🇵🇸antifa_ceo

I am going to assume you don’t live in the US based on your comment. I can only speak from a US centric perspective. I will try to explain what I am saying.

Living in the US is interesting because of how thoroughly propagandized the population is. Large swaths of the working class have been convinced their best bet is on the rich, not on building power for themselves. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Living in the heart of the evil empire ruining the world does something to you that you have to work hard over time to deprogram.

As conditions in the country deteriorate many people become disabused of these ideas but it takes time and a direct confrontation with their beliefs for it to happen often times. On top of this the capitalist class has many pressure valves that allow people to wash their hands of feeling like they need to do anything - they went to stomp around at a protest sanctioned by the police and went home, they donated to an LGBTQ advocacy NGO, etc etc etc.

Moreso effective protests and strikes especially take massive amounts of coordination and planning to pull off in a safe way. To organize those you need people who have apparatuses to make them happen and we are largely still building those structures. Big strikes don’t just happen out of nowhere they take years to make happen. It takes time to build the organizations that can even organize these efforts too.

And lastly people who are struggling to feed their kids and afford to go to the doctor simply do not have the ability to go to protests when it risks their only livelihood allowing them and their family to survive. We need to work as socialists to identify the material needs these people are lacking so they CAN join us.

I wrote this up hastily but would love to keep talking on this more. Broadly I think these ideas touch on my concerns about the material conditions even if it could probably be fleshed out and revised some more.

The oligarchic pseudo democracy we have does yes. The whole system is captured and only gives the illusion of choice.

True democracy has people working collectively to make decisions with robust systems of accountability to those who are elected to carry out those decisions. Democracy is truly having your hand on the wheel of your destiny by having a real voice in the world you live in.

Organizing mass protests or strikes like you are describing is downstream of the strategic agitation and education i am advocating for. You can’t just manifest these forms of direct action - you have to do the work to build the material conditions for them to happen.

Elections are useful when used as an agitational tool to activate more of the population. The problem is when electoralism is the end goal.

It is ok for us to push for reforms on the way to revolution. To cohere a larger movement we need to not only prove ourselves as socialists who can improve your life materially, but also we need to uplift those who are worst off so they are able to join our movement in the first place.

I believe in using everything at our disposal to do the necessary organizing, agitating, and educating on the path to fomenting revolutionary sentiment, but will fight subordinating the movement to milquetoast reformists who’s end goal is nicer capitalism, not the wholesale dissolution of it the world over.

Our movement is still frustratingly in its infancy. The material conditions for revolution are building but are still not here. We need to keep agitating this line - people are waking up. They hear what we have to say and they agree. Organizing works but it takes time and a strategy of patience. If we do not meet people where they are at and engage in the structures they trust, even when we do not, we are simply ceding ground to those who would poison them against us.

We aren’t gonna vote our way out of facism but we sure as hell can use those votes to agitate for why voting will never be enough.

Edit: one other thing to add here is we should not be striving to build a movement predicated around voting. Voting is the least impactful way to be involved in politics. What we should be building is a movement of average people, the workers who make this country run, who have an active say and care about how the country operates top to bottom. We want people to care about how things work and get done. We want them get involved in areas they care about and making their voices heard with suggestions and concerns. We want a truly involved population of people engaging in democracy - not just by voting but by having a hand on the wheel that steers not only their country but by extension their lives. We are building a movement not of better voters but of leaders who can champion the world we all deserve.

AI is fine when it is your hands. Not when it is your brain. As long as you can vet it it can be useful for coding. Its the moment we give agency away to the AI that many see issues with it.