ITT:
Everyone thinking that the only two options are being quiet or being violent.
Strikes are currently making those in power very uncomfortable, and are resulting in genuine progress for workers.
In my area, people camping out in thousand year old trees has protected them time and again from being illegally logged.
Black Lives Matter protests were loud and made the powerful uncomfortable, and despite media narratives it wasn’t “violent protesters” that made the powerful uncomfortable.
It is true that any form of protest that is loud and inconveniencing enough to actually be productive will be met with state violence.
It’s also true that some working for progress do use violence. But make no mistake, it’s not guns that made those in power uncomfortable when it came to Malcom X and the Black Panthers.
The most radical and intimidating (to those in power) things the Black Panthers did were to give free food to schoolchildren, and free healthcare at their People’s Free Medical Clinics.
Building community and mutual aid is subversive.
Building community and mutual aid makes those in power uncomfortable.
Building community and mutual aid is subversive.
This. Both the government and the major corporations depend on being able to extract wealth from real people getting what they need. If we build dual power structures, help one another out and cut the owner class out of the transaction entirely, we weaken them. Growing food in your garden is revolutionary. Clothing swaps are revolutionary. Cutting the old lady next door’s lawn, then eating the soup she made is an act that strikes at the fundamental underpinnings of the power structure set up by those who think that they should be entitled to our labor because they’ve been arbitrarily designated as the “owners” of things. We can and should remove them from the equation entirely.
Canada’s treatment of first nations is just as bad as the U.S.'s, and we won’t win every time; But neither will the fascists.
People are waking up to the fact that many governments we were raised to trust are committing active genocide, but the protests that will win will not be spontaneous. They never truly are.
The people that are organizing and building community now learned (usually quite directly) from those that made real change decades ago.
The constant cries of “general strike!” (almost exclusively from white people who refuse to learn from those that have done the work) always fail.
They fail because it’s not about just setting a date and announcing it; It’s about having the community, infrastructure, expertise, and experience already in place to care for the people that simply would otherwise starve if the communities of care weren’t in place.
The trust from very reasonably scared people that they will be cared for rather than abandoned.
Successful movements always come from years to decades of building a foundation.
Every protest is an opportunity to build that community, even if individual actions “fail”.
And yes, people will die on the path to real change. But more will die if we simply remain complacent.
I know you weren’t suggesting to give up, and I assume you also weren’t suggesting perpetrating violence to achieve progress.
Even though you weren’t suggesting either, I think it’s worth laying out the bigger picture explicitly.
Also, for anyone who read this far, I highly recommend reading any of Mariama Kaba’s books, https://mariamekaba.com/ https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you .
Why wasn’t I taught about the free food and medical care part of what they did?
You were quietly taught that armed black people were scary. That’s what they wanted you to remember, not what they armed themselves for.
Building community and mutual aid makes those in power uncomfortable.
Small mutual aid for local communities grow out into large social aid organizations that have political power. Politicians can make them redundant by unemployment, healthcare and pensions, or try to nip them in the bud.
One of the most subversive things you can do IMO is move your life and wealth to China
or get hired for a gubment job and slack off/sell seekrits
if you can’t do those two, then comes the 5 finger discount and IRL minecraft
IRL socialist networks need to be secretive and disguised as something else. Maybe even “community watch” or something
Anytime I hear people say dumb shit like this I just start listing all the times anti-abortion activists either successfully murdered or attempted to murder their political opponents in the name of the pro life movement. A hit list of judges, physicians, nuns, retired old ladies that like to knit, they absolutely didn’t give a single fuck about any of this struggle session bullshit wreckers like to trot out to sabotage effective resistance
Then I end with the date Roe got overturned, but they still somehow cannot connect the dots and want to talk about registering new voters or some fucking bullshit
My take home message is it turns out that when white people actually want something they magically know what effective forms of protest actually look like (???!)
start listing all the times anti-abortion activists either successfully murdered or attempted to murder their political opponents in the name of the pro life movement. A hit list of judges, physicians, nuns, retired old ladies that like to knit
The problem is that this form of violence is implicitly endorsed by the state and by a majority of the ruling class. They don’t see it as competition to their monopoly on violence.
However, if leftist groups were to emulate this level of violence it would be condemned by every media outlet for weeks. Liberal politicians would rush to condemn the violence and lay the groundwork to justify an even more violent retaliation.
