It’s Probably Time to Start Talking About Revolution. Say It Out Loud, Just to See How it Feels.
Why is this “cringe” to say?
Say it out loud , just to see how it feels:
Revolution.
Revolution is so far outside of the regular discourse of the movement, that you can literally get called crazy, sneered at and openly dismissed by members of the “left” for even talking about it. It exists in our movements, at best, as a very abstract, even futuristic end goal. I don’t even see any discussion that materially places it somewhere in our own lifespans, maybe like, “in 25 years, we should have the infrastructure we would need to win in a possible force takeover, and this is our 10-year agenda to start us off”, or, “within 5 years, we will arm 20% of the left, within 10, we aim for 50% coverage”, or even, god forbid, “it will never happen in our lifetimes, but we are taking these 10 steps to give the next generation a rich revolutionary inheritance. We are smuggling them out of school to give them secret Marx lessons and burying guns in the woods for them,” etc. We are simply not operating on anything LIKE these terms.
I.e., our largest socialist organization, has the MO that we have to “build” ourselves up to some unquantified point of revolution in the future — that we get to that unquantified point using … voting and what am I reading here, no, actually just voting until we have enough people inside the government that, let me see if I follow, we are the government, or something, we become the government? Or we are enough of the government to… I don’t know, attack it from the interior? Miss me. Not even going to entertain this ridiculous thought process, frankly; for our purposes, these lines of inquiry are notably *remote*, by definition, from revolution.
People talk about revolution in theory; far, far more time is spent discussing views on various historical revolutions and how they want down (often from the academic/philosophical perspective, no less), than on what our own will look like. Which might be OK, or even make sense, if it was because we were putting a preponderance of context and strategy onto our own plan, in service of our own material progress towards revolution. But instead, this mode of historical analysis just pushes our revolutionary praxis into mainly abstract, dislocated, terms. While using historical analysis is obviously critical on many levels, and even a vehicle for talking about it in the contemporary sense, the situation of our relationship to revolution lying in the past and not even necessarily in ongoing revolutions around the world, is of concern.
It’s been interesting to see that even amongst some kind of (purportedly) “leftist” revival, you’re still not seeing revolution as the basis for the modern contemporary leftist ideology. I very rarely hear people talk about themselves or their peers (even in left circles) as revolutionaries or their work as revolutionary. In fact, I gotta tell you, people act like you’re being … cringe… to call yourself a revolutionary or to identify primarily with a revolutionary politic. It is as if it breaks the cool boy irony that has blanketed the left — bro, way to fuck up the vibes, we’re here to canvass, not throw down. There’s a sense that people who are talking about revolution are being overdramatic and attention-seeking: this is seen in blank dismissal of material revolutionary polices as immature, out of touch, unrealistic, unknowledgeable/unsophisticated about what the world is really like. If you’re gunning for revolution, you’re not being “serious” — this according to the same people whose version of getting “serious” about what we are facing is this country is to just keep voting Democrat like everyone has been all along from the inception of this bullshit.
At this point the aversion to revolution feels straight up embarrassing and overly self-conscious. The lack of talk about revolution that is tied to *this* time, in *this* place, in America, *by us*, is in my mind, symptomatic of a resistance that has invested in reform to such an extreme degree that even 10 years of evidence that reform doesn’t even hold back the dam, is insufficient to change tactics. To even take the idea of revolution SERIOUSLY in -any- material way would seemingly preclude so much of what we were doing. (And that is why it continues: because it would mean that we’ve been wrong and we have to try something new).
There are, indeed, “justifications” offered as to why we aren’t pursuing a revolutionary track. For example, the idea that “things just aren’t bad enough”, when in fact, things very much are. I invite you to reflect on the fact that the giant energy of movements over the past 10 years has not been enough to maintain our footing. In the technology industry we fought against surveillance and against weapons companies. We waged war against gentrification in every city. We have seen an incredible amount of protest and activation around the #MeToo movement and in the movements against police violence against Black people. We saw incredible growths in non-profits (huge mistake), but, too, in grassroots movements at times. The degree of use of social media for organizing was though the roof. It felt like the critical awareness was reaching entirely new levels.
If you didn’t look at the material results, you could envision a triumphant movement, and a sustained dedication to protest and reform that spanned huge sectors of society, generated an entirely new, updated body of work for the digital generation, established a true, articulated Millennial political base, that was dynamically achieving its goals and restructuring society.
