Individual, spontaneous acts alone are not sufficient either. This is adventurism, which is fun to celebrate but does not actually change the equation. The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing! Throughout all of history, there have been no successful changes in the status quo without a mass, organized movement. Read theory and get organized. If you need a place to start, I suggest my introductory Marxist reading list.
The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing!
This is true, but also extremely difficult, especially in an era of mass media induced paranoia and alienation. Mass militant organizing requires a large cohesive social class that has a center of gravity - a church house or a social club or a workhouse floor - that increasingly no longer exists.
Social media was supposed to be the new venue for mass mobilization, and we saw the beginnings of it in the early '00s. But media consolidation, saturation from automated marketing accounts, and counter-programming have largely washed it out.
Read theory and get organized.
One is significantly easier than the other.
That said... go look for local unions in your town or neighborhood. Look for chapters of the DSA or the PSL or other labor-friendly organizing groups. Go to your local PTA meetings and city council meetings when you can, and get to know the people who show up there regularly. Get out of the house and meet people where they are.
That's all good advice. But its also hard, exhausting work. And its done in the face of enormous headwinds. Don't mistake the failure of leftism as a simple failure of "human nature" or whatever. We're in an entrenched system and attempting a Herculean feat to change it.
Revolution, rather than being easy or impossible, is simply and truthfully hard. I agree, and that's why it is important to start building that and contribute to those who have already started.
If enough individuals do it, it will be collective.
I disagree that that would accomplish anything. Assassinations do not "transfer power" as the SRs once claimed, but create a void that is filled by the next in line, always bourgeois or bourgeois adjacent. What is required is revolution, but through organization, so that there can be dominance over this sphere entirely, and the working class wrest its Capital permanently and gradually.
As someone that was at the protest, at no point did I think it would result in the war stopping. It was still worthwhile, however. In retrospect, the war was so much worse than any of us knew at the time and also based on flimsy and/or no evidence of WMD. Business as usual in America. We'd do it all over again today, I have no doubt.
They knew there weren't WMDs and used the fear of 9/11 attacks to push the war. They had OpEd pieces published to further push the idea of WMDs.
The protests were amazing, nothing like it before or since. The media suppressed coverage of them as best they could. They couldn't totally ignore them but gave almost 0 coverage. Masses and masses of people packing the streets. Wish we'd had drones back then to get some good aerial footage.
I wish they had come armed. I wish Jan 6 happened to Bush. So many children's lives could have been spared across the years and borders.
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism that made people support whatever the president wanted to do in the middle east.
It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism
Its so easy for people to forget the decades of violent acts committed in and around the Saudi Peninsula, and fixate instead on a handful of retaliatory strikes against US interests. The Battle of Mogadeshu, which involved Black Hawk helicopters obliterating Somali mosques with hellfire missiles. The brutal occupation of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 2001 as a US-backed narco-state. The entire Iran-Iraq War, sponsored by US arms dealers and double-dealing diplomats, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Persian young people. The occupation of Saudi Arabia by a western-backed military dictatorship going back nearly a century. The violent overthrow of democracies from Indonesia to Egypt in pursuit of neoliberal international trade policy.
9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum any more than the Brian Thompson assassination or the aborted coup in South Korea. These have long historical tails that trace back to a geopolitical policy that's racked up a staggering death toll.
To quote Mark Twain:
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Oh yeah because I forgot they totally proved Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were secretly the same person.
Iraq had zero to do with that terror attack but was used as a pretext for war based on the lie that the two were connected somehow.
Very large* act of violent terrorism.
American problems require American solutions
I remember huge student protests for weeks on end. Then, over spring break when all the students were off elsewhere - the bombs began to drop.
Cool sticker on your cybertruck!
Cybertrain*
Indeed and wait until Mango Fucking Mussolini decides to invade Iran. That will be one hell of a protest.
Partially because "peaceful" and the definition of what would or would not be accepted as valid protest became co-opted by the management/ ivy league class.
Compare the Seattle WTO protests to the 2003-2005 Iraq protests.
I don't want to shake the ruling class, I want to take away their power to exploit people. I want insurance companies reigned in. Getting Obamacare passed did more than what a thousand vigilantes could, and that was after the Republicans and lobbyists gutted it.
If people really want to stick it to the man (conservatives and liberals alike), then they can vote in representatives and Senators who will actually legislate for the people, rather than ones who will enrich themselves off their backs.
You can revolt, you can eat the rich, it feels great. But what matters is how the system gets changed or doesn't change. Plenty of revolutions have replaced the system was something worse, with these heros who took down the ruling class in their place. Keep a close eye on Syria, here's hoping for the best.
I want to take away their power to exploit people.
They don't want that. They control Congress and the courts. It can't be done through proper channels because we already lost our Republic. They won't give it up without a fight.
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