I’m not saying that violence is never the answer, but if you are not on the side that has a monopoly on violence then you have to be much more aware of how your actions may validate the state’s ability to do violence upon yourself and your cause.
Anytime I hear people say dumb shit … out to sabotage effective resistance
Great points here
Then I end … some fucking bullshit
Still going strong
white people bad
Audible disgust
First things first: white people bad! If you have questions I’ll try to answer em, but the settlers in a settler colonial state are unequivocally bad.
With that out of the way, the person you’re replying to is assuming you are already aware and recognize the ways that protest and direct action are coded and racialised in media. Pictures of white people are used with captions about a peaceful protest, pictures of black and brown people are used with captions about them “turning violent” and looting.
The narrative that creates is one where white people are nonviolent and it’s the black and brown people who are associated with direct action.
The point the person you’re replying to is making by saying
turns out that when white people actually want something they magically know what effective forms of protest actually look like
Is that the media narrative about white forms of protest being nonviolent is a lie.
Ah, I see the point. I didn’t realize it was a commentary on how media portrays these issues.
I struggle with the idea that all white people in the U.S. are somehow bad.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease
Reasonableness is for the status quo.
The entirety of history also shows that a whole lot of people need to be ready to die for the cause for social change to happen.
So, still feeling up for it?
That is the question:
live in an unjust and amoral society
or die trying to make a righteous one.
The stoics, at least Seneca, opted for the former.
He really wasn’t given much of a choice. He just chose his stance on the one option he had.
Seneca was one of the wealthiest Romans of his time.
He more than 99% of the Empire had a choice. He happened to be rich and choose status quo. Who ever would have guessed that ?
or die trying to make a righteous one.
. . . and realize that your new, righteous society will quickly collapse into corruption and amorality because a society is filled with people.
Far more people than you seem to think so are feeling up to it, risk of bodily harm nonwithstanding. That same history shows that whole lots of people do and have gotten that fed up.
The current challenge imo is the hyperfocused and extremely well funded tools to disorganize and fracture populaces globally.
They are so abstract, so psychologically targeted and so pervasive that they enable the rise of fascism again even though many of the players are frankly cartoonishly inept (more so than in the past; fascism is cunning and bullish, but seldom clever) to the point that the banality of evil of yesterday is nearly preferable to the bumbling cruelty of today.
Yes, still feeling up to it, but while the precipice nears, there’s still both time to turn the car around and get ready to violently brake. We’re just careful drivers until there’s a need to maneuver.
When doing nothing becomes so intolerable and the potential gain is high enough to make the risk of death is worth taking then the answer becomes “yes”. That’s why people don’t take extreme actions easily.
Putting it another way, if enough people are willing to take big risks, then the status quo must be pretty damned awful in their view.
If you live inside the heart of the West, your life is still good enough—yes, even those struggling and clinging on the edges of poverty—and the bread and circuses still mostly work as distractions. But the world isn’t only the West. There are plenty in the other 6/7 of humanity who are willing to die for the hope of change. Life was hard before, but having endured impacts of a global pandemic, wars, and starvation, people are getting pushed to their limit. We are seeing many sparks of revolution starting to light on the dark prairie.
How many of them are fighting for the “right” reasons? How many of them will end up in a better place? Nobody knows. But if even one or two turn into full-on fires, things will certainly get shaken up. And thereafter, unlike the Arab Spring days, there are Global South countries arising that are strong and wealthy enough to lend a hand, whose national interests lie toward helping regions to transition toward stability after any social blowups.
At some point, change will come upon us, and we won’t have any say in how peaceful or violent it will be.
a whole lot of people need to be ready to die for the cause for social change to happen.
For the change to not happen, a whole lot of people need to be ready to keep dying from the status quo. It’s incredible that some people still think a war isn’t being waged when we don’t resist the oppression and exploitation. Here you are implying those who are ready to fight for themselves—and for you!—are your enemies, when your real enemies know the lesson you refuse to learn:
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
—Warren Buffett
So, still feeling like leaving us all to continue being slowly murdered as you sit and do nothing?
The question is, do you think more will die from the status quo or from a revolution?
Nope. That’s really not the question, in fact. What a shitty, boring, “utilitarian” view of the struggle for liberation. Why are you even in this community, liberal?