seems like we only have ~10 years to deal with climate change. also seems like joe biden is gonna get the nom. What the fuck do we do in these next few years given that the dems are not remotely interested in dealing with climate change in any real way?
I was listening to an old Chapo the other day, and it was the one with Adam Curtis. And he was talking about how Jihadists pivoted to doing lone wolf attacks and stochastic terrorism, because in the age of US mass surveillance, any real organizing or cadre would be stamped out by a fucking drone. White supremacists started doing this too.
If the left is serious about what to do in the current moment, it will learn from our enemies. There's plenty of simple, easy things to be done that cannot be sabotaged by the Feds. They can't track individuals that don't make their plans known. No one guards those pipelines, or power grid hubs, or transportation nexuses.
Can't say anything more than that.
If that scares you, then you have to realize that mass organizing is impossible until either A, conditions get significantly fucking worse (like lack of food and water worse), or B, the state apparatus develops some kind of blind spot that allows organizing right under its nose (which seems impossible rn.)
If the left doesn't do this, it will remain an impotent, pointless online nuisance.
If you really know how bad things are, you know what has to be done. The difference between us and our enemies is that we're crippled by moral indecision and the desire to actually have a better life.
Some deep id part of our brains has internalized the idea that there's still a possibility that things will get better, so it's not worth risking ourselves to do anything about it.
But if you really believe there's no electoral solution, and you're serious about alternate power structures, there hasn't been a successful mass movement that didn't follow this decentralized, amorphous structure for about 40 years now. The State got too good at crushing them.
Someone is gonna be cope and call this "adventurism" or something. But dig through the history, prove me wrong. Meaningful organizing isn't possible in the current context. Maybe, hopefully, it will be soon. But I've yet to see it.
If you see the timeline we have left, I don't see any other solution.
Yeah, stochastic cells that do straight up sabotage and/or kidnappings and/or assassinations are the only thing I can think of that may scare people into making changes in Minecraft
Look, at this point the fed algorithm translates Minecraft to real-life so dont even bother
I don't want to sound like too much of an asshole here, but can anyone give me any examples of this "propaganda of the deed" kinda thing working? Perhaps there are a few occasions where you'd get one government representative over another, but has it ever REALLY pushed the needle in a way that mattered?
John Brown, for one. And there's plenty of right wing success, eg Gladio.
We're building an entirely new future here. One that isn't compatible with current industrial outputs. No one has ever attempted to do what needs to be done.
It could very possibly eat shit and fail. There basically isn't any other outcome, actually. But this is where the system is vulnerable, and it's what people are actually capable of without being smashed down by the state.
In the absence of any alternative, it doesn't matter how unlikely it is do anything. We're running out of time.
okay, sure, the right wing terrorism succeeds because terrorism breeds fear, and that fear helps the right consolidate power among a scared populace.
And John Brown simply accelerated a process that was clearly already happening. Most historians agree that without Brown, the same civil war probably just would have taken another 5 years or so to start. And sure you could say that perhaps doing isolated left-wing terrorism could accelerate a process that's already happening, but I don't see that acceleration happening in the direction we'd hope.
I'm asking specifically about left-wing terrorism ever working. And the simple answer is that it has never worked in any way that mattered. There used to be a lot more leftists in the 20th century that advocated for the propaganda of the deed, but it has fallen out of favor not because of weak knees, but because it's never shown to be effective.
Algerian revolutionaries? The Sandinistas? Fuck, Castro's army wasn't that big.
You're just looking for reasons to give up.
It "fell out of favor" because a lot of it was aimless violence, which is not what I'm advocating, and the rest were stamped out by newer state powers. The Western left has been impotent since '68 anyway. So what's the fucking counterexample?
Looking for an example of something that's never been done isn't exactly easy. We don't live in the past anymore. This is a different era.
They were sending Feds to infiltrate little old ladies with sewing circles who opposed the Iraq War. And that was fifteen years before they built this modern surveillance apparatus, and they started throwing kids into concentration camps.
So there's not going to be tens of millions of people in a working class party, or even a small vanguard in the tens or hundreds of thousands. That's not possible anymore. Attempts to build that kind of movement get squashed in their infancy.
General strikes or alternate mutual aid networks are building towards a labor strategy that existed to exert pressure before the state was this involved and the supply chains are domestic and uncomplicated.
This is the only lever in front of us for the foreseeable future, and it's the only thing we refuse to do.
