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Get organized. Join a Leftist org, find solidarity with fellow comrades, and protect each other. The Dems will not save you, it is up to the Workers to protect themselves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there’s an org you like more near you and join it, the point is that organizing is the best thing any leftist can do.
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Read theory. A good primer is Blackshirts and Reds. It will help contextualize what fascism is, what causes it, and how to stop it. I can offer more advanced reading lists regarding Marxism if you’d like, but this is a good starting point.
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Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground.
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Be more industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your problem-solving capabilities. Not only will you improve your skill at one subject, but your general problem-solving muscles get strengthened as well. Theory guides practice, which sharpens theory to be reapplied to better practice.
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Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others. The Democrats will not save you, you must do so.
I think an underrated piece of theory that the right-wing seems to understand and utilize more than the left is Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. They seem to be very good at recuperating our theory and twisting it to their own ends, while we on the left struggle to détourne their words and ideas in a way that promotes leftist thought.
I think media theory in general is a big aspect where the left is losing.
EDIT:
Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others.
Also, one of the best ways to survive a fight is to escape it. If getting armed isn’t practical, a high-powered flashlight that can temporarily prevent an assailant from seeing you clearly enough to attack and approach is a good move. A group with laser pointers can work, too. Can be quicker and more accurate than pepper spray, but more effective at long range than close.
That’s an interesting point! I agree that Capital does a great job of subverting, de-fanging Leftist theory, co-opting it and churning out opportunism. “Hollywood Resistance,” if you will. I think Lenin said it best in The State and Revolution, at least with respect to Marxism specifically but applicable broadly:
What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this “doctoring” of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers’ unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!
Also good point with respect to Self-Defense!
Also, I wonder if we should be considering the move to organizing on secure channels instead of in the open in places like here on Lemmy? Like Matrix has end-to-end encryption out of the box and its at least similar to Discord.
Depends on the purpose. For organizing? Yes, I agree. For agit-prop? Lemmy instances vary in security. Some instances have Matrix rooms as well.
In this critical time, I do think it is important for well-read leftists to channel the defeat liberals are feeling right now and try to push them to read more and take a more active role in politics. That becomes harder in Matrix rooms vs open federated servers.
The left inherently recuperates through political education, but cannot do much about the society of the spectacle without winning revolution, as it does not have cultural hegemony. Debordists would traditionally go on mindfulness field trips and such, which is fun, but not really building power.
The left needs to build: it needs more and members. This means political education and doing organizing work, with everyone levelling up skills, planning and executing actions, recruiting, studying, and running education programs for the recruited. And all of this means nothing without the context of an organization, so join one that looks good and revisit your decision every few years as you develop politically yourself.
This is the real answer. When we are stressed, depressed, anxious, and feeling hopeless, we can either turn inwards and retreat from society, or we can lean into our friends, family, and community.
If you have no community, now is the time to build it. A lot of liberals will be desperate, and that means it’s a great time to shake off the lies of individualism (we are all individuals part of a community) and develop the truth of community. Otherwise this cycle will continue the way it always has.
I agree 100%. This is a painful day for liberals, and an important opportunity to analyze what went wrong and how to fix it going forward. Voting blue and going to brunch is not enough.
Also, a reminder that community can start with just one other person, you don’t need to personally create a large organization overnight.
Spontaneous revolution/organisation for revolution has been promised for a long time, and is no closer to happening.
I am not advocating “spontaneous” organization or random revolution. I am arguing for joining orgs and building Dual Power. As for revolution, the US is a pot of an unknown liquid constantly heating up as Capitalism decays. The boiling point is unknown, but the fact that conditions are worsening and contradictions are sharpening at increased rates means it still is likely to come.
I just like, don’t believe it. Capitalism is hundreds of years old, and it’s only gotten stronger.
Why do you believe it is stronger? The fact that Capitalism’s decentralized markets result in centralized monopolist syndicates is exactly why Marx predicted Socialism to be the next stage in Mode of Production. Marx said it best in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Lenin further analyzed these monopolist syndicates and described why we are seeing dying, decaying Capitalism in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Once competition begins to die out, the Rate of Profit sinks and these Monopolist Syndicates strangle each other. The only way to fight this rate of falling, other than further automation which further lowers the rate of profit, is joining each other in ever larger syndicates, which is not infinitely replicatable. Capitalism is in its death throes.
