If you are fortunate, the next four years will be stable. You must educate, organize programs to better material conditions, and bring the proletariat into the left.
Do not betray yourself with “doomer” thoughts, these are a form of liberalism and must be routed out. Despair only perpetuates itself and it is hollow.
You have a feckless neoliberal now in office. Biden will fixate on enriching his donors and once again take his eyes away from the working class. He will expose bourgeoisie electoralism as a fraud incapable of delivering true improvements to the material conditions of the working class.
Do not waste these next years. The left in America has not had this opportunity in almost a hundred years. Seize this moment!
You cannot wait for some ahistorical great man to deliver a new world to you. Those figures only appear so great looking backwards, they reflect the workers they emerged from. All of us have fought alongside stronger comrades than them.
Comrades, this is the calm before climate change crashes down upon you. Unite as leftists and as socialists. Discard your privilege, your chains, your false pride. Seize liberation for all who are oppressed. Build your revolution.
some occupy footage came up in a movie i watched, and i really want to start collecting as much as i can find.
as much as the left is always rehashing where occupy went wrong, i realized there's something sort of magnificent about the structure of it and the way it played out that i don't believe resurfaced last summer. i hope it will this time; i think it has a lot to do with taking physical public spaces and holding onto them, which is harder in the age of the internet
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i mean i think we kept a lot of the politics. it's a tired point and playing counterfactuals sucks but i doubt we'd have the left we have now without it
you're right that's still age of the internet, but yeah that's what i mean. i look at chaz/chop or whatever and it seems like the internet spectacle blew it up long before it would have died had it been just ten or twenty years earlier
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well of course! every good movement will be demonized or co-opted at some point, and while i didn't know that then i do now and it's a helpful piece of info going forward. the occupy democrats facebook page is an occupy -> democrat pipeline, and so is /r/occupywallstreet - just chock full of :LIB:
in fact, most of the people who took part in occupy were libs. the fact that not all of them made it over to our side isn't necessarily a failure. what we've had since then are two big pushes at the presidency, which were actual failures in the sense that they didn't get us a president. in the long-term who knows exactly what place the sanders movement will take in history, but i really do believe the left is now in a better position than we were before his campaigns, and before occupy.
10 yrs before occupy you had the alter-globalization movement and the anti-wto/imf actions and quebec and the 2000 rnc/dnc and all of that spanning at least up until 9/11 completely wiped it from the public consciousness and scared anyone away from doing any serious direct action. 10 yrs after we've seen the biggest civil rights protests in us history.
i don't really know where we go from here i'm just happy to see the left has grown and i consider all these events of the last several decades as part of the historical process. it doesn't mean you have to repeat them - go out and do your own shit - but i think it's useful to place yourself inside that historical process.
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don't fully agree with everything, but that's a solid perspective. my point on seattle is that occupy was bigger as a result, and hopefully the next big thing is even bigger (i think 2020 was an okay start). also sanders and squad need to fail in order to send even more libs down the tube.
i agree with your optimism at the end. contrary to superpol, i think intersectional struggles can help bring libs into the class struggle