Is it really fucking because it won't do anything? Or is it because it's fucking scary, and everyone would rather just keep their head down?
It “fell out of favor” because a lot of it was aimless violence, which is not what I’m advocating,
oh, i misunderstood your point. I thought you were talking about terrorist cells like 17 November in Greece, not small-scale cadres.
I’m asking specifically about left-wing terrorism ever working.
I know very little history, but how about the assassination of Czar Alexander II? There was a lot of terrorism by socialists and anarchists in the late 1800s that may have set the stage for the Russian revolution
IIRC, the organization that killed him was literally headed by an Okhrana asset.
The goal of these right wing losers was idealistic, bird brained nonsense. Bringing back the "caliphate," starting a "race war."
If you have a real concrete goal, say, shutting down shipping for two weeks. That is trivial to accomplish even for most bumbling idiots.
Don't take my word for it, US Security experts have complained about this for decades! You could shut down communications in a major US city just by putting on a hard hat and a fluorescent vest and messing around with a couple of boxes guarded only by a fucking padlock. You don't really even need to know what you're doing.
The system assumes compliance. It is not prepared for any real sabotage attempts. It's just that, thus far, those attempts have mainly been right wing psychopaths engaging in mass murder of civilians. Which they don't care about, because it's not a threat.
Are you a fed or you speaking facts, is it really that easy?
Gosh I feel scared just typing this, I'm not really interested in leftism, Mr.FBI whos reading this, Im just an ordinary guy looking for a job and a home.
the book blackCatSabotage has a ton of tips for this kind of thing for anyone wanting to learn more
I'm sorry but imagine thinking that even if Bernie had won anything remotely resembling his vision for a green new deal would've made it through congress. I'm not trying to be cynical, but we need to recognize the reality we live in and act accordingly.
The most Bernie could've realistically done on his own as president is ban new fossil fuel projects on american soil, all this would do is increase the price of oil and would result in more of these sorts of projects happening in Canada instead of the US. From a sort of real politik view, the only way to meaningfully address climate change is to make it so that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.
Now, how can leftists make renewables cheaper in comparison, they can do forms of direct action that do make the price of oil go up. Things like pipeline protests are far from useless actions. It's time to ramp up on that sort of thing.
Exactly. Even if Bernie won and Democrats won the Senate, Bernie would be dealing with Joe Manchin as the ranking member of the Energy comittee
There really is no other way to answer this question other than to build a revolutionary movement outside of bourgeois structures. There are many formations of this that are in the early stages and need support and membership. I know it gets tiring being told to organize and agitate, and there are days/weeks in which I feel entirely hypocritical saying that, but we can't afford to keep waiting for elections to change the conditions, the system is clearly on its decline towards another large scale recession/depression. We need to be out there telling people exactly why we're in this hellish situation and showing them that we need to restructure from the ground up, and that its worth risking many of the comforts we in the imperial core enjoy.
It's incredibly hard to see such large-scale problems held up by immense power structures and forces of violence, and then to be told the only thing we can do is go out in our community, build relations, and perform mutual aid. As an ML, I believe that we need to build a Party to be able to maintain/protect revolutionary energy, but the on-the-ground implementation at the moment is all similar regardless of your tendancy.
Whoever can actually answer that gets to be the next Bernie. It's the ultimate question for the US "left".
the next Bernie
... spineless and ultimately of no real consequence?
No, he means what Bernie symbolized, not the man himself, who sadly seems to have gone the way of Alexis Tsipras
If Democrats win the Senate you've got Bernie as Chairman of the Budget Committee. That's the most political power he's ever had. His most consequential days are still ahead of him
The road to fascism will be paved in the next 4 years and setting the stages for a future civil war and potential balkanization.
I posted this thread last week with my predictions of a Biden presidency - https://hexbear.net/post/34180
Bear in mind - Dems will inherit the worst economic conditions since the great depression and they want to pass austerity budgets. The right wing backlash to this is going to be worse than anything we've ever seen before. We're going to have a new reactionary right wing movement and they will be far more fascistic than anything Trump could've ever done. It will be a direct result to Biden's incompetence and Dems doing fuck all about the wealth inequality.
Richard Spencer endorsed Biden and said that his movement could benefit from him more than Trump. The alt right wasn't really helped by Trump's 2016 victory cause it pushed them to the forefront and into the spotlight before they were prepared. They would've been better off with another useless neo-liberal president like Hillary, where they could sit back for 4 years and keep building their base and pushing propaganda. Biden is going to be a wet dream to them.
