My uneducated blueprint of priorities for American leftists:
Protecting oppressed people living in the imperial core. Mutual aid & community protection programs are good examples. Maybe fights for healthcare as well? Idk
Organizing a worker's party of sorts, political education & agitation. DSA is doing some of this, though most people are attempting democratic entryism. Entryism seems to have had some successes as a platform for educating people about the left considering how attached many Americans are to politics, though I think this is limited to upper classes so probably not a long term strategy. I hope entryism can be abandoned at some point in favor of organizing around an independent party positioned explicitly against democrats.
Sabotaging imperialist aims. Attempting to preventing American imperialist wars through direct action as well as education on solidarity with the attacked. Agitating for mass anti-war movements the next time it inevitably happens. This will probably have to include getting liberals (yuck) on the street like during Vietnam. Hopes very low here too given the failure of anti-war movements in the last 2 decades.
OP to your point I agree about the need to kinda set aside the American ML utopia. Because the above strategies aren't really ML specific at all, they're shared by anarchists too! (Right?)
But most importantly, this blueprint is unique to the US / western imperial core countries - it probably looks very different in revolutionary Russia, and it certainly looks very different in today's India.
I debated deleting this because I have no idea what I'm talking about lmao but I'm leaving it because I'm curious to hear disagreements.
Precariat is becoming the primary class in the imperial core. Organizing on the heels of union strikes worked for Lenin and the Bolsheviks because the power lay with the proletariat and their proximity to the means of production.
That isn't the primary conflict anymore. The source of most organizing is service related work. Nurses, teachers, and the precariat class working odd jobs and unable to unionize because of alienation from their co-workers. It's gonna be a lot harder and a lot different organizing these forces. The BLM protests showed that it's possible though. That there is anger and power lying dormant in us. No matter how much they try and sperate us and alienate us, we will still have that collective power.
I haven't considered this take enough. It's really accelerating too.
Your comment makes me want to look into / help organize a rideshare union, (NLB approved or not). You're right that there's potential there. Like a mass distribution of rideshare agitprop pamphlets is not such an impossible idea. For the few times I do use rideshare, drivers are so often bored as fuck and willing to have real deep and personal discussions. On the other hand as I understand it there are very few rideshare drivers that "identify" with the job, so there's naturally less unity there. Which I suppose yeah, that's what the nature of the precariat has always been, and why the uniting power of the proletariat have historically been the deciding factor in movements.
It's a good question and I'm not sure, but I was thinking along the lines of what BPP was doing. Which ranged from free breakfasts for kids to basically creating their own community police force. So I suppose not far from creating an army lol
It's difficult to compare though, as I understand it cops & white people were even more aggressive toward black neighborhoods back then so the need was maybe more obvious.
I realize my post was vague, it was vague because I just honestly don't know
Oh yeah I agree with you, capitalism is harsh as fuck on black communities today too. You put it better than I, I was referring exactly to the diffused responsibility of neoliberalism. It's harder and more confusing to organize a BPP army against "neoliberalism" than physical wh*tes coming at you with guns. I agree we should exploit this shit, but I don't know how. Tenant unions & eviction resistance are great though. This is probably where some of the most egregious state violence happens today.
This is a good list overall, and this bit touches on it to an extent, but we need an explicit goal to be "get more people to openly, meaningfully call themselves leftists."
If every single leftist who currently exists in this country was perfectly organized into whatever your ideal leftist project looks like, and was active in pursuing that project, it still wouldn't be enough. We needs tens of millions of more of us, at minimum.
“get more people to openly, meaningfully call themselves leftists.”
Nice, this is sounds relatively easy. But yeah I agree.
My brother said "how could someone openly call themselves a communist in 2020?" We'll get there. Lmao. The genius response I thought of in the shower later was "HOW COULD SOMEONE CALL THEMSELVES A CAPITALIST??"