This sounds amazing and beautiful maybe, and it is actually what should have resulted from our work. But when you look at the REALITY of where we STILL are in political and material conditions, it is almost shocking to see the barrenness and the lack of progress. In some areas, say, diversity in tech, there would be no way to demonstrate, working back from the material results, that there had actually been a 10 year sustained effort to increase representation; because representation literally did not improve. It would have literally not changed the results at all if we had simply done nothing, as far as I can figure. Perhaps there is now slightly less attrition or something, but again, there are less women in tech then there were 10 years ago. It carries on; in the anti-surveillance movement it is literally impossible to imagine having more surveillance than we do … except that they keep ratcheting it up at warp speed. Police continue to kill with impunity; the US continues to destroy other countries, and sexual assault and rape continue unabated. We didn’t bust the Epstein ring. We didn’t rip out the Catholic ring. The CIA continues to coup governments, and from the military to the technology industry, we are seeing mass death and mass death and human rights abuses after human rights abuses, and warcrimes on war crimes. All ADVANCING, not slowing, not stopping; getting WORSE.
You would think that movements that mobilized tens of millions of people, that educated half a country, that raised an unprecedented amount of money in the name of these causes, that led to the revival of democratic socialism, that led to some of the biggest protests and marches in American history — for the Women’s March, for George Floyd — that those movements would have gotten us somewhere totally different than where we are today. They didn’t. They’ve called our bluff -- we did this set of strategies again and again and again, and we got materially nowhere, and we kept going, and we got nowhere, and we ran up into the biggest test of leftist and liberal activism in our generation’s history, Roe v Wade, and we were destroyed. We sustained a staggering defeat. And there has been no sustained register even of comment. We took it lying down with barely a whimper.
Which moves our movements are dead. Gone. Lights out.
And so, we are in this moment presented with some of the gravest calls to revolution: which is that every single one of our dearly loved and tenderly grown movements was ban hammered, infiltrated, bribed, sold out, de-radicalized, corporatized, non-profitized, violently put down by cops, threw out in the courtrooms, intimidated off the internet, disrupted by intelligence agencies, stolen by tech companies and profited off of by media companies. The intense violence and the totality with which we got creamed out there, should be the strongest summons of all to Revolution. We simply cannot allow the government and the elite superstructure in American to get away with that shit. That is fucking insane and if their answer is no, ours needs to be FUCK YOU.
Any material analysis now shows that no reform is possible, in the face of opposition that won’t bow at all to the most base of human demands — as we have demanded freedom from police violence, from exploitation through surveillance, from sexual abuse, for crimes against labor, from poverty, from pedophilia; we have demanded health care and food and an end to international aggression, and so on, in clear terms.
They have given their answer to our demands: no. No. Fuck you, you can die. Fuck you, you can suffer. Fuck you, you can starve. Fuck you, you can die. Fuck you, you can get shot. Fuck you, we’re gonna watch you and your pretty dog too .
Fuck you, you can be sick.
One million of us just needlessly died in the pandemic. One million. Materially, this is point blank period, outright, 100% avoidable, government mass murder. One. Million.
In saying “we’re not there yet”, it’s almost like we’ve taken the privilege discourse so far that we find our own movement too privileged to deserve a revolution, because we are America, and we are the most privileged in the world; that this is something for other countries where the conditions are worse, that we “have it better than anyone else”, even though something about this smacks of directly of American propaganda and brainwashing, making us unable to see how truly bad it is; I.e. When you look at the maternal death rate and see that we have a much higher rate of maternal death than many of these countries, when you look at our rates of police shootings, when you look at the extremes of the wealth gaps in this country, when you look at the poor quality of the food and the prevalence of pedophile rings in the schools, when you look at the level of actual democracy that is in evidence, when you look at the reproductive rights we have, we are, in fact, very often NOT better off than other countries in either the most basic profiles of society, or analysis of the overall oppression in this country. And our basic, basic human rights not to have our destinies as controlled by a tiny monopolistic group, to not spend our entire lives working for that tiny monopolistic group, do not exist AT ALL. And that is way before you even get to the fact that America’s revolution is so important specifically because it IS built on the wealth of other nations. This is how we take American boots of their throats.
Its hard to say what is behind this attitude that we’re “nowhere near the conditions” for revolution; when the conditions for revolution are nothing more than to be oppressed and to overthrow that oppressor and replace it/them with a different system of governance, economy, law, etc. At times it feels like the left is trapped in some kind of lazy man’s accelerationism, accelerationism through what is materially, at this point, total inaction, through “let’s just keep voting, let’s just keep raising awareness, let’s just keep making reforms” not until its GOOD ENOUGH we can do something but until its BAD ENOUGH that its just gonna happen, but oh, we just aren’t there yet, and we just have to wait it out. Oh and send my non profit more money.
