we’re never getting change outside of third worldism bruh
source link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1akcbol/if_the_revolution_comes_people_will_start_eating/
we’re never getting change outside of third worldism bruh
source link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1akcbol/if_the_revolution_comes_people_will_start_eating/
I mean… eh? There’s definitely a large community of people who just kinda post a lot about Leftism and then Fed-jacket anyone caught doing actual organizing. There’s folks who try to do electoralism and completely fail at it, then fish around for this direct action stuff and come up empty, then just get burned out and go terminally online (I say, staring directly into a mirror).
There’s a certain Waiting For Godot thing going on with lots of self-proclaimed Leftists, where we just kinda sit around and debate as the world passes by, and we try to figure out if we’re actually getting any closer to Leftism without really doing anything (or grasping what it is that we can do). There’s a lot of fantasizing and wish-casting about what a Revolution might look like, without any serious effort being applied. And there’s a lot of real honest to fucking god revolutionary struggle taking place completely outside our sensory range, such that we’re consumed by despair.
So… I sympathize with this sentiment, at least somewhat. There’s definitely a certain “Second Coming”-esque attitude towards the idea of Revolution, because its only described to us in the moment of its apotheosis. You get to read about 1917 as a thing that happens all of a sudden, rather than a culmination of half a century of building pressure blowing the lid off in an unexpected place. You get to read about the fucking First Coming as a thing that happens one day in a manger, rather than the cumulative pressure of centuries of Roman imperialism in the Levant.
I don’t think the guy’s strictly wrong. He’s just phrased it like an asshole.
I’m also on team “I don’t think this was the right phrasing but the fundamental idea is essentially correct.” Like, I really can picture myself on both sides of this argument. I think that having a genuine belief in a “destined eventuality” of a revolution is important to counter capitalist realism, and it’s really only in the last year or so that I feel like I’ve fully transcended that doomerism and believe in the very depths of my heart that capitalism will indeed be overthrown just like how feudalism and the slave empires were. So I think it’s heartening when people talk about a revolution as if it’s something that very much could happen rather than being caught in spirals of doomerism and pessimism, even if that speculation is imperfect and even has some liberal brainworms writhing around in there.
I also think that believing that a mythical revolution will save us is, more than anything else, simply ahistorical. Things are going to get worse before they get better. A LOT worse. Even once “the revolution” is occurring. Even for a number of years after “the revolution” has officially been won. It’ll all be so much worse that the 2020s will be looked upon with fond nostalgia and mythologized as the “pre-war” times where things were simple and happy. And, most importantly, I feel like this idea of “The Revolution” being something almost divinely created and bestowed upon us, rather than actively fought for with the death and sacrifice of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, leads to a big fracture with the idea of putting in effort towards The Revolution. How many Tumblr and Reddit radlibs are actively cheering on Hamas and Hezbollah (and, god forbid, Iran - the object of so much scorn over the last few years due to all the “my people yearn to be free, let’s overthrow the patriarchal and women-hating regime of Iran!” propaganda and color revolution attempts). I would bet that most of them are currently dejectedly commenting about how much the situation in Gaza sucks and how it’s all doomed, while the Resistance continues its incredible fighting and is bringing Israel to its knees. The Resistance are working towards the revolution, but not The Revolution, and so they cannot be supported.
kinda incoherent further notes
I have trouble ascribing any particular blame for this tendency or making moral judgements, though. Making a comparison between socialism and religious belief only leads to the second question of “Okay, why is it bad to have a religious belief in an eventual blissful reward for all the earthly suffering?” And I can’t really answer that. It’s not “bad”, it’s a coping mechanism, as the “opiate of the masses” quote demonstrates. Not the “cope” sort of coping mechanism, either - every human alive has to have a coping mechanism (even if at a subconscious level) to remain functional in daily life. You can call yourself a nihilist all you want - when you’re done with the daydreaming or philosophizing about the utter cosmic pointlessness of life, you then go do the laundry and go make lunch - very pointless activities in the grand scale of even your country, let alone the Earth or the Universe - rather than lying prone on the floor until you die of thirst.
Ultimately I have a fairly deterministic view of life and human society and all that. While I was anxious for a few years of my life about the seeming utter impotence of, say, the Western left and its organizations, and how we’re spiralling towards fascism and climate hell, I’m not really anxious about that anymore. The beliefs and actions of people aren’t really determined by what is told to them; “We’ve gotta stop climate change! We have to do socialism NOW! If we don’t then the planet is toast and billions might die!” They’re determined by their immediate conditions and surroundings. As conditions become more dire, the revolutionary potential of people correspondingly increases - the mistake is misjudging how bad things have to get before enough people decide that the cost of rebelling against the system is worth it. A naive leftist will look at every headline of “Thing gets worse!” and go “Please, NOW things have to be bad enough! There’s not much more that capitalism and the empire can take!” But there is a lot more it can take. A few ten thousand more dire article headlines like that over the next couple decades and we might be getting somewhere.
