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Even this I think obscure what actually happened in Cuba. Cuba didn't have people who were down to "back liberation movements" when Fidel Castro started. They built that. When we resign ourselves to what exist today, we surrender ourselves to the fate chosen to us by the capitalists. I don't think this will be easy and have its own exceptional problems here, but I don't think it is impossible.

The following is Fidel Castro in his own words:

How did you put together the group of militants who were going to attack Moncada?

I’d done quite a bit of proselytising and speech-making - because I already had a clear idea of how to make a revolution - and I had the habit of studying each and every combatant who volunteered, determining his motivations and ensuring that he understood the rules of organization and conduct, explaining our goals and principles, explaining what I could and should explain. Without that approach, you couldn’t have conceived the plan for Moncada. On what basis? What forces were you going to have? Who were your combatants, what were their motivations, their backgrounds, and how many of them were there? If you can’t count on the working class, the campesinos, the under-class, the poor and humble, in a country terribly exploited and suffering, then none of it makes any sense. **There was no class consciousness [in Cuba at the time], except for those who were members of the Popular Socialist Party, who were pretty well educated politically; there was, though, what I sometimes called a class instinct. ** here was Mella, a young, brilliant university leader who, along with a fighter from the War of Independence, had founded the Communist Party of Cuba in 1925. I’ve mentioned him more than once. But in 1952 that party was politically isolated - imagine, this was the heyday of McCarthyism and [Cuba was] under the influence of a ferocious imperialist campaign, with all the resources imaginable at its disposal, to be used against anything that smelled the slightest bit like Communism. There was an enormous lack of political culture.

Did it take you long to gather all those men together?

It went relatively quickly. I was amazed at how fast, using the right arguments and a number of examples, you could persuade somebody that that society [we lived in] was absurd and that it had to be changed. Initially, I began the job with a handful of teams. There were a lot of people who were against theft, misappropriation of funds, unemployment, abuse, injustice, but they thought it was all attributable to bad politicians. They couldn’t see that it was the system that created all of that. We know that capitalism’s influences, invisible to the majority of people, act on the individual without the individual’s awareness. Many people were of the opinion that if you brought an archangel down from heaven, the most expert of them all, and gave him the job of governing the Republic, that would bring about administrative honesty - you could create more schools, no one would steal the money to be used for public health and other pressing needs any more. They couldn’t see that unemployment, poverty, the lack of land - all those calamities couldn’t be fixed even by an archangel, because those enormous tracts of land, the latifundios, that system of production would not allow anything, anything at all, to be done. I was totally convinced that the system had to be done away with. The kids I recruited were Orthodoxists, very anti-Batista, very good, honest kids, but they lacked any political education. They had class instinct, I would say, but not class consciousness. As I explained at the beginning, we began to recruit and train men not in order to make a revolution, but rather to engage - this seemed perfectly elementary - in a struggle, along with others, to reestablish the constitutional status quo of 1952, when [the constitutional system] was short-circuited, two months and twenty days before the elections, by Fulgencio Batista, a man who had great influence in his old and unpurified military and who conceived the coup when he became convinced that he had no chance whatever of winning the elections. We organized as a fighting force - not, I repeat, in order to make a revolution but rather to join all the other anti-Batista forces, because after the coup on 10 March 1952, it was elementary that all those forces had to be united. The party that had won the 1948 elections, the Authentic Party, was in power and it was pretty corrupt, but Batista was much worse. There was a constitution, there was a whole electoral process under way, and eighty days before the June elections, on 10 March 1952, Batista launched his coup. The elections were going to be held on 1 June. He was his party’s candidate, but the polls said he had no chance whatsoever of being elected; clearly the party that Chibas had founded, the Orthodox Party, was going to win by a wide majority. So Batista launched his military coup. [And almost immediately,] everybody began to organize and make plans to bring down that illegal, despotic government.

How many men did your group have?

We didn’t have a centavo, we didn’t have anything. What I did have was a relationship with a party, the Orthodox Party, which had a lot of young people in it, all very anti-Batista - they were like the antithesis of Batista. In that respect, there was no other organization comparable to it in the country. The ethical and political stature of the youth wing of the party was very high. I couldn’t say that they had, as I said to you earlier, a high level of political awareness, revolutionary awareness, class consciousness, because when all was said and done, the leadership of that party, like always, except in Havana, where there was a large group of intellectuals and professionals, had gradually fallen into the hands of landowners and other wealthy men. ** But the majority of the party were good men, honest, hard-working people, even some from the middle class - [they weren’t] even particularly anti-imperialistic, because the subject of imperialism was simply not discussed. It was discussed only within the circles of the Communist Party - that was how low the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people had fallen after the Second World War; it had been crushed under the overwhelming weight of the Yankees’ ideological and advertising machinery.**

Those countries had far more than their fair share of reactionary counterrevolutionaries.

Or they'd have asked what a fascist was

I agree, but also it's important to realize that there were reliable pressure release valves. The FBI/CIA didn't put down the American revolution, being able to afford a house did it. Now, we're getting to the point where the 30-50k year income bracket is going to be priced out of apartments and wind up in long term hotels until they totally fall through the cracks, and the previous bracket that lived in apartments are dropping out of the labor market and society as a whole if they aren't sharing a 2 bedroom with 6 other people. Even the Floyd protests were squelched through the vague promise that a Biden presidency would return the "tension" back to pre-Trump standards (which are still genocidal).