A good, quick read if you don’t want to dive into books is the article Why Public Property?
I mean, the idea of socialism has certainly seen setbacks since the end of the last century, hasn’t it? While gross inequality is still a huge problem, and I hope it will be solved somehow, the Lenin/Stalin version of socialism feels like it has basically lost.
A good, quick read if you don’t want to dive into books is the article Why Public Property?
I hadn’t seen this one before, thanks for that. There’s some great examples in here, on the subject of monopolies.
This phenomenon only continues to be proven true over a century later. The United States today has a far greater concentration of industry than it did during Lenin’s analysis. The small business sector has also consistently been on the decline. This is an observable reality. [Accompanied by a graph]
Monopolies and particularly oligopolies are having a moment, but the chart only goes back to the 70’s, and implicitly shows total company number going up (why is hard to say, it’s a paywalled article, and they mixed data from two other sources). If you go back further, I think it would look pretty different - the old gilded age ended, Standard Oil was broken up, and some of the giants of the postwar era got knocked down a peg or more. Further, the trend is pretty uneven by sector. Mom and pop shops are dead now, but independently owned franchises and publicly traded whatevers are hella dominant, and contractors (or “contractors”) are everywhere.
A clear modern example of this would be the smartphone industry. Competition has made cellphone manufacturing more and more complex over time. A cellphone these days is far too complex to be created by a small business. One requires access to enormous factories, machines, and supply chains. According to The Wealth Record, “the net worth of Samsung is pegged at $295 billion.” This is roughly the amount of capital one would need to acquire to even begin to be a serious competitor to Samsung.
I actually know quite a bit about semiconductor manufacturing. It may be the most capital intensive endeavor of all, but you don’t quite need to be Samsung to do it. If you want to build your own at scale, a fab might be “only” a billion dollars. That’s a lot, but many startups have raised it (for other things), so it’s a different story from being Samsung on day 1.
If you just want your chip design made, it’s way easier. TSMC exists to build other people’s designs. Companies like Sam Zeloof’s new enterprise exist for small scale printing of your prototypes. Most of the basic design tools can be found open source.
The network effect has made some genuine monopolies and definitely many oligopolies, but other things are less affected. Individual rich people get rich by chance (if you don’t mind me introducing my own source, which happens to be my favourite one).
All this to say, I don’t think concentration is going to kill capitalism in the near future, or even come close.
It is easy to look backwards at prior systems, such as the feudal economic system or the slave economic system, and then figure out how that system developed into the system afterwards. Adam Smith, for example, already explained in detail in his book Wealth of Nations how capitalism developed out of feudalism long before Marx.
It’s a tangent, so I’ve separated this out, but this is also an interesting claim. The end of feudal economics is an actively researched bit of history, and was far from neat and tidy. IIRC some of those old fealty-type agreements lasted into Marx’s time, if being mere formalities by their end. And I’m not sure why we (correctly) decided slavery was bad after doing it since before recorded history, either.
Socialism hasn’t been perfect, the only people that think leftists are arguing for perfection are right-wingers. Marxism-Leninism is still correct analysis, and the USSR was still a massive improvement on existing conditions. It has not “lost,” it is continued by Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and more. Blackshirts and Reds debunks a lot of common anti-communist myths.
One thing you seem to be misunderstanding is the idea that because there are mom and pop shops, that there aren’t fewer and fewer, with decreasing portions of the overall share of Capital. The barriers to legitimately compete with these megacorporations like Samsung are getting higher, you can’t legitimately compete with their resources and design work.
Finally, your mark on the presence of new modes of production emerging from the old is a misconception of the Marxist argument. What is Socialism? explains that in further detail, and Productive Forces explains societal progression. Slavery resurging was an aspect of settler-colonialism, a notion that remains to this day, this was not a resurgence of old pre-feudal economics.
Feudalism was status quo in most of the world since the dawn of civilization and it was replaced in many parts of the world.
Yeah, and I’m still not sure how that happened or if democracy is here to stay, honestly.
I can’t really see things going back there economically, though - modern technology is just too good, and isolated illiterate peasants can’t make it.
Edit: Unless we really fuck up and cause nuclear winter or something. I suppose if we’re starting from scratch being agrarian again is on the table.
After ww1 there was one socialist country.
After ww2 one third of humans lived in a socialist country.
That number has risen since. Capitalism is slowly making its way off the stage of history.
