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It’s wild how many people seem to think that winning a revolution would somehow be easier than winning an election.
This is what I’m saying!! People keep being like “we can’t possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don’t have to deal with any of those things!”
And it’s like. I’d be less annoyed about what are obviously people who are hurt and frustrated lashing out if they didn’t act like I was a fucking fascist for saying “I don’t think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually”
“I don’t think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually”
Implying that these things aren’t already happening
its not happening to me so its alright
I don’t see anyone who was killed by the capitalist death machine complaining about it today
“I don’t think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually”
Then why you pull lever on the death and violence machine, dummy?
It’s so frustrating to read this because usually the revolution is what keeps the agitated masses (let alone the reactionary forces, well usually the reactionaries already had their bloodbath at that point) from creating a massive bloodbath. And people genuinely don’t know that and it’s really hard to convince anyone otherwise with how heavily they’ve been indoctrinated.
Is there an example of a bloodless left revolution that we can point to as an example? All I can think of are the USSR, China, DPRK, Cuba, and those all required bloodshed to fight off Capitalist resistance.
Never said bloodless. Just that the masses were (understandably) more out for blood than the revolutionary leadership.
Once again I am asking liberals to read a book written by a socialist on how to actually do a revolution instead insisting they are experts on something they have never bothered to investigate.
it’s every american’s god-given right to spout off about shit they don’t know anything about
There’s a how-to guide for this? What book?
What is to be done by Lenin. Haven’t read it yet tho. Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin is pretty good, but it’s more after the fact. Mostly just gotta look at what folks have done before in moments like this and adapt it to your specific circumstances. It’s why I regularly point towards the work of Lucio Urtubia during the Franco regime.
I, a proud American who’s had a civics class, am well aware of how 1776 went down, thank you very much. /s
It’s wild how many people think that ending segregation would somehow be easier than making facilities that are separate but equal
It’s wild how many people think that striking for higher wages would somehow be easier than working harder to prove they deserve it
It’s wild how many people think that destroying i*rael world somehow be easier than asking zionists to stop committing genocide
Good post
It’s wild how many people seem to think that doing a surgery would somehow be easier than praying to God.
It’s not a question of what’s easier, it’s a question of what’s actually going to implement the needed changes. Yeah, it’s relatively easy to get a Biden elected once every 4-8 years, but then you get Biden waffling and sundowning.
Listen Jack…
We must give Israel 400 billion dollars.
Reform only works in a socialist state. That’s actually the entire point of a socialist state… To let progress happen and guard it against hoarding and stagnation, against backlash etc.
The only reason revolutions even works is because the existing states become so destabilized, they collapse. Which is like THE PROBLEM for Vanguard parties. Any newly formed state is going to be extremely susceptible to interference inside and out. It takes time to produce new ranks of intellectuals, grow new state organs.
I honestly don’t even have a clue of what’s going to happen in the West. They’re obviously too weak to invade China. They have failed to crush even Iran, their dog is pissing and shitting on everyone and engaging in cannibalism all the kids can see on social media and the Labor aristocracy has their head in the sand thinking: “This too will pass. This too will pass. This too will pass…” They did manage to bait the libbed out europeans into self-sacrificial ritual for the daddy, but what are they going to do? Can’t deal with racism, needs the hard working migrants to do their jobs, it’s a disaster, okay go vote whatever. These people are impossible to reach, might as well stop wasting my time trying to engage with them.
“Surely this time the bourgeoisie will play fair and let themselves be voted out of power”
It’s a rigged game that can be altered by fiat, making it literally, structurally unwinnable unless the ruling class chooses to lose, which is an absurd idea. Concrete reality, where a revolution takes place, cannot be rigged that way, even if there is still tremendous disadvantage in some respects. One deductively impossible to win against an opponent who wants to win, the other has a high chance of failure but, unlike the first, there is a real possibility of success.
Also of course the violence of the status quo is papered over, etc.
Whenever, and I mean, whenever, we have resorted exclusively to voting within this system, the outcomes have been demonstratively worse for the working class. It has only been when we have threatened to destabilize the system through violence that things ever get better. After all, the only language that the state actually speaks is that of violence. That is what makes a state, a state.