Any civil war in the US will be between nuclear armed factions of what is left of a broken US military.
You should listen to Robert Evans' 'It Could Happen Here' podcast and read up on civil wars like in Yugoslavia, Syria and Lebanon. It's not all about nuclear weapons.
Read up on it anyway. Nuclear weapons aren't a McGuffin that is going to decide everything. The government will most likely still have possession of them.
A civil war is not going to be left vs right. Not in a country like the US. It will be split racially, culturally and by class. There will be several factions all fighting each other. I told you to go read about Lebanon and Yugoslavia cause the similarities are there, especially Yugoslavia. They suffered an economical collapse and had many ethnicities who retreated into mythology about how great they used to be (MAGA) and blaming others. Lebanon was similar with all of it's culture differences and many groups.
different regions would be seized by different groups so different weapons might fall into the hands of some group, sure. but as the central state collapses, which is what balkanization implies, it's not going to suddenly turn around and start nuking within it's own borders. chemical and biological weapons? sure. but you can't really hide nukes going off. it would literally invite invasion.
if it's some splinter group that gets its hands on a nuclear weapon, they have to do so with knowledge of how to unlock, arm, and fire the things, so outside of splinter factions of the US military, that's also out.
that said, we're also likely to get invaded as the whole world has a stake in the outcome, at which point the state using nukes seems more reasonable, but they're much more likely to try to hit the invading countries back home as to try and hit american soil.
so all in all, I don't think nukes are likely if we balkanize due to the onset of a civil war.
you're assuming a coherent entity capable of making these choices. in fact, it will be many small groups making their own calls because no one can tell what the central authority even wants. while they still retain control, they'll be cautious about showing weakness to the outside world. once control starts slipping (which will likely happen before the start any of conflict), too many factions will be vying for power within and around the state. I'm not saying it's impossible that bombs go off. I'm saying that it's unlikely to be a tactical decision made for the furtherance of a war.
only if they can get the things loaded and launched. that's purposefully almost impossible.
More likely a civil war will be guerrilla fighting between a handful of different insurgent groups than different factions of the US military fighting each other. Of course given the military's penchant for losing nukes and that we live in hell, i wouldn't be surprised if some of the militias end up with them lol
There's too many hypotheticals to say for certain what would happen one way or another. Obviously one possibility is the former US nuking itself to oblivion and dooming the rest of the world to a nuclear winter.
If you dont like talking about it then don't participate in the discussions? No one's forcing you to
these daily fantasies about balkanization are boring and reek of cope
It's more realistic than the daily bullshit on here talking up China like they are some communist utopia.
The law of value does not appear to hold in China. What is your explanation for that?
Balkanization, though often treated as more a meme than a viable political strategy, is a legitimate approach that the left should consider.
Think about crazy, irrational Qultists or MAGA zealots. These people are completely insane. They are also potential allies in the push for balkanization. Someone in one of those crowds is not interested in facts or consequences. For them, politics is an extension of faith, hatred, and pleasure. Adrenochrome and mole children and microchips are real because them being real feels good. Hillary is going to be tried and executed because they hate her and revenge on people you hate feels good.
You know what else feels good to this crowd? Excluding perceived undesirables. Improving the purity of your country. Sell these people a narrative about why letting places they've already been taught to hate secede is patriotic, holy, based, a return to tradition, a middle finger to the deep state, a way to make America great again. Conservatives have spent the past four years enjoying a dominance built on the support of a population that will respond to this kind of messaging. A sufficiently convincing campaign may leave conservatives no choice but to provide political assistance to a secession attempt.
Breaking up the US reduces the power of the federal government and could be a first step towards building something better.
Very good points. I wish I had a good answer to the criticism that this kind of narrative is dangerous for people who are left behind in American territory, but I don't have anything to offer, because you're right.
As for the food issue, maybe the lesson is that balkanization needs to start in an area where agriculture is a possibility. The People's Republic of New York sounds fun until everybody is starving because of sanctions.
A lot of the nations food is produced in California but yeah the highway system will be a choke point regardless of if California secedes in one piece (eg if the rural parts of the state stick with the urban parts) or if somehow the east and west coasts have some sort of alliance in the hypothetical Balkanization map
I hope they have good oatmeal, I can't do four years of something heavy like french toast or pancakes....
