Genuinly curious. With your plan to vote for the democrats to dig out of the hole the US has dug itself, how will you be able to vote for the party that you want to vote for later?
Dam can one ask a question without geting barated for speling mistakes? I’ll refere you to some resources about how revolution might make things better but I’m not sure if you interested in engaging with a proper conversation atm.
The only reason you wouldn’t want to break things right now means you still think there is good in the system. The system is working as intended and absolutely needs to be broken so something better can be made.
Alternatively, there can be the simple recognition that breaking the system that exists will result in a mass casualty event as current systems keeping the masses alive break down, and the resulting collapse will be capitalized on (lol) by your local warlord.
I’m sure the local warlord will be a great bastion of anti authoritarian praxis.
Brother your goverment, democrat or republican, does a mass casualty event abroad every other fucking week, when will you stop with the “me, me, me, me” attitude ffs.
What’s the difference between you and a republican who can excuse all the shit Trump does because he’ll supposedly lower gas prices? They’re just being responsible for themselves right?
If you can’t tell the difference between someone who doesn’t think the world is 100% bad and trump, then your ideological purity tests are too black and white for us to ever be anything other than enemies. I won’t ever be able to 100% agree with every thought you have. Nor will anyone else.
“purity testing” and the testing is just don’t do genocide. Are you purity testing republicans when you tell them they should hate Trump for being a pedo? But he wants peace and to lower gas prices. C’mon don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
What an astute observation! I wouldn’t even describe it as a boil, maybe a light simmer if anything. Because you know what? My life is pretty nice.
So now that we have established that fact, perhaps it would be prudent to consider how you reach the majority of the population that is in my boat (not literally, I mean, when I’m on my boat I’m generally reading a book on my own). But I mean the ones that think like this and don’t read books by Kropotkin.
Yeah, no shit. I do things to improve my life. If you don’t, then you’re either lying or an actual example of capitalist caricatures of leftism, just looking for a handout.
Edit: And if you’re not acting to improve your life and the lives around you, what’s the purpose of revolution? Action for the sake of Action? That’s point #3 on Umberto Eco’s list of the 14 common features of fascism.
Your life is nice because of the death and destruction of those who your system deems to be lesser. If you can’t be motivated to change things because you can’t see the issue with the cost of your comfort, you’re going to learn some very hard lessons once people you thought were on your side start fighting you.
I was born in a small village ~200km SE of St Peter back in the soviet days. We got electricity when I was six years old, because my neighbor figured out how to tap into some nearby high voltage lines. After the collapse of the soviet union, I collected enough scholarships and got a visa sponsorship to get a chemical engineering degree in the US. Then I went on to grad school. Then I got the rest of my family out of there. Now I am somewhere in the top 10% of the US.
The only advantage I was born with is above average intelligence and the ability to put it to work. And a bit of luck for everything else to work out.
That is the cost of my comfort. And yes, I am sure that whether leftists or fascists take over, I will be persecuted. Fascists will persecute me because I am not a fascist. Leftists will persecute me because I have done reasonably well for myself, but not well enough to hop on a private jet when the shit hits the fan. That is also the cost of my comfort.
A mass casualty event? Brother we’ve been in the mass extinction event for years, and every day we don’t destroy the system that created it is another day the odds of the human species surviving the next couple centuries continues to fall towards zero.
Yes, I am certain that your life will begin improving measurably when the food runs out.
Revolutions have had a history of dramatically improving living conditions for everyone as soon as the old system is abolished.
The Russian revolution ended famine and doubled life expectancy.
Alternatively, there can be the simple recognition that breaking the system that exists will result in a mass casualty event
Revolutions also don’t have to result in violence (think of a mass strike across the entire country that never ends). But when capitalism gets desperate it will start a civil war if that is its only hope to maintain the old system.
And think about the mass suffering caused by mass poverty, genocide, minority oppression, political polarisation, endless war, boring work and the list goes on. If one revolution is all it takes to install a democratic society and fix so many of our problems, I know I’m on board.
Yeah, everyone except the people that end up against the wall.
More often than not, those people aren’t the ones causing the structural problems in society. The really rich people with the power all escape before that point.
Yeah, everyone except the people that end up against the wall.
Yes generally peoples living conditions do not improve for people who have been shot dead by a firing squad, since they stop living. Although can you please be more specific, I’m not sure how that is related to our discussion.
