If you believe a bourgeois dictatorship will allow you to vote away the interests of capital, you have utterly failed to do any kind of analysis. Even if the vast majority of Amerikkkans voted for Claudia, the state would never allow her to take office under any circumstances. Be it by legal fiat, arrest, political ban, assassination, whatever. An imperialist state will never cede a fraction of control to an anti-imperialist. It always has and always will employ any and all forms of violence to prevent any loss of bourgeois political capture. This is true not just of its own state, but for all other sovereign nations in the wold as well.
We’re talking about the same modern Amerikkkan state that:
Spent the last 80 years directly supporting Nazis, Contras, reactionary terrorists, brutal compradors and fascist dictators.
Spent decades hunting down, prosecuting, imprisoning and assassinating Communists living in the US.
Murdered MILLIONS of people in Viet Nam for winning a war against their colonial slavemasters and trying to have a socialist society. The land and water in Viet Nam is still poisoned and scarred from when your fascist empire invaded.
Murdered MILLIONS of people in Korea for trying to have a socialist society while occupying and enslaving the southern half of the country, and has kept the DPRK under starvation sanctions in order to kill the remaining population while laughing about how underfed and difficult their conditions are.
Assassinated Allende and his supporters for winning a popular election on a socialist platform, replacing him with a brutal fascist dictator.
Tried to assassinate Castro OVER 600 TIMES for winning a socialist revolution and Cuba has spent the last 65 years under illegal sanctions designed to starve the entire country to death.
Almost ended the world who-knows-how-many-times just to exterminate socialism in the USSR.
Which is presently, training, arming and providing media cover for the neo-nazi regime in Kiev that the US couped into power 10 years ago to run a proxy war against Russia to strip mine the land and keep capitalism going for a few more decades, and is now on the brink of nuclear war.
Waged a proxy war against the USSR by the CIA arming, training and funding reactionary terrorists and mercenaries to overthrow the revolutionary socialist PDPA government in Afghanistan. A US-backed project which would plunge Afghanistan into war from 1978 to 2021.
Assassinated Gaddaffi in 2011 and couped Libya for being too socialist, the giggled about his murder in a TV interview.
Couped Iran in the 1950s for being too socialist.
Presently wants to nuke Iran because Iranians had a successful anti-imperialist revolution in 1979.
Is presently using Isn’treal to genocide and warcrime its way into a direct hot war with Iran in order to give the US a pretext to invade Iran, overthrow their government, stripmine the land and murder its people (for opposing imperialism).
Is endlessly lying, arming fascist proxies in Phillippines, occupied Korea and Japan and crossing every red line possible to start a nuclear war with socialist China. While fomenting anti-Chinese racism on every media outlet they control, which is all of them.
See any historical theme? I could go on for fucking days… But if you don’t understand why “revolutionary electoralism” is a dead-end, you have failed to understand why Fascism exists.
There is no path to end the global capitalist empire which does not require meeting state violence with proletarian violence, but good luck with that because the vast majority of Amerikkkans are fascist anti-intellectuals with no self-awareness.
Thankfully, the PSL is not deluded enough to be engaging in “revolutionary electoralism.” Their candidacy is viewed firstly as a party-building effort (rather than a direct path to proletarian power) and secondly as a mechanism for heightening the contradictions inherent to bourgeois democracy: that the Republicans and Democrats worked together to kick them off the ballot in swing states – Pennsylvania and Georgia – serves to underscore the futility of bourgeois democracy and prime the public for a proletarian alternative.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation? When at least a third of the populace, and half of the military ranks, have enthusiastically endorsed socialism over capitalism. There are no shortcuts. Jumping straight to firebombing a military base is adventurism.
Half the US military? We’re talking about the same fascist military that either committed or supported the largest atrocities in modern history? The Amerikkkan military that is on the ground, right now, protecting a genocide in order to create a pretext to invade Iran? The Amerikkkan military that is currently trying to provoke a nuclear war with Russia?
Not in the next one hundred years will half your military and 30% of your population stop being nazis. That will never happen before you either 1) decay and collapse into civil war, 2) get everyone else killed, 3) force the rest of the world to destroy you, or 4) the earth becomes uninhabitable. Amerikkka is an imperialist colonial project that should not exist. You cannot reform it. If you care about the rest of the world, you should be burning your fascist empire to the ground to give the rest of us some breathing room and let occupied countries burn your military bases for you.
Ok. I’d love for you to walk us through your analysis of how doing that could be organized and carried out, and then what the likely responses would be. Otherwise, you’re just an armchair revolutionary advocating for people to be either killed or spend their lives in prison for… what, exactly?
