One of the reasons they only teach whitewashed history at school
ITT:
Everyone thinking that the only two options are being quiet or being violent.
Strikes are currently making those in power very uncomfortable, and are resulting in genuine progress for workers.
In my area, people camping out in thousand year old trees has protected them time and again from being illegally logged.
Black Lives Matter protests were loud and made the powerful uncomfortable, and despite media narratives it wasn't "violent protesters" that made the powerful uncomfortable.
It is true that any form of protest that is loud and inconveniencing enough to actually be productive will be met with state violence.
It's also true that some working for progress do use violence. But make no mistake, it's not guns that made those in power uncomfortable when it came to Malcom X and the Black Panthers.
The most radical and intimidating (to those in power) things the Black Panthers did were to give free food to schoolchildren, and free healthcare at their People’s Free Medical Clinics.
Building community and mutual aid is subversive.
Building community and mutual aid makes those in power uncomfortable.
Building community and mutual aid is subversive.
This. Both the government and the major corporations depend on being able to extract wealth from real people getting what they need. If we build dual power structures, help one another out and cut the owner class out of the transaction entirely, we weaken them. Growing food in your garden is revolutionary. Clothing swaps are revolutionary. Cutting the old lady next door's lawn, then eating the soup she made is an act that strikes at the fundamental underpinnings of the power structure set up by those who think that they should be entitled to our labor because they've been arbitrarily designated as the "owners" of things. We can and should remove them from the equation entirely.
Building community and mutual aid makes those in power uncomfortable.
Small mutual aid for local communities grow out into large social aid organizations that have political power. Politicians can make them redundant by unemployment, healthcare and pensions, or try to nip them in the bud.
Why wasn't I taught about the free food and medical care part of what they did?
You were quietly taught that armed black people were scary. That’s what they wanted you to remember, not what they armed themselves for.
Ugh.. this just makes me feel all sorts of awful. I struggle to find the exact words.
One of the most subversive things you can do IMO is move your life and wealth to China
or get hired for a gubment job and slack off/sell seekrits
if you can't do those two, then comes the 5 finger discount and IRL minecraft
IRL socialist networks need to be secretive and disguised as something else. Maybe even "community watch" or something
There's a reason people on the left who actually bother actually learning a bit of history become Marxists.
Honestly, because it has a gun in it and I didn't really think about it much. I improved it now.
Look at the US, they begged England for representation. Even after they gave an ultimatum they begged to stay but it didn’t work and they had a war that France won
Anytime I hear people say dumb shit like this I just start listing all the times anti-abortion activists either successfully murdered or attempted to murder their political opponents in the name of the pro life movement. A hit list of judges, physicians, nuns, retired old ladies that like to knit, they absolutely didn't give a single fuck about any of this struggle session bullshit wreckers like to trot out to sabotage effective resistance
Then I end with the date Roe got overturned, but they still somehow cannot connect the dots and want to talk about registering new voters or some fucking bullshit
My take home message is it turns out that when white people actually want something they magically know what effective forms of protest actually look like (???!)
Eating breakfast won't force change
Brushing your teeth won't, either
Nor will telling your mother you love her
Being an anarchist doesn't mean every action you do has to be praxis
If I do it by myself I go to prison, my life is ruined, and nothing changes. If I get several thousand people to do it with me then several people go to prison, a few probably die, my odds are probably pretty good and things have a nonzero chance of being changed.
Your 3rd grader conception of hypocrisy doesn't apply here.
The entirety of history also shows that a whole lot of people need to be ready to die for the cause for social change to happen.
So, still feeling up for it?
That is the question:
live in an unjust and amoral society
or die trying to make a righteous one.
The stoics, at least Seneca, opted for the former.
or die trying to make a righteous one.
. . . and realize that your new, righteous society will quickly collapse into corruption and amorality because a society is filled with people.
Far more people than you seem to think so are feeling up to it, risk of bodily harm nonwithstanding. That same history shows that whole lots of people do and have gotten that fed up.
The current challenge imo is the hyperfocused and extremely well funded tools to disorganize and fracture populaces globally.
They are so abstract, so psychologically targeted and so pervasive that they enable the rise of fascism again even though many of the players are frankly cartoonishly inept (more so than in the past; fascism is cunning and bullish, but seldom clever) to the point that the banality of evil of yesterday is nearly preferable to the bumbling cruelty of today.
Yes, still feeling up to it, but while the precipice nears, there's still both time to turn the car around and get ready to violently brake. We're just careful drivers until there's a need to maneuver.