No, no it hasn’t risen since - unless your definition of socialism has expanded far more than I agree with. Meanwhile, economies elsewhere have gotten more and more market-oriented and financialised.
Lack of hope is a benefit, but not for you. People thought that a revolution was impossible even before the 20th century, and still, 1917 happened.
For a while, and then it failed. Meanwhile, the Western world got more and more free market.
Yeah, and we need to make it last next time.
Well, to go back to my OP, good luck with that.
Infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources
That’s not the problem with Capitalism, the problem with Capitalism is that decentralized markets through competition result in monopolist syndicates. The endpoint is one single, centrally planned monopoly, at which point public ownership and central planning along democratic lines is critical. We don’t have to wait for that point, but Capitalism cannot last beyond it.
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Republicans also control senate and might control the house in addition to majority conservative judges in supreme court. I so hope its going to be “just 4 years”
Go fishing.
For real. Take some time to focus on something new and “pointless”. Soak in some gorgeous views and learn about your local waterways. Reconnect with the land around you.
Life’s easier with a clearer head.
Although I agree with the rest of the comment, I would suggest a less brutal activity, such as a hiking or bird watching.
These also require less equipment.
Catch and release fishing is fine for the fish. If you gut hook them and they won’t survive, well, you eat that one, but it’s also easier to avoid that if you know what sort of fish you’re looking for and change your hook/lure accordingly.
I don’t really get how hurting an animal and then NOT eating it, just for fun, is better than killing for food
Well you don’t want to eat every fish you catch, that’s not good for the fish population. You want to ensure you’re only taking fish that have had a chance to spawn, determined by size.
The point is that torturing animals is something that we probably shouldn’t recommend.
It is yanking a water animal by their mouth into an environment they cannot breathe. And if memory serves, fish have a lot of nerves in their mouths so that hurts a LOT, and even released ones have a reduced survival rate.
That “fun and wholesome” activity causes a lot of pain and stress to the victims, so it’s kinder to recommend something less cruel. Like birdwatching and photography.
Y’all, I’m very very vegetarian, but knocking this dude for recommending fishing is silly. “Fishing or another outside activity that seems relaxing to you” is implicit. People have different morals regarding animals and consumption. I get where you’re coming from, but “birdwatching is also a great activity!” is a better and more positive response imo.
That’s implying that fishing is a great activity. That is about as okay as saying it’s okay that people chose not to vote.
I did not state it in a mean way, I simply said it in a way that says please do not encourage animal abuse.
I do not think it’s a good thing to encourage animal abuse, and I don’t think good people should be encouraged to continue normalizing it.
Please don’t ask people to stay silent about cruelty. That’s helps keep it normalized.
@tamal3 is right.
Fucking hell, people, go touch some grass, go meet real human beings. Not everybody adheres to the moral code you construct in your head, and that is FINE!!
feeling stressed? go harm animals for fun.
Get involved in Mutual Aid groups!!
No one is coming to save any of us, the only people who have our back is each other. We have to drop this American individuality bullshit and focus on growing communities that function outside the capitalist/US government paradigm because those institutions are not going to save us: they plan to grind us into paste to make money.
We truly are at the end game, the capitlists don’t see our middle class as valuable internationally anymore, so they want to cut the strings and make us compete with people who get paid dollars a day to solder parts together in a factory. Bezos pushes his employees so hard because he’s part of this mindset, too. They expect our lives to revolve around making them money until the planet is burnt to a cinder.
Figure out what your useful skills are, and add them to the pile. A lot of us here are tech nerds, and we can build out sneakernets and large-scale non-internet-connected-LANs in neighborhoods. Others can offer grow food, others can offer medical care, and so on.
We have to accept that the systems as they exist are failing us, and we can only count on ourselves and each other.
We don’t have to do it alone.
I’m interested in supporting mutual aid. Any good reference sources?
It’s an okay place to start, but it really starts by building community locally. If you don’t have enough decent people locally to work with to build a mutual aid group, then… that’s a tougher situation. When you’re stuck in largely Republican areas, it can be quite difficult to find others who want to build such groups, but not impossible.
As a Washington state resident, it seems like sane people are well represented here, by our voting numbers. So if you can get out here, not the worst place to ride out this storm.
More people in Washington should be willing to open their doors for people who need to get away, honestly. I’m really trying to push my extended family to get more active, because there’s going to be a lot of people who need help, a lot.
