I figure shit’s going to get worser whether we end up with 99% Hitler Blue or 99% Hitler Red. So, anyone have any ideas on what to do next?
I figure shit’s going to get worser whether we end up with 99% Hitler Blue or 99% Hitler Red. So, anyone have any ideas on what to do next?
When in doubt: agitate, educate, organize
What are the key contradictions to agitate about? Palestine, Yemen, climate crisis (especially the trade war with China undermining green energy efforts, this angle is very important and reaches a lot of ears since you can also point out that this contradiction is hurting their pockets directly), workers being displaced by automation, trans rights and immigrabts being crushed in a rising fascist movement in reaction to neoliberalism’s collapse.
And what does the western left have to offer, and educate people on? Connections between Black liberation and indigenous movements in Palestine, China’s mutual development approach, our connection to imperialism and how it benefits us (the hard part of this step) and how it hurts us. Be realistic and explicit, don’t be a tailist.
As far as organization there really isn’t a one size fits all answer but the critical development for the western working class this year is automation, which means a sector of workers that was previously far from precarity now joins the same space as gig workers, as automation vastly lowers the skilled labor that goes into that sector. The left has to come up with an answer to the gig economy, which is inherently atomizing, and find a way to work outside of the failing left liberal institutions.
Along these lines I’ve noticed a bit increase in far left parties where I live. DSA has been sort of active since 2016, but now we PSL, cpusa, some anarchist thing, and a few others. I’ve only just moved here, but from talking to PSL they say their local chapter is only a few months old and they have momentum specifically as a result of anger about Israel’s genocide.
What is a tailist?
Tailism is the tendency to expect the workers and the revolutionaries to be separate entities, with the revolutionary’s role being to heighten the contradictions in order for workers to spontaneously perform the revolution, so the revolutionary is actually following in the tail of the worker; it’s the opposite of vanguardism, which sees the professional revolutionary as the most advanced workers, whose role is to perform the revolution on behalf of, and as part of, the working class. The vanguard is ahead of the revolution in this model.
The problem with tailism is that if you aren’t a worker, and your engagement with the workers is purely by informing them (and with the specific goal of tantalizing them into performing revolutionary action) then you are an outsider with no genuine connection to the workers, who have no reason to trust you and will see through your shallow engagement with them.
E: Just to be specific about what I meant, you shouldn’t sugarcoat and distort the truth when talking with other people just for the purpose of baiting them into becoming leftists.
Tail-ism… so a revolutionary party will look at a mass of workers and just assume that they will make the right decisions all on their own while the party is most just sitting back being a spectator.
IF, the mass of workers do something good, the revolutionary party committing a tail-ism might take credit for it.
IF, the mass of workers do something bad, then its all the fault of the workers and not the revolutionary party in any way.
In both situations, this revolutionary party hasn’t taken the lead by actually doing any work educating, agitating, or organizing the workers.