More often than not, those people aren’t the ones causing the structural problems in society. The really rich people with the power all escape before that point.
Okay, I’m not sure if that is true or not but I don’t think that is relevant anyway.
The oligarchs will escape. The people up against the wall will be those that are not wealthy enough to escape, but not poor enough to be desperate.
There’s a reason that Orwell was banned in the US for being pro-communist and banned in the USSR for being pro-capitalist. That reason is because Orwell was anti-authoritarian.
Just one more election bro, I know we have The Camps and everyone on earth has organs laden with microplastic and we’ve killed fully one third of the forests and the oceans are turning to acid, but now is not the time for radical change bro
I’m sure your life will (moderately, bipartisanly) improve when the oceanic algae is all dead and you can no longer breathe. At least then you won’t have the air to speak this nonsense, and I’ll only have to listen to our gasping coughs as we wait for the harm reduction to kick in.
There are already thousands and more dying by the second with the current system. There is already a mass causality event and it will continue to get worse as the current system makes the world less and less inhabitable.
And we don’t have to have a “local warlord” the idea that people can put something better in place then fascism is ironically a right wing talking point. Though I blame the propaganda that has caused us to view our fellow as a enemy instead a comrade. But that’s a whole other point.
And yet, the reality is that the collapse of society will lead to even more casualties. The other reality is that I don’t know of a single collapsed society that became altruistic, and did not devolve into local warlord killing each other.
In order to effectively break the system you need organized Revolution, and for that it must be supported by the masses, and for mass support it must help people, meaning the Revolution must be building something like a state within itself to support it’s own Revolution, so when it is big enough, when it finally has overthrown the Capitalists, it will already be prepared to take over as a governing body. The only chaos then is in the Revolution itself, but a small moment of bloody violence in plane sight is nothing compared to the massive death, destruction, torture and despair, that the system does constantly out of sight, hidden away (as much as it even can hide it), that the small by comparison but more in sight and quicker violence of a Revolution which will finally end it.
Okay. Well, when this glorious mythic Revolution begins, we will see what happens. Until the second coming of the Revolution, were stuck in reality. Although it seems some of us might be stuck is a certain level of Revolution Revolution worship.
See, because the anglosphere is drenched in leftover christian thought, and because liberals fundamentally have a magical view of the world and society, you see revolution as something akin to the rapture: some grand external event to be prayed for and waited on. Meanwhile, since communists have a scientific view of the world and society, we see revolution as a machine to be built. What you’re doing is the equivalent of walking up to a shipyard and going “Pffft, good luck magically manifesting your glorious ships, idiot.” Just a fundamental misunderstanding of how history develops. Movements just spontaneously arise at full strength out of nowhere in the movies and video games we all grew up on, so of course reality must work the same way, right?
You want to talk about “we’re in reality”? Yeah, we’re in the reality where the working class in many countries have already achieved the building of a revolution. That’s a concrete fact, not some article of faith you can pessimistically handwave away to justify your continued murderous apathy. We live in reality, so roll up your sleeves and get to work with the rest of us.
“Build a revolution for me and then I’ll show up after”
Consumer brain is a disease on par with Alzheimer’s. You’ll never be anything but a dead weight to any social organization with that attitude. Look around yourself, opportunities to build have never been more abundant. I’ve helped create a recurring mutual aid event in the community where we exhange food, clothing and services, much of it homegrown and handmade. We have regular self defense training and educational lectures from people of different expertise. We’re connected with the local ICE watch org, a growing anti data-center movement and Palestinian orgs for miles. We are beginning to host study sessions and draw up outlines for political education. We even have a direct member with a shot at city council, which would make our job even easier than it is now, which, I gotta tell you, is pretty easy these days. People are fucking done with all of it.
All of this and more can be yours. This is what I have achieved in less than one year of really, actively studying and trying after having spent the previous decade as a depressed addict. The only thing holding you back is this learned helplessness, this ingrained idea that someone else has to do it first because you are incapable.