Both The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization do work with Mutual Aid. If you’re more interested in feeding the needy specifically, Food Not Bombs does great work.
Your fear is understandable and valid, this is a dark timeline and a really bad outcome.
But being afraid and panicking cannot possibly help anybody, least of all yourself.
Take a few days if you can to reset mentally as much as possible.
Then, get to work building resistance, it’s more critical now than ever. Find a leftist org near you and get involved. DSA, a local anarchist group, a worker co-op that needs volunteers, a democratic socialist org, anything leftist that is doing real work locally.
If you can’t donate your time, donate your money. If you can’t donate either of those, then help them spread the word on your social media. Post all their links and use your social media to advertise their events and meetups, help make people aware.
On the personal side, protect your health. The conservatives largely want to demolish healthcare, especially for underprivileged folks. Your health is so critical, especially now.
Quit your vices or at least, reduce them:
- Quit smoking/vaping.
- Stop drinking, at least heavily if you do.
- Stop eating junk food/candy.
- Get in shape, hike, calisthenics, walk, bike, etc.
It will not only help protect you from an administration that wants you to have less coverage if you’re sick/injured, it will help your mental health and save you money, sometimes tons of money.
Final advice for money, save it as much as you can. Practice frugality, get together with friends to cook and share meals. Get involved socially with people, learn about your community, build solidarity.
We will get through this, I believe in you, and I believe in the human drive for true freedom, equality, and community. Don’t let that flame burn out, we’re in this together, and only together can we come out victorious. ✊
Yeah, the election results were a horrible thing to wake up to. I had really hoped for a better outcome, but this is the direction America decided to go.
The biggest thing to remember right now is that the progressive cause will always have work to do, and challenges to face. Even if we had won, either partially or by a landslide in the House, Senate, and Executive branch, that would still hold true. The American Right may very well unleash new horrors that make life intolerable for absolutely everyone, and may take up policies that get people killed. Now, more than ever, it is on us to build bridges and networks of support. All we have to do is outlive these bastards, and oppose their worst tendencies at every turn. Vote early, vote often, and vote locally.
In the coming days and weeks, pundits will likely try to highlight all the possible reasons that the Harris campaign failed, because they love sounding like informed geniuses who take a result, work backwards, and highlight what should have been done. Try not to lean into the tendency to blame people on the left, and try to avoid infighting. It’s going to happen.
in the short term: do something that helps you cope with our reality.
in the long term: reach out the people who both love and respect you and tell them how you feel. mutual aid is how we survived every time there’s been a hostile government and it’ll work again. we’ve been here before, we’ve survived, and we will do it again.
I’m not saying I understand the magnitude, but ICYMI: the populist right is also winning left and right in Europe. In my country, it’s mostly just kind of funny since these blowhards are only now realising governing a country is kind of difficult and lots of government employees are just fighting against everything that’s idiotic or destructive.
Thing is, one man can only do so much. If there are still people on the inside who have a feel for wrong and right, democracy is pretty rigid. People are desperate, but nowhere near as desperate as Germans were in the 30s after the huge sanctions and fines after The Great War.
In any event: my take on it all is to see what happens. If you voted, you did all you can do other than organising and taking to the streets. That’s essentially what your second amendment is for. To put a positive spin on it: maybe he will actually improve your admittedly declining country. I just hope the means won’t be catastrophic for anyone.
Unfortunately Trump’s stated plan is to boot out everyone who won’t kiss his ass, shut down “non-essential” services like the education department or national weather service, put someone in control of healthcare who believes all vaccinations need to be immediately banned, and pass national laws against women’s reproductive health care despite his claims of letting each State handle their own business. And yes, on his own he could only do so much, but the Republican party also gained more seats in both houses of representatives which means it will be easier to steamroll through anything he wants. So yeah, we have many many good reasons to be worried.
I’m not saying ‘don’t be worried’, I’m saying ‘have a little bit of faith in the system and see how far he gets’. I take it some of the stuff he yells at easily influenced voters will be unconstitutional and I hope your checks abs balances will be strong enough to withstand the fall of your democracy.
If it’s not, well, I’ll also be fucked. So whichever way you slice it, the only thing to do is to wait and see.
I mean technically you could storm the Capitol but I think we know that doesn’t really do shit except make you a meme or a prisoner or both.
