this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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"We need to take it by force" does not necessarily follow "They won't give up power voluntarily". People with civil war fantasies need to have a sit down and have a long fucking think about what that implies. What we need to do is revive a culture of labor solidarity that we've allowed to wither since the heyday of labor unions in the country.
eat the rich.
One billionare showing up publicly lynched or drawn and quartered will get the rest in line. If not, two or three dozen more will do the trick.
No. What will happen is the rich will surround themselves with more security and will have a legitimate reason to be more aggressive towards who they consider a menace. If you want to change society, get involved in politics, involve those who think like you, and be patient.
That historically works out great for the oppressed hungry masses with nothing to lose.
It kinda does. The New Deal, minimum wage laws, education reforms in many countries in the 60s are a few examples that come to mind. But now your turn: when has a violent revolution been beneficial to the oppressed masses in the last two centuries?
WWII
Yeah just shut up and take it!
That’ll show the powerful who’s boss!
Yeah they will, but they won't stop either way. You have to kill them all. There is no functional society with billionaires in it.
If your idea of a functional society is one where all billionaires have been killed, I wouldn't call it functional.
Think how much resources will be freed up when the dragon hording the gold is killed and the communities can share the enormous wealth to fix the problems that came from the dragon hording everything and letting everything else degrade around him.
It would give them more power. You wanna see what psychopathic minds given a reason to work together and given victim cards can do? I don't.
The rich are brought in line by denying them of power, not feeding them more power by offering reasons for them to get protected even more.
You wanna go that route, be prepared for a lot of collateral damage and extended times of hardship.
Sounds like you're scared. You should be.
That...doesn't even make sense.
Scared of what? The rich or the lynchings?
In context, you kind of just sound like an evil rich person trying to threaten me lol. I imagine that wasn't the dramatic effect you were going for.
Yall realize many of the rights we have as laborers now we're won with force... Right?
Like, yes collective bargaining, labor solidarity, etc. is super important (which is also a form of force) but there were literal armed conflicts between laborers and the police on behalf of companies.
I'm not saying we need a civil war, but let's not pretend we won our rights today without bloodshed.
Edit: Left out a key word, whoops.
Oh, I didn't mean it like that. More that using force as the tool of overthrow is fundamentally a mistake. Obviously in any sufficiently powerful labor movement there will, inevitably, be those who attempt to use both legal and illegal force to disperse them. Force is thus necessary to defend the other processes of labor solidarity - forming unions, protests, strikes, lockouts, etc.
Many people, not all of them unreasonably, will side with the system in the case of a violent revolution, though. When a shooting war starts, you can't un-shoot the bullet once you realize the death toll will reach the millions - it will be carried on to its gruesome end, and that may not be to a left-wing victory.
For those who think that a revolution would have overwhelming popular support, for God's sake, a third of the country still believes nonwhite and LGBT folk are inferior, and another third doesn't fucking care. Supporting a violent leftist overthrow is not gonna be on the agenda for them, no matter how much theory you've read and how solid your arguments about their exploitation are. The last third will be difficult to convince - not unreasonably, considering the value placed on democratic ideals and processes.
And the situation is similar, if less severe, in other developed countries at this time.
Fwiw I did mean to say, "I'm not saying we need a civil war." Though, honestly, I'm not saying we don't either. It just wasn't really the point I was trying to make in that moment.
I think I more or less agree with you though. Violence is not necessarily my first choice, but it's naive to think the opposition will listen without it. Or at the very least the threat of it.
The reality is that our power structures heavily favor the owning class, and they're not going to hand over that power laying down. Collective action and such is of course the first step, but as you mentioned force will be used to dispurse labor movements.
And they're definitely willing to use force to protect their entrenchment. If you've got a different way to get power back please start working on it now because we're running out of time to do anything other than kill them all.
No they don’t realise.
People have been propagandised to so much they have no comprehension how much blood was spilt in pursuit of barely tolerable working conditions.
If we can't keep them without killing each other then we are just repeating a cycle. But freedom of choice is more important than forcing politics and beliefs on people just so they cooperate. Me nor anyone I know is going to engage in murder just to get my way. I did my part, I have no kids to perpetuate the cycle. Stop providing the machine with fodder and the issue solves itself.
My guy, who do you think shot first?
I'm sorry but if you're saying when people trying unionize or collectively bargain for better conditions start getting shot at they should just give up or lay down and take it you're a fool.
There's no cycle. That's the whole problem. They made money the most important thing, required for life, then took all the money and sat on it. There's no cycle. Yesterday they had the money. Today they have the money. Tomorrow they will still have the money unless the people of this world do something about it.
We might not seek violence, but it’s coming for us if we organize in any way that has a chance to succeed. The history of the last century has been violent crackdowns on labor organizing. From Pinkertons and cops at home to CIA coups and full on military blockades abroad.
We do need to get everyone organized for anything to happen, but we do have to be ready for when that crackdown comes for us.
And yeah. That’s fucking terrifying and I’m pessimistic enough to not really think we have that much of a shot at winning. But it’s wishful thinking to imagine that we could get to the future we want just by playing nice within the system that’s keeping us here.
Yeah it's like... they've got a boot on your neck and you're worried about you hurting them? Where's your worry about the people they're hurting right now?