Our goal is to seize that state apparatus, through any means necessary, and wield the legal violence within it against our enemies, namely capitalists, but in particular, the parasitic rent-seekers that funnel their way up to the highest echelons of the capitalist order. Those who do not spend their wealth on the development of markets, labor and capital, but only accumulate profit through the destruction and collapse of civil society.
Both sides of the bourgeois party apparatus are entirely made up of or funded by, this class of people, as they are the only ones with the time and money to participate in such a system, who will never let us take away their power, forever changing the rules of the game that they themselves created. At best you can get them to fight amongst themselves, but never actually for your benefit. For every disrupted industrial tycoon there is a tech guy waiting in the wings to eat their lunch, only giving crumbs to their lackeys and sycophants.
Voting does nothing without a way to impose consequences on your representatives should they defect. Voting does nothing if there is nothing to enforce discipline and a steady course of action after the votes have been cast.
It isn’t ‘less that perfection’. It is nothing. The system can and will be improved only through social revolution, because the social revolution actually imposes consequences on those with responsibility. And that is what is intolerable to them, because they live in a world without actual consequences, where the shit only ever rolls downhill.
- this is what winning looks like
“we” don’t win elections, we’re not allowed to run candidates in them.
Don’t do hard things, JUST SURRENDER, it’s easier!
This is what passes as liberal “philosophy”, it’s literally the crux of their rancid politics
worse they say it’s the moral thing to roll over and die for your ‘superiors’. fascism really is just liberalism plus time
They really think revolution is just firebombinb a wallmart.
…isn’t it that but at government buildings on a large scale?
You also gotta build a parallel infrastructure.
Isn’t that going back to the point from OP? It is way, way easier to convince a group of people to knock on doors and send text messages to their neighbors than it is to build a whole parallel government, especially in the most militarized area on Earth.
There’s a ton of great small-scale work being done by Food Not Bombs, people growing community gardens, etc. It’s just now going to replace the Capitalist society anytime soon.
I would argue that the point OP is missing is that the mechanisms they’re advocating for don’t actually result in the change we are looking for. You can get out the vote all you like, the levers of government were specifically designed from the ground up to be resistant to change. James Madison actually wrote about this in the federalist papers while advocating for the constitution.
The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from, and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals (he means rich people), or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. - Madison, 1788
Here’s what he had to say when advocating for the Senate:
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent(again, rich people) against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability
Representative democracy is designed, layer upon layer upon layer, to be resistant to change and to insulate the power of the wealthy. You’re just not going to vote in socialism.
There’s a ton of great small-scale work being done by Food Not Bombs, people growing community gardens, etc. It’s just now going to replace the Capitalist society anytime soon.
Agreed, which is why things will get much worse before they get better, unfortunately.
Thanks for these quotes.
It’s just hard. Not to rehash old threads, but I am in the deep south and apathy is huge here. Most people aren’t paying attention on purpose. I don’t blame them!
There’s a growing number of comrades too but we’re so far away from anything like a revolution. If we can’t even get the people most harmed by Capitalism to vote, how can I expect them to do anything spicy? I get that we don’t have the best candidates so maybe that’s what needs to change.
I also can’t in good conscience abandon my trans friends and family over ideological differences. I care too much to refuse to vote and let the worst bigots run free through the local legislature. Dems also suck but 99.9% of the time they aren’t trying to make it illegal to be trans in public!
I need to see some real material wins from this decade from the non-electoral crowd. From what I’m seeing we need more Mamdanis and ones who are willing to give the middle-finger to the Dem Party. Use the ballot line to get those free votes and sidestep all of the hurdles that makes parties like the Green Party irrelevant, push for actual Socialism, double down, and attack attack attack. It won’t fix everything but again I’d rather have universal child care and landlords on defense than Cuomo spending his time glazing Israel…
I keep writing and deleting shit and I’m just gonna be honest. I think you need to read more. You’re asking questions and giving answers that are to be blunt, rather naive. You wanna vote that’s fine, I do it too, but it really feels like your expectations for how that’s going to work out are still way above the bar of reality. People aren’t here advocating for revolution because it’s fun, they’re advocating because electoralism has been tried over and over again and stopping up the cracks in the dam has never prevented the flood of fascism from coming and wiping out the marginalized. You can spend your entire life getting Mamdanis elected and as soon as they become a legitimate threat to capital they will just get killed along with anyone to close to them. That’s a historical fact. Electoralism is playing a rigged game by the rules that your opponents aren’t following.
