So I get on Piefed, bc there apparently the tankie problem is more addressed, and 50% of what I see is tons of posts calling for violent solutions to the fascist craze going on in the US right now, but not a single person anywhere calling out that these posts are largely 2 accounts and both have, by now, been on this very community documented as left masquerading apologists for the other (hostile) foreign camp. Somehow, all conversation on the fediverse, and Im sure everywhere else on the social media I dont consume, is dominated by, how much more can we take until we [REDACTED]?
I’m not here to shit on people lashing, nor am I even here to debate the morality of violent solutions to violent times. I’m here to say one thing and one thing only,
THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FOUGHT WITH GUNS.
WE NEED A GENERAL STRIKE!
Even here on the fediverse, threadiverse, or whatever fucking thing yall decide to call it next, where you think you are so far away an immune from it, the oligarchs are still programming your thoughts. Despite decent education having indirectly taught it for years that it is easier to mobilize MASS amounts of people nonviolently, and that teaching much more directly that the size of a strike needed to bring down a country is really not all that great, we’re all here jerking off to violent self-righteous fantasies in which we, the super martyr, emerge either victorious through trials and blazes, or perish in the noble cause and are carried high above the shoulders of the screaming masses, cozied up in their most precious memories.
Fuck that.
Be real.
The rich even control all platforms of communication. Call your friends and stop working. That’s what actually works.
Your demands should be: the immediate dissolution of this entire farce of an administration, and the immediate undoing of all laws enacted during their reign of terror.
Or fight against the surveillance state sponsored by Palanturd, complete with militarized drones.
Either way no rats.
https://lemmy.world/post/29072279 relevant thread
But yea, a lot of tankies love to hate the fact that we’re not immediately resorting to violence to install some authoritarian flavor of communism or something or another and scream about bLuEmAGa all the time
Can the ballot box fail? Sure. Is it guaranteed to be ineffective? No. Are corporate Democrats good? Fuck no. But violence isnt ruled out, it’s just the last resort
Yeah. You can solve the problem in a bunch of different ways:
- If you have enough people unified and together, you can run candidates and win elections with actual humans with good intentions, instead of this crew of criminal ghouls who are running the country
- If you have enough people unified and together, you can stage a general strike with a clear list of demands, and bring the existing system to its knees until it takes those specific actions without having to go through the whole tedious “governmental” bit or figure out any new system
- If you have enough people unified and together, you can just fight a war and replace the current system with something better (although, be very careful what new system you put in place, often violent revolutions are followed by a system even worse than the bad system they were fighting to overthrow).
The problem comes when you don’t have enough people unified and together. Trump is actually doing a lot to try to create that in the populace, but it’s not happening. Maybe a little bit, we’re doing way better on that score than the German people did, but still it’s not even close to what we need. People are scattered, they’re on their phones, they’re working all the time just to stay in their housing and fed. They don’t have news, and they don’t have the education and historical background they would need in order to really make something solid and good if they did manage to seize the reins. It only really becomes a big deal when ICE comes to your community. A lot of people I talk to have no idea that any of this is even going on, or have a wildly distorted view of it, because they are completely tuned out from anything resembling information about the world and events.
I think we’re just fucked. I think it’s the end. Trump isn’t even the worst of it, although he has the potential to bring down the final curtain in ways that will be hard to come back from. But the show was in its final act long before he came along.
I honestly wish I knew something to do about it. These problems are long and deep, they don’t arise overnight and the answers don’t come quickly even when people start working on them.
Agreed with most everything you said, but I’ll point out a silver lining on the doomerism:
Germany exists today, is unified, and is by most sane accounts a free and democratic country with strict anti-fascism laws.
It took 50 years of turmoil - war, genocide, calamity, separation, and untold suffering, and even today is not perfect - but it exists. If the fate of America is to be that of Germany’s, then eventually it will improve. I don’t expect to see the terminus of that arc, in 50 years I will likely be dead, but I do expect it to exist and for it to be better than I see it now.
True. And London is still around, and Istanbul, after their empires fell. But there’s enormous suffering in the meantime, as you said, and the empires usually don’t come back once their day is over.
I’m not trying to be pure doomerism. Things will continue regardless. Part of it is just trying to come to grips with the reality and what’s coming, to figure out what I could even do, where is the solution or the survival to maybe be found.
I feel you, friend
A general strike would be the end game. To get there you have to do community organizing, set up mutual aid groups, unionize workforces, engage in union solidarity, etc etc. When you lay all that groundwork then you can start thinking about a general strike. Expecting normal, everyday people with kids, mortgages, sick family members, and no class consciousness to rise up spontaneously, risking their jobs and livelihood, is unrealistic to say the least. They need ways to feed their families, care for their children, and maintain their communities without the help of corporate/oligarchic systems, all set up in advance. And then you need to understand that a strike with a schedule is a lost cause as well; you have to be able to strike indefinitely for those in power to get the message. Otherwise they will just wait it out.
I agree, but OP is advocating pacifism, which is naive and idealistic. Nonviolence protects the oligarchy, because the oligarchy relies on violence to exist and perpetrates violence continuously.
Pacifism worked for gandhi lol
Gandhi was one individual.
Political change never comes from one individual.
I assume you are trying to argue based on an assumption that India gained independence without anyone perpetrating violence against colonial rule, which is completely inaccurate.
you make a lot of assumptions
Did pacifism work for the civil rights movement?
I was being charitable, because you failed to present a coherent argument.
Your “gotcha” questions are not as persuasive as you think. Rather, they reveal your own ignorance of the broader history.
You should educate yourself, instead of charging headfirst with such a cocksure attitude.
word salad
That wasn’t a word salad. It’s perfectly coherent, even if you don’t want to acknowledge it.
tbf, some of it is just venting. I’ve certainly had my fair-share of guillotine-posting and molotov-posting even though I don’t believe it’s realistic; the sensation of powerlessness lends a certain appeal to power fantasies, if you will.
But yes, I agree - a general strike is both more viable and less likely to have… unintended consequences.
!plt@sh.itjust.works might interest you conceptually, though it’s not very active at the moment.
Those who wield power never relinquish it voluntarily.
When strikes become a credible threat to the consolidation of power by oligarchs, the latter quite enthusiastically resort to violent repression.
In fact, strikes becoming a right by legal recognition was itself a concession that workers won through struggle.
We live under immensely violent systems. The only means of securing better conditions for everyone across society is dismantling such systems, which is not possible except through at least some violence.
Please stop living the idealistic fantasy that political power ultimately derives from elsewhere than a threat of violence.
holy shit is that Gary Busey?
