these months would have happened anyway and are/would be more of a radicalization deal for way more people than your socdem bernie voters
Deteriorating material conditions aren't enough to push people left -- they'll get radicalized, alright, but not necessarily in the right direction.
To radicalize people to the left you also need (1) a critique of capitalism and (2) a vision for how leftist policies could do better. That's why Medicare for All was such a great rallying cry for Bernie; it did both for a huge problem that everyone has at least some interaction with. If you get people moving in that direction then what radicalizes them is all the Bernie-adjacent people who are farther, more formally left, not someone on Fox News screaming that immigrants are the problem.
I think that depends on the chapter. BLM LA are communists as far as I can tell. The organizers were talking to the crowds about Marx and the dialectic at marches.
I’ve been super fucking impressed by them actually.
They had us doing the Assata Shakur chant:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Damn here in Portland any sort of BLM leaders are dedicated libs. Barely any overt connection being made between racist oppression and capitalist structures from anyone with a megaphone
Yea, this pandemic would be a really wild ride, politically, if Bernie was the nominee. And that is exactly why the effort went into his campaign. But the deeper question always was, "is there a tipping point, where the left can win electorally? Or is electoralism within the grip of power to a degree that it will always be abused to prevent real power distribution.
With eviction rates at the 50% level combined with human shields blocking courthouses, I think we're witnessing the slow collapse of the US in real time. The Covid market dip is 2x worse than the Great Depression and we're only a little more than a quarter in. If the US doesn't manage to start a hot war with a regional power like Iran or Russia, its economy is in permanent decline as long as it remains capitalist. Declining rate of profit and all that jazz😎
The US is declining, but moreover what you're seeing is capitalism worldwide sliding from one crisis to the next without the ability to lift itself out of the spiral. Last year, before covid and the economic meltdown, you already had revolutions or near-revolutions taking place across the world: Chile, Haiti, Colombia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, France, Puerto Rico, Sudan, Algeria, Catalan, Ecuador, and more.
Quite a few of these were triggered by the austerity policies the capitalists were using to pull themselves out of (on the backs of the working class) both a generalized crisis of overproduction and falling profit, and the last major spike in that trend, the historic crash in 2008 that has now been overshadowed just 12 years later. In many places--the middle east, Africa, South America--austerity is coming on top of capitalism's perpetual failure to produce livable conditions for huge numbers of people.
The ruling class truly have no solution for the economic woes besides debt spending-->more austerity, but those economic solutions only lead to political crises. It's hard to see how things will stabilize short of overthrowing capitalism.
They are going to try to clamp down through fascism. I think new fascism will rely more heavily on propaganda than old fascism but it will still be physically repressive.
The US is already the only place on Earth were this illusion is still alive.
Honestly I feel like Americans are so propagandized that there’s no degree to which material conditions can deteriorate that will punch through it, but who knows,
covid has had people in direct conflict with the police for more than two months straight across the entire country. if by "americans", you mean the PMC, sure, but otherwise, the american proletariat has entered the world-historic stage. no propaganda makes the evictions and starvation okay to the literal tens of millions of people going through it.
the number of people impacted by these evictions, loss of UI, etc are at the same order of magnitude as the number of people who voted in the last election.
Fair point, I should have made the distinction, I was mainly referring to PMC. It’s seriously gonna be interesting, and terrifying, to how to see how all this plays out.
they have a class interest in not seeing it. nothing has really impacted them yet. their kids dying in schools might shake them, but who knows. there are indications that small business owners are joining the protestors in cities like Portland, which literally seals the fate of the state regardless of how long the PMC continues to tongue their own buttholes.
Allowing the reproletarianization of the petit bourgeois and PMC will probably be America's biggest rope-selling maneuver.
I don't think the PMC is actually facing that right now but the petit-bourgeoisie sure the fuck are. it's blindingly stupid.
I think people who were born into a PMC family are feeling way more precarious than their parents and a lot of them have been forced to essentially become Proletarian with benefits (lots of people working low paid office jobs and having mommy and daddy pay their rent etc). The petit bourgeois is definitely declining way more rapidly though. The hard part is going to be bringing these new Proles into our camp instead of them siding with fascists like they normally do.
yea, agreed. I'm speaking specifically about the existing PMC, not their downwardly mobile children. in contrast, the petit-bourgeoisie are being told to fuck off in favor of the bourgeoisie as their last bastions are wiped out in cities across the country. they are being directly proletarianized in a way I didn't think was possible at the start of this crisis. like if you're going to do a bailout for anyone, it's obviously them, right? they're the lynchpin of liberal democracy - if they sway to the forces of revolution, the state crumbles.
in the short to medium term, I'm not actually that afraid of them joining the fascists. counter-revolution is being conducted almost exclusively by the state right now and their would-be allies haven't embraced dying for the cause just yet: groups like the proud boys generally walk away from fights rather than picking them even when outnumbered to give security forces an excuse to bloody protestors. they'll come around to that eventually but for the immediate future they aren't a real political force. that will change quickly as the state crumbles and the fighting over the future begins in ernest. it's at this point that the petit-bourgeoisie (and PMC where they haven't already) will properly join the counter-revolution.
I don't think the American proletariat has done much of anything thus far.
Sadly, even gusanos from my country believe you can become a millionare in the US, "and that's why we should copy them". I just cant with these people.
"There were times that -- I don't want my husband hearing this -- I made sure he had food," she said. "I just ate enough to keep going."
