Please discuss! No uncritical sectarianism, bad faith arguments, etc.
Important questions:
- Is the strategy most socialist organizations in the US are using, in your opinion, a good one? What else should they do?
- As individual socialist, what do you think we should be doing? What groups are worth joining?
- What should be done about the sudden rise of socially reactionary beliefs and laws across the country?
Reading posted by users:
Where’s the Winter Palace?, posted by @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml, written by unknown author, I checked and could not find one on the article.
Conclusion from this text, that I think summarizes it’s premise quite well:
We believe that, in the U.S. in 2018, the truly important theoretical tasks have not been solved. We are in a period of a nascent socialist movement since the 2008 financial crisis. We should not be afraid of new ideas, and should look forward instead of harping on the 20th century. Without bending to reformism or adventurism, we must feel free to put everything back on the table and come to build strategy and theory through struggle.
(Emphasis mine)
I will get to the rest of this later, but I completely disagree with your first two sentences. I especially disagree with your assessment of the BLM stuff.
The left cannot, and will not, ever find success by insisting that workers have to care about their cause. People, generally speaking, do not listen to insistence or abstract reason. Why should they? They’ve been duped and lied to by the United States government for longer than they can remember using those same things. When we, intentionally or otherwise, insist that the proletariat listen to us rather than the other way around, we are going to end up with no support and no power.
The way we build power is by showing the proletariat that we are a functional method to get what they want.
The BLM movement didn’t fail because we failed to generalize it, it failed because we failed to show how we were the best way to accomplish it’s goals.
The challenges we face when trying to cooperate with other groups on fronts (such as queer liberation) are tactical issues to be faced. The purist vision of a vanguard is definitely not working and has historically never existed.
That’s only scratching the surface. 6 of the original BLM activists from the 2014 Ferguson protests were found dead under “mysterious circumstances”. You can bet your ass the alphabet soup agencies worked overtime to COINTELPRO the fuck out of that movement.
It’s definitely not the left’s fault. Without constant fed involvement we would have been able to eventually organize a large movement successfully regardless of whatever tactics we used.