Did anyone here predict this time last year that the US would be in its current state? Because I sure didn't. Everything seems to be going downhill really fast. The decay seems exponential rather than linear. So with that being said, do you think the collapse could come soon? 2 years? next year? Maybe even before the end of this year? It would honestly be shocking if the US went from business as usual to civil war in the space of a few years.
I think decades of the FBI putting lead into any semi-prominent leftist leaders probably did way more to weaken the left than any ideological spat
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The past 40 years are the result of the repression of the 70s. The left was making huge gains and the Black Panther Party and the Rainbow Coalition were probably the most significant American revolutionary organisations to come out of the latter half of the 20th century. I dunno, I just don't get the appeal of such an idealist reading of the weakening of the American left when it was decades of ops like COINTELPRO that put us here and we are picking up the pieces. I say this because I don't want people to think we did this to ourselves, our movement is righteous and it has been strong in the past and can be made strong again. The capitalist class had to pull out all the stops to put it down. Ideology is important, but that division is more a symptom of our lack of organisation than its direct cause.
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The FBI very much helped with those splits, for example Eldridge Cleaver's split was based on a lot of inflamed tensions and bad information from COINTELPRO while he was in Algeria.
That's why I said latter half of the 20th century, I know the labour movement was larger before then but again, it was the red scares, Palmer Raids, HUAC purges in CPUSA, deindustrialisation putting labour on the defensive, and other more concrete stuff that caused the decline. I do think you're speaking to how it would be an incomplete story if something wasn't said about liberal hegemony and the complete takover of the universities by capital, but I still think this is part of a wider, concerted effort to undermine the left and not so much of the left thwarting itself. Not to say it doesn't happen, but I think people tend to blame the left for a lot of stuff which is the state's fault.
The FBI infiltrated community relief organizations that cropped up in the aftermath of Katrina. You don't need to be established, or big, or have a prominent leader to be a target.
You have the order of these backwards. Cointelpro started in the mid 50s, targeting the Communist party and the civil rights movement. From there, they expanded to target any left group that was remotely effective, over the next decades. By the time the Weather Underground even formed, the left of the era was beginning its decline.
And the FBI is continuing to operate against BLM, and I'd be shocked if it didn't extend to every left group significant enough to have a Wikipedia page.