Again, I would be open to switching off electoralism as a tool if I saw real gains made by non-electoral work. I can point to small-scale things like bus beaches being built that I helped with, but that pales in comparison to getting a million kids childcare and getting the attention of the entire mainstream media apparatus. The fact that Hasan Piker is on Fox News all the time is going to recruit more people to the left than the last 20 years of newspapers and independent parties’ organizing combined. I’m seeing electoralism winning and improving people’s lives and scaring the shit out of the people in power. No one’s mutual aid project has done the same thing!
They will never give you any of that, and a Republican will just be elected in the next cycle to turn back the clock twice as much.
If you push for actual Socialism (which Mamdani is not doing btw), and have any level of real success, they will not hesitate to use the power of the state to harass, imprison, or kill you, and if things get really dire for them, they will not hesitate to kill your friends, your family, and anyone you have ever loved regardless of if they had any knowledge of your action. And I am talking about the Democrats here, who will just sit back and let the Republicans do this to you.
You can either take this shit actually seriously, and understand what the real stakes are, or you can just wander through naively and assume that they are just as non-committal as you are. That said, it is possible to take this shit seriously and choose to do nothing or only work when there is something that can actually be gained. These are all rational choices. Just be aware of what the stakes actually are, and what, if you are advocating for Socialism, you are actually asking for. The truth doesn’t have to drive you mad.
Not that you shouldn’t vote. By all means do. Just don’t expect anything substantial to actually come of it.
People who weren’t running for office got killed for organizing. We’re dead either way, so I don’t buy that argument.
And I do read! I tried getting through What Is To Be Done and it was a slog that wasn’t helpful in anyway. I’ll give State and Revolution a chance. But also I have reservations about telling people to “just read theory”:
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We need people to learn the skills of organizing, how to talk to people and run meetings, etc. Theory doesn’t teach this.
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Most people aren’t going to read, and if they do, they’re not reading at the grade level needed to understand this stuff.
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Telling others to read instead of being able to explain ourselves quickly makes us look like a bunch of dorks. Dorks don’t win.
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Theory is great to learn context and history behind major left events, but is not relevant today. Material conditions are different and we need Theory that reflects this. Let’s not become Bible thumpers unable to adapt because we keep pushing the same set of readings.
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By pushing Theory you are self-selecting for a small number of nerdy, bookworm type people to organize with. And I’ll be blunt, those people aren’t leading anything much less a revolution. We need people of all stripes from across the working class. We need to be accessible to someone who just pulled a double at Wendy’s and asking them to read super dense history lessons isn’t reaching that person.
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Building a federal government based around subordinating people to the whole is hard.
Building a movement based around localities and organizations asserting their own self-determination, opposing corporate looting of their territory and people, and having some sort of collective self-defense, is a lot easier.
You don’t need to change the minds of everyone on the ship to allow you to steer it around, you just need a hole in the hull, and a lifeboat.
You win election half of the time shitlib. It would have been easier to remember if they did anything to make you proud
The response post sets off my AI sensors. It’s using if this then that speech patterns.
It’s not even the argument anyone is making. We want a revolution not because it would be easier but because winning elections does not end the existing state. Now you’ve won an election, the existing state, its bourgeois courts, its bourgeois laws, its bourgeois constitution, its bourgeois institutions are all working in collaboration to maintain the bourgeois state.
You can’t just declare the bourgeois constitution over with. You have bourgeois laws that say no. You have a billion hoops to jump through and you’re not getting through them before they take power away from you in a new election.
Reform has not worked. Not one single time among hundreds of attempts. The only thing that has ever worked is revolution. Your attempt at reform will not be different, that one shining beacon. We have multiple examples of revolutions working and successfully lasting for 100+ years bringing vastly better lives to the people. The only examples of nearly successful attempts at the reformist path have ended in mass murder of all the reformers.
