A sticker slapped in a NYC subway reads:
“One person with a pistol just shook the ruling class more than decades of peaceful organizing”
Individual, spontaneous acts alone are not sufficient either. This is adventurism, which is fun to celebrate but does not actually change the equation. The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing! Throughout all of history, there have been no successful changes in the status quo without a mass, organized movement. Read theory and get organized. If you need a place to start, I suggest my introductory Marxist reading list.
The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing!
This is true, but also extremely difficult, especially in an era of mass media induced paranoia and alienation. Mass militant organizing requires a large cohesive social class that has a center of gravity - a church house or a social club or a workhouse floor - that increasingly no longer exists.
Social media was supposed to be the new venue for mass mobilization, and we saw the beginnings of it in the early '00s. But media consolidation, saturation from automated marketing accounts, and counter-programming have largely washed it out.
Read theory and get organized.
One is significantly easier than the other.
That said… go look for local unions in your town or neighborhood. Look for chapters of the DSA or the PSL or other labor-friendly organizing groups. Go to your local PTA meetings and city council meetings when you can, and get to know the people who show up there regularly. Get out of the house and meet people where they are.
That’s all good advice. But its also hard, exhausting work. And its done in the face of enormous headwinds. Don’t mistake the failure of leftism as a simple failure of “human nature” or whatever. We’re in an entrenched system and attempting a Herculean feat to change it.
Revolution, rather than being easy or impossible, is simply and truthfully hard. I agree, and that’s why it is important to start building that and contribute to those who have already started.
If enough individuals do it, it will be collective.
I disagree that that would accomplish anything. Assassinations do not “transfer power” as the SRs once claimed, but create a void that is filled by the next in line, always bourgeois or bourgeois adjacent. What is required is revolution, but through organization, so that there can be dominance over this sphere entirely, and the working class wrest its Capital permanently and gradually.
Cool sticker on your cybertruck!
Cybertrain*
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism that made people support whatever the president wanted to do in the middle east.
Very large* act of violent terrorism.
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism
Its so easy for people to forget the decades of violent acts committed in and around the Saudi Peninsula, and fixate instead on a handful of retaliatory strikes against US interests. The Battle of Mogadeshu, which involved Black Hawk helicopters obliterating Somali mosques with hellfire missiles. The brutal occupation of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 2001 as a US-backed narco-state. The entire Iran-Iraq War, sponsored by US arms dealers and double-dealing diplomats, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Persian young people. The occupation of Saudi Arabia by a western-backed military dictatorship going back nearly a century. The violent overthrow of democracies from Indonesia to Egypt in pursuit of neoliberal international trade policy.
9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum any more than the Brian Thompson assassination or the aborted coup in South Korea. These have long historical tails that trace back to a geopolitical policy that’s racked up a staggering death toll.
To quote Mark Twain:
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
American problems require American solutions
I remember huge student protests for weeks on end. Then, over spring break when all the students were off elsewhere - the bombs began to drop.
This is why peaceful protest is legal, it accomplishes nothing.
So you’re saying that Gandhi accomplished nothing but leading the most significant and largest non-violent struggle in all of history? To each their own I suppose.
He just didn’t sit with placards, he refused to co-operate with the British establishment, and when millions followed him, they couldn’t just arrest them all. He got India independence through a non-violent struggle, the basis of which lied in subjugating the British trade and administration.
They could arrest Gandhi and Congress leaders all they wanted to, but the movement they inspired couldn’t be stopped.
This might just be the American train of thought, but you’re wrong here. When millions follow you, and refuse to cooperate, the ruling class will suffer, because they’re dependent on you for power. Checkmate.
Something often missed about Gandhi’s efforts was that it was still more about what he did do than what he didn’t (violence). He still used resistance and force, including illegal actions that he believed were just, and massively hurt Great Britain’s bottom line and sense of control.
The trick is to locate efforts that aim to accomplish that in modern US politics.
That’s an american matter and I couldn’t be bothered less.
I think it’s not really fair to compare 1940s India with current American politics.
It feels somewhat like saying “the Mongolian army took over half of Eurasia with mounted archers, Ukraine should just use those against Russia!”
