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.
No one really knows what will happen in the future. Capitalism is imploding on itself. People are mad. Anything could happen.
Think about how many times the power of the US has been defeated in recent history by so-called "primitive warfare"
If a tiny country like Vietnam didn't give up against the supposedly most powerful country in the world, shouldn't we at least try?
The big difference is that Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba and all the other poor countries that have successfully resisted US imperialism all have a people that backs the liberation movements. The imperial core is vastly different, as most people here are effectively propagandise to support the empire. You won't have sympathetic villagers who will help hide revolutionaries, you will have hordes of howling fascists clapping their hands like trained sealions every time the imperial goons crack some skulls.
So we send wave after wave of liberals at them until the chuds hit their pre-set kill limit.
Send the KHive hopped up on PCP and some vasodilators and point at the chuds are agents of Brianna Joy Gray who posted memes at them on facebook
It went relatively quickly. I was amazed at how fast, using the right arguments and a number of examples, you could persuade somebody that that society [we lived in] was absurd and that it had to be changed.
I’m sorry I can’t relate to this at all
Those countries had far more than their fair share of reactionary counterrevolutionaries.
Yeah lets not forget that south Vietnam was basically their version of the Confederacy, not to mention a fascist Catholic theocracy where child prostitution was legal and openly practiced
This is why being at protest matters now, its not because the protest can or would change anything, its because for every person active in resistance you inform and revolutionize others.
Its often more about how after the protest you tell everyone you know you went and then proselytize your beliefs to try to radicalize those you can influence.
Right now we are firmly still in the "get more people on our side and to our cause" of revolution. Its not about protesting fascism for the end to end fascism today, but to have the mindshare to end it eventually.
This is why optics matter. We need more people on our side, and the fascists have been winning the optics war (to radicalize AND normalize) for the longest time because leftism preys on empathy and rationality while fascism preys on fear and hate, and in late stage capitalism its hard to feel empathy and easy to hate, as the system intends.
Like Rosa said "Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable"
If you read the history of and leading up to the Russian, Chinese ,Cuban etc revolutions without knowing the outcome you would 100% have said "this is impossible ! No way a working class revolution succeeds or even positive overthrow of the old order happens" . If Vegas odds for betting was a thing back then the Russian Revolution happenening would be at 500 to 1 lets say 5-10 years before 1917 and still at 100 to 1 to survive for the next 10 years after 1917. You could pick points in the 30s where the CPC coming out on top would be at a 2000 to 1 odds or even worse.
Every revolution was against their own insourmountable odds and required a huge stream of luck and correct decisions at every junction point to happen. Thats why dozens and dozens have failed and never took off. But some happened no matter how batshit unlikely it was . And they will happen again. And the conditions and chances to overcomed those hundreds to 1 odds will present themselves again in many countries and not just once . The only important work we have to do is to organize , with history as our guide, the best we can in order to even remotely be in a position to attempt that flipping of odds when the time comes and excert any influence on those revolutionary junction points. The American left due to its sorry state has missed the last half dozen of them and will miss more but they wont stop happening and will only become more frequent. It only has to get it right once (even if it fails again later)
If you told someone in 1910 that there would be a communist revolution in Russia and a fascist takeover in Germany and not the other way around people would’ve laughed you out of the room
"Dafuq you mean the Italians invented it and everyone just went along with it?"
Police states crumble fast when there is a genuine civil uprising that is actually violent. There just isn't enough of them to stop throngs of violent people.
As far as i can tell when westerners talk about revolution many are just talking about realizing all the propganda and how fucked up the state is. They don't mean an actually uprising with blood running down the street and power brokers fearing for their lives.
Most Americans and westerners have not really had much violence done to them since ww2. Most have never even been in a legit fight or attacked physically. So it's a pretty big ask to go from complacency to lobbing bombs.
When people get angry in large numbers they go from complacency to lobbing bombs really quickly actually. Sometimes in a matter of days.
The problem isn’t peoples complacency, it’s that the most intense police state to ever exist on planet earth is actively repressing subverting and coopting any movement that arises and killing or controlling them while still in their cribs before they can grow too large.
I agree, but also it's important to realize that there were reliable pressure release valves. The FBI/CIA didn't put down the American revolution, being able to afford a house did it. Now, we're getting to the point where the 30-50k year income bracket is going to be priced out of apartments and wind up in long term hotels until they totally fall through the cracks, and the previous bracket that lived in apartments are dropping out of the labor market and society as a whole if they aren't sharing a 2 bedroom with 6 other people. Even the Floyd protests were squelched through the vague promise that a Biden presidency would return the "tension" back to pre-Trump standards (which are still genocidal).