Fuck everything about this country.
obama snuffed out any hope of change last time. if biden gets in i don't know if he will be capable of doing the same. if trump is back in for a 2nd term then who fucking knows
My feeling about this is that the US has had the material conditions for a revolution for some time. It's hard to tell, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of Americans are poor, unhappy, and angry at their government. The reason way no revolution or Big Change happens in because their is no leadership that articulates a different way. I've been to a decent share of protests now, and all of the BML leadership I've seen is extremely liberal. The anarchists who show up to these have my sympathy, but, like, you actually do have to tell people what to do in order to build something.
Exactly. It's a lack of organization. The American people burned down a fucking police station, the revolutionary potential is definitely out there. Leftists need to start building parties for duel power. Start a soup kitchen or something and keep building up.
Leftists need to start building parties for working class power. We don't want dual power, we want power for the working class to the exclusion of the capitalists.
Dual power is an untenable position, but it is what happens between the buildup of proletarian power and the collapse of bourgeois power. I don't think there is any way around it aside from some sort of cataclysm which completely erases the power of the state as we know it.
Sure, it's possible, but IMO not a forgone conclusion, that there will be some unstable and transitional period of concurrent and competing power structures, but again, that's not actually what we want to to achieve.
No argument there. We're trying to abolish class, not re-invent the Petrograd Soviet.
The leadership isn't there because the communication channels arent strong enough. I don't just mean how we communicate with each other. Specifically I mean how the masses get their news and political analysis. As long as people get their info from for-profit, corporate media, they aren't going to choose to overthrow the corporate oligarchy. "The master will not give you the tools to destroy his house."
I'm not sure I agree. It's true that the mainstream media is very centralized and controlled by a few corporations, but also social media lets unusual ideas spread very quickly. Think about Qanon. Even though it includes bizarre and insane ideas, everything from aliens to Donald Trump being capable of planning and secrecy, it has spread to the point where there are thousands of believers of different ages and genders across multiple countries. Too bad it's so reactionary... Chapo trap house, in it's podcast form, is another good example. I feel like radical ideas have way more potential to spread now than they did like 20 or 30 years ago.
That’s like, more than the population of my country (Australia) and that’s just the people surveyed....
That's only up a few million from normal and it's not even close to enough.
hot take: the even more miserable conditions most americans are now facing will only atomize them further and ironically make organizing a left response more difficult. leftism in america is a lost cause
have you? the riots have accomplished nothing at all outside minneapolis
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Berkeley-council-bans-police-from-traffic-15410326.php
Took like three seconds of googling. There are other examples of this. Seattle's hashing things out right now. Plus plenty of schools have gotten rid of cops.
But it's not so much what gains have been made immediately from the riots but the fact that they existed demonstrates the revolutionary potential of people, particularly the colonized, within the US.
Oh, and the fact that this has been a radicalizing moment for a lot of people. Socialist orgs are dealing with large influxes of new members (like me!), and public sentiment has turned more against the cops. As shit gets even worse, we can reasonably expect more of this kind of thing.
of course there is revolutionary potential within the people of the US, that's true of all exploited people. what needs to be demonstrated is a willingness and ability to organize that potential into a useful force that the bourgeoisie can't ignore or easily placate with small concessions. this type of organization is anathema to americans and they actively seek to avoid doing it, no matter the cost
I just edited my post to mention that orgs have been swelling lately. It just takes time.
Orgs full of liberal idiots who think socialism is getting a few scraps from the corporate overlords.
I'm talking specifically about the IWW (based on what people have said here) and PSL (from personal interactions with members). There's a few smaller, definitely radical orgs I try to follow on Twitter who seem to be growing, too.
the bourgeoisie are going to start fighting back, though. there haven't even been any mass killings of strikers or protesters yet. that kind of thing will inevitably happen if they deem it necessary and it will strongly dissuade a lot of people from meaningful leftist action in public. the bourgeoisie haven't even scratched the surface in terms of the tools they have to maintain their grip on power
I think that is more likely to accelerate things, like how the abductions in Portland reignited the protests to some degree.
it's going to accelerate things for sure, but the acceleration can't continue forever. it's eventually going to reach a breaking point where either enough people are angry enough and organized enough that we can actually threaten the power of the ruling class, or (more likely IMO) the bourgeoisie successfully crush the threat and we essentially go back to the pre-COVID status quo where everything sucks and is constantly getting worse but people are atomized and alienated enough that leftist organization disintegrates. then we're back to square 1
I think it will get to a point where the state can't meet people's need to the degree that the struggle becomes one for basic, immediate survival. I think those conditions can drive organizing out of necessity, like how anticolonial struggles in Cuba and Vietnam became socialist revolutions when the imperialist atrocities became too much for the people to bear.
I agree -- I've said for a long time that successful revolutions can only take place when people don't have enough food to eat.
but the bourgeoisie can use that against us, even if only as a last ditch effort. whether they would like to or not, they can just do a UBI that keeps people fed and sheltered, if only temporarily. obviously that would be a concession on their part, so they're not going to do it except in dire circumstances, but that is a tool they could use, and frankly I think it would successfully snuff out a lot of the revolutionary potential we're talking about.
because the US government have a vast surplus of resources to draw from, unlike cuba and vietnam, we're fighting a different type of enemy than those revolutionaries were fighting, so i don't think we can fall back on "hunger will inevitably lead to revolution." we're going to have to inspire people to imagine a better world than that, and that to me that feels uniquely impossible in america, or at least almost impossible
A lot of things can change and we cannot perfect everything with dialectical materialism lol. Any number of scenarios could happen in the near future, some might weaken our position, some might bolster it. We can't know so we should continue the work of organizing and propagandizing.
So far the only thing a few workers have done is protest and some limited strikes.
Neither side has done much.