It wont just magically happen on it’s own, if we only wait for it we are more likely to see the inside of a US death camp as the Capitalist rulling class is getting scared and desperate and have been laying the foundation for the people to be moved further into Fascism for a long time. It is possible only with our willingness to organise together within one or more (cooperating) Revolutionary Parties to learn and use Marxist Leninist Theory to slowly awaken Class Consciousness within the population and prepare the way for a successful Revolution supported by the newly awakened masses. This has succeeded many times already, even though the USSR unfortunately collapsed, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and the People’s Republic of China are still standing against all the Capitalist Imperialist hostile odds, and China in particularly is more technologically and scientifically advanced then the US by now, and have provided enormous improvement to the lives of everyone they get involved with. It is why the Capitalist Imperialist “Core Countries” (Global North) are so desperate to smear them with endless lies and nonsense not based in reality or evidence, and the CIA/MI6/MOSSAD assert their control and spread such misinformation via “news” (Propaganda is basically just another name for this give or take), Hollywood, Social Media AI bots, Youtube algorithmic control, and even our very Video Games (do people believe Call of Duty is politically neutral).
With all of that they shape our very view of reality to make us support things against our own interests, and to avoid learning anything real about the countries that threaten Capital.
Edit: I was a little confusing about the point on propaganda, I mean that it is more or less another word for news, mostly involving the handing out of pamflets or leaflets, it has been twisted into being the same as saying “misinformation” very likely as a way of discrediting bottom up, glass roots style movements (what the working class has access to as a way of communicating among the populace) while leaving the Capitalists corporate “news” reputationally intact.
I don’t know about the history of the Church, but I do know that the word has been used for the handing out of legitimate and accurate information on a paper medium as a way of spreading awareness when one is censored by the State and cannot use the normal channels, and it has been used this way for a long long time before the use of it to mean the same as “lies” was popular.
Propaganda was short for “congregation for propagating the faith” in 1718, and meant a movement or organization for the propagation of ideology before the end of the 1700s. The modern usage refering to the information disseminated is from after WWI (which wasn’t perjoritive at the time), when German telegraph lines to other countries were cut and they turned to high-power radio communication. The negative connotation comes from WWII after Germany’s very effective use of it.
Nevertheless, propaganda has been used as long as humans have existed, and much like the subcategory “advertisement”, is more effective with as many lies as one can get away with. There’s nothing inherently untruthful about propaganda, but neither is it inherently truthful. It’s manipulation, and can still be effective without lies. It’s much broader than papers to circumvent censure.
We need to get to the point where we can vote for the people we really want.
You people have actual short term memory loss
How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it. *
Frederick Engels 135 years ago
That shithole’s banana republic politics is the longest running gag in history.
It’s been a multi year mockery of common sense while even thinking of discussing common good being screamed out of the room by folks screaming over listening. It’s been common and weird while certain folks lean into it…
Precisely. We are not in a place where it is possible to make a different choice. Other countries seem to not understand it - do you know how massive our country is? How inconsistent our education is? How divided we are? We are not, under any circumstance, uniting half of the country in voting 3rd party, especially not now when tensions are so high. We have to get past the point where being picky dooms us to the greater of two evils. Should it work this way? Of course not. Should we try to change this stupid two party bullshit? Absolutely…but not right now. Right now, there is too much at stake.
Not directly going for the throat of the two party system =/= pro status quo. I’m saying we cannot skip over everything else before we can take that on. If you truly believe that we can just jump to that complete overthrowing of the government rather than first address immediate dangers on smaller scales and building up what’s been destroyed, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Should we try to change this stupid two party bullshit? Absolutely…but not right now. Right now, there is too much at stake.
Its sad that people are so ignorant they don’t realize that the controlled opposition wing of the US empire has done this for every election, and people are still falling for it. Liberals have the memory of a goldfish, and are naive enough to think the US is a democracy.
And what exactly do you propose? How do YOU think we unite the entire country in making this change? Because right now, half of it is brainwashed by a cult. Things in 2026 are completely different from revolutions in the past and need a different approach. So if I’m so ignorant, then please, enlighten me on how we invoke change on such a massive scale right now, today, instead of focusing on getting to a mediocre point where basic rights aren’t being stripped away one by one. Because as someone who has a life outside of the internet and isn’t a straight white man, I have much more immediate concerns for the safety of myself and my loved ones than a grandiose plan to overthrow the government. So I implore you to give me somewhere to start.
Dessalines already linked the reading guide I put together, but I want to address something you bring up. Conditions are different from past and present revolutions, correct. In what ways, though? What part of revolutionary strategy is general, and what part is particular? What do we take, and what do we have to figure out? The truth is that much of revolutionary strategy is very similar, but what changes is the class outlook.
