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?
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?
oh, i misunderstood your point. I thought you were talking about terrorist cells like 17 November in Greece, not small-scale cadres.
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.