I’ve seen a lot of ink spilled recently over the Harris campaign’s recent adoption of the tactic of calling Trump and his cronies “weird”. There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the Democrats ceding the high ground or being unserious about serious matters, but this article, and especially the source material it links to by Sdrja Popovic (a non-violent Serbian revolutionary during the Milošević regime) about the power of humor in non-violent movements, really changed my thinking on this.
“Marxists have failed to gain power because they think too much” is one hell of a liberal elitist take from the author of this article.
Honestly, my reading of Marxist theory makes me look to the inverse of this. The uprising Marx and Engels talk about is a reaction to the injustice and instability of capitalism. As resources are consolidated, as capitalists become more entrenched, the forces that create a change increase. More people see it for what it is until eventually we reach a critical mass spontaneously.
Authoritarian communism doesn’t work because it’s trying to jump the gun. It comes from people seeing changes down the road, but they’re not changes that they can force to come too early. The fruit of the proletariat ownership of the means of production and the withering of the state literally isn’t ripe yet.
Ironically, it’s acts of suppression that ripen that fruit. From active attempts to keep it from ripening to socially destructive capitalist practices like elevating C-levels and chasing quarterly profits.
An authoritarian imposition, to my reading, not only won’t work, but slows down the process by essentially letting off steam as well as creating a negative association between communist social structuring and authoritarianism.
At least reform has positive results in the short term, potentially building greater association between distributed resources and greater social benefit at large. But even then, it may literally be the reverse that brings us closer to the end state of universal proletariat throwing off of chains and the eventually withering of the state.
This was just a meme for fun, though I do think people overlook just how effective anti-Socialist propaganda and actual political suppression has been in the US in particular.
But yes, I agree that we’re not yet at a place as a society where a Leftist revolution would even occur, much less have a chance at success. Though we are much more aware of that possibility as a society than even just 10 years ago.
I have a lot of opinions about what Lenin did to Marxism. In philosophical terms, I’m a Mutualist. In practical terms, I’m a DemSoc. MLs/Tankies are a peeve of mine because I have a lot of respect for Marx and Engels’ view of an idealized society, and Lenin just shits all over it (whether he intended to or not).
Agree 1000%, which is why the State Capitalists who call themselves Communist piss me off so much (looking at China and Russia).
Sadly, I have no confidence that people will react to authoritarianism/ imperialism/ capitalism/ corporatism in any kind of organized revolutionary movement. I think violent outbursts of despair like suicides and spree murder are more likely (as we’re seeing already), and will just feed the State security apparatus. I think we’re much closer to a real-life Equilibrium, but without the inept state security forces, than we are to another Paris Commune.
This is exactly what I was thinking of. American liberals are almost entirely ignorant of how much violence their government exports – and especially how much of it is targeted specifically at leftists. Marxists haven’t gained power in the US because any time they started to build working-class support they got murdered.