I’ve met many a soldier who upon leaving service becomes horrified at the realization of what they have done. They can become potent forces for change or just propaganda. Even the most irritating centrist doesn’t scoff at military service; something that us leftists are pretty much unique for. If you don’t see how that has it’s own uses…not really sure what else to say.
Most people going into service have three options. Be a shithead and drop out in basic. Internalize and consume every piece of propaganda or try their best to maintain their humanity, dignity and morals in an environment designed to break those and mold them into something else. It’s no wonder that until they get out most of them don’t realize what they’ve done. Does this excuse them? No. Most of them are too far gone. However, we have ex-military here on Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Plenty of people have no idea what communism is at 18; conveniently another option to take is either extremely expensive education, wage-slave, or join the service…to which then you are under contract.
The military recruits poor and hungry as a tactic. Afterwards, a good chunk of them shoot themselves. Most of them are ticking time-bombs ready to go. A lot of analysis of what they’ve done, theory to help understand why and actual emotional appeal can turn them into sympathetic, military-trained comrades. Once again…if you don’t see how that his it’s own uses…
A lot of the organizing I’ve done has been with ex-military. I’ve heard some horrible fucking shit. I raise a question to you though, what do you think Lenin felt when ex-Whites joined the revolutionary cause? It’s something I’ve asked myself a lot.
I raise a question to you though, what do you think Lenin felt when ex-Whites joined the revolutionary cause?
It’s hard to think of a successful revolution that didn’t have at least some former members of the group they were fighting against. It’s a political struggle, which means changing people’s minds. You have to have some means of letting people who change their minds into your movement, or your movement will stay perpetually small and never accomplish anything.
There’s also a major contradiction between the “all amerikkkan troops are irredeemable” thread of leftist thinking and the thread along the lines of “people who commit serious crimes can change, your brain doesn’t even fully develop until your mid 20s.” You can’t on one hand say a guy who did a violent crime at 18 and who sincerely attempts to turn his life around at 25 is reformable, then on the other hand say joining the military at 18 is some indelible sin. Either people who do bad things can change, or they can’t.
This is a flippant comment, but let me try a serious response.
If you want to start an armed struggle, you need people who are willing to die in that struggle. You need people you can trust to not immediately get everyone around them killed. You need money, you need equipment, you need an organization that people will trust with their lives. You need a strategic plan (what is your end goal, what are the steps between it and attacking some base), you need a million different tactical plans (which base? how are you going to get into it?). You need a high degree of agreement among your members on all of the above.
All this doesn’t materialize out of the ether. It comes when you have sufficiently desperate people try peaceful change first only to discover it doesn’t work. Then the people and organizations that were radicalized by the crackdown on peaceful attempts have at least the start of all those things you need for an armed struggle. There’s no shortcut for this.
If you investigated first, you would know PSL talks like it’s in it for the long-term, not like it thinks a single election is going to be revolution. But you are yourself “failing to do any kind of analysis” if you think that when dealing with such a violent state as what you describe, people can organize around the idea of anti-imperialist revolutionary violence in broad daylight, through a campaign megaphone, without having busses pick them up to take them to prison, not to mention how it will sound to the segment of the population who has been primed to believe the contradictory notion that the endlessly violent US empire is somehow a force for peace and that nonviolence is the only way to do change. I remember at one point reading about the history of the IRA and how they had both the guerilla aspect of it that was extremely disciplined and covert, and then they also had a public-facing part of the struggle that could act more freely. I’m not sure how connected those two parts were (it has been some time since I read about it and I’m not sure how much detail it went into on that), but that is an example of how these things can be multifaceted. There is no surefire playbook for overcoming imperialism, especially from within the heart of the empire’s current center. Although it is true that thinking electoralism alone can overcome it is naive to say the least, it is also naive in its own way to speak of the alternative like it’s a “just do it” alternative, when it involves a lot of logistical hurdles and sacrifice, and is not the sort of thing that is advisable to speak of flippantly in contexts where it’s easy for the state to view it as threatening, especially when considering its violent history of suppression and infiltration. I mean, hell, The Black Panther Party had its kitchens targeted when doing a breakfast program for schoolkids. People work with what they can get away with where they can, in order to build momentum and organize, in the context they’re currently living in. The empire both plays by its own rules and has a certain amount of own-hands-tying due to a need to maintain some degree of legitimacy of its layers of legalese, in order not to collapse the facade of “democracy.” Sometimes there is room within that to break through the propaganda.
