essence, we exist as the social subjects of the tail end of the Neoliberal Era, in which we are in many ways materially made to be individuals in pursuit of our own narrow & atavistic self-interests in a way that social & political subjects in other periods & areas of the world were not.

      A consequence of this is that the problem we are faced with is not providing class-consciousness to already extent & organically formed definite communities, which can then be mobilized towards the goal of achieving political power. Rather, we are tasked with the much more complicated task of getting hundreds of thousands, or potentially even millions of (people who perceive themselves to be) distinct & discreet individuals to all independently agree that organizing for political power on a collective basis is good idea for them, personally. This is pretty obviously not a recipe for success, as it were, and it is the basic problem that the Left (in the Imperial Core) has had since the post-war era, and it will continue to be so until such time as those material conditions which build & maintain American Consumer-Identity are no longer operable.

      It is important that we consider what to do in the event that that does happen, but I don't know that I can say in confidence that we can have much in the way of definite plans until that point, because there is not much of a we that actually exists until then.

      There isn’t much discussion, as far as I am aware of, of how to counter the bourgeois state apparatuses. What is the grand strategy of the left to defeat the state? Is it to build decentralized power bases in neglected rural areas and converge then surround the cities by cutting off their supply lines, like Mao did? Or is it to infiltrate and control key urban infrastructures (power plants, transportation hubs), like Trotsky did?

      How to avoid surveillance and sow disinformation? How to communicate securely to organize coordinated actions between workers movements? How to properly engage with (or rather, avoid encounter with) the state security forces? How to conduct asymmetrical warfare against the much superior media propaganda as well as police and military forces employed backed by the state institutions?

      These are all important questions to answer, none of which I have answers to, nor any that I imagine would be a good idea to give answers to online.