Western countries are generally imperialist, and the US is also a settler-colony. This impacts the class demographics. The US Empire is also in decay. Gradually, the working classes have interests more aligned with the global south, ie ending the empire. This type of revolution has not really happened yet, but this doesn’t mean revolution isn’t still necessary.
Step one is to get organized, join an org like PSL. Step two is to educate yourself and others on theory, history, and practice. Step three is to agitate among the people and bring them into the fold, creating a unified and disciplined working class with the skills and knowledge to correctly overcome revolutionary obstacles.
Step two is organizing: joining a communist / working-class party, and if none exist, starting one like the Black Panthers did. Which org you join depends on which country you live in; but we can only gain liberation by joining organizations which push our interests and not those of capitalists.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
Correct, it’s not voluntarily given. I’m not saying we should keel over and die. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that. I’m saying right now we have much more dire issues than the two party system. We can’t skip to that. Everyone loves to say “but there will never be a good time, you have to do it now!!” Okay, do WHAT now? Like I asked the other person under my reply, what exactly do you think we should do to completely skip over the shit that’s close to home and attack the two party system? We have to address the issues that are plucking us off one by one before we as a nation can have the strength and unity to take on the core principle of our government.
The first step to finding a solution is to recognize that the existing tools are woefully insufficient. Suppose we didn’t have elections at all, suppose all we had was a monarchy where the only recourse within the system was to petition the king, to ask him nicely to act on our behalf. Should we still rely on that? Should we drop other approaches because they might sour the king’s mood?
With a little imagination, you can find that there are inherent mechanisms for asserting power that are not provided by the system and which exist regardless of the system’s best efforts to take them away. All systems are manmade and can be changed and dismantled if enough people stop cooperating with it. This does not have to look like a traditional revolution, with pitched battles and whatnot. Strikes, protests, development of mutual aid networks and dual power structures, even targeted boycotts can be more effective than voting for a candidate hand-picked by the ruling class.
The electoral system keeps people disorganized and divided, it directs energy away from those tactics instead of towards them. The idea that non-disruptive tactics could possibly someday produce change makes people unwilling to engage in tactics that are more disruptive, because nobody really likes being disruptive, taking risks, creating tension, but that tension is necessary to effect change.
The effect that electoral politics has on defining people’s political identities cannot be overstated. The moment you cast your vote, no matter how reluctant it may be, there will be a part of you that wants to justify and defend your choice and before you know it you’re now defending things that you never would otherwise. Nearly all political discourse becomes colored by this question of who to vote for. Again, think about how you would read news stories differently if you had no mechanism within the system for expressing your voice. But that is essentially where we’re at because the mechanisms provided by the system are ineffective, but while we have this idea that they could be effective, people still define themselves along those lines.
Let me give you an example. I live in a solidly blue state, previously, I lived in a solidly red state for most of my life. At no point has my vote for president had any impact on the outcome whatsoever. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. And yet, when I talk about my refusal to vote Harris or Biden, people yell at me, a lot. Why? It has no material impact. It’s because it’s primarily a cultural signifier, a way of defining a political identity, and any material consequences are of secondary consideration. So long as people are allowing bourgeois parties to shape and define their political identities, that’s going to dissuade them from engaging in direct action.
Really tired of “both sides bad.” Political change should not be moving fast and breaking things.
Right now we have a hole to dig out from. We need to get to the point where we can vote for the people we really want.
By not voting you say that everything is fine and you are okay with the status quo.
Vote for the change we need right now. Do not let our future slip away.
Genuinly curious. With your plan to vote for the democrats to dig out of the hole the US has dug itself, how will you be able to vote for the party that you want to vote for later?
Removed by mod
Dam can one ask a question without geting barated for speling mistakes? I’ll refere you to some resources about how revolution might make things better but I’m not sure if you interested in engaging with a proper conversation atm.
You’re dodging the question
You’re misspelling the question missing the point and not making sense. But everyone else is wrong…
I’m not OP. You’re still doing it btw
The only reason you wouldn’t want to break things right now means you still think there is good in the system. The system is working as intended and absolutely needs to be broken so something better can be made.
Alternatively, there can be the simple recognition that breaking the system that exists will result in a mass casualty event as current systems keeping the masses alive break down, and the resulting collapse will be capitalized on (lol) by your local warlord.
I’m sure the local warlord will be a great bastion of anti authoritarian praxis.
Brother your goverment, democrat or republican, does a mass casualty event abroad every other fucking week, when will you stop with the “me, me, me, me” attitude ffs.