It’s just not comparable, different cultures, different opponents, and wildly different technology. And this isn’t just the US, it is a worldwide class war. Organized resistance on that scale, especially when the ruling elite can monitor nearly 100% of all communication, just isn’t something that’s going to happen, even with a charismatic figurehead.
Not American. Ghandi’s mission was to give “untouchables” caste some human equality. Technically, women’s/lgbtq movements were peaceful. Unlike US/Israel first oligarchy, there is complete/absolute media loyalty for it, in a way that the British Empire is harder to defend as benevolent to Indians. The support for oligarchy’s wars and supremacy is unconditional. If we don’t give them everything we have then China, Russia and Iran will win, and you all nod along.
Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right.
~ M. Gandhi
A protest has to have teeth. If the teeth are economic, then that’s ok. If the protest is violence, then that can be ok. Martin Luther King was helped by the threat of violence of Malcom X.
Protests do nothing if they can be ignored. If they can be ignored, they WILL be ignored.
Then why do peaceful protestors get arrested and brutalised by cops all the time?
Target practice. Did you see the video where they shot the teenager standing still on a hill doing nothing? The shot him in the head with a rubber bullet, causing concussion and permanent damage. The officer high fives another officer right after.
The kid was literally just standing there doing nothing. A fucking child was used as target practice by adult civil servants.
Funsies.
Easy targets.
Thats not true. As much as I see the need for violent protest sometimes, peaceful protest can change things. See the fall of the berlin wall.
Yes, but also no. The GDR and the Soviet Union who supported it and supplied it were both almost bankrupt and economically broken. Infrastructure was falling apart because the state couldn’t afford to fix it.
The potests sure helped, but the government of the GDR was also in a state where it would accept the demands as a way out. The protests probably did accelerate the downfall a bit, but it would have happened either way.
Similar protests years before were leading nowhere.
Gandhi disagrees
(Unless he’s playing Civ)
One of the funniest programing bugs ever. Gandhi’s code was meant to be the least aggressive AI in the game, but if something made Ghandi become even less aggressive it could overflow backwards and set his aggressiveness to max. This creating a Gandhi that wanted to always be at war.
We want public healthcare. This act of violins highlights the anger we feel. It doesn’t bring us closer to a solution. But imagine the roles swapped. We continuously live in fear of getting sick and then going bankrupt and homeless because of it. But what about from the other side…imagine a wolf in a house eating his sheep dinner. Imagine that asshole dancing around and humping several wolfority mates every night having the time of it’s miserable life…and suddenly that wolf peaks at the window and has a sudden realization… Sudden because he suddenly opened the window. It realizes that there’s nothing but sheep outside, all looking at him thru the window. Goes up to the roof top and observes himself surrounded by million upon millions of sheep all looking directly at him. The wolf sees one fellow wolf nearby as the sheep trample him. The wolf listens to his friend’s bones crackling into mush. So just close the blinds and have another sheep from the fridge? Or maybe address the impending problem?
And the gun was 3d printed. They will not stop at making 3d printing illegal.
honestly if you can 3d print something you can make something almost as strong out of wood, it just takes more effort
one could also easily make a disposable mold for a low-melting-point metal alloy, those are much stronger than 3d prints and many can be melted on a normal stove
I think the problem is more that information on how to make guns is now easily available, rather than the specific usefulness of 3d printing as a manufacturing technique
Shinzo Abe was assassinated.with a doohickey made out of a wood board and metal conduit pipes wrapped up in electrical tape
It’s gonna suck to burn to death.
Peaceful protest is a spook
Peaceful protests are the opening argument.
We have a second amendment specifically to give the citizens teeth. The idea isn’t to overthrow the military, it’s to make enrollee potential threat.
The more people those in power piss off, the more danger they’ll be in. The way they’ve been treating us, they should all be terrified to step outside.
What’s that old JFK quote? Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable?
The state draws its legitimacy from the social contract. When people no longer feel like the social contract is beneficial to them or to society - ie as one might feel with a healthcare system that is 100+ years out of date and has received one (1) bandaid for normal folk in the past 50 years - the state can no longer expect individuals to uphold their end of the social contract (adherence to laws, norms, and peaceable conduct).
This doesn’t mean “the overthrow of the government is coming tomorrow”, but rather means that the social contract is beginning to fray, and a failure of those in power to recognize and accede to that fact (by making major concessions) will result in this sort of incident continually intensifying until… well, until the social contract is gone to a large swathe of people, and then at that point, the overthrow of the government will be imminent, for better or worse.
