elguwopismo [he/him]
every cis white male radical went through this phase
I plead the 5th
Motherfuckers needa read some Luxemburg and understand that you don’t get to just call out “alright mass strike time baby, come on working class people join us”.
The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
- Sophie Scholl
It’s Malthusian shit, early Christian Political Economy. It’s never really gone away. I just happened to be reading this right before I hopped on right now:
But as Thomas Malthus and other Christian economists proved, such beauty truly was in the eye of the beholder. Scarcity, evil, and suffering played positive roles in the evangelical theodicy of capitalism. To many of the evangelical economists, our expulsion from the Garden of Eden was not a punishment, but an opportunity. In the evangelical gospel of scarcity, privation was excellent news: the lashes of adversity and competition would compel us into moral and material improvement. Malthus and Nassau Senior led the way among evangelical economists in redefining evil as a necessary good. In his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus—an instructor at Haileybury College, the training school for administrators of the East India Company, as well as an Anglican pastor—asserted that want, conflict, and other agonies were parts of a godly metaphysical and moral architecture. Human life, he asserted, is “a state of trial and school of virtue preparatory to a superior state of happiness.” Departing from the mainstream of Christian theology since Augustine, Malthus argued that moral evils and natural calamities were “absolutely necessary to the production of moral excellence … instruments employed by the Deity” to spur industriousness and ingenuity. Malthus’s insistence on the goodness of disaster rested on a toilsome, penurious sacramentality, an ontology of dearth and meanness designed by an omnipotent but skinflint deity. Life is “the mighty process of God,” he insisted, “a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit.” “The finger of God is, indeed, visible in every blade of grass that we see,” and among the “animating touches of the Divinity” is the salutary character of evil. “Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.” (If it failed to spur industry, then, Malthus wrote in the 1826 edition, “we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality”—i.e., the death of the poor.) Senior—first professor of political economy at Oxford, and a protégé of Whately’s—told students in 1830 that God and nature “decreed that the road to good shall be through evil—that no improvement shall take place in which the general advantage shall not be accompanied by partial suffering.” So rather than look to reform or revolution to end their miserable condition, evangelicals such as Cobden advised workers that they should abide by “the principle of competition which God has set up in this wicked world as the silent arbiter of our fate.”9 The God of Love consigned the poor and dispossessed to a lifelong Calvary road.
I’ve honestly found everyone I’ve talked to in person about it to be very receptive of my takes. Like I know a few hopeless upper middle class sucdems who are swallowing the propaganda hook line and sinker, but idk I do think we tend to put a lot of weight on the astroturfing we see and the opinions of petite bourgeois. Working class people I interact with have mostly been “I don’t know shit about China” and generally listen when I talk about all the sources and stuff I’ve read about it. Maybe that’s a unique experience, dunno, but it’s been mine. However still it’s not like there’s hordes of people dedicated to combating the propaganda, so we’ll see.
It’s definitely evidence that the supremacy of the IMF and US imperial control is waning.
Folks, the bourgeoisie, they’re no good. Everyone is saying it. All these workers, very handsome workers come up to me and say, Comrade Trump there is a specter haunting Europe, and you know what, they’re right. These bourgeoisie are very nasty people very very rude and very unfair to the workers. They are stealing our surplus value and no one is doing anything about it. The proletariat comes up to me everyday and says, Comrade Trump will you lead the revolution? And I gotta turn to them and say, look the instruments of capitalism will be used to bring about its destruction believe me you gotta trust me on this one. The means of production, Obama never wanted to seize them. Well guess what? I’m seizing them. Landlords? They’re done for folks. Everyone told me they said, Comrade Trump you won’t be the vanguard of the revolution and they would laugh, the media laughed the Democrats laughed, guess who’s laughing now?
This one?
Dunno if you’re being ironic, but the whole point of the works I reference (The Mass Strike and Theory & Practice) is that the Mass Strike can’t be viewed as a singular isolated event sparked by a singular call to strike. That level of solidarity must be forged through smaller strikes and extended class struggle. The working class as a whole ain’t going to just read a couple well worded polemics and collectively risk their jobs. No it needs to be shown how solidarity and strikes and resistance helps them and those around them. Then as more and more people get engaged, they can see (with the help of and united struggle with educated, dedicated comrades) how their economic interests align with others and how political goals are necessary. Even then the Mass Strike doesn’t end up being a singular force with a singular goal; it has that big political goal, but constantly explodes in spontaneous regional outbursts over local issues. It is messy, chaotic, and it is historical. The 1905 Russian Revolution didn’t start in 1904, it started in the the mid-1890’s with the first smatterings of urban proletarian acts of resistance and solidarity - the socialist forces, which were not very strong beforehand, coming to prominence (after being primarily intellectuals for decades) over the next decade+ through escalating tensions, REPEATED struggles and attempts at spreading the Socialist message through the proles (and it was basically the same with a different timeline for SRs and the Peasants).
So no I don’t just want to read books. People can call for a general strike all they want, but don’t expect it to amount to anything other than weak agitation. Praxis and local struggles, like always, are the fucking key
It constantly amazes me how much of history has been driven by and how much wealth has been concentrated in the hands of absolute fucking manchildren.