I'm sorry for my tone there. I didn't pick up that you'd support properly implemented UBCs.

Here's my point about material conditions: you can just say, "change the material conditions" as a solution to pretty much any problem and it's so broad and vague that it feels like a cop-out to me. It's not clear to me gun violence comes from a lack of money, since there are poorer countries than the US with lower rates of violence. Looking at material conditions should just be the starting point of your analysis, and from that you try to figure out which conditions are the cause and how they could be changed.

The thing is that if you can find specific causes and solutions, it gives something else to direct energy towards. It provides a criticism where we can say, here's what the government could be doing to stop this, and they're bad because they're not. But if it's just, like, "If we were in charge things would be better and this wouldn't be happening," then it's just like, 'says you.' It's just not compelling unless you have a more clear and tangible solution.

As for the point on guerrilla war, the reason I don't think that Americans can use the same methods as the Vietnamese is that an average American and an average Vietnamese farmer from that time are about as different as two people can be. And those differences are the result of vastly different material conditions. The Vietnamese fought as hard as they did because they didn't have much of a choice, whereas Americans will likely always have the choice to go back to their life, which makes living in a tunnel a much tougher sell. Moreover, Americans are very divided intellectually and culturally, and there is a strong current of individualism that influences people regardless of their beliefs, and many people are alienated and isolated. All of these factors make it much harder to coordinate and organize than in a homogeneous, pre-industrial society filled with people with strong, organic social bonds who have nothing to lose. Just a cursory glance at American culture tells us what an uphill battle it is.

Imo, socialism has a better chance of catching on outside of the imperial core, and the best thing Western leftists can do for now is to seek to gum up the works of the war machine. A full scale guerilla war may not be feasible, but riots are. We can also work to counteract propaganda and attempts to manufacture consent by challenging false narratives (e.g. Zenz) and getting people to question the government more.

I won't say that it's impossible that there will ever be a guerilla war that will overthrow the government with executions in Central Park and the whole shebang, but it's a long way off. In the meantime, we need to focus on building support - and part of that means harnessing the anger that people feel over gun violence, and saying, "Yes, this is not normal, we need to do something to stop this because unlike them we are not a death cult and we take people's lives seriously, and that's why we support X, Y, and Z solutions." UBCs don't have to be one of those solutions but they do need to be more specific than just saying "change the material conditions" which just sounds to me like, "make things different in some way."