I figure shit's going to get worser whether we end up with 99% Hitler Blue or 99% Hitler Red. So, anyone have any ideas on what to do next?
I think we need to start a newspaper! Nothing says "getting the attention of workers in 2024" like a $10 newspaper!
Join a Marxist-Leninist communist party building a revolutionary vanguard like
And if you are pessimistic about the possibility of revolution in the imperial core, do this anyways. You'll find the people you can rely on going forward in this increasingly-awful fascist country.
https://youtu.be/VoYZlyBHyQM
And of course: Learn to hack, learn to quadcopter. Or something within that spirit.
Show
you dont want your affinity group to rely on mutual sexual/romantic compatibility
yeah, each had one lover. basic buddy system. if they were all fuckin and suckin each other it would have been untenable.
exactly. the bombings had nothing to do with it, and were good, actually.
Align all union contracts for May 1st, 2028 and threaten general strike if they don't meet all of the different union's demands.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/may-day-2028-general-strike-working-class
Until I see a left wing party or organization that is serious about taking power, there is nothing to be done.
There is no organized Left in the US, these are not serious people. They only want some marginal improvements for the workers, a more humane version of capitalism, not seriously planning and strategizing about taking power.
Look at Lenin and Mao, even at their worst moments when the movements had been reduced to mere thousands under endless persecutions, they were already plotting for the end game.
EDIT: I noticed I might have been too harsh since we have some comrades here who are involved in organizational work. You all are doing the best you can, but it doesn’t change the fact that the current structure of left wing organizations do not threaten capital, and do not demonstrate a viable strategy towards taking power.
If I was an accelerationist things would be looking up rn
it's the perfect cope. things have to get worse to get better, so that means things getting worse is getting better!
I actually see a lot of really accelerationist takes around, but nobody uses the word.
yeah i think its sorta an understandable form of hopium at a certain point that if things get worse enough they must eventually somehow get better. agree it seems more common now than ever
I think the term kind of lost it's meaning. Things are getting so much worst so fast like, what are you going to do? The democrats already have a brick on the accelerator and have aimed the car at a cliff. Are you going to get out and push to speed things up?
"Nothing is to be Done: Burning Questions on What Booze to Drink"
-V.I. Lenin
It's high time to stop thinking that any sort of change can be enacted in the terms of what is "officially" called "politics". Who is sitting in the white House is irrelevant to whatever we need to do
I've wholeheartedly become one of those 'boycott the elections!' people recently. Obviously getting progressives elected isn't the goal--I would hope this is a starting point most would agree with here--, but neither is it good strategy to say we'll win reforms by creating powerful working-class organizations. I'll go even further and say that the shame-faced agnosticism of saying that election are wholly irrelevant misses the point in that the farcical nature of Bourgeois democracy behooves us to put this fact forward as primary. We don't ignore elections because everybody knows politics is a shame, a rich mans game, and so on, as although this may be true we understand our 'democracy' itself is a tool of class oppression by the Bourgeoisie. Therefore, we dont posit more working-class representation in government, we posit the dictatorship of the proletariate instead. We understand that all consessions, and reforms won through popular struggle are meant to bury the contradiction driving class-struggle, to quash popular discontent by channeling it through safe, legal avenues. The state legalized unions because the alternative was killing your boss. The state became 'democratic' because the alternative was overthrowing your government.
I'm a gradualist, but, yeah, you guys should be stocking up on rifles and ammo if you intend to have your actions align with your speech.
When in doubt: agitate, educate, organize
What are the key contradictions to agitate about? Palestine, Yemen, climate crisis (especially the trade war with China undermining green energy efforts, this angle is very important and reaches a lot of ears since you can also point out that this contradiction is hurting their pockets directly), workers being displaced by automation, trans rights and immigrabts being crushed in a rising fascist movement in reaction to neoliberalism's collapse.
And what does the western left have to offer, and educate people on? Connections between Black liberation and indigenous movements in Palestine, China's mutual development approach, our connection to imperialism and how it benefits us (the hard part of this step) and how it hurts us. Be realistic and explicit, don't be a tailist.
As far as organization there really isn't a one size fits all answer but the critical development for the western working class this year is automation, which means a sector of workers that was previously far from precarity now joins the same space as gig workers, as automation vastly lowers the skilled labor that goes into that sector. The left has to come up with an answer to the gig economy, which is inherently atomizing, and find a way to work outside of the failing left liberal institutions.
Along these lines I've noticed a bit increase in far left parties where I live. DSA has been sort of active since 2016, but now we PSL, cpusa, some anarchist thing, and a few others. I've only just moved here, but from talking to PSL they say their local chapter is only a few months old and they have momentum specifically as a result of anger about Israel's genocide.
Tail-ism... so a revolutionary party will look at a mass of workers and just assume that they will make the right decisions all on their own while the party is most just sitting back being a spectator.
IF, the mass of workers do something good, the revolutionary party committing a tail-ism might take credit for it.
IF, the mass of workers do something bad, then its all the fault of the workers and not the revolutionary party in any way.
In both situations, this revolutionary party hasn't taken the lead by actually doing any work educating, agitating, or organizing the workers.
Tailism is the tendency to expect the workers and the revolutionaries to be separate entities, with the revolutionary's role being to heighten the contradictions in order for workers to spontaneously perform the revolution, so the revolutionary is actually following in the tail of the worker; it's the opposite of vanguardism, which sees the professional revolutionary as the most advanced workers, whose role is to perform the revolution on behalf of, and as part of, the working class. The vanguard is ahead of the revolution in this model.
The problem with tailism is that if you aren't a worker, and your engagement with the workers is purely by informing them (and with the specific goal of tantalizing them into performing revolutionary action) then you are an outsider with no genuine connection to the workers, who have no reason to trust you and will see through your shallow engagement with them.
E: Just to be specific about what I meant, you shouldn't sugarcoat and distort the truth when talking with other people just for the purpose of baiting them into becoming leftists.
Unionize or radicalize your union.
Join an org, or convince your org to do things outside of electoralism and book clubs.
Organize a monthly potluck with your normal friends because horizontal ties are the backbone of community crisis response.
Accept that progress is incremental and boring until it builds up enough of a base for change that isn’t.
If anyone can figure out how to use non-corporate social media to funnel liberal “activism” into building dual power, that’d be cool. Don’t think we’re any closer than the last time this site had this conversation 4 years ago, though.
Edit: I don’t want to be delusional and say that Lemmy is some inherently revolutionary force. But I also think that saying we’re not any closer may have been a bit too doomer. We have software developed by well-read communists and several instances which are run strictly on revolutionary principles. We’ve had several lighting in a bottle moments following Reddit bans and pseudo purges that have netted us increased membership.
Again, Lemmy is not the home of vanguard or anything like that. But we’ve had a lot of weird existing-in-the-cracks circumstances that lead to our existence and weirder things have become important in times of unrest. Who knows what connections made here will have an impact? I think it’s important to have this leftist dive bar at the end of the internet.
the perfect polycule couldn't possibly exist
