seems like we only have ~10 years to deal with climate change. also seems like joe biden is gonna get the nom. What the fuck do we do in these next few years given that the dems are not remotely interested in dealing with climate change in any real way?
I was listening to an old Chapo the other day, and it was the one with Adam Curtis. And he was talking about how Jihadists pivoted to doing lone wolf attacks and stochastic terrorism, because in the age of US mass surveillance, any real organizing or cadre would be stamped out by a fucking drone. White supremacists started doing this too.
If the left is serious about what to do in the current moment, it will learn from our enemies. There’s plenty of simple, easy things to be done that cannot be sabotaged by the Feds. They can’t track individuals that don’t make their plans known. No one guards those pipelines, or power grid hubs, or transportation nexuses.
Can’t say anything more than that.
If that scares you, then you have to realize that mass organizing is impossible until either A, conditions get significantly fucking worse (like lack of food and water worse), or B, the state apparatus develops some kind of blind spot that allows organizing right under its nose (which seems impossible rn.)
If the left doesn’t do this, it will remain an impotent, pointless online nuisance.
If you really know how bad things are, you know what has to be done. The difference between us and our enemies is that we’re crippled by moral indecision and the desire to actually have a better life.
Some deep id part of our brains has internalized the idea that there’s still a possibility that things will get better, so it’s not worth risking ourselves to do anything about it.
But if you really believe there’s no electoral solution, and you’re serious about alternate power structures, there hasn’t been a successful mass movement that didn’t follow this decentralized, amorphous structure for about 40 years now. The State got too good at crushing them.
Someone is gonna be cope and call this “adventurism” or something. But dig through the history, prove me wrong. Meaningful organizing isn’t possible in the current context. Maybe, hopefully, it will be soon. But I’ve yet to see it.
If you see the timeline we have left, I don’t see any other solution.
Yeah, stochastic cells that do straight up sabotage and/or kidnappings and/or assassinations are the only thing I can think of that may scare people into making changes in Minecraft
I don’t want to sound like too much of an asshole here, but can anyone give me any examples of this “propaganda of the deed” kinda thing working? Perhaps there are a few occasions where you’d get one government representative over another, but has it ever REALLY pushed the needle in a way that mattered?
John Brown, for one. And there’s plenty of right wing success, eg Gladio.
We’re building an entirely new future here. One that isn’t compatible with current industrial outputs. No one has ever attempted to do what needs to be done.
It could very possibly eat shit and fail. There basically isn’t any other outcome, actually. But this is where the system is vulnerable, and it’s what people are actually capable of without being smashed down by the state.
In the absence of any alternative, it doesn’t matter how unlikely it is do anything. We’re running out of time.
okay, sure, the right wing terrorism succeeds because terrorism breeds fear, and that fear helps the right consolidate power among a scared populace.
And John Brown simply accelerated a process that was clearly already happening. Most historians agree that without Brown, the same civil war probably just would have taken another 5 years or so to start. And sure you could say that perhaps doing isolated left-wing terrorism could accelerate a process that’s already happening, but I don’t see that acceleration happening in the direction we’d hope.
I’m asking specifically about left-wing terrorism ever working. And the simple answer is that it has never worked in any way that mattered. There used to be a lot more leftists in the 20th century that advocated for the propaganda of the deed, but it has fallen out of favor not because of weak knees, but because it’s never shown to be effective.
The goal of these right wing losers was idealistic, bird brained nonsense. Bringing back the “caliphate,” starting a “race war.”
If you have a real concrete goal, say, shutting down shipping for two weeks. That is trivial to accomplish even for most bumbling idiots.
Don’t take my word for it, US Security experts have complained about this for decades! You could shut down communications in a major US city just by putting on a hard hat and a fluorescent vest and messing around with a couple of boxes guarded only by a fucking padlock. You don’t really even need to know what you’re doing.
The system assumes compliance. It is not prepared for any real sabotage attempts. It’s just that, thus far, those attempts have mainly been right wing psychopaths engaging in mass murder of civilians. Which they don’t care about, because it’s not a threat.
There really is no other way to answer this question other than to build a revolutionary movement outside of bourgeois structures. There are many formations of this that are in the early stages and need support and membership. I know it gets tiring being told to organize and agitate, and there are days/weeks in which I feel entirely hypocritical saying that, but we can’t afford to keep waiting for elections to change the conditions, the system is clearly on its decline towards another large scale recession/depression. We need to be out there telling people exactly why we’re in this hellish situation and showing them that we need to restructure from the ground up, and that its worth risking many of the comforts we in the imperial core enjoy.
It’s incredibly hard to see such large-scale problems held up by immense power structures and forces of violence, and then to be told the only thing we can do is go out in our community, build relations, and perform mutual aid. As an ML, I believe that we need to build a Party to be able to maintain/protect revolutionary energy, but the on-the-ground implementation at the moment is all similar regardless of your tendancy.
I’m sorry but imagine thinking that even if Bernie had won anything remotely resembling his vision for a green new deal would’ve made it through congress. I’m not trying to be cynical, but we need to recognize the reality we live in and act accordingly.
The most Bernie could’ve realistically done on his own as president is ban new fossil fuel projects on american soil, all this would do is increase the price of oil and would result in more of these sorts of projects happening in Canada instead of the US. From a sort of real politik view, the only way to meaningfully address climate change is to make it so that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.
Now, how can leftists make renewables cheaper in comparison, they can do forms of direct action that do make the price of oil go up. Things like pipeline protests are far from useless actions. It’s time to ramp up on that sort of thing.
Whoever can actually answer that gets to be the next Bernie. It’s the ultimate question for the US “left”.
The road to fascism will be paved in the next 4 years and setting the stages for a future civil war and potential balkanization.
I posted this thread last week with my predictions of a Biden presidency - https://hexbear.net/post/34180
Bear in mind - Dems will inherit the worst economic conditions since the great depression and they want to pass austerity budgets. The right wing backlash to this is going to be worse than anything we’ve ever seen before. We’re going to have a new reactionary right wing movement and they will be far more fascistic than anything Trump could’ve ever done. It will be a direct result to Biden’s incompetence and Dems doing fuck all about the wealth inequality.
Richard Spencer endorsed Biden and said that his movement could benefit from him more than Trump. The alt right wasn’t really helped by Trump’s 2016 victory cause it pushed them to the forefront and into the spotlight before they were prepared. They would’ve been better off with another useless neo-liberal president like Hillary, where they could sit back for 4 years and keep building their base and pushing propaganda. Biden is going to be a wet dream to them.
Any civil war in the US will be between nuclear armed factions of what is left of a broken US military.
You should listen to Robert Evans’ ‘It Could Happen Here’ podcast and read up on civil wars like in Yugoslavia, Syria and Lebanon. It’s not all about nuclear weapons.
More likely a civil war will be guerrilla fighting between a handful of different insurgent groups than different factions of the US military fighting each other. Of course given the military’s penchant for losing nukes and that we live in hell, i wouldn’t be surprised if some of the militias end up with them lol
