Adventurism works
Removed by modAt least when the target is generally regarded as evil by 90% of people. Just look at the front page of reddit, it's wall to wall shitting on UHC and being oddly supportive of violence for civility liberals (i'm assuming the astroturfers don't have a coherent line yet)
The health insurance company will keep on doing the same exact thing, that's why their stock price didn't move at all yesterday.
Propaganda of the deed is just that, propaganda. No revolution without organization.
"Propaganda is useless" says someone living in one of the most heavily propagandized societies in history
You act as if one dude with a gun can magically undo decades of extremely well funded society wide international propaganda campaigns
I'm acting like I'm watching terminally civility brain-ed redditors chomping at the bit for insurance CEO blood, a widespread sentiment this action has exposed, while you look at the same thing and go "this isn't anything"
Okay, well if the end result of this is a bunch of copycats murder hundreds of CEOs leading to widespread systemic change I'll admit I'm wrong. Do you really think that's going to happen?
I posted above - the biggest issue is that if any sort of copycat meme starts, these ghouls will just hire a bunch of private security and the odds will go way down.
I'm willing to be proven that
is wrong, but right now I just don't see it going anywhere without real organizing. If we got people with medical debt, denied claims, together in one room, etc. - then maybe this will galvanize something. On its own it's fun, but it's not a political movement yet.
Why's that the only outcome where you could see yourself acknowledging it having any effect whatsoever? choose your goalposts i guess
Because the only outcome that is relevant is a systemic one. Killing one dude does not make systemic change. I really don't understand what's so hard to understand about that.
I really don't understand what's so hard to understand about propaganda, especially propaganda which reveals that 90% of even the most civility poisoned liberals are supportive of this, having systemic effects. I don't understand why "inspiring copycat murders" is the only effect you would deem tangible.
"Organize" you cry, like organization or the will to organize appears from the aether and not from groups of people experiencing radicalizing events like this
Seems like an ideological commitment to the idea that violence towards our masters achieves nothing except in very narrow prescribed circumstances. IMO this is yall experiencing the last vestige of civility brainworms.
I love that you think I'm the ideological one here, when you're just blatantly ignoring hundreds of years of historical reality. That's honestly the funniest part of the entire exchange to me
I've been seeing this incident spawn a lot of discourse about political and social violence which seems to be causing some "progressive Libs" suddenly have oddly materialist takes. Even r/neoliberal had some people discussing the brutal reality of the health insurance industry and the failure of the US system to do anything about it (while condemning the violence of course).
We can't say anything for sure yet but it does seem like this incident has triggered something in some people.
I guess I've seen it before enough times to know the libs always fall back in line eventually. By this time next week they'll all be "the rule of law" and "yes we need change but that's why you vote this isn't the way". Nothing ever happens it's always the same shit forever without actual organizing.
yeah but what if that guy is cool and also hot
If he's literally gigachad and spends the rest of his life doing the same then maybe
I said propaganda is propaganda. It's not useless. But it will not win the class war alone. The working class is propagandized, but it's held down primarily by the state - economic coercion and actual organized violence - and not ideas that somebody has put in our head. Most people don't kill CEOs not because they believe the ads they see on TV, but because they don't want to be jailed or killed and there is no movement to prevent that outcome. Propaganda is a useful tool that can help us organize our class, and the organized class is what will carry out a revolution. I think what this guy did was great. But until there's a mass movement to go alongside adventurism - which can't be built by lone wolves - we're just gonna have narodniks.
If posters on this website aren't doing adventurism we should be doing mass organizing to create a climate where violence will be more effective. We should use this to call for public healthcare, tell everybody about social murder, etc. Build a huge public force for M4A so that a healthcare CEO killed makes you think "right, M4A" instead of speculation about it being a mob hit or whatever. Calls for more assassinations - although they'd be good news! - are "easier" versions of Twitter leftists calling for strikes. It'd be nice but it won't work unless we make it possible.
I never said it would, but things like yesterday are part of what causes revolutions to happen, people need to be radicalized, they need to be exposed to new viewpoints and ideas, and that's what happens when you have half of reddit circle jerking over the evils of the health insurance system while lauding the assassin as a hero. It's not nothing, and the people telling me it's nothing are really fucking annoying me honestly.
Especially when, like that one dude, they want "hundreds of copycats" to be satisfied that the adventurism "did anything." They're literally arguing against those copycats taking action! It's incoherent! Do you want mass copycats or do you want to tell people it's useless, stay home? Ugh
this site tends to be on the vulgar materialist side. But I really do think our spectacular society makes us tend to overestimate the effect of propaganda. The left loves marches, flyering, stickering, blocking a highway for an hour to get on the news, and we reach for these things before collective action aimed at material conditions. Multiple people burned themselves alive to protest Israel's genocide of Gaza and it did not slow the bombs at all.
Propaganda of the deed is a little different, you're supposed to actually do something, but the problem is that killing a CEO actually doesn't improve anyone's insurance coverage. There's no material effect, it all depends on invigorating a mass movement. If it was during the height of Bernie's M4A campaign I bet it would have done something material. But what's today's call to mass action, go kill a CEO? That won't be heeded by more than a handful of people, and if that's all that happens there won't be material change. I would love for this to ignite a popular uprising against private health insurance but that only works in movies and color revolutions. I think that deeds aimed at high-value capital targets, oil pipelines and bomb factories (shout out Palestine Action), are better because if there's no accompanying movement at least they do get a smidge done on their own. They also lend themselves to propaganda about systemic change, not individual greedy CEOs.
You called?