My uneducated blueprint of priorities for American leftists:
Protecting oppressed people living in the imperial core. Mutual aid & community protection programs are good examples. Maybe fights for healthcare as well? Idk
Organizing a worker's party of sorts, political education & agitation. DSA is doing some of this, though most people are attempting democratic entryism. Entryism seems to have had some successes as a platform for educating people about the left considering how attached many Americans are to politics, though I think this is limited to upper classes so probably not a long term strategy. I hope entryism can be abandoned at some point in favor of organizing around an independent party positioned explicitly against democrats.
Sabotaging imperialist aims. Attempting to preventing American imperialist wars through direct action as well as education on solidarity with the attacked. Agitating for mass anti-war movements the next time it inevitably happens. This will probably have to include getting liberals (yuck) on the street like during Vietnam. Hopes very low here too given the failure of anti-war movements in the last 2 decades.
OP to your point I agree about the need to kinda set aside the American ML utopia. Because the above strategies aren't really ML specific at all, they're shared by anarchists too! (Right?)
But most importantly, this blueprint is unique to the US / western imperial core countries - it probably looks very different in revolutionary Russia, and it certainly looks very different in today's India.
I debated deleting this because I have no idea what I'm talking about lmao but I'm leaving it because I'm curious to hear disagreements.
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Most of my political education has probably been from posting cringe and being told so. (This is not a good thing but still)
deleted by creator
Precariat is becoming the primary class in the imperial core. Organizing on the heels of union strikes worked for Lenin and the Bolsheviks because the power lay with the proletariat and their proximity to the means of production.
That isn't the primary conflict anymore. The source of most organizing is service related work. Nurses, teachers, and the precariat class working odd jobs and unable to unionize because of alienation from their co-workers. It's gonna be a lot harder and a lot different organizing these forces. The BLM protests showed that it's possible though. That there is anger and power lying dormant in us. No matter how much they try and sperate us and alienate us, we will still have that collective power.
I haven't considered this take enough. It's really accelerating too.
Your comment makes me want to look into / help organize a rideshare union, (NLB approved or not). You're right that there's potential there. Like a mass distribution of rideshare agitprop pamphlets is not such an impossible idea. For the few times I do use rideshare, drivers are so often bored as fuck and willing to have real deep and personal discussions. On the other hand as I understand it there are very few rideshare drivers that "identify" with the job, so there's naturally less unity there. Which I suppose yeah, that's what the nature of the precariat has always been, and why the uniting power of the proletariat have historically been the deciding factor in movements.
How do you protect oppressed people? With an army?
It's a good question and I'm not sure, but I was thinking along the lines of what BPP was doing. Which ranged from free breakfasts for kids to basically creating their own community police force. So I suppose not far from creating an army lol
It's difficult to compare though, as I understand it cops & white people were even more aggressive toward black neighborhoods back then so the need was maybe more obvious.
I realize my post was vague, it was vague because I just honestly don't know
If the wh*tes are less aggressive now (they aren't, neoliberal policies are used to diffuse responsibility instead), then we should exploit that.
Oh yeah I agree with you, capitalism is harsh as fuck on black communities today too. You put it better than I, I was referring exactly to the diffused responsibility of neoliberalism. It's harder and more confusing to organize a BPP army against "neoliberalism" than physical wh*tes coming at you with guns. I agree we should exploit this shit, but I don't know how. Tenant unions & eviction resistance are great though. This is probably where some of the most egregious state violence happens today.
This is a good list overall, and this bit touches on it to an extent, but we need an explicit goal to be "get more people to openly, meaningfully call themselves leftists."
If every single leftist who currently exists in this country was perfectly organized into whatever your ideal leftist project looks like, and was active in pursuing that project, it still wouldn't be enough. We needs tens of millions of more of us, at minimum.
Nice, this is sounds relatively easy. But yeah I agree.
My brother said "how could someone openly call themselves a communist in 2020?" We'll get there. Lmao. The genius response I thought of in the shower later was "HOW COULD SOMEONE CALL THEMSELVES A CAPITALIST??"