I mean yeah. We are powerless. They could kill every single one of us tonight and it wouldn't even make the news. I would never say we were successful at liberating literally anyone.
I suppose part of my point is that we exist in a sort of equilibrium, where the state and its capitalist analogs do not simply smother us- out of a combination of a) not recognizing us as a threat, and b) not being willing to casually slaughter its own citizens. And there are both ideological and material components of both a and b.
This might sound liberal, but we have an ability to build things up from the individual and small-collective level, and our personal choices can point in a revolutionary direction. We are stuck in hegemonic liberalism (which is not going to change any time soon), and as such our survival is largely connected to staying in the good graces of liberals, of maintaining a position such that in a cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn't make sense to kill us off.
We can make noise about what foreign countries are "advancing socialism" all we like, and it's not going to do anything more than make the target on us less blurry. We can form unions and party structures (which are good, although capitalist institutions in this country have 80+ years of success in getting the better of them), and potentially accrue big victories but also become a choicier target to crack down on. We can go full insurrectionary and get totally merked. Or, we can build anti-capitalist ways of living in ways that are not ostentatious, but directly secure most of the means of production of decent lives organically, and in a way that will allow us to resist climate change, attract people, and maybe even start a PPW from.
I am sympathetic to all of these but I favor the latter.
I mean yeah. We are powerless. They could kill every single one of us tonight and it wouldn't even make the news. I would never say we were successful at liberating literally anyone.
I suppose part of my point is that we exist in a sort of equilibrium, where the state and its capitalist analogs do not simply smother us- out of a combination of a) not recognizing us as a threat, and b) not being willing to casually slaughter its own citizens. And there are both ideological and material components of both a and b.
This might sound liberal, but we have an ability to build things up from the individual and small-collective level, and our personal choices can point in a revolutionary direction. We are stuck in hegemonic liberalism (which is not going to change any time soon), and as such our survival is largely connected to staying in the good graces of liberals, of maintaining a position such that in a cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn't make sense to kill us off.
We can make noise about what foreign countries are "advancing socialism" all we like, and it's not going to do anything more than make the target on us less blurry. We can form unions and party structures (which are good, although capitalist institutions in this country have 80+ years of success in getting the better of them), and potentially accrue big victories but also become a choicier target to crack down on. We can go full insurrectionary and get totally merked. Or, we can build anti-capitalist ways of living in ways that are not ostentatious, but directly secure most of the means of production of decent lives organically, and in a way that will allow us to resist climate change, attract people, and maybe even start a PPW from.
I am sympathetic to all of these but I favor the latter.