This is all good and nice, but there’s a huge wrinkle: energy. The amount of energy it takes (people, resources, money, time) to really exhaust the bourgeois methods through direct challenge WITHIN the norms is absurdly high. And that energy must be conserved or used in the most productive way possible. The energy required is so high that the #1 excuse for failures is “we needed more energy to win” and that’s an almost inexhaustible resource for the bourgeoisie is a western nation, so it’s always running on a treadmill moving faster than our little legs can manage–racing a giant.
So the challenge is to find ways to manage an utilize the limited energy we have and prove that the current methods are untenable. Framing it as a problem of not trying hard enough/not exhausting it is exactly how we fail to confront the bourgeois system at its weak point.
I think George Jackson didn’t mean “exhaust” in reference to how hard we must try, but “exhaust” in terms of how many possibilities we can prove are untenable. Forcing the bourgeois systems themselves to prove that it then the trick.
I agree yea, you can’t fight every battle, but you can strategically find battles worth fighting and trying your hardest to win, even if we think they are bound to be blocked.
My comment wasn’t trying to frame it as “not trying hard enough”, but against nihilism and leftism (in the lenin sense). I see a lot of marxists that understand the futility of bourgeois democracy and end up stuck, they don’t want to participate in it and any discussion around it or organising on the topic receives only sneering lectures, and that’s also a lot of wasted energy at best but more often the people that fall into that thinking just don’t do anything at all. And in a more general sense, most people can absolutely tell if you think they’re idiots, rubes, naive, that they’re wasting their time, etc, and that’s not gonna convince them to trust you. You often can’t afford to stand aside or try to do something else when the mass of people is active in electoralism, we can be as correct as we want but if we’re not where the people are to help them, even if it’s to help to almost certainly lose so they can be educated in practice, then we’re never gonna get what we need: People.
Bourgeois parties and organisations are also not as strong as we think. They don’t have unlimited energy and resources, and once you actually have a large amount of people backing you it takes them a ton more to attack you. It exhausts them too, and can force them to take the mask off or to reveal their hand.
That’s not to say this is simple or just “participate in it and that’s it”, it’s very complicated. You need to know what you’re doing, to make very annoying choices, etc. It’s also extremely contextual to the place and time. But every political moment has to be utilized, every crisis, every story.
This is all good and nice, but there’s a huge wrinkle: energy. The amount of energy it takes (people, resources, money, time) to really exhaust the bourgeois methods through direct challenge WITHIN the norms is absurdly high. And that energy must be conserved or used in the most productive way possible. The energy required is so high that the #1 excuse for failures is “we needed more energy to win” and that’s an almost inexhaustible resource for the bourgeoisie is a western nation, so it’s always running on a treadmill moving faster than our little legs can manage–racing a giant.
So the challenge is to find ways to manage an utilize the limited energy we have and prove that the current methods are untenable. Framing it as a problem of not trying hard enough/not exhausting it is exactly how we fail to confront the bourgeois system at its weak point.
I think George Jackson didn’t mean “exhaust” in reference to how hard we must try, but “exhaust” in terms of how many possibilities we can prove are untenable. Forcing the bourgeois systems themselves to prove that it then the trick.
I agree yea, you can’t fight every battle, but you can strategically find battles worth fighting and trying your hardest to win, even if we think they are bound to be blocked.
My comment wasn’t trying to frame it as “not trying hard enough”, but against nihilism and leftism (in the lenin sense). I see a lot of marxists that understand the futility of bourgeois democracy and end up stuck, they don’t want to participate in it and any discussion around it or organising on the topic receives only sneering lectures, and that’s also a lot of wasted energy at best but more often the people that fall into that thinking just don’t do anything at all. And in a more general sense, most people can absolutely tell if you think they’re idiots, rubes, naive, that they’re wasting their time, etc, and that’s not gonna convince them to trust you. You often can’t afford to stand aside or try to do something else when the mass of people is active in electoralism, we can be as correct as we want but if we’re not where the people are to help them, even if it’s to help to almost certainly lose so they can be educated in practice, then we’re never gonna get what we need: People.
Bourgeois parties and organisations are also not as strong as we think. They don’t have unlimited energy and resources, and once you actually have a large amount of people backing you it takes them a ton more to attack you. It exhausts them too, and can force them to take the mask off or to reveal their hand. That’s not to say this is simple or just “participate in it and that’s it”, it’s very complicated. You need to know what you’re doing, to make very annoying choices, etc. It’s also extremely contextual to the place and time. But every political moment has to be utilized, every crisis, every story.