it appears I’ve opened the floodgates
First of all, thank you for actually engaging in a productive manner and not just calling everyone who disagrees with you an idiot, like in some of the other reactions I’ve got here.
I don’t live in the US, so for my personal engagement with politics it’s irrelevant, but it saddens me to see that comrades give up on 3 quarters of their population. That’s defeatism in your own country, and it weakens the support you can give to revolutionaries in other nations.
Anti-imperialism is the single most important effort of the world today because anti-imperialist successes have genuinely resulted in the emancipation of countries from imperial rule.
This is true if you’re in the third world but if you’re in the US and you only limit yourself to solidarity with different peoples, you won’t achieve anything. If you want to engage in a large scale struggle you’ll need to talk about the issues close to home to the proletariat that you’re organising. Why are they living in poverty? Why do their lives suck? And then organise on the basis of their suffering. You have to start from their lived experience (sorry if that phrase sounds liberal), that’s what all succesfull revolutionaries always have done.
My own party always starts with doing surveys in the working class neighbourhoods about what people think is the most important issue that affects them. Before we did that, we only had a couple of hundrerds of members and we were irrelevant in every sense of the word. Since we switched in our approach we steadily growed and now we’re a major political player.
I think that optimism is nice but ultimately unrealistic. We’ve seen several hundreds years so far of failure to achieve a revolution within the core, not a single one has succeeded. Not just the USA, all of them across Europe, Canada, Aus etc. This isn’t caused by a lack of effort and it’s not going to be resolved by simply trying all the same basic strategies (such as mass line) that have been tried.
I believe it is more realistic for communists to simply cripple the core in such a way that projects elsewhere in the world may flourish. Then the core can simply collapse as its power shrinks. It has demonstrated time and time again the ability to prevent the efforts of the left.
This is not a defeatist attitude, it is a “we should be focusing on a different strategy as the existing ones have proven uneffective” attitude.
Let’s accept the premisse: the imperial core has been too strong to allow a revolution. You’d still have to grapple with the fact that the relative power of the imperial core is shrinking in comparison with the rest of the world, which in turn would make it possibel again. (Accept if you’re talking about absolute power instead of relative, but then the amounts of places where it’s possible has been shrinking and there’s probably nowhere left.)
