I’m envious of the way the French protest their government. They’re literally setting things on fire because their schools aren’t adequate. Because the government tried to raise the retirement age. Because their politicians are shitbags.
I think the biggest obstacle to organizing in the US is the sheer distance. It takes 40 solid hours of driving to get from one side to the other. That’s not counting any breaks. France takes about 14 hours. Doable in a day or so if you push it.
Anyway, I’d sign up for a Revolution if there was a serious contender.
Whole bunch of pussy ass accelerationists on this platform. I enjoy calling out their pussy ass behavior.
Vote or die.
And I suggest voting for a candidate that isn’t guaranteed to lose if you want anything other than fascism to happen.
False dichotomy. There are many things to do between “do nothing but vote for evil” and “revolution”.
I don’t want to write the whole thing again, so I’ll just leave this here.
The problem is nobody on the left is actually doing those things. It’s almost like bitching about people on the internet has taken the place of actual activisim.
I want to have things like Universal Healthcare and a living wage and/or UBI before I die. That stuff isn’t going to happen by not voting. If “the left” were capable of achieving these things by not voting then we’d have them already.In the USA (which was the focus of OP) I would argue there is virtually no left in the first place. Outliers excluded even their left-most people are still centrists, at best. Note that nowhere I said people should stop voting, it’s kind of crazy how that’s always a knee-jerk assumption. Obviously you still ought to choose the lesser evil - but that must come with doing the other parts. Otherwise, again, you’re just choosing evil.
That being said: If you live in the USA and you want that to happen, you need to step up. Not say “nobody else is doing it”. You need to do it. If you already are: Congrats! Next you need to accept that you can do everything right and still lose. That’s just life.
I think that’s the first reply I’ve seen with an actual action item and not just diverting from actual criticisms of the “don’t vote” mentality. The revolution doesn’t have to be violence. A cultural revolution can also affect change. Dr. King’s civil rights movement was famously non-violent.
My point is the nay-sayers here say “don’t vote”, but offer no alternatives.
You say join a union? I say hell yeah, sign me up! Can I join yours?
Dr. King’s civil rights movement was famously non-violent.
Just one small facet of the civil rights movement; Dr. King is the “public face” selected by the government to admire because he was so unoffensive.
On his own, he would have accomplished nothing. Black Panthers are not as widely admired by the public, because they’re only taught about Rosa Parks and MLK, not about the BP patrols and Death Angels.
Revolutions need a widespread diversity of tactics, with a spectrum of action; everything from refusing to sit in your assigned seating all the way to openly fighting the police.
The key is action, so think about what you’re doing and how you can contribute. What are your strengths?
I’m one of these.
My point is the nay-sayers here say “don’t vote”, but offer no alternatives.
I’m a nay-sayer (to doing no more than perpetually voting for the lesser of two evils), and I’ve offered alternatives. I’m also not alone in this, I’ve seen about as many people, proportionally speaking, advocate for the same things in past posts about this here on Lemmy as there are on Reddit. Might this be a bubble issue on your end?
You say join a union? I say hell yeah, sign me up! Can I join yours?
Feel free to come to Germany and join one of our unions. The one primarily responsible for negotiating the collective agreement currently determining my salary is ver.di.
It’s INTERNATIONAL. It’s our world-wide economy, which is directed by investment companies and their holdings all around the world.
If you killed everybody in the White House tomorrow, absolutely nothing would change (other than an increase in security elsewhere). At most, you’d delay business by a few weeks.
It’s not one country, it’s not one person, it’s not one company, it’s not one family.
This isn’t France with a couple million people and a simple paper bureaucracy, muskets, and cannons. Grow up
Asking for a friend, how does one lead a revolution? I’ve always assumed it was more about the universe lining up, right place/right time sort of thing and someone/someone’s are just there at the time, not that anyone really ever set out to “lead the revolution” as a job
Same. If there was a pipeline I’d surely be in it by now.
I can’t answer, but I can tell you that if your revolutionary group is online (Discord, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp), you already have a watcher in your midst.
They can’t watch everywhere, but bots can, and the owners of these companies are certainly on the lookout for certain words and phrases. It’s not even vaguely secure.
Given that, I don’t think that revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers, Minutemen, et al are a viable option today. Whatever your online group is, it must be able to withstand discovery and observation. Only small cells with in-person meetings can avoid detection. Unions, churches, and organizations are all virtually public.
People ask “why aren’t they doing anything”, meanwhile there are hundreds of arrests all over the country with regularity. They’re getting arrested shortly after organizing… and the full extent is not going to be openly reported. So you see hints here and there about “plots” with a mention of “informer” at best. (likely the company that was used to communicate).
So, in my opinion, all that’s left is spontaneous eruption. It could be someone setting themselves on fire, an assassination, war, food shortage, economic collapse, and so on. It won’t be because it was lead by a Robert the Bruce
The sitting president in his second term was never the lesser of two evils.
Been seeing this sentiment lately, and it’s silly. At least in the decades I’ve been around, people only vote the lesser evil about half the time. What we get is the “lesser” evil fixing and/or improving things, then the other party wins and undoes it all, rinse and repeat. You’d only actually have a point if it was consistently people voting the lesser which they’re not. This is just propaganda to demotivate folks from voting and making them feel like it’s hopeless so nothing changes for the folks that don’t want it to.
What we get is the “lesser” evil fixing and/or improving things
Or maybe you look at what you want and close your eyes to the things that need fixing and they leave alone or make actively worse.
Want an example? ICE budget under Biden. Everyone saw under Trump 1 that he was pushing ICE to be his militarized Gestapo, and rang all the alarm bells, telling Democrats to shut them down. What they did instead under Biden is boost their budget and scope. ICE is what it is today because Democrats voted to make it that way when they had the power to kill it. Because ICE is immigration, and borders MUST be secured at all cost, don’t you know
Choosing lesser evil is not cause of problem. Not choosing anything instead of lesser evil is a key problem. The time to activate is before it comes down to final choice. Not voting, means all of your concerns are irrelevant, because you are unlikely to vote next time, according to establishment algorithms.
Nice try, DNC.
Isn’t this another way of saying that you are voting for the best available option? What’s the alternative? Vote for the worse option so things get worse? Don’t vote at all and tell other people to do the same so the worse option always wins? If you aren’t voting and are also not out in the streets stoking revolution against the greater evil, you can go fuck yourself. Because people spreading this bullshit concept and voter apathy is the real reason we have the government of today.
Americans don’t protest like that because they hate each other. It’s not complicated. It’s a cultural issue where excuses are abundant.
And lazy/entitled.
The French retirement age is a bit of a problem.
France partly has a pay as you go system, meaning current working people are paying the pensions of retired people.
France also has an aging population, so there will be fewer people paying for more people. And that’s a problem, and you can really only solve it by increasing income, decreasing spending, or having fewer retired people (and raising the age is the most ethical way to do that).
You can’t do nothing and expect a pay-as-you-go system to keep working with an aging population.
Hey, as much as I get your point about distance, I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think there is one of the most powerful history and tradition of revolt and demonstration in the US. I think the difference has something to do with the esthetics of it. In France, revolt, fire and police violence are associated with beauty. I’ll leave that here.
I think we can conclude the French are absolutely not “doing it right” because then they wouldn’t have a shit country. They have just been doing this for fun since the beginning.
What, exactly, makes France “a shit country”?
Lmao
