Long-form analysis on the #50501movement. I found this thread on mastodon interesting, so I thought I’d crosspost here as well
Thanks for the read.
I’m currently dealing IRL with people who have their head so far up their ass they’re in denial that this is fascism or that we’ve been couped.
It’s not going to be obvious to these people until the fascists stop social security and Medicare/Medicaid payments. And even then…
The decades of destroying education have led us here. People are too stupid and their brains propagandized mush to realize wtf is going on. And those who do have an idea about it don’t want to talk about it because it’s too upsetting.
I’m so angry.
I think it’s important to remember as you walk around the street that at least 80% of people have not the slightest idea that any of this is even happening. For them, it’s just a normal day, and everything is fine as long as they have a good day at work. And if you try to tell them what is happening, you’re going to sound like you’re off your rocker about something, like some kind of Alex Jones nut, because you’re so far out of step with their previous cognitive model.
Education and media are a massive chunk of the problem.
- Stop referring people to Reddit and Facebook as organizational tools, setting them up to get nabbed later on down the road as fascism picks up steam
One additional nitpick with the analysis:
A movement that escalates without scaling gets crushed by the state without popular resistance. This is what happened to the Left in the 70’s and early 80’s. Small groups radicalized and escalated without popular support, and they were all arrested or killed.
I think what happened there was two interrelated issues:
- After 1968, the passionate left abandoned the idea of influencing state power “within the system,” abdicating control to the centrists of the time, with totally predictably disastrous results
- Mass media dispelled and diffused any influence on mainstream culture that the left might have had, and enabled monsters to come to power without the majority of people understanding what was happening
I like the analysis of scaling vs escalating, but I would add to it “educating”: Getting ordinary people to understand what is even happening. The Iraq War and WTO protests, happening as they did an instant before the internet and non-mainstream media entered into, well, the mainstream, is a good instructive example, contrasted against for example the BLM protests.
imho, BLM is a textbook example of recuperation. To start, you have a revolutionary movement with a revolutionary message/goal (abolish the police). Over time, the movement centralized leadership and softened message (defund/reform the police). And now today the movement is a brand that is owned by a company and the leadership is too timid to be effective or promote anything other than slogans and t-shirts.
The Harris campaign ran and died on exactly the same playbook. Come out strong and rally the base with revolutionary talk, then walk back demands to reformist ones that are palatable to the donor class you’ve become dependent on, then become irrelevant and fail.
History on this is clear to me. America is in terrible state, and everyone living here knows it, which is why revolutionary ideas are so immediately popular with the masses. But those ideas are too dangerous for Capital so they get watered down and defanged every. single. time. Until we build a decentralized mass movement that isn’t susceptible to leadership ideological capture, we’re going to keep losing.
I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.
We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”
We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.
I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.
I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.
We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.
You can abolish the police, if you want to, and you get enough people on board. Somewhere in my comment history is a lengthy discussion I had with someone about the idea. There are actually a handful of examples to draw on of in-US communities that functioned without police: Among them the libertarian takeover of a small town in New Hampshire, and the community described in “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix. The Freak Party attempted takeover in Aspen is another example, although they didn’t succeed and they weren’t talking about complete abolition anyway. There are also quite a lot of unincorporated communities where any day-to-day presence of police is basically nonexistent, and where even that nominal county-level police oversight could be cancelled out with a single abolitionist sheriff winning a single election.
If you want to see the wider discussion or continue it, I’m up for that. Overall, I’m saying that the claim that “they” won’t let there not be police is false. “They” in the sense of, the consensus of the people in the city/county/whatever is that there should be police, and the general institutional and capital resistance to abolition, is absolutely true. But if you can win the right elections, or just set up your own place separate enough from existing administrative structures, you can to a pretty large degree already have this, in the present day. The system’s resistance to it is real, but it’s not indomitable.
This is such a liberal take 🙄
One of the main points of the OP’s thread is that you have to hit where it hurts, and that is the economic and not the political base.
Appealing to authority or “influencing from within” is long proven to be ineffective and just results in burned out activists and well-meaning people that join the state apparatus and get grinded down by it.
And condecending takes on “educating the masses” are not very original either…
Sorry, did I say “I like the analysis of scaling vs escalating” and you heard “I hate the analysis of scaling vs escalating, please lecture me about how escalating is important”?
Basically I’m adding some examples of ways in which “scaling” can happen within what I think is a pretty good framework. Not sure why you’re insisting that I must be the enemy.
Appealing to authority or “influencing from within” is long proven to be ineffective and just results in burned out activists and well-meaning people that join the state apparatus and get grinded down by it.
Let me explain a little more of what I meant about BLM: I think BLM succeeded in a lot of its goals because the average American had an effective grasp of the problem, because the mass media had for whatever reason started presenting it accurately. And then, the groundwork laid, the movement could both scale and escalate, to the point that it couldn’t be ignored, which did a lot more than either most “handful of people carrying signs” protests, or any amount of voting for the presented options. I’m holding that up as a good example of what should be happening more to produce change.
I’m not sure where you got from that, to me saying “appealing to authority” was the answer, but I’m more or less agreeing with both you and OP, and it sounds like you’re insisting on tagging me as a “liberal” and creating a disagreement with me for some reason.
Edit: Oh, I see, I think I triggered something by talking about change “within the system” being good. Oh well. In my opinion, it is, in some cases, if nothing else to reduce the number of dead Vietnamese or Iraqis or Palestinians while we’re sorting our progress out. In addition to change outside the system being obviously necessary for actual permanent progress. If you feel the need to disagree with that, then fine. Just please refrain from constructing wild strawmans for the rest of what I am saying so you can disagree with me even harder about the thing that triggered you.
