The protests changed me in a lot of ways. One way was, I was by no means a class reductionist before. But the protests really woke me up to the real struggles of oppressed communities in the US and importantly, the revolutionary potential in those communities. I remember listening to Rev Left in my car and had to pull over for a minute to absorb it when Breht said something to the effect of “what did white socialists in America ever give us?! Bernie Sanders!? Fuck that! The real revolutionary potential is with oppressed communities.”
Some major things for me were:
-The weird left-com/ Third Worldist feelings I had were done away with. I intuitively came to understood the need for a vanguard party, even though I didn’t know what that even meant. I began reading ML theory around this time.
-It was the first time I saw opportunism and wreckers really start fucking shit up “within the walls” of leftist orgs and movements. “Leftists” going after bail fund organisers for being “tankies.” Org leaders tailing reformists and quickly pivoting the momentum to a Biden campaign, etc. This lead to me reading more about opportunism, left sectarianism, and put me more onto ML theory.
Basically, the protests turned me into a tankie.
Damn you have a real way with words. ML is cringe and not based, I am now Third World
We have seen nothing successfull on a large scale of numbers and time communism anarchism wise in the US in general. Still the most successfull and threatening to teh status quo organization in the modern american left were the Black Panthers with a membership of barely 10k at their peak. So i guess moving towards that organizational stucture and theory is moving to the right direction for the OP
