Lots of protests, lots of people willing to go out and disrupt cities and force the state to listen. Great! I know Americans suffer under a fascist police state, commit genocides, underfund public services, ooh - they have a shitty bourgeois democratic system, maybe they’re protesting to fix that, or maybe they’re demanding free healthcare, that’s long overdue. No, I know, it’ll be about the insane amount of school shootings, or serious police violence. I know the LA riots started against ICE, that’s cool, so maybe they’re protesting for actually fair justice! That’d be a step forward.
Whatever they’re protesting, they seem to be in huge numbers, so they’ll probably make an actual effort to disrupt things. Occupy buildings. You know, some sort of direct action, they can’t all stand around pointlessly. Anyway, enough anticipation let’s go look and find out
Oh, the protests are just “Trump bad” in another form. And they’re decrying all forms of violence. And the police are literally collaborating with some. Oh.
Americans really took all these years of mistreatment, fascism, genocide with their tax dollars, deliberately being made poorer year after year, violent suppression, being allowed to die in droves, and the mass culmination of that is… “trump bad, also be polite while saying it”??? And then the protests are used as an excuse to tighten the fascism.
I can’t wrap my head around it. Millions(?) of people coming out to protest, and the overwhelming demand is ‘replace orange man with another genocidal fascist pls’. ie. basically for nothing to change whatsoever.
At least leftists try to get the fucking goods. Lib organising is the worst.
EDIT: I’mma just be clear - protesting ICE is extremely cool and not the part I’m complaining about.
Yeah, remember all those books we’re supposed to be reading that most of us do not?
In some of them they talk about having a permanent professional revolutionary class, right? A small group that basically waits for moments like these and has some plans as to how to try to galvanize, organize and direct the angry masses.
The libs have their permanent professional counter-revolutionaries to nudge things in a direction more favorable to their goals.
We seem to be lacking a counter to that in the USofA.
Huh I never considered the Democrats an anti-vanguard party before
Its more than just the dems. They exist in depth through a multitude of NGOs.
Yeah, for sure. I’ve seen the talk of how nonprofits and prestigious universities capture the revolutionary potential of the working class, but never thought of the Democrats as a professional organization to act as an anti-vanguard
DSA is that. The mainline democrats are just the terminus of the defanging pipeline.
In my fiction of the future, the DSA is who wins and ushers in the age of socialism by necessity
The masses in most of these cities aren’t even angry though. They are mildly annoyed that the man on the TV isn’t the correct looking man on the TV.
Bingo. 99% of the people who showed up for No Kings protests would never attend any kind of protest if Kamala was president, even if she did a lot of the same shit as Trump. I don’t even think I’m being facetious here.
there were fucking ‘out to brunch’ signs fucking everywhere.
On the other hand though, I guess that an optimistic view would be that theres maybe something to be said for the fact that this has driven people who ordinarily would never protest U.S. policy like this to protest.
Whether or not that protesting is effective is another topic but it at least feels like more people are engaged now.
My view of it is that news media isn’t interactive enough for them anymore, especially since Jan 6th, they want to be part of the participatory television. It’s not that they want or hope for real change, they just want to be part of the spectacle, not just observe it.
it’s called the PSL
There is a lack of any coherent organizing structure on the left. Leftist media is for example dominated by a myriad of unaffiliated breadtubers who spew nonsense. Why is there no officially linked “influencer type” for the PSL? Is there an financial support system for people on strike or on the run? Safehouses? Community first response? I think the PSL is only barely approaching most of the fundamentals.
Not even stalin himself led the bank robberies in Georgia, he coordinated it. Literally event management is half the revolution.