Tough ask.
In the US, the core of the beast, the built environment has been fundamentally transformed over the last 80 years such that most people don't interact with hardly anyone. By spurring white flight, the population was re-segregated and minorities relieved of what little generational wealth had been accumulated through property to replace them with highway projects, surface lots, and parking garages for the commuting white professionals automating the war machines, surveillance equipment, computers, and algorithms to financialize all aspects of human interaction.
Now we're post that, with everyone's faith in others and all institutions, public or private, decimated. The zombie empire pillages the globe, the CIA and capital interests in the US are only meaningfully opposed by some powerful states, and neoliberals burned the social fabric so that apps could replace it.
The West spent all the trillions it stole from the former colonies which had revolutions, to destroy them. While destroying them, they exhibited "authoritarian" tendencies, for which they could be browbeaten in the capitalist propaganda and sanctioned, subjecting them to further instability and causing their projects to languish. Now the reality we got because of the specific circumstances of our history are regarded as thought-terminating axioms by the public at large. Communism is "authoritarian". It will always fail for unspecific, obscure reasons to do with bureaucracy.
Absent something incredible happening, I think we're just forced to wait for the US' overtly fascist turn, increased militarism to shore up resources for the ruling class to try to finish automating their technological supremacy, which should bring the US into conflict with many countries. Hopefully whoever rises to the challenge can destroy the Fourth Reich, occupy it, and re-educate its population.
Don't forget all of this has to happen before climate change becomes irreversible too
Yeah, I think we'd just keep repeating the cycle with some slight changes and more technological sophistication, if not for the fact that burning hydrocarbons at the rate we have been will take 11 generations to slow down. Climate change guarantees massive changes eventually, we're getting mild preview of it today.
Keep in mind I'm including myself in this crit.
So, you know how liberals define themselves by being to the left of conservatives and calling it a day? I feel like, not all, but a lot of us leftists still do the same thing, but for libs. A lot of us haven't figured out that if change is actually going to happen, it's going to require changing our expectations of what our lives are going to be. It's not enough to just replace liberal aesthetics with leftist aesthetics, we have to start thinking about who we want to be as leftists and the life that person would live in the world outside of the lies. Some of us still have the same damn dreams we had for ourselves back when we were libs, we've just replaced the liberal world they're supposed to occur in with one in which there's more Lenin statues scattered around. This has been demonstrated most succinctly, I think, with how many leftists hopped on the "back to normal" train; Abandoning our immunocompromised comrades to bear the stigma of masking on their own, while also ignoring the harm we're going to let Covid do to ourselves. Zero Covid is just as much class struggle as fighting for worker rights. Someone who's not willing to do even the bare minimum of changing their lifestyle to prolong it, let alone help others, surely isn't about to contribute to a revolution.
Of course, that leads us to the other problem, The Cultural Hegemony and how its maintained through manufactured consent. Which is a whole other rant. Thanks for coming to my RED Talk.
If we do imagine and implement that alternative, there's going to be a lot of work to do to clean up climate change. Unless something better comes along, probably a lot of planting forests, cutting them down, and storing the lumber underground. Maybe we'll get a better carbon capture than that someday, but all the "high tech" alternatives thus far are just public money being laundered to someone.
The left needs to become revolutionary and do the work to become informed in theory and action. There are not many of us right now and the vast majority of organisations are simply unserious in their knowledge, strategy, positions, and achieving strategic goals.
Many commie/anarchist groups are very small, fail to embed with the people to build off of community issues, and spend all of their time arguing about a German guy from the late 1800s or about why China is revisionist or going through the motions of what their LARPie tendency makes them think they should be doing but without working it into a coherent agenda to build power, to build revolution.
For example, orgs whose approach to unions is to just cheerlead regardless of what is happening. That Maoist article criticizing PSL, FRSO, DSA etc was about 70% correct, just presented in the most insufferable way possible and with no real conclusion of what to actually do aside from having an opinion. Every leftist group appears to have forgotten how to say, "yes and" or "yes but" in order to recognize the value and insufficiency of the union status quo. It's just "yes that's awesome" or "I condemn this in the strongest terms" dressed up in left-sounding language. They've definitely forgotten how to influence unions or carry out a realistic campaign around doing so. Roughly 50% of IWW groups appear to be deeply incompetent, don't provide useful support to workers, get people fired for no reason, but seem to care a lot about getting "cred". I know two people who were head of IWW groups in two cities and they now work at unions and they are some of the worst organizers I've ever met, doing the easy stuff you're supposed to be focusing on getting other people to do (stand at a picket...) and not the things the organizer has to do (ensure materials are available and delivered, recruit people to do tasks, create an organizing committee, have any strategy at all for winning).
The commonality I see for all of this is that they have zero institutional support showing them how to do it, forcing them to read, training them to be competent organizers, let alone socialist organizers, so they adopt what they are exposed to: the non-profit industrial complex model and the ubiquitous liberalism of avoiding reading but desperately needing to have an opinion to feel valid. Having an opinion or title is somehow the most important thing and simultaneously does not depend on gaining expertise or succeeding at your work. Telling other people looking to contribute no (because of X flimsy theoretical reason they don't understand) is more important than rerouting that enthusiasm into a political program.
This isn't all orgs, but it's very common. Competence is the exception and is diluted and frustrated. Also, in case I sound unreasonably grumpy, competence includes building bridges and creating non-asshole spaces that define strategy and carry it out, not some elitist academic form of competency.
Basically, it seems like the basics need to be taught from scratch in most places. The left was a zombie before and now it's a zombie with a bunch of babies with no mentorship but who really want to do something.
On the bright side, I see signs of us transitioning out of the armchair larpy socialist phase. I see more and more competent orgs, I see competent factions within incompetent orgs, I see little fits and starts of a rekindling of socialist organization (some cities' organizers during the George Floyd protests). We are learning by doing where we have failed to learn by reading (even just 3 books, I'm begging you, Western leftists).
I hope we can learn and grow quickly enough.
I read an interesting paper a few years ago that informs how I look at this stuff on some level. One of the authors is kinda sus and the movement is overall pretty white and merits some criticism for sure, but I think the basic approach could be helpful. Basically it argues that we should collectively presuppose that societal collapse is inevitable because policy will not respond adequately to climate change. If that were true then we ought to be forming community networks and building infrastructure and skills to be prepared to preserve the things that are most important, since in a triage situation like this you won't be able to preserve everything. I think resiliency is a useful attribute for any organization to have, and necessarily requires reaching out to people around you in order to collect relevant skills and just raw manpower for what will need to be done.
Granted I am working nights and am doing an abysmal job of learning to garden and shit, but I when I have time to think about proactive steps these things are where my mind goes. I guess you could see it as a type of vanguardism? The idea is to be creating conditions where your group is organized enough to step up when the opportunity presents itself. Maybe that's still defeatist I don't know.
Sorry, it's a bit rambly.
Honestly I was a bloomer before I saw that they are just going to send kids back to the factories. That will buy another decade probably.
