Imagine having a giant mob willing to march and take the fucking capitol, doing it while the police supported you and the army looked to their bellies, and not even getting concesions out of it. WORSE: your movement and party is shitting itself after it.
I really believe they could have pulled something IF Trump wasn't Trump.
If they had any real leadership there would be hundreds of turds on that desk right now. Nancy would open her door and a wave of turds would come pouring out like the blood-filled elevator in The Shining.
No telling where the lower deck ends and where the upper deck begins.
Literally #OccupyCapitolHill would have do the trick. But nobody thought on that.
Glorious
Imagine setting an autonomous zone in the fucking capital. Streaming theory lectures thru C-SPAN, housing the homeless, being able to hold desk as hostages and the libs fucking melting down because of it. Maybe some day
You and the other 5k comrades will be vaporized with a satelital laser before getting near than a km from the Capitol.
no data from PCs that weren't logged off, unlike the blm CHADS that burned the precinct.
You don't have to do any of that, you just have to get them to ask agree that they are getting fucked on pay or benefits and work from there.
"Did you see they raised the price of 'x' again? Kinda weird how we haven't gotten a party bump"
Target people who had covid/other illness and didn't get solid comp pay
"That's bullshit that you missed 2 weeks of work and they didn't even pay you full time for it, you got it on the job, they should be more responsible with our heath"
Target anyone who seems to have existing anger at the company and agree with them/help them so something
"That's fucked up that you got written up for being 5 minutes late, there was traffic and you didn't cause any problems. Let's write something to send to management about this. I think we should have a longer grace period"
Keep doing stuff like that and being helpful to everyone when they need it. Drop hints here and there, use dogwhistles when you can, if someone responds to one bring them closer and let them know your plan. Once you get a few people, it's easier to get more. Quiet organizing can work, but you have to be patient.
The other option is to just come into work and start screaming about a union. Tell everyone that you need to organize and give them the contact info of a local/a wobbly contact. Make a scene, scream leftist shit, get fired in a blaze of glory and shout "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOU CHAINS" as they walk you out. Immediately go to the local newspaper and tell them you have a story about harassment and abuse at your former job, file a complaint with the NLRB, basically martyr yourself and make a racket so people notice.
That option is really only viable if you're already a salt and got found out, are already getting fired for something else, or for caught doing quiet organizing and are fired for that. People pay attention to drama so don't ever go down quietly, make sure to compile evidence wherever you can while you're working so you can give it to the media or have something to publish online later. This method had actually worked at a couple places around me.
I mean jfc at least spike the train and road networks with side cadres, establish defensive perimeters, and hit the communication lines.
Didn't so much as read insurrection tactics 101. Just Pathetic.
I award them 0 points, and may god have mercy on their souls.
Yes. Can't share everything I want to because posting your praxis guides on a public forum is not super wise, but a few pointers that immediately come to mind.
The coming insurrection has its flaws and is over-theoretical, but has good stuff. Mao and Che's Guides to guerilla warfare are classics, but need substantial abstraction to adapt them to a modern urban setting.
I also want to shout out Cory Doctorow's series Little Brother which while it suffers from fatal 2000s Left-Libertarian syndrome, is a decent overview of civil disobedience tactics circa Occupy, and was written explicitly as a guide for young protesters as a homage to Heinlein's famous "Here's how you build a terrorist cell network" passage in The moon is a harsh mistress.
There are many many other guides of the same type, and I want to single out eco socialist protest methodologies as especially effective and adaptable to wider movements. Chaining yourself to heavy industry or putting bricks on a road works everywhere. Things like the Sydney Green Bans are important case studies, as are the classics like Barcelona 1936. Study how they brought major institutions to a standstill.
Isn't The Coming Insurrection like Situationist shit or something? I remember J Moufawad-Paul dunking on it in The Communist Necessity
Yes, and that's my primary criticism of it. Doesn't mean the tools described aren't useful in a more organised and directed framework. Tendencies are toolkits not identities.
Blanqui's *Instructions for an Armed Uprising * is obvs dated but still has some good stuff in it.
Mao and Che are read in American military academies because they knew their shit. I recommend Mao's "On Guerrilla Warfare" as well as Võ Nguyên Giáp's writings. This is Protected People's War style stuff though, but they stress the need for political organizing as well as military activities which is very important for revolutions.
It's anticommunist in its origins, but
and
Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency
The Green Book (IRA)
It’s very good this happened because this is a prime example of action without theory. Stuff like this requires a plan of action, and extra plans to cover extra scenarios.
Imagine having a giant mob willing to march and take the fucking capitol, doing it while the police supported you and the army looked to their bellies, and not even getting concesions out of it. Worse, your whole movement/party is now shitting itself.
This is why organization and planning matters. And if something goes to plan, we can’t just collapse. We have to adapt on the go.
my favorite description of it was someone calling it a "minor league coup"
Which is why I’m scared of Cotton or Hawley, They need to be nipped in the bud now. They’re both extremely dangerous for progress and human rights
that assumes they have charisma and they do not but it doesn't mean they can't be trained
Hawley is basically sideshow bob in the field of rakes after this. He fucked up bad trying to play to the fascists and now he just looks like an idiot.
