The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?
If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.
Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.
All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
I understand that. I just don’t think it’s possible
Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?
If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.
Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.
All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.