No.157073
No one will act, and by this I mean do anything besides pointless chanting and marching because they have not reached some undefined, arbitrary (and constantly shifting, in order to provide them with unlimited excuses) threshold of popular support that will, they think, magically flip a switch and allow them to do something. No change in circumstances will spur them to action. Even as their erstwhile comrades and immigrants are openly rounded up and thrown into for-profit concentration camps to be tortured and deported, the American "left", such as it is, sits on its hands and not only does nothing, but tells everyone else to do the same. Even as they watch the general public cheer and applaud the random murder of a CEO, they still believe that doing anything would be the greatest sin possible and doom their already insignificant movement to destruction. The greatest crime anyone can commit in the eyes of the western "left", such as it is, is so-called "adventurism", which is to say doing anything at all. They are so afraid of this "adventurism" that the quickest way to be ostracized from the American "left", such as it is, is to imply that anyone should DO anything.
Why has this sickness emerged? It is because the "left", such as it is, spends all their time reading theory but none of it reading history. Dialectical materialism is a tool which we use to analyze history, not a means to an end. Understanding dialectical materialism but not history is like a mechanic buying all their tools but loudly and boastfully refusing to ever work on a car for fear of getting their hands dirty. It is pointless, a waste of time, resources and energy. If anyone in the western "left" had genuine conviction in their beliefs, even a cursory reading of actual history would dissuade them of this cancerous strategy of "sit and do nothing." It takes only a basic understanding of history, analyzed through the lens of dialectical materialism, to understand why this strategy is doomed to fail.
This mindset of passivity is in error for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it ignores the class composition and material conditions of America. The ancient tomes into which the western "left", such as it is, pours all it's time and attention, were written over 100 years ago in countries with wildly different material conditions to America and the west in general. Russia and China, the origins of most of the theory that the western "left" hyper focuses on, were still struggling to escape from the yoke of feudalism and suffering from deep, existential crises, both internal and external. Even then, the revolutionary movements only gained serious traction when the old order was either seriously diminished or outright destroyed by brutal foreign invaders. In the case of Russia, this was caused by the first world war, and in China, a series of western interventions, culminating in complete anarchy and a genocidal invasion from the Japanese imperialists. This means that the majority of the people were ruthlessly oppressed, both by their own government and by external forces. This gave the people a common cause and a rallying cry, which allowed the Communists (through hard work and lots of bloody struggle) to gain mass popular support.
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No.157074
I agree with the critique of the current American left.
The critique of "adventurism" is incredibly stupid, in part because the left in the US today categorically refuses to organize proactively for any kind of large scale action. So let's say that someone like [whoever shot Brian Thompson] wasn't doing an effective thing, was acting chaotically, wouldn't accomplish much - ok, well all you have to do is scale it up and that changes immediately. All you have to do is give individuals called to action by the horror of capitalist crimes a reason to wait, something to build where they will be able to take decisive action more effectively, and they gladly will. Isolated acts of violence to retaliate against the unchecked violence of the parasitic rich are inevitable when there is a refusal to take the initiative to harness the violent discontent of American workers into a movement which is not afraid to use violent means.
The fact of the matter is that paranoia and cowardice are so rife that I can't even write this without thinking to myself "oh, what if someone calls me a fed?" - I genuinely think at this point that the "fed" meme has been deliberately planted to increase the chilling effect of actual fed entrapment schemes without actually doing more work. It's a very simple psyop to derail and to stoke fear and paranoia even where nothing is risked and to reduce the willingness of people to exercise their own rights, rights whose realization is an inconvenience to the powers that be. For someone like me who fears very little, this does not move me to pretend that I have done anything incriminating and to cower away from speech, but for people who are more comfortable maybe that's not the case. It's difficult to say if Americans are genuinely so stupid and cowardly and complacent or if I simply have had that idea put in my head by… bad faith actors on the internet engaged in that very psyop. My suspicion is that it's a little bit of both, but it's also obvious that not everyone is such a worthless do-nothing piece of shit because guys like [whoever shot Brian Thompson] do indeed exist and are obviously as unserved by this atomization and paranoia and insincerity as I am.
The fact is that America is fucking full of people who are completely disgusted with the way things are. Not only is the left not taking the fullest advantage of this, those people are actively and visibly being psyopped into the right through well-funded astroturf campaigns designed to appeal to a real sense of unease but obfuscate the biggest causes. You don't need absolutely everyone to have a great grip of theory! It's totally unnecessary. Is the US military full of people with a perfect understanding of how capitalism works in theory? Of course not!
The left could have great resources provided it was willing to use what is already available, but far too often it waffles around. The actual American left is almost as bad as what the DNC pretends to be. While the DNC's helplessness is quite obviously a cynical act, the behavior of American socialists seems to be influenced by a genuine cowardice. I don't begrudge any of the outreach or protest or any of that, even though, by this point, it almost does bother me. Like for all of this stuff the left does, why in the fuck can't they organize a general strike after all this time? Why in the fuck are there all these lone wolf one-offs and so few organized working class decisive actions?
I'm sorry, but if one guy like [whoever killed Brian Thompson] can do it, a thousand people can do far, far more and better. So why the fuck don't they?
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No.157075
>>157074>I'm sorry, but if one guy like [whoever killed Brian Thompson] can do it, a thousand people can do far, far more and better. So why the fuck don't they?no one really cares about politics if they don't have skin in the game as someone either directly and tangibly (not just vaguely and economically) affected by policy or someone directly involved in the political game for their own ambitions. it's no secret that to the rest of them politics and held beliefs are more like posturing or a social rite, a thing that's expected of them if they wanna soykaf and fuarrrk in harmony with other soykafandfuckers. even in relatively successful revolutions masses hesitate the moment anything threatens their prolonged and direct chances to soykaf and fuarrrk continuously. their soykafting and their fuarrrking takes priority.
this has been known to us for millennia desu.
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No.157076
>Do anything
Exactly, there won't be a mass movement in the states until material conditions change. Somehow the system has bred a large number of people who will defend it unconsciously.
Btw I'm in Canada so it's even less likely for something to happen here than in the USA
>Do anything
Okay but concretely what do you want people to do? Do we have any actually good ideas?
Let's say you want to seize control of Amazon. Google says they have 110 distribution centers, like 10 campuses, plus I don't even know where to look up where they stash their delivery vehicles. And then you have to consider where their goods actually come from, probably from shipping ports.
So how many people do you need to seize control of one vertical slice of the economy, like that? A lot right? And once you do that the existing state will probably send tanks after you because you would be essentially considered an occupying force, taking over their economy. Now it's an all out war.
It's like OP said, we don't have a precedence of a western country revolutionizing. So how is it "supposed" to go down? That's what I think leftists should be working on.
Tbf before such a major plan could be created, it may be necessary to execute some smaller plans first, to formulate some kind of theory. You can read all the existing theory you want but if we don't act we cannot refine it and extend it for our specific conditions.
And so my argument circles back to what is it that you want to do, specifically?
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No.157077
>>157076>>157074>Like for all of this stuff the left does, why in the fuck can't they organize a general strike after all this time? Why in the fuck are there all these lone wolf one-offs and so few organized working class decisive actions?Okay I missed that you were talking about a general strike, that's actually a reasonable thing for the left to try and do, and it's reasonable to ask why they haven't made any progress.
Does the left actually talk to workers? Do they try to facilitate unionization? If there was a larger percentage of unionization, the unions could coordinate a larger strike action.
Because people still need to live, there still needs to be an operational economy (a more basic one) during a sustained strike, which means participation across multiple industries right? I don't see a way to that without mass union participation.