When I become Jesus Christ, savior, and responsible for the collective sins of humanity.
Until then, I’m responsible for myself, and will act accordingly.
Sounds like we’re all on the same page then: you’re a selfish asshole
What’s the difference between you and a republican who can excuse all the shit Trump does because he’ll supposedly lower gas prices? They’re just being responsible for themselves right?
If you can’t tell the difference between someone who doesn’t think the world is 100% bad and trump, then your ideological purity tests are too black and white for us to ever be anything other than enemies. I won’t ever be able to 100% agree with every thought you have. Nor will anyone else.
“purity testing” and the testing is just don’t do genocide. Are you purity testing republicans when you tell them they should hate Trump for being a pedo? But he wants peace and to lower gas prices. C’mon don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Test failed, got it
Then go back to the forest so that other people don’t have to be responsible for you
The humankind is a collective. When a nation has individualism as a core value, what does that say about its human character?
you’ve been boiled too slow
What an astute observation! I wouldn’t even describe it as a boil, maybe a light simmer if anything. Because you know what? My life is pretty nice.
So now that we have established that fact, perhaps it would be prudent to consider how you reach the majority of the population that is in my boat (not literally, I mean, when I’m on my boat I’m generally reading a book on my own). But I mean the ones that think like this and don’t read books by Kropotkin.
Liberals just cutting straight to the heart of what they care about
Yeah, no shit. I do things to improve my life. If you don’t, then you’re either lying or an actual example of capitalist caricatures of leftism, just looking for a handout.
Edit: And if you’re not acting to improve your life and the lives around you, what’s the purpose of revolution? Action for the sake of Action? That’s point #3 on Umberto Eco’s list of the 14 common features of fascism.
Your life is nice because of the death and destruction of those who your system deems to be lesser. If you can’t be motivated to change things because you can’t see the issue with the cost of your comfort, you’re going to learn some very hard lessons once people you thought were on your side start fighting you.
Are you the caricature of someone who was given an extra money in a game of monopoly but believe to have earned your winning position through sheer strategy and “working harder”?
I was born in a small village ~200km SE of St Peter back in the soviet days. We got electricity when I was six years old, because my neighbor figured out how to tap into some nearby high voltage lines. After the collapse of the soviet union, I collected enough scholarships and got a visa sponsorship to get a chemical engineering degree in the US. Then I went on to grad school. Then I got the rest of my family out of there. Now I am somewhere in the top 10% of the US.
The only advantage I was born with is above average intelligence and the ability to put it to work. And a bit of luck for everything else to work out.
That is the cost of my comfort. And yes, I am sure that whether leftists or fascists take over, I will be persecuted. Fascists will persecute me because I am not a fascist. Leftists will persecute me because I have done reasonably well for myself, but not well enough to hop on a private jet when the shit hits the fan. That is also the cost of my comfort.
yep indeed
A mass casualty event? Brother we’ve been in the mass extinction event for years, and every day we don’t destroy the system that created it is another day the odds of the human species surviving the next couple centuries continues to fall towards zero.
Yes, I am certain that your life will begin improving measurably when the food runs out.
Revolutions have had a history of dramatically improving living conditions for everyone as soon as the old system is abolished. The Russian revolution ended famine and doubled life expectancy.
Revolutions also don’t have to result in violence (think of a mass strike across the entire country that never ends). But when capitalism gets desperate it will start a civil war if that is its only hope to maintain the old system.
And think about the mass suffering caused by mass poverty, genocide, minority oppression, political polarisation, endless war, boring work and the list goes on. If one revolution is all it takes to install a democratic society and fix so many of our problems, I know I’m on board.
Yeah, everyone except the people that end up against the wall.
More often than not, those people aren’t the ones causing the structural problems in society. The really rich people with the power all escape before that point.
Yes generally peoples living conditions do not improve for people who have been shot dead by a firing squad, since they stop living. Although can you please be more specific, I’m not sure how that is related to our discussion.
Okay, I’m not sure if that is true or not but I don’t think that is relevant anyway.
Source: my ass
Now you’re just lazily regurgitating Orwell-style fed bullshit about how somehow revolution won’t change anything.
“Everyone except the people that end up against the wall” yeah that’s the point dumbass, the oligarchs cannot be allowed to fuck up the new world too
The oligarchs will escape. The people up against the wall will be those that are not wealthy enough to escape, but not poor enough to be desperate.