An example that comes to mind recently is the contradiction showing in how the US talks about Palestinian resistance leaders vs. how israel acts as a state. Helping people who are already on the side of “free Palestine” notice how they call somebody a terrorist who is resisting occupation. This sort of thing is obviously not making a revolution on its own, but the point here is, use what is there to use. That is what PSL appears to be doing, in spirit. They are using electoralism as a vehicle, rather than an end goal. The question, in other words, is not, “Is this the end-all, be-all that will end imperialism once and for all and bring about global communism?” The question is, “Is this advancing the goals of anti-imperialism and communism? Is it contributing or detracting from?” Sometimes the answer really is “it’s detracting from” and in those cases, reformist-like movements can be more of a capture of revolutionary energy than a help. It’s a fine line. Probably one example of that in the US is the corporate pollution(dilution?) of the black lives matter movement, which was already vulnerable to being watered down from (as far as I can tell/remember) being more of a moral value around which people were spontaneously rallying than a centralized organization with ideological discipline and specific goals.
If you believe a bourgeois dictatorship will allow you to vote away the interests of capital, you have utterly failed to do any kind of analysis. Even if the vast majority of Amerikkkans voted for Claudia, the state would never allow her to take office under any circumstances. Be it by legal fiat, arrest, political ban, assassination, whatever. An imperialist state will never cede a fraction of control to an anti-imperialist. It always has and always will employ any and all forms of violence to prevent any loss of bourgeois political capture. This is true not just of its own state, but for all other sovereign nations in the wold as well.
We’re talking about the same modern Amerikkkan state that:
See any historical theme? I could go on for fucking days… But if you don’t understand why “revolutionary electoralism” is a dead-end, you have failed to understand why Fascism exists.
There is no path to end the global capitalist empire which does not require meeting state violence with proletarian violence, but good luck with that because the vast majority of Amerikkkans are fascist anti-intellectuals with no self-awareness.
Thankfully, the PSL is not deluded enough to be engaging in “revolutionary electoralism.” Their candidacy is viewed firstly as a party-building effort (rather than a direct path to proletarian power) and secondly as a mechanism for heightening the contradictions inherent to bourgeois democracy: that the Republicans and Democrats worked together to kick them off the ballot in swing states – Pennsylvania and Georgia – serves to underscore the futility of bourgeois democracy and prime the public for a proletarian alternative.
So how many more contradictions until you burn down a military base? Asking for a friend.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation? When at least a third of the populace, and half of the military ranks, have enthusiastically endorsed socialism over capitalism. There are no shortcuts. Jumping straight to firebombing a military base is adventurism.
Half the US military? We’re talking about the same fascist military that either committed or supported the largest atrocities in modern history? The Amerikkkan military that is on the ground, right now, protecting a genocide in order to create a pretext to invade Iran? The Amerikkkan military that is currently trying to provoke a nuclear war with Russia?
Not in the next one hundred years will half your military and 30% of your population stop being nazis. That will never happen before you either 1) decay and collapse into civil war, 2) get everyone else killed, 3) force the rest of the world to destroy you, or 4) the earth becomes uninhabitable. Amerikkka is an imperialist colonial project that should not exist. You cannot reform it. If you care about the rest of the world, you should be burning your fascist empire to the ground to give the rest of us some breathing room and let occupied countries burn your military bases for you.
Ok. I’d love for you to walk us through your analysis of how doing that could be organized and carried out, and then what the likely responses would be. Otherwise, you’re just an armchair revolutionary advocating for people to be either killed or spend their lives in prison for… what, exactly?
Yes. Aaron Bushnell was service.
I’ve met many a soldier who upon leaving service becomes horrified at the realization of what they have done. They can become potent forces for change or just propaganda. Even the most irritating centrist doesn’t scoff at military service; something that us leftists are pretty much unique for. If you don’t see how that has it’s own uses…not really sure what else to say.
Most people going into service have three options. Be a shithead and drop out in basic. Internalize and consume every piece of propaganda or try their best to maintain their humanity, dignity and morals in an environment designed to break those and mold them into something else. It’s no wonder that until they get out most of them don’t realize what they’ve done. Does this excuse them? No. Most of them are too far gone. However, we have ex-military here on Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Plenty of people have no idea what communism is at 18; conveniently another option to take is either extremely expensive education, wage-slave, or join the service…to which then you are under contract.