No one is promising anyone under the age of 35 anything. The best you can get from the Republicans are low hanging culture war victories that alienate a larger amount of people each go around, and the Dems' offer is "eat shit and die for another highway lane". Post-2008 created a generation who had nothing, and post-2022 looks like it'll be demanding that generation to pay a price that their grandparents wouldn't have been able to pay when the state still allowed for social democratic concessions. You can't even fucking smoke decent cigs unless you spend the time to roll your own at this point.
I don't expect concessions to the working class anytime soon, but I disagree with the people also expecting some sort of balkanization to occur soon either. I think the United States as it stands currently is much more fragile and rotten than we realize, and only exists to suppress the working class. It's why the only real answer to inflation is to raise interest rates and get double digit unemployment. The state is totally moribund, and I think we're likely to see a total collapse of the economy. You'll try to go to McDonalds, but they'll have one or two members of management working, having to explain to customers that all they have for the day are fries because their supply of beef and chicken is delayed indefinitely. Walmart gets more infrequent restocks because they can't afford to pay anyone with a CDL more than $25k a year and turn a profit, the backlog on transistors needed to repair the trucks is immense, and the hours would be brutal for the early 1800's (they're already trying to get kids into these roles). School attendance plummets (it already has) as public schools, already stretched to the breaking point from lack of funding and staff (compounded by culture war bullshit) now have to share a portion of their budget with the private catholic charter school down the block, and that place is only kept afloat because they've never paid a cent in taxes despite tuition resembling the price of college two generations ago. A lot of kids are already priced out of sporting programs, even in public schools. Rolling blackouts become more commonplace. The water dries up to the west, but don't worry, that almond crop will will continue uninterrupted. Profit continues to plummet because even if business could operate at decent standards (which as of the time of me typing this out, it really can't in the US), whatever money the worker will have been able to scrap together will go straight to rent seekers. Both parties are totally captured by capital and refuse to use the state to reign it in even for their own sadistic agendas. Donald Trump governed like Jeb! would have except slightly louder, and Biden governed like Trump would have if he won. Things will stop.
Within that context, do you think the state garners more consent? Do you even think it maintains the ability to police as effectively? For what it's worth, by the Pentagon's own projections, they expect internal warfare against the US military around 2025, not due to an existing political faction taking up arms against the state (they largely benefit from it, even in it's rotting state) but due to economic conditions deteriorating until that's all that's left to do. I think after Floyd, and the increased tension from the recent Supreme Court ruling, and the impending depression (that'll make the one we've been living in for two years seem like a dream), we're on track. When that time comes, I'm sure the CIA/FBI/DHS will knock it out of the park. They have a fantastic track record against protracted guerilla warfare during the height of the empire's power, I'm sure they'll have no issues when the insurrection is coming from inside the house, and nothing's getting made.
Unnecessarily pessimistic. Why and by who? Do you think the 500 chapters of warring fash offshoots are going to do it? Because from what I remember from the last 6 years, they didn't spend any time ingratiating themselves to impoverished communities. Whenever they showed up to demonstrate past Charlottesville (which was a total failure), they've required police escort and were always vastly outnumbered. Their actions and support and in many ways their recruitment is dependent on the state. Jan 6th was organized by an FBI informant and allowed to happen because they knew the right wouldn't actually do anything other than tailgate.
The fash you have to worry about will be the remnants the state that you'll have to fight anyways if you want a fucking house. You should be much more afraid of Mormon G-Men than some dude named Odin who has spent the last five years posting slurs on Idaho dialup. The left isn't prepared for the collapse because we never get any sort of institutional experience, anyone who's kinda effective gets brutally murdered or imprisoned. The right operates with total impunity from the law, and they're so ineffective they left the fucking front door open for them and the Hunters and Kaitlyns of this country were too fucking useless to walk through. They're just as beholden to capital as the main political parties, and even if they could properly organize the day of the rope (they can't), it isn't going to get you a fucking meal.
But those groups will still continue to infight against each other, and those affectations are ones they can afford because politics don't fucking matter to them. They can still afford to pretend that their camp of the saints shit matters because they can get their goods. They'll freak out and there will be violence, I would prefer this not to happen and there is a good possibility I will be on the receiving end of whatever violence happens, but their basic operations are tied to the state and while they'll be used against whatever manifests itself in the coming years, they're still just American libs. They want to speak to the manager just like every other Karen. They'll complain and whine and there will be those of them that will fight, but they'll blink and we will overcome them. Besides, cop gangs already exist in most major cities, and if our success really was dependent on the support of every Elgin, OK in the country over the collective working class, we never had a chance to begin with.
I'm sorry, their moment has come multiple times and they've whiffed it harder than the left ever has. It won't be their last failure.
Yeah most of the people in my home town would hoot and holler to shoot them some libs
The country by numbers is in the cities and burbs.