What?
Often when I bring up the idea of the revolution people say: its dangerous to organize a revolution. The CIA and the tech companies are watching. Yes, they fucking are, as they have been doing for many revolutions many times. The thing is, it will not be any safer at any other point in time or history. The acceleration of autonomous weaponry including drone swarms and planes and robots, that is starting to pump out of Silicon Valley, makes it more unlikely by the day of being able to pull off anything, and that’s just the tech industry alone. The surveillance that will monitor our resistance, only gets worse by the day. The lack of resources we have as the wealth gap grows and grows, will also continue; the salaries of computer programmers are even going down. We are literally in a free fall right now as far as how bad things can get.
You are left arguing that no revolution is possible because the conditions of oppression are so advanced; these of course, are the only conditions that revolution is possible, and of course, the left simultaneously claims that the conditions are too bad, and that they are not bad enough.
The feds are the conditions of our oppression, they are its material reality. We are going to have to figure out how to organize the revolution in a way that takes the actors into accounts. People have organized revolutions and continued to do so under very severe constraints. And have developed a number of tactics for doing so, most of which we do not use.
Most importantly, we don’t really have a fucking choice. These are the conditions we are operating under. They will never get less dangerous than they are today. We have abundant evidence that the reform-based approaches we are using are not holding the dam, much less softening the ground for something more serious. If we were actually orchestrating our movements in a way that was paving the way for some new level of organization, if we were getting to that point, perhaps we could just stay the course; but this has literally not happened.
One thing we hear out of, for example, the DSA is that we lack some kind of critical mass or organization of workers or, “education” of the workers, that is missing. They even reach way up their ass and pull out some theoretical numbers of like how many DSA members it would take, and trot out this line even as the membership growth has slowed significantly. If you want to talk about some abstract critical mass, I would suggest that we have had nothing BUT critical mass. The number of protesters who came out for George Floyd? Up to 26 million people were involved. In the Women’s March 2017, there were over 5.5 million. When #MeToo exploded, everyone in the country was made aware of it and tens of millions of women took to the internet, to the media, to their schools and work and homes, to organize. Even the tech industry at times has seen critical mass in movements like for diversity and representation; even though the results never came, there were 100,000s of participants from that field and others around it.
We. Have. The. Numbers.
Yes, you say, but they’re not “there” yet. “They aren’t educated enough/networked enough/unionized enough/connected with some kind of central apparatus like a political party that’s an offshoot of the Democratic party enough, etc.”
But here’s my pitch: maybe we can’t get “there” when “there” has never been on the agenda? How do we expect to radicalize the left towards revolution when the majority of the effort has rather been to stay any hand of revolution, to funnel revolutionary energy into reform? How do we expect people to sign off for a revolutionary movement when one has not actually been presented to them, and while rather, they have been brow beaten over the head again and again about reform, when reformist movements are all that has been there for them, when it is the only option put on the table by the very people who claim to have ANY kind of revolutionary kernel?
To dig deeper, one thing that is very obviously happening is that non-profits have been quelling any backlash to ongoing revelations of just how much our strategies have been failing us. The NPIC has been basically running cover for the movement’s growing understanding that something is terribly wrong. They have a message: stay the course, stay the course. What did the abortion non profit system have to say when everything went down? They said to send more money, send more money, just to them, not to community mutual aid, not directly in aid of women who need abortions. March!!! Contact your representatives!!! Tell your stories!!! Make your voices heard!!! The DSA similarly says to vote, to vote, to vote, when it is just untrue beyond any reasonable doubt that this approach is meeting an acceptable level of change. We are told to contact our representatives. Cast a ballot. The exact same messages that we had been hearing, the exact same action plan we’ve been hearing from every other sector of the movement. We have BEEN voting, we have BEEN canvassing, we have BEEN raising money and giving it to the non-profits, we have BEEN reading articles and sharing information and telling our stories and building awareness, we have BEEN connecting in our communities, we have been, we have been, we have been.
The people who are telling you to do these things are the ones who have been empowered with the best that we have to give them, the most resources we have, and haven’t turned around a commiserate result. These strategies, what would you call them? Reformism is the only descriptor. These reformist strategies have captured by far most of the resources and the momentum of those who have a stake in our movements. Perhaps it is time to stop listening to those who have been the leaders and stand-outs of the past 10 years.
