Please discuss! No uncritical sectarianism, bad faith arguments, etc.
Important questions:
- Is the strategy most socialist organizations in the US are using, in your opinion, a good one? What else should they do?
- As individual socialist, what do you think we should be doing? What groups are worth joining?
- What should be done about the sudden rise of socially reactionary beliefs and laws across the country?
Reading posted by users:
Where’s the Winter Palace?, posted by @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml, written by unknown author, I checked and could not find one on the article.
Conclusion from this text, that I think summarizes it’s premise quite well:
We believe that, in the U.S. in 2018, the truly important theoretical tasks have not been solved. We are in a period of a nascent socialist movement since the 2008 financial crisis. We should not be afraid of new ideas, and should look forward instead of harping on the 20th century. Without bending to reformism or adventurism, we must feel free to put everything back on the table and come to build strategy and theory through struggle.
(Emphasis mine)
These are some causes that I think we as ML’s ought to adopt that I don’t see being adopted much:
Right to repair The bottom line of corporations has made products harder to repair and has gone beyond planned obselecence to using the state to restrict access to schematics and replacement parts for various machines to even requiring the manufacturer to approve any replacement of components of machines. This is a popular movement that we can capitalize on superstructure wise and undermine the base of profits to the corporations by depriving them of the profits of purchasing new goods all of the time. This is a popular position that I don’t think that only the libertarians should be capitalizing on.
the Privacy movement The USA has a stupidly almost unavoidable surveilence network and it seems that even in left wing spaces nobody really cares much about privacy. I don’t know how we can do revolution at the moment, but having the state and the corporations channeling all of that info through Palintir et al is info that we’d rather them not have. I’m frustrated by the number of people even with a supposedly revolutionary ideology have ambivilence towards the amount of data servieled on each and every one of us to scare us from revolutionary action. Privacy promotion should be normalized to give us the freedom to act in manners legal or illegal to improve the conditions of the working class.
the Landback movement On a moral level, settlers have made the lives of indigenous people a living hell and It is sensible to say that we owe them something. On a tactical level many of them stood up to prevent the DAPL. So much land is not being used in the USA and quite frankly, even in reform methods, it is not impossible to give the unused land to the natives with a stroke of a pen. Our ecological concerns of the capitalist means of food production are unsustainable but we have people with knowledge of the land that were able to live off of it sustainably in the past. Why not use their knowledge to grow food sustainably in these Bureau of Land Management lands? Their songs teach of the laws of the lands and how to treat them. These songs come from the people that lived on the land for centuries and culturally had a dialectical relationship with that ecosystem to live in a more harmonious manner than that of the settlers. I know we can’t necessarily bring everything back to the way it was but their insight would be helpful in building an ecosocialist future.
This comment is long enough.
I think regarding privacy it can feel insurmountable and so people give up. At least that’s pretty much how I feel. I do a few things but it seems like it takes a lot of time and sometimes money to keep up with it and use the proper applications. And as someone who is not super into tech it is very difficult to filter through the noise and figure out what concrete steps to take.
We need to make a collective approach to privacy, instead of an individualist one. Current attempts at obtaining privacy focus on individual means of separation from exploitative software, but this is doomed to failure. We need to instead focus on organizing to fight these kinds of software and practices directly.