Rural areas are a small percentage of the actual population
And the thing that will convert liberals to communists is also going to fuel a fascist surge. Even if there are enough communists to do something it is by no means certain they will win or that they'll win soon. History is littered with failed uprisings and even the ones that won only did so through immense horrors. The Chinese revolution lasted decades for god's sake.
how likely do you think a latam style military dictatorship would be in this case? From an outsiders perspective it seems more likely than chud insurrection or balkanization
I don't know because the military (from the outside) seems just as captured by capital as every other branch of the government. All the core leadership has been hand picked from the bourgeois for some time now. The CIA has always been an arm of Wall Street (it was actually started by a bunch of corporate lawyers). I see their class interests aligning with how things are currently, and until something happens (which it totally could, I'm not part of the military and we're really looking from the outside in), I see them suffering the same institutional rot. We don't even really have an army at this point, it's just a bunch of mercenaries, overly specialized officers from the wealthy suburbs, and grunts who sit in an army base for 8 months at a time until their leg gets blown up by a land mine.
I think some type of police based dictatorship is the most likely with the military remaining “neutral.”
The movements are easy to coopt cuz there is no structure. There is no van gaurd there is no leadership. They also aren't serious in actually forcing what they want
Decentralized movements organically just fall apart. And that's what blm, occupy and other recent movements have been.
Yeah I'm disagreeing with him. I know what i wrote
The USA police state is not destroying movements. They don't have to go under cover. They don't need to seduce an activist who's serious. Because the seriousness isn't there.
All they have to do is show up to a protest.
Place a few agent provocateurs Throw a brick. Give an opening for the police to do their job and than watch the protest scatter to the wind.Yes history. As in the past. And yes than i would agree.
But we are in govt where the police state is just as dumb and inept as the politicans leading it.
The America of the PAST is dead. We are entering a new stage where the momentum from the past successes, intelligence, and evil of the empire is gone.
It's not a movement. It's a gathering of individuals who are trying to show displeasure with what's going on. Protests are not movements. They can become the beginning of one.
A movement requires some type of central leadership and planning.
They didn’t just fall apart, they were crushed, repressed, divided, and coopted by the state.
Yes good leadership and a vanguard would help, but such centralized leadership is very very easy to crush/divide for the state.
Police states crumble fast when there is a genuine civil uprising that is actually violent.
Or even just one dude coming in guns blazing. Lessons from Uvalde.
It's low key depressing to see liberals get in TV and be like "we have to continue the fight" like what fight what have u been doing, I know u just mean vote for democrats
I have been so much more productive since I stopped worrying about keeping up on the news. I know that’s way easier said than done, but I’m not spending this weekend protesting or reading news. I’ve got 4 hours of logistics work blocked out for an org I’m involved in. And then I’m tuning out and playing with my kids and doing some laundry. Those 4 hours over the course of 3 days is more productive than I would have been in weeks prior to giving myself the permission to detach
They mean they’re fighting to get a new deal on the yacht they’ve been looking at now that they have all those donations
I know it’s kinda lib but the show “severance” features an extremely powerful panopticon that all the characters live in fear of, only to discover through trial and error that the capabilities of that panopticon are extremely limited by simple staffing issues.
The reality is that no matter how automated they have these surveillance systems it has to get to a person to actually mean something and you gotta imagine that list is not terribly long.
Maybe I’m dead wrong but sometimes I wonder just how practical a tool of oppression this panopticon actually is, with its deluge of information, and without a massive dedicated staff monitoring it all the time. Maybe they have that but that comes with its own issues. No matter how inescapable this tech hell feels, it is still people power that moves the world, that will always be true.
We live in a panopticon. As of 2017, the clearance rate on murder in the US is 61%. Those are murders where a case is opened with police and an arrest is made or the case is resolved by some other means. 61% isn’t even the chance of you being convicted.
We are the most surveilled people in the world and we still cannot catch and hold half of our murderers
Yeah that’s a great example of what I mean.
Scaling up always creates unexpected problems and there has never been a panopticon of this scale before.
I’m sure the worst is yet to come. but at a certain point the info you have has to be parsed by a human mind and every member of the panopticon parsing team has to be completely ideologically committed so they don’t risk a whistleblower or spy. That vetting process will seriously limit the candidate pool, and then they have to stay ideologically committed while staring into the maw of this extra legal nightmare surveillance machinery that they have no reason to believe isn’t watching them too.
Maybe it’s naive but it’s worth considering that atleast part of the reason the State can never seem to use this capacity to actually prevent anything is because a panopticon of this scale is a lot more unwieldy from the inside looking out that it seems from the outside looking in. I mean if that’s the case then doing things like baiting lonely Muslim youths into doing dumb stuff also makes sense. Instead of the rationale being “gladio style strategy of tension” the rationale is “look let’s get some numbers on the board to justify this surveillance apparatus before we get accused of being wasteful and ineffective” because it may seem meaningless but I’m sure the fact the “fed posting” has become a meme in left and right wing online spaces is of some concern to the ghouls at Langley.
