Hi, I’m here to announce that everyone pushing the standard Hexbear party line on the protest movement is a loser and wrong. I already know the weak-ass arguments you’re gonna make and every single one of them reveals your disconnection from any actual organizing. Let’s go through them one by one. If you have another that you think Marx Failed to Consider, please bring it up and I will explain how you are wrong in that way as well.
This was funded by the Waltons
No, one Walton bought an ad in the NYT. Who fucking cares? It has no material bearing on the movement whatsoever. There’s no organization money is being funneled to other than the Democratic Party and Indivisble, which is not different in any way. The on-the-ground organizers in most cities and towns are not receiving a penny from the left’s George Soros conspiracy. They’re just normal people (and, to the next point, lots of leftists).
The Democrats are using this to steal the leftist energy of the masses
The Democrats certainly want to do that, but on the ground reports indicate they are losing all over the country. That’s because leftists (especially 
) are not leaving this space uncontested. I have spent an enormous amount of time putting in the work to earn the trust and legitimacy necessary to place a bunch of literal revolutionary communists in the leadership of the local movement. Not in some sneaky, behind the scenes way, but out in the open, succeeding specifically because we are literal revolutionary communists who never shut up about it. The Democrats, by my accounting, are losing the struggle in more places than not. If you refuse to engage because you’re afraid the Dems will suck your leftist soul, you’re just conceding the struggle and granting them victory. They don’t co-opt by pressing a button, they co-opt because they have the resources to take leadership and then defuse. So far they have failed to do so specifically because the space is not empty and the communists are fighting harder to reach the masses (since we actually have an appealing program).
The attendees are all Kamala-loving liberals who just want to go back to brunch
If you had ever bothered to go to one of these events and talk politics to people, you’ll discover a very broad array of political perspectives, including a strong trend towards explicit support for socialism. Yes, of course, the PMC bug-eating libs are there - who cares? They are by no means the only attendees. Maybe you’re just Too Cool to be around someone who reminds you of your mom, but the rest of us are finding deep political discontent and activating it. When one of my comrades gets on the mic and says “we need to break from the democrats and do a literal socialist revolution”, the crowd response, by and large, is incredibly positive. The retired dentists and accountants in the crowd grumble and whine, but they are a minority - and they don’t leave. They stay and listen to the arguments we make. They say things like “you’re right, I just don’t think it’s possible”. They very, very rarely say “you’re going too far”.
This is a disorganized mess that’s going to fizzle out
50501 and other decentralized spontaneous protest movements never last, but they do give an opportunity for dedicated political organizers to intervene on a stage where thousands of disaffected liberals and Democrat voters are asking “what is to be done?”. If you decide not to show up and answer that question, the Democrat machine will coordinate the demobilization of this movement. If you do show up and you deliver the political argument you believe in. If you show up with the AV equipment, safety marshalls, march route, signs, and speaker list - the bare minimum for a halfway serious organizer - then you don’t just hand out flyers and talk at a table but set the entire political line of the event. And in doing so, you demonstrate the leadership of the socialist movement and win a lot of those attendees to your side. If you can plug them into actual organizing work, you can bring them into permanent political motion. Does it matter if 95% of these people just go home and never bother to do anything besides another protest? If those 5% join the movement in a meaningful way, that’s half a million new comrades.
Mao says: “All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail.”
Stop thinking about what you want to do and achieve and start thinking about the fact that we needs tens of millions of people to support revolutionary socialism in the US in order to get anything done. They are out in the streets begging for you to explain this to them.
These are just peaceful protests that won’t achieve anything because they aren’t revolutionary.
Lenin says: “What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, and he was right. We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot.”
You’re doing the ultra-leftism of conflating tactics with strategy. Our tactic in this moment is to intervene in these protests to convince people of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist political organization as the only solution to our sick society. Right now, mass revolutionary socialist consciousness and organization does not exist in the USA. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out open revolutionary militancy. If the current crop of people who are in some way directly involved in revolutionary socialist organizing (certainly a lower bar than revolutionary guerrilla warfare or sabotage) turned today to armed struggle, all ~100,000 of them would lose. The broader periphery of people who semi-passively support that objective through attendance at events and monetary contribution is probably a few million. The masses who would passively support probably number in the tens of millions, but that passive support is not particularly useful. And the number of people who would simply sit by and watch it happen is probably over 100 million. Every one of those groups needs to be elevated to the next stage - observer to passive supporter, passive supporter to semi-passive periphery, semi-passive periphery to revolutionary organizer, revolutionary organizer to doing the literal revolution. Each of these layers of the movement have a symbiotic relationship with the others that strengthen the entire struggle.
Here’s the key lesson: WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.
Amerikkkans will never do a revolution because they are labor aristokkkrauts
Ok, thank you for you contribution, you can resume sitting in a hole since your prescription is inactivity.
Please tell me your other weak-ass reasons why you’re correct to sit on your ass.