The discontent of the people is a downtrodden one these days. After being sick for several years, I started looking around again and found that on the left it feels like everything is suspended, frozen in time; its like nothing has moved forward. The language is the same, the tactics, the discourse, the organization. There is a stagnation, a stillness, and embarrassingly, it feels like not a sense of defeat but rather of “oh well, that didn’t work, time to just keep it moving I guess”. It is not even an energized stillness, it is not something about baited breath and tension. I don’t see much anger, I don’t see much panic The defeat has not been energizing; that is because a lot of what the “left” has managed to achieve doesn’t escalate in response to the circumstances, but instead suggests simply a measured ongoing traction (which we now see is no traction at all).
Where is the sense of urgency? Where is the sense of momentum? Do we realize that in not doing the revolution, we are making the consequences and fatalities to our side much larger? Every second that passes more people suffer and die. Even if you argue that things within the country are not in a bad enough condition, think of the nations and peoples that are colonized by the United States which causes material mass death on a truly continuous basis? Are things not bad enough for them?
The fates of other revolutions are tied to our own. America is the imperial center, the mother of devils, she is the beast that has the nations on leashes. In America we become accustomed to her, I think. I think its important to think of our movements across space and time, and to think what the consequences are of waiting to do this motherfucker.
The enemy just grows stronger and stronger. It builds more weapons, it detains more children, it arrests more Black people, it kills severely mentally ill people in the streets, it takes away homes and schools, and children. The handling of COVID alone shows the degree to which the deeply impacted capitalist system means millions die and millions die and millions die. The hate of human life that the enemy has is profound. Every moment that we wait has a human cost to it. We can sit here and theorize and calculate that the time isn’t right, but do those calculations hold the weight, the cost of that time? I bet you can even map it out mathematically, add up alllll the deaths that happen in direct association, direct kills and fatalities by the enemy, and not only here, but for all the other nations where American produces death, and get a number. Get a number and project, and divide it out. Do you know how many lives 5 minutes of talking about reforms, we know don’t work, cost us? How many lives are the meetings where you talk about which Democratic politicians to back… even the ones who directly fund GENOCIDE?! Ones who add to the cost of the waiting?
Make sure you know how much everything costs in human life before you spend it on cynical lack of urgency under the guise of being “realistic”.
The reason we can make no progress on coming up with a revolutionary base is because we are not pitching revolution. They will tell you: we have to grow our movements. But this is not a movement that is building, even though we are told it is movement building. If our movements had been building, if they had momentum, if they had any teeth, there would have been a much much more serious reaction to the loss of Roe v Wade on the “left”. We would have seen tremendous energy around that event, as that great injustice inflicted on our entire country and intersecting literally every single one of our movements, it would have revitalized us all and also given a collective platform onto which we could collectively unleash.
But that didn’t happen. In fact, almost nothing happened.
Our energies, instead of becoming more unified, more urgent, are simply sapping, thickly, into the same fucking places and the same tired strategies. Distorted and fractured and channelled into like 150 different kinds of reform. Our movements take an inch from a wall that is growing a mile a day. Capitalism is running unopposed, as the only thing that can be run against it is revolution, and that is not on the ballot.
The people who are telling you that a revolutionary movement isn’t called for or isn’t necessary, are the ones who proposed the reformist strategies that landed us in this stagnation. A revolutionary ethic is moving towards revolution in clear, material terms; this is simply not compatible with strategies like incrementally electing more and more Democrats, a party which has blood all over it and is not reconcilable with a movement of the people in any way (and thus you see why it gets nowhere). All of this terror created by America has been committed by both sides of this same system; why are we even fucking around with these people like this?
We haven’t even TRIED the revolutionary path!! We haven’t even TRIED to put together the revolution, on those terms, we don’t discuss how we get to the revolution, in OUR LIFETIMES, how do we bridge the gap between where we are and a world without death by American imperialism?
We are sitting in a moment of… weariness, and unease. As the cliche goes, it could really go either way. If a strong revolutionary core was assembled — and I mean, even 500 people getting on the same page about this could potentially produce huge momentum — we need to at least be seriously discussing revolution as a potential strategy. I think that this would be a much better direction to take disaffection, rather than just folding it right back into the same cycle of reform —> failure —> apathy, alienation —> reform —> catastrophic failure.
It’s interesting to me that the lack of progress and results from a reform strategy result is such deflation, murkiness and hopelessness. Sometimes I think that the failures of revolutionary movement would be far more energizing. We have discovered another way the enemy cannot be defeated!!! We make a new attempt at dawn!!!
