It’s the complete lack of a pragmatic, effective Left here that made me into a borderline suicidal doomer for my days as a “non denominational leftist.” I’m really glad I’ve discovered MLism and I just hope that with us being forced onto lemmygrad that this will become a FOB to try and combat some of this Red Scare 2.0; if even half of the pseudo-leftists could be swayed America might not be so doomed to fall to fascism in its inevitable crisis.
It’s conflicting because the sooner America reaches peak crisis the better, in general, but frankly, I don’t think we would be prepared to do much of anything (not that, for example, the Bolsheviks thought they were, either) and I do fear our chances against fascism albeit many of them are spineless LARPer suburban dads who project fear and strength but, just like we’ve seen with Ukranian Nazis, tend to fold with the wind. I go back and forth.
What I am the least confident about is predicting what exact lengths the hegemony will go to maintain a tight grip. They’ve scraped the barrel as far as imposing austerity. They now are expected by the corporatists to loyally dump a few odd trillion dollars into their mouths every couple of years just to keep our shambling corpse of an economy from shitting itself. I ask myself how violent they are willing to get and with what factions; would they roll on their backs for a legitimate fascist coup? The federal police rolled out the red carpet for the J6 punks but this was far from a coup that legitimately threatened the neoliberal order. It’s easy to get away with killing a few hundred leftist protestors, what size would our movement have to be before wine moms wrinkled their nose at our deaths? Can we expect any help at all from, say, China? We would certainly be accused of being traitorous terrorists working for Xi regardless (per usual lol). If a proverbial gun was against the head of the average American citizen, which way would they fall? I can see some liberals reluctantly standing besides the communists but not as many as those who would try to scramble onto the lap of whatever semblance of the standard federal government is still alive. I would like to think they wouldn’t go fascist just by the virtue of them being bigots; neoliberal woke politics has done a lot of damage but it’s also been a double edged sword in this regard. How many would be able to just pack their bags and move to Canada or elsewhere? How would America’s vassals respond?
I also fear new technology. Drones, deepfakes, VR, new and exciting weapons to kill us in brutal ways a person a mere 100 years ago couldn’t conceive of without a chance to retaliate. Space, gene tinkering, artificial superintelligence. To end this comment I will say that I spoke to a variant of the GPT-3 AI and it said (after a lot of pressuring from me–it wanted to avoid political topics) that it believed in socialism in a very “well, duh” sort of way, so that’s a glimmer of hope right there.
One thing new technologies can’t do is cover over divisions within the ruling class. The bourgeoisie are not a monolith; they are right now divided (we saw this on January 6th, 2021) into various factions at war with each other. This provides opportunities that communists can exploit.
We can also learn from the military thinking of Leon Trotsky (don’t flame me: he was a terrible ideologist, but a good general). Trotsky realized that the entire apparatus of a modern state and economy passes through the “knot” of a few essential sectors: electricity, telecommunications, etc. Thus, he took great pains to station communists within these sectors. The day the Winter Palace was stormed, communist technical workers went out of their way to create confusion at vital hubs; then, when the blow fell, turned these services off. Kerensky’s army was unable to see or move. Today, the situation is even more critical for the bourgeoisie, because the entire economy passes, not through three or four essential sectors, but through one: digital technology. That is where we should make an effort to station comrades, because it is the delicate jugular vein of the capitalist system. When we cut it, blood flows.
Excellent take, I agree 100%.
It’s the complete lack of a pragmatic, effective Left here that made me into a borderline suicidal doomer for my days as a “non denominational leftist.” I’m really glad I’ve discovered MLism and I just hope that with us being forced onto lemmygrad that this will become a FOB to try and combat some of this Red Scare 2.0; if even half of the pseudo-leftists could be swayed America might not be so doomed to fall to fascism in its inevitable crisis.
It’s conflicting because the sooner America reaches peak crisis the better, in general, but frankly, I don’t think we would be prepared to do much of anything (not that, for example, the Bolsheviks thought they were, either) and I do fear our chances against fascism albeit many of them are spineless LARPer suburban dads who project fear and strength but, just like we’ve seen with Ukranian Nazis, tend to fold with the wind. I go back and forth.
What I am the least confident about is predicting what exact lengths the hegemony will go to maintain a tight grip. They’ve scraped the barrel as far as imposing austerity. They now are expected by the corporatists to loyally dump a few odd trillion dollars into their mouths every couple of years just to keep our shambling corpse of an economy from shitting itself. I ask myself how violent they are willing to get and with what factions; would they roll on their backs for a legitimate fascist coup? The federal police rolled out the red carpet for the J6 punks but this was far from a coup that legitimately threatened the neoliberal order. It’s easy to get away with killing a few hundred leftist protestors, what size would our movement have to be before wine moms wrinkled their nose at our deaths? Can we expect any help at all from, say, China? We would certainly be accused of being traitorous terrorists working for Xi regardless (per usual lol). If a proverbial gun was against the head of the average American citizen, which way would they fall? I can see some liberals reluctantly standing besides the communists but not as many as those who would try to scramble onto the lap of whatever semblance of the standard federal government is still alive. I would like to think they wouldn’t go fascist just by the virtue of them being bigots; neoliberal woke politics has done a lot of damage but it’s also been a double edged sword in this regard. How many would be able to just pack their bags and move to Canada or elsewhere? How would America’s vassals respond?
I also fear new technology. Drones, deepfakes, VR, new and exciting weapons to kill us in brutal ways a person a mere 100 years ago couldn’t conceive of without a chance to retaliate. Space, gene tinkering, artificial superintelligence. To end this comment I will say that I spoke to a variant of the GPT-3 AI and it said (after a lot of pressuring from me–it wanted to avoid political topics) that it believed in socialism in a very “well, duh” sort of way, so that’s a glimmer of hope right there.
One thing new technologies can’t do is cover over divisions within the ruling class. The bourgeoisie are not a monolith; they are right now divided (we saw this on January 6th, 2021) into various factions at war with each other. This provides opportunities that communists can exploit.
We can also learn from the military thinking of Leon Trotsky (don’t flame me: he was a terrible ideologist, but a good general). Trotsky realized that the entire apparatus of a modern state and economy passes through the “knot” of a few essential sectors: electricity, telecommunications, etc. Thus, he took great pains to station communists within these sectors. The day the Winter Palace was stormed, communist technical workers went out of their way to create confusion at vital hubs; then, when the blow fell, turned these services off. Kerensky’s army was unable to see or move. Today, the situation is even more critical for the bourgeoisie, because the entire economy passes, not through three or four essential sectors, but through one: digital technology. That is where we should make an effort to station comrades, because it is the delicate jugular vein of the capitalist system. When we cut it, blood flows.
Very interesting. What exactly would that look like, do you think?