All interactions between state and citizen are implicitly negotiated. Negotiations require leverage. Violence has always been a form of leverage. But assassinations are far more powerful leverage than riots.
This last election made me into an anarchist for now. I do not believe there is any way to salvage this system we have in any meaningful way. I’m not a violent person so I can’t see myself doing anything like Luigi, but Democrats aren’t going to save anyone and are just one part of the problem.
I think Donald could be the death blow to our country as more and more of our social contract is upended, especially with talks of killing the ACA and other popular programs.
I don’t think John F Kennedy said that.
Receipts! 🧾
Even if you want a peaceful protest, the state security apparatus will turn into a riot when they need to discredit the protester, ie Floyd Protests is recent example.
Then older people start pearl clutching over “black youth” “looting” a corporate location! The horror!
Liberals will bring some generic race arguments etc
Now we got a proper circle jerk and discussion about police brutality is third order of operation.
its afraid.jpeg because we have not seen such class unity in modern history.
Good.
Just want to plug the movie and book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Also the book Rattling the Cages.
Is true.
That is why so soooo many headlines everywhere are preaching how this should have been done through voting & protests or whatever.
Iirc majority of Murikans want public healthcare for at least two decades now, yet nothing has changed (expect living generations).
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
But taxes!!!
Said anyone who doesn’t know that minus $600/month that only covers the basics plus $300? in taxes that covers a lot more is a net savings.
Lol, “voting”.
Peaceful protest, electoralism, those are spooks. If you want to stop something, try physical destruction.
Not opposing your comment at all, more of a rare occurrence fun fact: Even an actual (ie financially or personality effective) show of power is enough sometimes.
Eg unions in USA haven’t killed any tycoons for the longest time. But they do get a loaf of bread per week more in wages when they stop working for a few days.
Not all revolutions need to be as complete as the French or Russian (tho that works, but also costs a few years of instability & political power struggles), 10% of the elite de-elited (eg losing their wealth bcs of direct demos actions) would send a big message in USAs case.
Even just for something as mundane as protected bike lanes, I’ve found through personal experience that just a couple instances of direct action against motorists who tried to park in them was infinitely more effective than years of begging peacefully for barriers.
Lol, yes, exactly.
Protests mean nothing if it doesn’t change how people vote.
I mean personally I do vote every election I can, but people did change how they voted after protests were ignored. The pro-Palestinian protesters and the uncommitted movement during this 2024 election had a basic demand they wanted met, that was ignored by the Harris campaign and some number of them didn’t vote because of it. And yet a lot of people blamed the protesters for Harris’s loss (of Michigan at least), even though that is literally changing your vote because a protest didn’t get her to change her position.
And that’s also skipping over however many people didn’t show up because of other positions she changed, like healthcare, fracking, the border, etc. And I do get it, I know Trump will be so much worse, and like I said I did vote, straight Democrat down ballot like I always do. But if the point of a protest is meant to show that a group of people is unhappy and you’re losing their support, having that group turn around and vote for you anyway means that you can just ignore protests.
And again, I know I’ll probably need to keep saying this, I voted for Harris. But the fact that the lesson a lot of the DNC is seemingly taking from this is that they should go more centrist just boggles my mind, because the point of people not showing up to vote for her after they protested and were ignored is literally that going more centrist and ignoring your base will lose democrats elections.
It’s no surprise though, the DNC receives a ton of corporate donations so why would they seriously support policy that hurts those donors income. Like Josh Shapiro condemning the killer and those who supported them, and thanking the police who caught him in PA isn’t surprising when he received $10,000 dollars from UHG in 2023 (the second most of any candidate). This is what people mean when they say voting is pointless, even if you somehow voted in a senate of 100% democrats, a house of 100% democrats, and Bernie Sanders as the president, they wouldn’t support a proposal for something like single payer healthcare because most of the other democrats in the house and senate get money to not support major reforms like that.
You didn’t like blood so you helped elect the river? I at least hope most people at those protests weren’t as stupid as you imply. The whole point was to get the institutions being protested to divest from Israel.