There’s a reason that Orwell was banned in the US for being pro-communist and banned in the USSR for being pro-capitalist. That reason is because Orwell was anti-authoritarian.
Just one more election bro, I know we have The Camps and everyone on earth has organs laden with microplastic and we’ve killed fully one third of the forests and the oceans are turning to acid, but now is not the time for radical change bro
I’m sure your life will (moderately, bipartisanly) improve when the oceanic algae is all dead and you can no longer breathe. At least then you won’t have the air to speak this nonsense, and I’ll only have to listen to our gasping coughs as we wait for the harm reduction to kick in.
There are already thousands and more dying by the second with the current system. There is already a mass causality event and it will continue to get worse as the current system makes the world less and less inhabitable.
And we don’t have to have a “local warlord” the idea that people can put something better in place then fascism is ironically a right wing talking point. Though I blame the propaganda that has caused us to view our fellow as a enemy instead a comrade. But that’s a whole other point.
Correct on all counts.
And yet, the reality is that the collapse of society will lead to even more casualties. The other reality is that I don’t know of a single collapsed society that became altruistic, and did not devolve into local warlord killing each other.
In order to effectively break the system you need organized Revolution, and for that it must be supported by the masses, and for mass support it must help people, meaning the Revolution must be building something like a state within itself to support it’s own Revolution, so when it is big enough, when it finally has overthrown the Capitalists, it will already be prepared to take over as a governing body. The only chaos then is in the Revolution itself, but a small moment of bloody violence in plane sight is nothing compared to the massive death, destruction, torture and despair, that the system does constantly out of sight, hidden away (as much as it even can hide it), that the small by comparison but more in sight and quicker violence of a Revolution which will finally end it.
Okay. Well, when this glorious mythic Revolution begins, we will see what happens. Until the second coming of the Revolution, were stuck in reality. Although it seems some of us might be stuck is a certain level of Revolution Revolution worship.
Revolution.
See, because the anglosphere is drenched in leftover christian thought, and because liberals fundamentally have a magical view of the world and society, you see revolution as something akin to the rapture: some grand external event to be prayed for and waited on. Meanwhile, since communists have a scientific view of the world and society, we see revolution as a machine to be built. What you’re doing is the equivalent of walking up to a shipyard and going “Pffft, good luck magically manifesting your glorious ships, idiot.” Just a fundamental misunderstanding of how history develops. Movements just spontaneously arise at full strength out of nowhere in the movies and video games we all grew up on, so of course reality must work the same way, right?
You want to talk about “we’re in reality”? Yeah, we’re in the reality where the working class in many countries have already achieved the building of a revolution. That’s a concrete fact, not some article of faith you can pessimistically handwave away to justify your continued murderous apathy. We live in reality, so roll up your sleeves and get to work with the rest of us.
Okay. Well, when all your hard work leads to actual tangible results that are better than the status quo, then we’ll talk.
Until then, less blabbing and more sleeve rolling
“Build a revolution for me and then I’ll show up after”
Consumer brain is a disease on par with Alzheimer’s. You’ll never be anything but a dead weight to any social organization with that attitude. Look around yourself, opportunities to build have never been more abundant. I’ve helped create a recurring mutual aid event in the community where we exhange food, clothing and services, much of it homegrown and handmade. We have regular self defense training and educational lectures from people of different expertise. We’re connected with the local ICE watch org, a growing anti data-center movement and Palestinian orgs for miles. We are beginning to host study sessions and draw up outlines for political education. We even have a direct member with a shot at city council, which would make our job even easier than it is now, which, I gotta tell you, is pretty easy these days. People are fucking done with all of it.
All of this and more can be yours. This is what I have achieved in less than one year of really, actively studying and trying after having spent the previous decade as a depressed addict. The only thing holding you back is this learned helplessness, this ingrained idea that someone else has to do it first because you are incapable.
Okay. I guess your world doesn’t have a place for me then. If it’s camps either way, I’d rather do it the easy way.