Maybe I’m way off base here and we should all definitely practice good and thorough opsec. But I still find myself wondering what the minimum staffing requirements are for a panopticon that watches everyone in the U.S. To be effective and then how easy is it to recruit a team of that size for such a sensitive task.
Some back of the napkin math suggests that with a 61% clearance rate, one could commit 9 murders and have a 0.02% chance of not being arrested for any of them.
The sentiment is fine if it's coming from actual lefties and the revolutionizing is joining an org.
Most of the time it's just a lib telling you to vote more often.
Times like these I can't help but think about the blue check lib on Twitter who promised that shit would pop off if Trump nominated another SC justice. Lul
In reality I truly feel that at this point a better world is only possible if the current one is in ashes. Sorry. Super doomer.
:grill:
The world will fall to ashes on its own. Our choices surround how organized we will be to pick up the pieces
I completely feel you. I am also despondent in the face of what is a relentless assault on the bare minimum of human rights, rights that even so called third world nations have long granted.
Never before in the history of mankind has a socialist movement had to deal with a corporate surveillance panopticon such that is the US and the west as a whole. If Lenin, Mao, or Castro had to deal with a modern surveillance state during their revolutions I feel they would've been swiftly defeated.
I'm scared as hell, and I'm reasonably certain this will not be monster that can be defeated from within. Except this time there is no Soviet Union steadily marching to cut the beast's head off at the neck. We are all alone. There is no geopolitical pole or alliance that would dare interfere with the US's internal affairs to that extent. I do not have an answer. Leave the country if you are in a reasonable position to do so or take the grillpill, it's gonna be a hell of a ride. And the ride never stops.
On the contrary, if anything history has shown us, these revolutionary figures would have been smart and adaptive enough to exploit the weaknesses of modern surveillance and use it against the state and disrupt their operations.
I would caution against countering doomerism w/ Great Man History, tbh. That's a good way of disappointing oneself & misdiagnosing the nature of one's own problem. None of these figures willed "The Revolution" into being of their own accord; they made experiments which happened to bear fruit, because the conditions in which they lived & fought were fertile for the planting. This does not mean that tilling comes without effort, nor that one can only raise a harvest in the best of fields; but only that the farmer does not make his own soil, and little grows in a salted field.
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.
That wasn't what he said, and my criticism was not of that premise.
I really hope you're right, because we absolutely could do with such figures right now. What is also true is that social revolutionaries in the developed world were also crushed, from the communards in Paris, to the spartacists in Germany, to the republicans in spain, to the antifascists in Italy during and after WW2. All crushed or those that succeed, co-opted and divested of their revolutionary potential such as in Ireland and Portugal. I guess the latter is still better than nothing.
Capitalist realism is a motherfucker. Even the simple notion of wanting to abolish capitalism is unthinkable. People will look at you as if you've just called their mother a whore if you merely suggest as a thought experiment that this whole capitalism thing is kinda fucked up
that panopticon doesn't run for free though and as the US empire frays around the edges the resources to maintain it will be stretched. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer size of the operation being run and forget that it isn't ran perfectly
The cops haven't seen anything close to a warzone. This is what they look like when they are more or less unopposed. A cop has never had their arm blown off by an IED, had an APC roll over an anti-tank mine, has never seen a car bomb crash through the door of their workplace. They have at worst occasionally seen someone with standard small arms target someone else and have been forced to go and stop them (though as we've seen they aren't even really obligated to do that). And remember, this is what soldiers saw in a poor nation with little access to resources and technology. The USA is a first world country overflowing with guns and consumer electronics, we could see entirely new mechanisms used against the police and those in power if they keep pushing their luck. Imagine being able to set up a gun weeks in advance and take the shot hundreds of miles away from fucking Tahiti.
I feel the exact same way.
The best I can come up with is to stick around in life and hope that one day there will be an actual powerful movement to participate in, and that a global movement will help us topple this apartheid police state. It will take at least as powerful of a movement both domestically and internationally as South Africa engaged in to overthrow apartheid there. That struggle and momentum took decades and decades to build.
So maybe I’ll be waiting all my life… but the future is unwritten, so there’s always some kind of hope i guess.
Something has to be done, momentum has to be built. Groundwork laid to take the next step.
We live under the specter of violence from the state, taking these actions hasnt changed anything, and we have to start somewhere anyway.
How about: "Don't let this defeat you, let it make you log the fuck off."
We have to wait for things to get so awful and apocalyptic, that the libs are willing to put their lives on the line, and by then it might be too late to deal with ecological collapse. Fuck humanity for all of this