The military recruits poor and hungry as a tactic. Afterwards, a good chunk of them shoot themselves. Most of them are ticking time-bombs ready to go. A lot of analysis of what they’ve done, theory to help understand why and actual emotional appeal can turn them into sympathetic, military-trained comrades. Once again…if you don’t see how that his it’s own uses…
A lot of the organizing I’ve done has been with ex-military. I’ve heard some horrible fucking shit. I raise a question to you though, what do you think Lenin felt when ex-Whites joined the revolutionary cause? It’s something I’ve asked myself a lot.
It’s hard to think of a successful revolution that didn’t have at least some former members of the group they were fighting against. It’s a political struggle, which means changing people’s minds. You have to have some means of letting people who change their minds into your movement, or your movement will stay perpetually small and never accomplish anything.
There’s also a major contradiction between the “all amerikkkan troops are irredeemable” thread of leftist thinking and the thread along the lines of “people who commit serious crimes can change, your brain doesn’t even fully develop until your mid 20s.” You can’t on one hand say a guy who did a violent crime at 18 and who sincerely attempts to turn his life around at 25 is reformable, then on the other hand say joining the military at 18 is some indelible sin. Either people who do bad things can change, or they can’t.
This is a flippant comment, but let me try a serious response.
If you want to start an armed struggle, you need people who are willing to die in that struggle. You need people you can trust to not immediately get everyone around them killed. You need money, you need equipment, you need an organization that people will trust with their lives. You need a strategic plan (what is your end goal, what are the steps between it and attacking some base), you need a million different tactical plans (which base? how are you going to get into it?). You need a high degree of agreement among your members on all of the above.
All this doesn’t materialize out of the ether. It comes when you have sufficiently desperate people try peaceful change first only to discover it doesn’t work. Then the people and organizations that were radicalized by the crackdown on peaceful attempts have at least the start of all those things you need for an armed struggle. There’s no shortcut for this.
If you investigated first, you would know PSL talks like it’s in it for the long-term, not like it thinks a single election is going to be revolution. But you are yourself “failing to do any kind of analysis” if you think that when dealing with such a violent state as what you describe, people can organize around the idea of anti-imperialist revolutionary violence in broad daylight, through a campaign megaphone, without having busses pick them up to take them to prison, not to mention how it will sound to the segment of the population who has been primed to believe the contradictory notion that the endlessly violent US empire is somehow a force for peace and that nonviolence is the only way to do change. I remember at one point reading about the history of the IRA and how they had both the guerilla aspect of it that was extremely disciplined and covert, and then they also had a public-facing part of the struggle that could act more freely. I’m not sure how connected those two parts were (it has been some time since I read about it and I’m not sure how much detail it went into on that), but that is an example of how these things can be multifaceted. There is no surefire playbook for overcoming imperialism, especially from within the heart of the empire’s current center. Although it is true that thinking electoralism alone can overcome it is naive to say the least, it is also naive in its own way to speak of the alternative like it’s a “just do it” alternative, when it involves a lot of logistical hurdles and sacrifice, and is not the sort of thing that is advisable to speak of flippantly in contexts where it’s easy for the state to view it as threatening, especially when considering its violent history of suppression and infiltration. I mean, hell, The Black Panther Party had its kitchens targeted when doing a breakfast program for schoolkids. People work with what they can get away with where they can, in order to build momentum and organize, in the context they’re currently living in. The empire both plays by its own rules and has a certain amount of own-hands-tying due to a need to maintain some degree of legitimacy of its layers of legalese, in order not to collapse the facade of “democracy.” Sometimes there is room within that to break through the propaganda.
An example that comes to mind recently is the contradiction showing in how the US talks about Palestinian resistance leaders vs. how israel acts as a state. Helping people who are already on the side of “free Palestine” notice how they call somebody a terrorist who is resisting occupation. This sort of thing is obviously not making a revolution on its own, but the point here is, use what is there to use. That is what PSL appears to be doing, in spirit. They are using electoralism as a vehicle, rather than an end goal. The question, in other words, is not, “Is this the end-all, be-all that will end imperialism once and for all and bring about global communism?” The question is, “Is this advancing the goals of anti-imperialism and communism? Is it contributing or detracting from?” Sometimes the answer really is “it’s detracting from” and in those cases, reformist-like movements can be more of a capture of revolutionary energy than a help. It’s a fine line. Probably one example of that in the US is the corporate pollution(dilution?) of the black lives matter movement, which was already vulnerable to being watered down from (as far as I can tell/remember) being more of a moral value around which people were spontaneously rallying than a centralized organization with ideological discipline and specific goals.