So, a belief that the course of history is bending towards communism, sooner or later, is my coping mechanism. Previously I thought that “Everything will be okay in the end - if it’s not okay, it’s not the end,” was a stupid, naive quote that belongs alongside a dozen other inspirational quotes on some imageboard, but I guess that’s now my guiding star, who’d have thunk it. It’s why I can really empathize with the radlibs on tumblr and reddit who talk about how “Oh, when The Revolution happens, we can have all these cool things, like…” And when they inevitably talk about how the USSR or current-day China is a totalitarian nightmare and we need to democratically vote in socialism but until then we just have to vote for Biden, etc etc, I now realize that their ideology and material conditions just need a little more time in the oven to cook. They aren’t doomed to be radlib morons with no sense of strategy forever - the difficulties of the future will harden them into the revolutionary communists of this generation and future ones. If not, then the poorer nations will overthrow the system from the outside, and those radlibs will die mad in the ruins of Western cities. Communism is coming, love it or hate it.
I really resonate with a lot of what you’re saying. I think one of the most important things you said is about how ugly the revolution is likely to be when it comes. I think a big part of that is that revolutionary change is very likely to come from the right first. By that I just mean any kind of real destruction or alteration of the constitutional order.
The western left are really kind of stuck doing triage on a really sick and miserable society. I know a lot of countries are like this too but the reality of modern car based life and infrastructure is so incredibly alienating and disempowering in its own way. It’s very difficult to work against. It is a society with no institutional left of any kind, horrible societal issues mostly stemming from poverty, union density that is only just starting to rebound, and a paranoia inducing panopticon. I think the reality is that the fundamentals of unionizing and community organizing will always be important. but also we must be creative and deliberate about how we present leftist ideas and actions and always seek small innocuous opportunities to just be an exemplary member of our communities and workplaces. That doesn’t mean do extra work for less money, but always do what you can with what you have to go out of your way to meet your neighbors and co-workers. You don’t have to be good at your job, just be friendly with everyone and look busy! Know their names and problems. Even if you can’t organize something now we should always try and behave as the membership of the party we want to have.
All this is to say that I do not look forward to what is coming from the right, but in the reaction to that there will be opportunity.
I may be naive in saying that but I will be very curious to see how things develop in Argentina because I think we may be in for something similar but less drastic but still worse in its own way. Only time will tell but one thing I am sure of is that war with Iran will bring lean times like they have not seen for a very long time in AmeriKkka.
Oops I think I mentally ascribed a frame of bad faith and total rejection of communism in the Tumblr post that doesn’t actually exist. Thank you for the reframe.
I agree that there’s certainly something there. Like a sense that the project is so unbelievably overwhelming that it seems uncertain what action would even help, so people console themselves with waiting and bystanding.
(and I’m people)
The “everything short of my version of True Leftism is useless” part has a point, too. We’ll critically support countries that aren’t remotely leftist (Russia, Iran), but won’t give an inch to American politicians who are anything short of Lenin. That applies to American politicians who have as much to do with imperialism as you or I, too.
I get where it comes from, but it’s not internally consistent, which is bad on its own and also makes it harder to communicate these ideas to other people.
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If you use that sort of 10 million foot view then everyone outside of AES states is a different shade of Nazi. This isn’t a useful frame of analysis.
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You wouldn’t say the only Nazis in Nazi Germany were the leaders, right? Obviously their enthusiastic supporters were Nazis, too, and you might say the libs who went along for the ride were just a moderate type of Nazi. So if you’re calling the political leadership of every country outside of AES states different flavors of Nazi, you’re calling much of the world Nazis, which is what I mean by “not a useful frame of analysis.” We have to go into detail enough to parse out which people can be brought around to our side and which can’t.
Those two are useful to the extent they start people down the leftist path, and harmful to the extent people get stuck thinking they’re the best possible solution. When we’re talking to baby leftists we shouldn’t say “this person who brought you left of the Democratic Party is a Nazi,” because we’ll sound unhinged, and because (as I outlined above) that’s not useful analysis anyway. Our take on the Bernies and AOCs of the world should be “they have some good ideas, but here’s where their failings are and why you should move past them.”