It wont just magically happen on it’s own, if we only wait for it we are more likely to see the inside of a US death camp as the Capitalist rulling class is getting scared and desperate and have been laying the foundation for the people to be moved further into Fascism for a long time. It is possible only with our willingness to organise together within one or more (cooperating) Revolutionary Parties to learn and use Marxist Leninist Theory to slowly awaken Class Consciousness within the population and prepare the way for a successful Revolution supported by the newly awakened masses. This has succeeded many times already, even though the USSR unfortunately collapsed, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and the People’s Republic of China are still standing against all the Capitalist Imperialist hostile odds, and China in particularly is more technologically and scientifically advanced then the US by now, and have provided enormous improvement to the lives of everyone they get involved with. It is why the Capitalist Imperialist “Core Countries” (Global North) are so desperate to smear them with endless lies and nonsense not based in reality or evidence, and the CIA/MI6/MOSSAD assert their control and spread such misinformation via “news” (Propaganda is basically just another name for this give or take), Hollywood, Social Media AI bots, Youtube algorithmic control, and even our very Video Games (do people believe Call of Duty is politically neutral).
With all of that they shape our very view of reality to make us support things against our own interests, and to avoid learning anything real about the countries that threaten Capital.
Edit: I was a little confusing about the point on propaganda, I mean that it is more or less another word for news, mostly involving the handing out of pamflets or leaflets, it has been twisted into being the same as saying “misinformation” very likely as a way of discrediting bottom up, glass roots style movements (what the working class has access to as a way of communicating among the populace) while leaving the Capitalists corporate “news” reputationally intact.
Propaganda was originally a branch of the Catholic Church, so the connotation is that it’s as full of crap and dishonesty as apologetics.
I don’t know about the history of the Church, but I do know that the word has been used for the handing out of legitimate and accurate information on a paper medium as a way of spreading awareness when one is censored by the State and cannot use the normal channels, and it has been used this way for a long long time before the use of it to mean the same as “lies” was popular.
Propaganda was short for “congregation for propagating the faith” in 1718, and meant a movement or organization for the propagation of ideology before the end of the 1700s. The modern usage refering to the information disseminated is from after WWI (which wasn’t perjoritive at the time), when German telegraph lines to other countries were cut and they turned to high-power radio communication. The negative connotation comes from WWII after Germany’s very effective use of it.
Nevertheless, propaganda has been used as long as humans have existed, and much like the subcategory “advertisement”, is more effective with as many lies as one can get away with. There’s nothing inherently untruthful about propaganda, but neither is it inherently truthful. It’s manipulation, and can still be effective without lies. It’s much broader than papers to circumvent censure.
It should absolutely 100% be that when the alternative is genocide and fascism.
You people have actual short term memory loss
-Hunter S Thompson, 56 years ago
Frederick Engels 135 years ago
That shithole’s banana republic politics is the longest running gag in history.
but this is the biggest election of our lifetime!™
Im writing in lenin or john cena or dennis rodman. Theres nothing you can do to stop me
This is the most political-history ignorant comment I’ve read in a very long time.
How do you think people have rights?
Yeah like how do you vote for voting rights before you even get them? 🔨
History started with the first election of the USA.
“We need to vote for change and to dig ourselves out from this hole!”
-Proceeds to vote for Democrats, who change nothing, and dig the hole deeper.
“Oh well, my memory will have reset long before the next election comes around, so we can do it all again!”
LOL
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What an insane sentence to put in the mockery font
It’s been a multi year mockery of common sense while even thinking of discussing common good being screamed out of the room by folks screaming over listening. It’s been common and weird while certain folks lean into it…
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What’s the common sense? Is it “we must vote, literally sign our approval by name, for a genocide?”
It’s common sense getting lost to “GeNoCiDe or nothing!” As offered by idiots…
Genuinely indecipherable, enigma-like
Precisely. We are not in a place where it is possible to make a different choice. Other countries seem to not understand it - do you know how massive our country is? How inconsistent our education is? How divided we are? We are not, under any circumstance, uniting half of the country in voting 3rd party, especially not now when tensions are so high. We have to get past the point where being picky dooms us to the greater of two evils. Should it work this way? Of course not. Should we try to change this stupid two party bullshit? Absolutely…but not right now. Right now, there is too much at stake.
With such mentality, pro status quo, change won’t ever happen.
Not directly going for the throat of the two party system =/= pro status quo. I’m saying we cannot skip over everything else before we can take that on. If you truly believe that we can just jump to that complete overthrowing of the government rather than first address immediate dangers on smaller scales and building up what’s been destroyed, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Étapisme failed hard everywhere. Why repeating the same mistakes?
Its sad that people are so ignorant they don’t realize that the controlled opposition wing of the US empire has done this for every election, and people are still falling for it. Liberals have the memory of a goldfish, and are naive enough to think the US is a democracy.