No one is promising anyone under the age of 35 anything. The best you can get from the Republicans are low hanging culture war victories that alienate a larger amount of people each go around, and the Dems' offer is "eat shit and die for another highway lane". Post-2008 created a generation who had nothing, and post-2022 looks like it'll be demanding that generation to pay a price that their grandparents wouldn't have been able to pay when the state still allowed for social democratic concessions. You can't even fucking smoke decent cigs unless you spend the time to roll your own at this point.

I don't expect concessions to the working class anytime soon, but I disagree with the people also expecting some sort of balkanization to occur soon either. I think the United States as it stands currently is much more fragile and rotten than we realize, and only exists to suppress the working class. It's why the only real answer to inflation is to raise interest rates and get double digit unemployment. The state is totally moribund, and I think we're likely to see a total collapse of the economy. You'll try to go to McDonalds, but they'll have one or two members of management working, having to explain to customers that all they have for the day are fries because their supply of beef and chicken is delayed indefinitely. Walmart gets more infrequent restocks because they can't afford to pay anyone with a CDL more than $25k a year and turn a profit, the backlog on transistors needed to repair the trucks is immense, and the hours would be brutal for the early 1800's (they're already trying to get kids into these roles). School attendance plummets (it already has) as public schools, already stretched to the breaking point from lack of funding and staff (compounded by culture war bullshit) now have to share a portion of their budget with the private catholic charter school down the block, and that place is only kept afloat because they've never paid a cent in taxes despite tuition resembling the price of college two generations ago. A lot of kids are already priced out of sporting programs, even in public schools. Rolling blackouts become more commonplace. The water dries up to the west, but don't worry, that almond crop will will continue uninterrupted. Profit continues to plummet because even if business could operate at decent standards (which as of the time of me typing this out, it really can't in the US), whatever money the worker will have been able to scrap together will go straight to rent seekers. Both parties are totally captured by capital and refuse to use the state to reign it in even for their own sadistic agendas. Donald Trump governed like Jeb! would have except slightly louder, and Biden governed like Trump would have if he won. Things will stop.

Within that context, do you think the state garners more consent? Do you even think it maintains the ability to police as effectively? For what it's worth, by the Pentagon's own projections, they expect internal warfare against the US military around 2025, not due to an existing political faction taking up arms against the state (they largely benefit from it, even in it's rotting state) but due to economic conditions deteriorating until that's all that's left to do. I think after Floyd, and the increased tension from the recent Supreme Court ruling, and the impending depression (that'll make the one we've been living in for two years seem like a dream), we're on track. When that time comes, I'm sure the CIA/FBI/DHS will knock it out of the park. They have a fantastic track record against protracted guerilla warfare during the height of the empire's power, I'm sure they'll have no issues when the insurrection is coming from inside the house, and nothing's getting made.

The movements are easy to coopt cuz there is no structure. There is no van gaurd there is no leadership. They also aren't serious in actually forcing what they want

Decentralized movements organically just fall apart. And that's what blm, occupy and other recent movements have been.

Yeah that’s a great example of what I mean.

Scaling up always creates unexpected problems and there has never been a panopticon of this scale before.

I’m sure the worst is yet to come. but at a certain point the info you have has to be parsed by a human mind and every member of the panopticon parsing team has to be completely ideologically committed so they don’t risk a whistleblower or spy. That vetting process will seriously limit the candidate pool, and then they have to stay ideologically committed while staring into the maw of this extra legal nightmare surveillance machinery that they have no reason to believe isn’t watching them too.

Maybe it’s naive but it’s worth considering that atleast part of the reason the State can never seem to use this capacity to actually prevent anything is because a panopticon of this scale is a lot more unwieldy from the inside looking out that it seems from the outside looking in. I mean if that’s the case then doing things like baiting lonely Muslim youths into doing dumb stuff also makes sense. Instead of the rationale being “gladio style strategy of tension” the rationale is “look let’s get some numbers on the board to justify this surveillance apparatus before we get accused of being wasteful and ineffective” because it may seem meaningless but I’m sure the fact the “fed posting” has become a meme in left and right wing online spaces is of some concern to the ghouls at Langley.

Maybe I’m way off base here and we should all definitely practice good and thorough opsec. But I still find myself wondering what the minimum staffing requirements are for a panopticon that watches everyone in the U.S. To be effective and then how easy is it to recruit a team of that size for such a sensitive task.

Some back of the napkin math suggests that with a 61% clearance rate, one could commit 9 murders and have a 0.02% chance of not being arrested for any of them.

On the contrary, if anything history has shown us, these revolutionary figures would have been smart and adaptive enough to exploit the weaknesses of modern surveillance and use it against the state and disrupt their operations.

I would caution against countering doomerism w/ Great Man History, tbh. That's a good way of disappointing oneself & misdiagnosing the nature of one's own problem. None of these figures willed "The Revolution" into being of their own accord; they made experiments which happened to bear fruit, because the conditions in which they lived & fought were fertile for the planting. This does not mean that tilling comes without effort, nor that one can only raise a harvest in the best of fields; but only that the farmer does not make his own soil, and little grows in a salted field.

I really hope you're right, because we absolutely could do with such figures right now. What is also true is that social revolutionaries in the developed world were also crushed, from the communards in Paris, to the spartacists in Germany, to the republicans in spain, to the antifascists in Italy during and after WW2. All crushed or those that succeed, co-opted and divested of their revolutionary potential such as in Ireland and Portugal. I guess the latter is still better than nothing.