Aside from that, revolutionary goals don't even require violence per se. If the people who set this shit up would recognize the will of the people and step aside there's no need for violence, but you know they're gonna fight to their last breath to keep the power to hurt and control others. The violence is starting with them.
Organized labor can demand all profits. Then the game of choosing the best investments doesn't have any winners. There isn't even money available to invest.
The elite is defending that game because it's our source of optimizations. Is there a better alternative so that they don't have to play?
There's a vast gulf between 'playing nice' and 'use force to overthrow the elite'. There were great strides made in the heyday of labor organization in the 1880s-1930s. There can be great strides made again. The elite are not some organized cabal of rulers plotting against us - they are selfish people who got where they are by being exceptionally selfish. They don't want to preserve capitalism - they want to preserve themselves. They can be pressured. They can be bargained with. Most of them are rational - that's their weakness. They'll accept deals that are good for them, or that they perceive as such, even if it weakens the system as a whole. For God's sake, we have the best educated generation to ever exist on the face of this planet - planning and bargaining are what we've been toiling our miserable white-collar lives around. All we lack is solidarity.
It's not as satisfying as heads rolling down the streets of Paris - but it's never just the elite who die in such scenarios. We should be ready for such an occasion as civil war - but it should also be a last resort.
All those strides came with the aforementioned violent crackdowns and the gains were short lived. Leaving the power structure in place and merely trying to bargain with it for a few more scraps left capitalists with the power they needed to erode those gains. And again, to the extent any progress was made, it was within the imperial core. All those other people around the world who were being exploited by international capital didn’t enjoy any of the benefits of the bargaining that went on here.
You have to ignore a lot of the reality of history to believe in the story of peaceful incremental progress.
Man, if you don't think we've made significant progress since the 1880s, I don't know what to tell you.
Oh no, you're one of those.
One of what? Someone who gives a shit about anyone besides people in one country?
No, the kind of idiot who says "Both sides" in the Ukrainian War are bad because the Imperial Core is Exploiting the Helpless Foreign Countries. It's reverse White Man's Burden, and ethnocentric as fuck.
So are we just supposed to be ok with all the people who died in wars or coups because the US wanted to make sure no country could successfully do communism or even just decide not to give away all their resources for cheap?
Don't know where I said that, but go off, I guess.
I think it's pretty clear that the rich are not rational actors and neither can they be trusted.
Rationality does not imply wisdom, nor intelligence, nor far-sightedness. But most of the elite are more Rupert Murdoch than Elon Musk - they are rational rather than irrational.
All it implies is that rich folk, generally, will do what most people will do in situations involving one's livelihood and assets - assess it according to their biases, determine their possible profit or loss and its likelihood, and choose the course of action that seems most suited to their risk tolerance.
We don't need a civil war, we need to kill the billionaires
If you think that happens without a civil war, you haven't been paying attention.
Force doesn't necessarily imply bloodshed, but forcing them to give up what they have against their will definitely implies force - I think we're well beyond the point of simple persuasion.
I mean, I actually believe that it won't be accomplished without bloodshed - but there's a world of difference between 'civil unrest' and 'civil war', and I see people fantasizing about the latter far too often. Force is the tool workers use to prevent the use of overwhelming force against the workers - but using it as a tool of overthrow itself is.... often strategically unsound, unless matters have already spiraled into chaos.
This is where supposedly communist regimes tend to go wrong - they skip straight to revolution without taking the necessary preparatory steps to do things like level inequality and shore up democracy. This just means that the wealth and power reconsolidate almost immediately into authoritarian state capitalism or similar - generally a worse state than preceded it, and definitely not communism.
The force is necessary though.
Again, I don't dispute that force is necessary for self-defense, for pressuring the government, and, once taken by democratic means, for use of state force to implement the necessary changes. Only that the use of force to overthrow the government is probably a strategic mistake at this junction, moral issues aside. No coup worth succeeding will succeed, and civil war would be... brutal, even if by some miracle leftist forces emerged and won.
I think we probably agree but are caught up in semantics and details.
Nailed it.
For all your sneering stupidity, you forgot your point. Are you saying they're actually democracies, or that there is a more effective set of material conditiond to establish to stop them rapidly sliding into autocracy?
You seem to think authoritarian states where wealth is consolidated and noone but members of the single party can vote for the single leader are sufficiently democratic and didn't follow a predictable path toward autocracy - or that it's desirable and democratic for that to happen. Just about any state that isn't busy larping at communism does a better job at democracy.
You want to throw the DPRK into the mix too, champ?
Force is fine. Speedrunning straight to toppling the government entirely is at this point a well-established way of creating an autocracy. If that's the near-inevitable outcome, why topple the government to get something worse? It's moronic.
You use force to push for change - with the threat of all the violence and revolution backing that. If you have the sustained force required to topple and effectively replace the government with a democratic machine, coercing the existing government into changes to protect your democracy seem straightforward. If you don't have the numbers or coordination, how do you think starting a government from scratch is going to work out? Helpful hint: Look at historical case-studies.
I don't understand why ML's are so keen to bang on about material conditions when they work so hard to ignore them.
The ruling class loves it when you say stuff like this bud.