Honestly, at this point I’m not convinced that Trump will be significantly worse for Palestine than Harris would have been. Neither one is going to stop sending weapons, and the stuff Trump supports are so extreme that Israel wouldn’t want to do them anyway, like nuking Gaza. Either way in 4 years I can’t see the US being the reason anything changes there.
I’m also talking about specifically the uncommitted movement and protests at the DNC, which were meant to get Biden and then Harris to support an arms embargo. The consequence promised by those protests was losing voters, so if that didn’t happen it would mean that the Democrats could see these as empty threats and safely ignore them.
There are only so many times you can say “vote for me because the other candidate is so much worse” before people get tired of voting against their interests just to prevent someone else who is also against their interests just more so. Either way you’re voting for something you don’t support, and eventually people will give up. Blaming voters for a candidate losing and not the candidate for abandoning voters doesn’t make sense. It’s not the voters job to represent a candidate, it’s supposed to be the candidates job to represent their voters.
Yeah thats true, real change is going to come from the house and senate, not the president.
Who are you supposed to vote for when both parties drift right indefinitely?
I see it differently; despite campaigning to attract cowboys Kamalla still wanted to cancel student debt, tax the rich, and legalize weed.
The old Democrats are dieing of old age, the young ones want Green New Deal.
If you elect 60 democrats you might not get single payer because only one of them has to object, but if you elect 60 Republicans you will get pure privatized healthcare and millions of people will die stupid unnecesary deaths because of it.
So you see people don’t feel represented when neither option gets them what they want? FPTP-voting is the problem.
One party specifically opposes any progressive election reforms. We’d all be so much better off right now if H.R. 1 For The People had passed, but it got the Mitch “The Reaper” treatment.
Voting means nothing if no candidates represents how 75+% of the nation feels on the biggest issues.
It feels to me that all the issues of concern are represented on the ballot. People are just too stupid to figure out which door tells only lies.
Not in USAs case.
On every big economically significant issue of the last 40 years both parties have been on absolutely the same page, none of the candidates would make different choices (at least for both houses and presidents, not sure about state levels, Im not from over there).
Even policies that one party publicly “opposed” were then carried on by the same party when it came in power (eg Bill Clinton).So both parties would and have brought constant deregulation (financial markets especially), wars & anything war industry related, healthcare, taxation of profit, etc.
They bicker by design on issues that are huge for the non-elite (but meaningless to the elite as they can circumvent such issues), like lgbtq+ and reproductive rights.
This is simply a lie
Health care is a prime example of how badly youre lying.
59 Democrats voted for Single Payer, 0 Republicans, it failed
60 Democrats voted to expand medicaid and protect preexisting conditions, 0 republicans, it passed
The USA then elected more Republicans. Republicans used that majority to cut taxes for the rich, raise taxes on everyone else, a plan that would have expired in 2026 if the USA didn’t just elect more republicans AGAIN.
Seems pretty fucking diverse, mate.
What’s funny is the majority of the country supported the war, at the time. Less than a quarter of polled citizens were against the war. (That’s me! I was there!)
When polled now, the majority of the country claims they were against it at the time.
Echoes of the Civil Rights era, where at its peak, it was deeply unpopular, but the Boomers spent the last 50 years re-writing their own history to pretend they were always on the right side of history… only for Trump to make them feel safe in being racist again.
“we can shoot them?”
“yeah apparently you can just shoot them”
I called for a massive peaceful protest that, occasionally, takes a shot.
There’s two episodes in the podcast Cool People who did Cool Things that talks about basically that in regards to the violent wing of the nonviolent civil rights movement. You need both.
A massive peaceful march from home to home of owner-class individuals. With a little occasional shots, as a treat?
Heavily armed and peaceful
Ftfy
Yes.
Otherwise the unarmed get shot by the police.
Yeah, the point of a peaceful protest is meant as a neutral option, just to show that a large group exists who has some demand, and if the demand is not met it will escalate, either via disruption to the economy with strikes or disruption to society with violence. It shouldn’t be blamed on protesters if it ends up escalating that way, because the protest was meant as the warning. Most people wouldn’t blame a country that has repeatedly warned a neighbor to stop annexing it’s land for fighting a war with them. If the country never went farther than warnings then they would all be empty threats. Somehow protests are thought of differently though, and if one turns violent it’s blamed on the protesters and not the government for basically completely ignoring every protest movement in recent memory.