I agree with the wait-and-see approach, but I also know how much damage he did the first time around even without a lot of support. And the amazing thing is that people still think the economy was better under Trump (who barely managed to coast on Obama’s success) than it has been under Biden (who managed to turn around a global economic disaster after COVID). This time it’s all going to be on Trump, and we’re all going to suffer from it.
It will be strikingly similar to the last 4 years but the partisan narratives will simply flip in various ways, as will those of allied media. The bad things that the Trump admin did in his first term that became suddenly tolerable, ir even “good” under Biden? They will be back to being good again. Dem politicians will be back to calling themselves “the resistance” despite losing another layup because they could not do more than campaign on “at least we aren’t them” while presiding over a genocide and economic decline for the average person, both with intentional policies. Remember that they are all PR and cynicism and are lying to you about what they will do, as they are not beholden to a disorganized public in any way.
To be clear, bad things will be happening. It is only reasonable to feel some despair for them, but if you can allow that to motivate you to substantive action you can escape merely being a witness to suffering and can begin to work materially against it. Much of that suffering was going to happen anyways or a different form of suffering may have happened under a Harris regime. It’s not like Democrats did much with their power, they tend to pretend they have no party discipline or power even when thry have the presidency and Congress, so they allowed the major shifts at state levels to occur largely unheeded and served a right wing agenda at the national level. So it is important yo ask the question of what action you can take that does not depend on expecting Democrats to save you. They won’t. What we need are other organizations, ones that organize independently of ans often in opposition to the Democrats, Dems who otherwise suck up all political energy demanding improvements to people’s lives and turn it into more cops and wars.
So, the two ingredients to effective organizations are political education and organization building. The former is just an organized form of reading and teaching, and it is essential because we have all internalized false ideas of how politics functions. They are taught to us by the ruling interests that keep us disempowered *because * this keep them in power. The latter is about growing and improving an organization so that it can have greater and greater leverage and develop strategies for gaining and wielding power (and power is not things like letter writing campaigns to already-elected ghouls, it is making demands that must be met or else).
You can enjoin this kind of project in many ways. You don’t need to jump deeply into a hardcore organization straightaway; it can be useful to join one that is only oushing yourself moderately at first. Maybe a mutual aid organization or a single issue or single community group. The important thing is that it is of the left and therefore not of thr Democratic party. You can also engage in your own political education independently if you’d like, which can keep the pressure down when you are first starting out with irl left work.
And of course please do rely on whatever community you already may have, including here. I am happy to chat here or via DMs if you’d like and can answer basically any question you might have. I’m also happy to recommend readings that you may find useful or helpful.
Some possibilities that might cheer you up:
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Trump is obviously in declining physical and mental health that might force him to step down. Of course, this just gives us shitbird #2, but at least he might be smart enough to not tank the economy.
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Maybe the Republicans will do something about him. We’ve seen some Republicans publicly come out against him, and there are probably a lot more who oppose him privately. Republicans are cowardly bastards, but they’re also greedy bastards, so they might invoke the 25th before Trump crashes the economy with tariffs.
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Maybe Judge Juan Merchan will sentence him. I’m not sure how this works legally, and this is so unprecedented that I don’t think anybody really does, but maybe, just maybe, Merchan will say “fuck it” and give the Republicans a little constitutional crisis to go along with their election victory.
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Form an in person community. Focus on fun, then slowly start integrating shared political activism. Use the experience from this to enter local government.
If you think this is just for the next 4 years, you’re fooling yourself.
Realize that things wouldn’t have magically gotten better if the other right wing candidate won and either way you have to keep going if you ever want to actually have things be better.
Imagine it like cleaning your room as a kid. You thought your mom was gonna come and ask you to do it, instead your dad barged in and yelled at you to.
Does one feel worse? Yes, does that change the reality of the situation? No, either way you must clean your room.
Is now a good time to think about a third party? Actual left one. Not 1995 Republicans left.
Absolutely. It always has been, to be clear, but it is always a good time to start. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there’s an org you like more near you and join it, the point is that organizing is the best thing any leftist can do.
To be clear, electoralism cannot and will not save us, Revolution is necessary. Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Lenin’s The State and Revolution have remained correct to this day, and are only further proven correct with the passage of time and the accumulation of confirming evidence.
A good primer is Blackshirts and Reds.
