this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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If you think we'll ever get universal healthcare without prying the capitalist's claws out of their well bribed government first, you haven't been paying attention.
Their bribe checks > any quaint peaceful protest that can be mustered.
All of that is true. But random CEO assassinations by lone wolves will only get us an expanded police state.
Violence will be unavoidable, but not just any old violence will do.
If they escalate, so do those they oppress.
The alternative is... this.
Oligarch's AI deciding if your children are worth healing or if they've already been exploited too much to make it worth it to them.
The violence is happening now. I reject the notion that we should continue to just take it because the slaughter is quiet and according to plan.
This is quiet, not peace. Have you been to our tent cities? Do those victims of our economy look like they're at peace?
If you look at my posting history, you’d see that you’re preaching to the choir.
But that doesn’t change the fact that adventurism isn’t going to get the goods. It’s a symptom of how bad things have gotten, but it’s not a solution. You can’t overthrow the largest global imperial hegemon in history that way. We haven’t even managed to pause a genocide in our name, never mind house, feed, and care for everyone.
Did you see who just won the popular vote? Many of these folks are as likely to cheer on the assassination of a socialist or trans person or an immigrant as a CEO. There isn’t a mass of class conscious proletarians organized for revolution right now. There is virtually no organized labor right now.
An alternative is the same as it’s always been, and it’s the only one that’s proven successful so far: organize, educate, and agitate a mass labor movement, and develop a vanguard party that’s backed by that labor movement.
Im glad we agree on the problem, Im sorry we can't on the only possible solution.
You can't organize a mass labor movement or major party under the current power structure for one important reason, one of the reasons Unions have been all but defeated from their height, the owners simply have a bigger pulpit, the biggest pulpit, the for profit media pulpit. They also have the pulpits of almost all elected officials. They don't need to use this pulpit to win any argument, merely divide this new renewed labor movement over petty divisions as they've done repeatedly over the last 60 years.
They own the means of production, they own the means of state violence, and they own the bully pulpit. All that is left is direct action or acceptance of the futility of the situation until climate change induced collapse.
Because before that climate change induced collapse, they'll also soon have virtually unlimited bipedal robots they can use to fight their battles for them, which will also eliminate direct action, which will effectively make the only possible agency anyone can exercise suicide.
This is last call for even a slim hope. If it requires generational struggle, it's already over. This isn't ebbs and flows of history, our technology and greed enabling are very well set to put a period on that in our lifetimes.
I'm an ancomm and "direct action" without proper tactics and direction is pointless. The illegalist and egoist tendencies have been widely denounced by almost every other large tendency historically. Kropotkin himself denounced illegalism and egoism. These tendencies are more or less dead from a theory perspective beyond the turn of the 20th century. It's 4KidsEntertainment. America was literally the last gasp of these bullshit tendencies thanks to Benjamin Tucker. Egoism and illegalism have never actually gotten anything done, the strain of Anarchism in America that has delivered the goods is Wobblies anarcho-syndicalism which was literally based around organization.
Direct action requires organizing. The Bolsheviks combined legal with illegal work, and this was the key to successful revolution. Adventurism, like the Socialist Revolutionaries tried to use, never made a real difference in the end, while organizing did.
It is much easier to do so through labor organizing and millitancy than spreading random terror. We can laugh and jest about a brutal CEO getting his just desserts, but we must move beyond simple adventurism. The fact that everyone appears united on this topic is only further evidence that revolution is a real and popular option.