Build the left. Hope to reach critical size before it's too late.
We'll probably fail but that isn't the end. It'll hurt people unfathomably and cause massive global damage but there's still going to be a society in that. The goal of ending capitalism doesn't stop and when the battle is done we can work on restoring the world afterwards.
Either way, we keep working at it. There's little else to say or do. There is only one path to take and it's the path of growing the left.
Emmigrate?
No not into slavery in Elon Musks unobtaniuam mines on Mars, I don't think theres any escaping the climate apocalypse.
But as capitalism eats it self shits going to get wild in neoliberal westerns states, we've basically just had a trial run with Covid. I don't see that shit going well.
China produces 35 percent of global emissions and is a growing renewables powerhouse, so hope for the best for the CCP and hope they deliver on their plans?
Naomi Klein has a decent short book on the use of renewables in Haiti IIRC, and how useful they are for community organising during climate and natural disaster disruptions.
china is a developing country. their per capita emissions are close to New Zealand. Ours is more than double. the us poses the single greatest threat to world stability and a proper response to the climate crisis and has contributed more co2 emissions over the past century than the next 3 countries combined (china, russia, germany). china might do the right plan for their country and help the region but the us will continue to be an impediment to a global response
On a per capita basis sure, overall I think the US contributes the second largest amount of emissions at about 10 percent.
While the US is a lost cause, Chinese dominance in renewables will bring costs down and result in American capitalists pursuing that instead.
The free market solution to fighting climate change is direct action involving the mass destruction of oil and gas pipelines and their accompanied fracking rigs.
Yes I agree that envirocapitalism narrative is absolutely shit and inappropriate - I'm a bit of a climate sooner with respect to Western developed countries doing anything particularly useful of their own accord
because I feel like Americans and US industry would dig their heels in and double down on coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
Coal is dying anyways, no one wants to invest in it
NZ isn't a good benchmark. We have very high emissions per capita due to our low population count and large agricultural industry.
Its comparatively higher to other developed countries yeah but countries like the us, canada, and australia are more than double. Mexico for example has half the per capita emissions of China. My only point is that in terms of the scope of the response most other developed countries have a need for a much more drastic action than China to get their emissions down. The only reason people focus on China is because they're the largest so their response has a bigger impact.
The hard thing about “we” doing anything is that “we” is just a rhetorical device. If you mean lefties, we’re beholden to all the overdetermining structural shit that normies are, we’re just more keyed in as to the root problems and how to solve them. We’re kind of locked in to climate catastrophe, and the ruling class ain’t gonna go commie just cuz the seas start boiling. I figure the most tangible actions we can take are local: develop mutual aid infrastructure, agitate lefty perspectives and goals, start growing food, etc. We’re only gonna experience more chaos on all levels, but we can ride these waves by building communal trash islands :)
Half my state just burned to the fucking ground and we're barely at 1.1C.
The situation is already catastrophic. The question is now whether we're going to have industrial civilization at all past 2100.
The fact that the average person doesn't know/care about this is not an indication that the problem is overblown.
Far fucking from it.
We just had two fires bigger than any in state history simultaneously.
The average burned acreage the past decade has matched the maximum in 1980.
As far as I'm concerned, what you're describing is a distinction without a difference.
If you pour gasoline onto a fire, can you reasonably say that because you can't "correlate" that action with the damage the fire ended up causing, they aren't related? If you donate a billion dollars to ISIS, can you honestly say "I did nothing wrong because you can't prove my money was used to kill people?" (This is an especially relevant example because we know climate instability will directly cause wars, arguably already has.)
So this shit is just an attempt to trick your own brain. It is not a complicated issue. It's a basic systemic problem.
We are, slowly but surely, sucking all the fucking oxygen out of the room. We are destroying our capacity to maintain current human populations and advanced civilizations.
Those are the fucking stakes, bar none. There is no doubt about this.
I don't need to navel gaze about whether this or that event is "technically" related because the problem isn't an increase in isolated, individual events.
It's a rising fucking tide that will drown us all. Literally, in some cases.
I'm going to try and educate people. There are a very good portion of people in my field in Computer Science that are clearly dissatisfied with the current status quo and are uncomfortable with big tech. While some may say this is a lost cause, it is stupid to not at least try.
I'm just waiting for the house of cards to collapse at this point and let the pieces fall where they may tbh.