I agree but to imply that everyone has the same “starting point” and “capacity” for “change” is cope. We are animals just like Chickens, not some sort of magical existentialist soul-being that has unlimited capacity for change. Its just not a scientific perspective.
Cope again. There is a big gap between simply “talking to other people” and “talking to complete strangers about sensitive topics in a volatile social environment such that you successfully and clearly articulate your position while managing potential bad-faith responses and ideally avoiding conflict”. Normal social skills don’t cut it here, you need to be very proficient. And its not realistic to expect everyone to reach this level of proficiency just as its unrealistic to expect everyone to have the capacity to understand advanced rocket science.
This is also a demonstration of the empathy gap phenomenon: you are someone who is good at socializing and therefore cannot understand the realities of someone who isn’t.
I’ll read that article in a moment,
That is wrong. You people go on and on about how poverty is deserved because everyone is born with the capacity to become rich if they just improooooved and worked hard enough. Its a core tenet of neoliberalism. Americans are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who believe that “economic outcomes are linked to personal growth”.
Its a scientific fact that due to a combination of environment and genetics, people have limits to the extent that they can radically change aspects of themselves.
And if you want the sort of radical change that you talk about, you need a high level of support since that sort of change isn’t possible independently.
Individually? No. Collectively, as a species? Yes.
That is not what I’m saying. People individually have the capacity to improve and learn new things but this capacity is different for every person.
I’m saying that your ideas are downstream from the delusion that people have near-limitless potential which is then naturally used to shame everyone who isn’t successful according to some pre-defined ideal instead of seeking a greater understanding of the situation and what can realistically be done to help.
Communicating on the internet via posts in a familiar environment where you have the time and energy to think carefully about how you respond by pressing buttons to change a readout on a screen is completely different to actually talking to people face-to-face where you need quick thinking, good social skills, confidence (being sufficiently intimidating/pretty).
Its a completely different skillset and from an organisational standpoint, the time and energy spent to train someone who sucks at socializing to do so would be better spent improving their pre-existing skills for necessary support duties. Its like if an army expected all of its infantry to be highly skilled special forces units and then got surprised when nobody was around to cook the meals and inventory the ammunition and all.
EDIT: *However whether the user can do the task or not is up to him to decide at the end of the day and you and I have to respect this decision.
This pivot is genuinely obnoxious. We were talking about a skill that many people have and this one person does not. The chicken metaphor is implicitly in the context of other birds who can fly that far, because we aren’t talking about something that no one can do. That’s also why it’s a terrible metaphor, because it begs the question of people having wildly and fundamentally different innate potentials by casting them as species, as though someone is being asked to produce spider silk, breathe underwater, or survive while only weighing a few pounds.
We do not all have the same starting point, but that so many of us can do it proves that it is possible for most of us, and there’s is no indication that our comrade has some specific mental disability or something that prevent them from doing what most people can do. Yes, maybe they don’t have the same beneficial socialization that people-persons have, but that doesn’t preclude them from improving and it doesn’t preclude them from reaching the level of competence, of being mildly helpful rather than a hindrance. Maybe there is some factor we don’t know about that will prevent this, but we don’t know about it, so assuming that encouragement is a trap is complete ridiculous.
It’s so disgusting to pretend that it’s just science that people simply can’t improve even a little because, idk, they went to a bad school or something. Yes, real disadvantages exist and they can be catastrophic for people’s lives, but what you are describing is a bizarre essentialism that is more at home with aristocratic notions about the highborn just being superior to the rest of us. It has no place in science to say that someone cannot be habilitated to a relatively normal human skill because they currently happen to be bad at it and feel pessimistic about improving, because it has been shown to be empirically wrong countless times. “Scientific perspective” my ass.
Talk about having opinions that are downstream from absurd and antisocial ideals
Are you sure that “many people” have the necessary social skills to engage strangers about political topics? Furthermore I agree that people who have major difficulty socializing are in the minority, but this isn’t some excuse to minimize the gravity of such a situation as just a matter of individual “skill improvement”.
I explained what I meant in an earlier post. “Potential” is just wishful thinking until realized and it isnt just about “innate potential”, its about where a person is at in terms of their abilities, strengths, weaknesses, due to how they have ended up at a certain point in life. People do vary in their abilities based on a combination of their genetics and their environment, not everyone has the ability to become competent at a given skill.
This is cope because I never said this and explicitly said the opposite.
What are you talking about man? If person A has worse social skills relative to person B, this does by no means imply that person B is a “better person” than person A nor that person A does not surpass person B in another skill nor that there are a race of highborn beings superior to both.
I’m not talking about holding basic conversation with friends and loved ones here. Talking to random strangers in a fascist country about leftist politics in a chaotic environment like a protest is not a “normal human skill”. Furthermore the term “habilitated” is doing a lot of work here because some people may need a lot of support.
How is it an “absurd and antisocial ideal” to state that people who are larger and/or prettier than average would be more confident in social situations, especially when talking to strangers?