With a goal of revolution in mind, a concrete agenda starts to take place. First of all, would be the agenda of unity around the very material fact of across the board loss. As diverse as the various factions of the movement have been over the past 10 years, we have all shared very similar experiences when it came to how our movements went down, how they were catastrophically destroyed by the media, by tech companies and venture capitalists, by feds and cops and sell-outs and non-profits and greed and clout and corruption and compromise.
This failure — this shared failure — is a gift, it could be a gift; this shared failure and shattered dreams and humiliation and our fight with the enemy, that is the basis for building a new goal. “You can’t bond over something negativeeeee” — absolutely false. “Let’s kill these motherfuckers” has united people for millennia. Our movements have also given us the legal proof and legal foundation that this is the necessary step. Combined, we have an irrefutable legal argument against these criminals, and a natural and international right to combat them. You know, I’m not sure what a unification effort would look like, but our groups still remain fairly distinct. I think that having a very diversified and decentralized structure worked for a long time. I think now is time for more communication and structure — and NOT one that is being gate-kept by an organization like the DSA that have deep priorities in managing communications in order to keep it palatable for their bosses in the literal White House. Gross!!!!!
Roe v. Wade proved more clearly, and beyond anything, than anything, that what we are doing is simply not working. If we had built a strong movement in the last 10 years, we would have seen something much different than we saw with Roe v Wade, which was essentially yelling for a few days and putting our credit card digits into yet another non profit, then just going off-air. The left is defeated, and more than ever, the non profits in particular — Planned Parenthood, the DSA, various women in tech organizations — are telling us to just stick with the same bullshit. In the wake of Roe v. Wade, thee DSA was talking about “State and Revolution(ary reforms)” — I’m literally gagging at all the levels of indirection, which show very clearly that the DSA is NOT a revolutionary player and does NOT have what it takes to stand up to this system. First of all, it is INCREDIBLY disrespectful to as STYLE *and* message, this blessed word in such a way that you are very clearly watering it down and demeaning it and diverting it.
For fucks sake, abortion non profits were outright saying not to even give a girl a place on your couch if she needs one to get an out-of-state abortion. We have arrived in la-la land.
We lost Roe v. Wade, and still people think it is pre-mature for revolution? The people we put in charge of determining the direction of our reproductive rights movements are telling you NOT EVEN TO DO MUTUAL AID? They didn’t have a plan ready for when this happened, a plan to ensure our rights by any means necessary? The didn’t have a defense? They didn’t have anyone armed to protect the sites? They didn’t have a militia? Those were all things that we needed in that moment.
It is time to wake up. Every single movement in this country has fucking backfired. Things are worse than ever.
It is time to join the revolution, as a concrete reality and concrete goal. Revolution serves each of our interests. People who do not think this is the case, will soon come to change their minds when we actually start and they see what they will see, which is force, power, purpose. If the revolution is not welcome in the movement, than it is no movement.
I am really not asking for anything more that even de-stigmitizing the revolution. Please do not concern troll me with “the cops can read our DMs, how could we possibly even SAY—” — of course they can. We must find ways of communicating and organizing around the material realities of power, as so many have before us. It is my personal belief that we have all kinds of ways of moving into more a more radical position that require zero changes other than basic common sense. And I will remind everyone of the safety of numbers principle.
Here is my pitch: When we lead with what People actually need — when our movements are there to do what all oppressed people in this country and abroad need — when that is the basis of our movement, we will find and grow the movement we need to take these bitches. (See? I just talked about revolution using a simple colloquial phase, ‘take these bitches’! There are so many street-ways and academia-ways and code-ways and CS-ways to move our discourse in this direction. Memes, you fucking idiots. Try one.) (Many of the things we need are perfectly legal: buying guns, buying land, setting up defense training camps, purchasing anti-drone aircraft, building an underground press, buying buildings, establishing a militia, flying to other countries for “summits”…. ) (not to mention we are NOT tapping leftist lawyers and academics, particularly Marxists, who can help us set up and structure everything and get us some serious air cover).
When we have a movement that offers what the People need, when we are not just continuing to launder resistance into various reforms that can be opportunistically implemented and taken away — when we lead with what they need, which is unquestionable revolution, we will find our movements blessed.
When we have a movement that offers what the People need, then we have the support of the People. All this other shit we’ve been doing? It is not what is needed. And that, as much as anything, is why it hasn’t worked.