We can laugh, but I'm sure there are a dozens of republican senators who are livid at Hawley (and Cruz) right now. they won't say it, terrified of the base, but I don't see how he gets any institutional support for a run.
To be fair, Trump and Cruz had zero institutional support for a run and they were the only candidates to get any meaningful voter support in the 2016 primary. Their base has only moved farther right since. Unlike the Dems, the old guard GOP has long since lost control of their primary voters.
I think coups tend to be appeals to—or at least, reliant on—often outside, higher authorities (eg, when the US gives its blessing to various coups over the ages).
But trump overturning an election appeals to a pretty fringe part of the US power structure; there is basically no support for this sort of thing where it matters.
I dunno, maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about how coups work
Is. This is not a video game. To capture the capital does not trigger a "win". It is only a building. The power inside does not come from it.
The power of the United States comes from capital and military. To take power they must be defeated or must support. The power of a president come from these, and can not oppose or defeat them. Capital do not need a coup. The military do not.
To take power there must be organisation to contest and told topple the current power. The elected heads are not current power alone, they are just chosen to use it.
The power inside does not come from it.
And a lot of people realized this. A lot of our normal daily lives to an extend depends on the fetishization of the institutions and their buildings. Suddenly it turned out that this massive symbol is just another rather disappointing building, and that the ruling people arent as far away and as safe as youd imagnie. This alone has power as it is eroding a lot of the stories that keep things peaceful. Now a lot of people suddenly realize that its all made up and they have the power to do a lot.
It certainly shows where our weak points are to a coup. Citations Needed did a quick episode on this already, the night of. They had one take that really stuck with me. Along the lines of the phrase "Fascism is when the power of empire is used against the core", the methods of encouraging a coup here, were the same as those used a year ago in Bolivia. They don't have to specifically call for violence. They just have to broadcast over and over, with legal efforts to back it up, that the election was stolen. The very implication is that the foundation of the country's government is being stolen, and the logical defense to that is force.
yeah to be a coup I feel like some group or person has to actually claim they're the new authority
They were trying to stop the results from getting certified, it was a failed coup.
I feel like there has to be some even remote chance of success to consider it a coup attempt. Unless you'd still call it a coup attempt if it was one chud trying to storm it on his own.
I'm sorry but it just wasn't a coup. We've seen coups dozens of times courtesy of the CIA, we know what they look like.
It was armed people surrounding the capitol to install an unelected authoritarian, charging it, and being repelled by gunfire. That's a coup. The only difference is that they're as good at committing a coup as they are at everything else in their life. An attempt and failure to do something is still doing that thing.
failling to do a coup does not mean you are not doing a coup like guaido did not succed on his coup BUT it was still an attempted coup
Especially when the thing immediately preceding it is that unelected authoritarian demanding they show strength by marching on the capitol while he'll be there with him. If Pelosi had stayed in her office, the hostage situation would either be Ruby Ridge on steroids- the genuine inciting moment for all of those militias who have been salivating about this very moment for decades- or the ultimate bargaining chip for Trump. "My supporters can do this with the support of the police and national guard. Your supporters did nothing". What are they going to do except play pope/antipope while the antipope controls a fanatically loyal paramilitary?
I'll downplay any of this when there aren't four people within this neighbourhood with 3%-er stickers on their cars. It would take all of an hour to muster any of their local groups and the bulk of the opposition to them doesn't believe in guns and denounces Antifa for punching them. We may be radical in the way we think and capable in the way we organise but the raw psychic energy of fascism results in irrational spasmotic violence. They're willing to attack the house, the most insane act of sedition since the 19th century, on a whim because they were there and the opportunity to unleash all of that pent-up hatred without consequences presented itself. I can't imagine PSL or DSA or any of the mutual self-defense militias we have doing that without similar conditions to 1917 because any of us can look at the strength of the military even in that immediate area. They're so poised for rapid escalation that even a completely uncoordinated attack on the seat of power without demands made sense when enough of them were in one place. It has never been easier in all of human history to get a bunch of them in one place and their entire culture revolves around convoys to those rallies. In better transport vehicles and with better guns than any insurgency I'm aware of. Big fucking spooks.
That was a joke of a coup attempt. That was a competely failure. That's what we should laugh and mock.
This was shockingly close to working.
true, but in this case there was no group or person claiming authority. like the difference between when the farmers broke into the royal bedroms in the 1740s vs. the actual French revolution
yeah it was a pathetic attempt with no organization but it was an attempt of doing it and not calling it let's people take control of the narrative because the discussion of what is or is not a coup is pointless like my personal example bolsonaro calls the brazilian military coup of 64, the 64 revolution, even though there is no space for discussion on this like it is one of the most obvious coups and time has only made it more obvious but it is about creating a narrative saying that it would be better if we went back to that.
What would they have pulled? They refuse to leave the building until Trump is president? Won't happen, even if Trump tried to go full coup. The fact the "mob" was unorganized, had no demands, had no real power etc is the whole reason they got into the building in the first place, if it was an actual possibility for a coup it would have been shut down
They would get concessions, if they had any solid demand besides "Trump4evar"
The "failed coup" is what happens when a movement has no
real leadershipplan, the "leaders" are just grifters, and the people has zero history/theory knowledge
