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You know, they’re halfway there. Protests against the owning class that appeal to their better angels absolutely don’t work. When your entire idea of what a “protest” is is standing around in your state-approved square and not even engaging in the most mild of civil disobedience, let alone disruption of the lives and profits of the owning class, protesting is almost completely worthless.
Of course, if they reflected on the prompt and how the people of France do actual civil disobedience, they might come to the fuller conclusion.
Lol I always loved the “let’s all lie down and calmly get arrested” protests from 2020. Peak lib performance.
Trump got reelected and the libs are planning a “We won’t take this lying down” protest. Trump has a rally in response. During his speech he riffs…
“They wanna do a ‘lay down’ protest? Is that right? Lay down to get stepped on? How dumb is that? Democrats. If they do that - they’ll get stepped on. Like - I’ll do a Trump Elephant Stampede. Lotsa people don’t know this but horses won’t step on people. They won’t do it. But you can get a elephant to do it. Strong and powerful. We need lots of elephants. But maybe not so many elephants are there so we can use cows too. Cows step on people too.”
“Cow people like boaters. They love me. Love me. Love me. Love me. I can get as many cows as I need. Trump Elephant Stampede. I can do it. Official act. I’m like the boy in The Twilight Zone. I think it - it’s official and I can do it. I can do anything…”
The libs have to rethink their plans.
Extinction Rebellion was not rebelling against extinction, but rather rebelling by going extinct.
A weird number of climate protestors think that if enough of them get sent to prison for non violent protest the rest of society will be massively inspired and will rise up.
They’ve learned that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King got sent to prison and then taken the most baffling lesson from it.
They’ve learned that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King got sent to prison and then taken the most baffling lesson from it.
makes a lot of sense; their views of those figures are filtered through the same state propaganda apparatus that they’re protesting. “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
Nelson Mandela does violent acts in opposition to apartheid -> sent to prison -> case becomes famous around the world because his supporters support him due to his commitment to the cause including his willingness to engage in violence to achieve the end of apartheid -> is eventually released and apartheid ends -> western propaganda purposefully removes the history of violence that got them in prison from public consciousness -> people, now unaware of that violent past, think that merely going to prison is some revolutionary act which will rally the public in support of them -> nothing happens when they go to prison, nobody cares -> either repeat this because they don’t know any better because, again, that violent history is still unknown to them, OR they experience disillusionment from politics and go grill (and probably become conservatives)
the history of western leftism is a long series of people becoming radicalized but still being alienated from their communities, learning that the only effective strategy for creating revolution is the difficult, painstaking, boring work of creating organizations, unions, etc inside their communities and linking up to form national networks which can challenge the capitalist state, then saying “nah, that shit sucks and sounds boring and scary, I don’t wanna do that. can’t I just do an adventurism and/or be sent to prison in a protest and/or become a martyr for the cause? if I’m in prison or dead then I don’t have to do shit and I’m seen as inherently good within the Western Christian paradigm and I like that” the only people who have escaped this process are those who are essentially forced to do this hard and scary work due to their minority status, like the Black Panthers. if they give up, they can’t just go grill like white (cis hetero neurotypical etc) people can, they’ll still be living under acute oppression.
Great analysis, really put into words what I could only vaguely gesture at before, definitely saving this!
What kills is that french protests themselves weren’t limited to crust punks throwing bricks at the police. They encompassed regular people going to their regular job and using it to fuck with those in power as much as they could. As a small example, electricians cut power to the houses of key politicians and their political headquarters.
As a small example, electricians cut power to the houses of key politicians and their political headquarters.
If that happened in the US there would quickly be a bipartisan “electricity terrorism” bill.
Sure but the point of popular movements is that you do it anyway to the point such bills and labels become useless against the amount of people who are willing to sabotage vs. the amount of people who are willing to comply
And then they’d label the electricians who do it as anteefa and working for the SeeSeePee
The only way americans know how to protest is by chanting on the sidewalk or shooting up a daycare center
Without savings or mutual aid networks, how can anyone afford to stop participating in the machine for a protest lasting long enough to affect any change?