And what exactly do you propose? How do YOU think we unite the entire country in making this change? Because right now, half of it is brainwashed by a cult. Things in 2026 are completely different from revolutions in the past and need a different approach. So if I’m so ignorant, then please, enlighten me on how we invoke change on such a massive scale right now, today, instead of focusing on getting to a mediocre point where basic rights aren’t being stripped away one by one. Because as someone who has a life outside of the internet and isn’t a straight white man, I have much more immediate concerns for the safety of myself and my loved ones than a grandiose plan to overthrow the government. So I implore you to give me somewhere to start.
Dessalines already linked the reading guide I put together, but I want to address something you bring up. Conditions are different from past and present revolutions, correct. In what ways, though? What part of revolutionary strategy is general, and what part is particular? What do we take, and what do we have to figure out? The truth is that much of revolutionary strategy is very similar, but what changes is the class outlook.
Western countries are generally imperialist, and the US is also a settler-colony. This impacts the class demographics. The US Empire is also in decay. Gradually, the working classes have interests more aligned with the global south, ie ending the empire. This type of revolution has not really happened yet, but this doesn’t mean revolution isn’t still necessary.
Step one is to get organized, join an org like PSL. Step two is to educate yourself and others on theory, history, and practice. Step three is to agitate among the people and bring them into the fold, creating a unified and disciplined working class with the skills and knowledge to correctly overcome revolutionary obstacles.
Step one is education about what works, and doesn’t, and how worker liberation has been acheived in the past. Here’s a good reading list from @[email protected] , and one that I host.
Step two is organizing: joining a communist / working-class party, and if none exist, starting one like the Black Panthers did. Which org you join depends on which country you live in; but we can only gain liberation by joining organizations which push our interests and not those of capitalists.
Correct, it’s not voluntarily given. I’m not saying we should keel over and die. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that. I’m saying right now we have much more dire issues than the two party system. We can’t skip to that. Everyone loves to say “but there will never be a good time, you have to do it now!!” Okay, do WHAT now? Like I asked the other person under my reply, what exactly do you think we should do to completely skip over the shit that’s close to home and attack the two party system? We have to address the issues that are plucking us off one by one before we as a nation can have the strength and unity to take on the core principle of our government.
The first step to finding a solution is to recognize that the existing tools are woefully insufficient. Suppose we didn’t have elections at all, suppose all we had was a monarchy where the only recourse within the system was to petition the king, to ask him nicely to act on our behalf. Should we still rely on that? Should we drop other approaches because they might sour the king’s mood?
With a little imagination, you can find that there are inherent mechanisms for asserting power that are not provided by the system and which exist regardless of the system’s best efforts to take them away. All systems are manmade and can be changed and dismantled if enough people stop cooperating with it. This does not have to look like a traditional revolution, with pitched battles and whatnot. Strikes, protests, development of mutual aid networks and dual power structures, even targeted boycotts can be more effective than voting for a candidate hand-picked by the ruling class.
The electoral system keeps people disorganized and divided, it directs energy away from those tactics instead of towards them. The idea that non-disruptive tactics could possibly someday produce change makes people unwilling to engage in tactics that are more disruptive, because nobody really likes being disruptive, taking risks, creating tension, but that tension is necessary to effect change.
The effect that electoral politics has on defining people’s political identities cannot be overstated. The moment you cast your vote, no matter how reluctant it may be, there will be a part of you that wants to justify and defend your choice and before you know it you’re now defending things that you never would otherwise. Nearly all political discourse becomes colored by this question of who to vote for. Again, think about how you would read news stories differently if you had no mechanism within the system for expressing your voice. But that is essentially where we’re at because the mechanisms provided by the system are ineffective, but while we have this idea that they could be effective, people still define themselves along those lines.
Let me give you an example. I live in a solidly blue state, previously, I lived in a solidly red state for most of my life. At no point has my vote for president had any impact on the outcome whatsoever. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. And yet, when I talk about my refusal to vote Harris or Biden, people yell at me, a lot. Why? It has no material impact. It’s because it’s primarily a cultural signifier, a way of defining a political identity, and any material consequences are of secondary consideration. So long as people are allowing bourgeois parties to shape and define their political identities, that’s going to dissuade them from engaging in direct action.
This would be more persuasive if you didn’t say it every election for decades.
Every election is “the most important election in history and in our lifetime”