This was the grand goal of the great American experiment: a completely subservient propagandized populace, forced by material conditions to execute the will of the bourgeoisie.
We’re stuck. It sucks.
yeah, I typed that comment, and then I was like, “oh, this is why capital likes us alienated.”
😞
100%, to add unless shit’s bad and directly under threat people deep down are fearful of seriously harming each other, so Murikkkans may have more guns than humans, but they don’t use them in the whole rebel sense, this was by design by founders in the concept of the ‘polite society’. Yet another method of control.
Protests don’t work, riots do
Why are so many folks convinced that anyone calling for even the tiniest bit of force is a fed? Where does this come from?
While they aren’t wrong, it can come off with that same energy of the “firebomb a wallmart” meme. I’m not such a fool to think protests and riots are the be-all-end-all. Mutual aid networks, organizing workplaces and buildings, boycotts, etc will sometimes do more good than a flash in a pan that gets any revolutionaries present arrested and out of commision.
I think we are maybe on the same page here. While in almost every scenario you should be looking for actions that aren’t violent, if the situation calls for violence, that is what you should do.
Riots in response to the scotus decision that the president of the united states is more or less a god king…I feel like that is a justified response. Obviously planning needs to be done, and the other things you mentioned should continue to happen in tandem. I can see how the comment came off as “firebomb walmart” but I really don’t think that was the intention. Maybe I’m just a tad ultra, idk, its just hard to know what the correct response to any given situation is.
For sure. I’m like, rent got hiked an extra $120 and I’m currently the only one employed in my household. If I’m gonna find myself in a jailcell, it better be for something more than breaking a window or ripping down and burning the rows of American flags currently lining my streets. For what US politicians are doing in Gaza, those corpulent fucks should be fearing for their lives, but not sure how much that could accomplish in the long term, ya know?
Ayo, just for the record fuck that lib ass meme though
Fair enough. Tbh I generally imagine a freshman “anarchist” expecting other people to either do an adventurism or nothing, while they continue to just sit around. But to my knowledge there’s no “useful idiot” meme.
Lib take
from Phil Neel’s Hinterlands book, I kinda got the impression that a good venue for class conflict (as opposed to downtown city cores, where empty, non-functional temples to the FIRE economy are resistant to protest by design… nothing physical needs to happen there, nothing is disrupted, protest is symbolic), are the logistics infrastructures… the warehouses/fulfillment centers, the freight rail switching stations, etc. just outside of big cities, these are the places where many workers find themselves, abused but in great numbers compared to capitalists and cops… and strikes have immediate consequences to capital formations in paralysis.
he doesn’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the strategy must adapt to the transformed geography of class conflict in the 21st century.
The chapter on the Fergesun protests/riots was really fascinating. Big cities like Paris and London were designed specifically to make it easier for police to fuck up protestors, but nobody ever saw unrest coming to the suburbs.
I liked the book but I felt it was written backwards, I couldn’t figure out his angle until he got to the big picture stuff towards the end.
Paris was first rebuilt to make crackdowns easier in mid-19th century by baron Haussmann.
I mean the only kind of protest Americans can picture is more like a municipal government-sanctioned parade for winky and pedantic wordplay on poster boards.
Lmao and even those routinely get them accused of being violent when the pigs show up with their tear gas and rubber bullets
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Liberals are fun to watch in the same way a car crash is fun to watch imo
Those billionaires have addresses
Housebroken losers
Genuine completely useless people
Easy to conveniently forget that the French peoples had guillotines.
Come on Americans, they’re not that difficult to build! Are you telling me a nation of people who think that snails are edible are better at revolutions than 'MURRICA???
They’re not talking about 1700’s french people, they’re talking about
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