Yes, and MLK is a perfect example of someone I can agree with and vehemently support on one issue while disagreeing on others. I reject his socialist agenda, but I’m completely on board with his civil rights activism.
You wouldn’t have the civil rights movement were it not for the socialist movement and MLK’s understanding from it and organizational methods built from it. These are not separable qualities and it is why the approach you are suggesting does not work. Your suggestion is actually the status quo. There are many single-issue abortion rights groups out there. They are small and disorganized.
MLK wasn’t successful because he was socialist, he was successful because his ideas resonated with a large, pissed off minority of various political persuasions. His org, the SCLC, was decidedly not socialist, in contrast to other groups at the time. Yeah, he had socialist views, but that was separate from his civil rights activism. And he was more of a democratic socialist, so more like Bernie Sanders than the USSR.
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist at all. He is a social democrat. He also failed to organize, as he only knew the aesthetics of the left and not the organizing content. He’s actually another pretty good example of why your suggested method fails.
As I mentioned before, MLK was a leader and organizer within a much broader context of civil rights organizations both constituted by socialists and learning from their methods, including the methods of organized labor.
But they were. There’s a reason King left socialism out of the civil rights fight, and it was to get greater appeal. He also wanted economic reforms, but that was secondary to the civil rights movement.
He left it out at first and then regretted doing so. This is why he pivoted to the Poor People’s Campaign. It’s also why liberation was dramatically incomplete. He arrived at a more accurate analysis and radicalized over time. He learned the exact same lessons that everyone does when they fight too idealistically, without a grounding in how the material forces work against you.
Of course, MLK was not the entire civil rights movement. Socialists were a major driving force the entire time.
And when I say “partisan divide,” I don’t mean appealing to Republicans and Democrats generally, I mean appealing to something that goes beyond partisanship. Highlight an idea that doesn’t fit on either side, and get people in the middle pissed off that neither side is doing anything about it. Eisenhower was a moderate Republican and he was guilted into helping, that’s how much it resonated.
No presidents are guilted into helping. Change doesn’t come from a convincing speech. He responded to leverage and, as has been the pattern, sought to mollify the movement to prevent it from doing even more. This is the same government that blackmailed MLK and blacklisted, marginalized, and killed civil rights leaders.
Absolutely, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’d like to go further and switch the House to be proportionally elected. But that scares people, so ending FPTP is the first step. Ending FPTP opens up opportunities for popular third party candidates to be able to win enough seats to effect real change.
But like I said, that’s not how it works in reality. The base of power and leverage dictates the change, not popularity of a candidate. There are plenty of places without FPTP. There are places where representation comes from voting for a party and they get proportional seats. They still face the same fundamental problem.
Yet having a mass organization can get results even without much electoral representation.
I’m not talking about Democrats here, and I think left/right thinking isn’t the way.
The right is reactionary and conservative, the left seeks to overthrow that order. To pursue justice you must be on the left. There is no fence-sitting nor valid pretense that these issues are isolated.
If Gaza is the hill we want to die on, it can’t be a leftist justification, it needs to go beyond that. Unfortunately, this issue is seen as leftist, so it’s going to be much harder to prove that decency isn’t political.
The ideas mean nothing without organization and neither does any notion of respectability politics or framings. It is also not unfortunate that this is leftist. The bourgeois electoral parties and their followers are anti-leftist and generally quite racist towards Palestinians. I interact with them often. It is only the left that correctly understands and advocates for the national liberation of Palestine. We would not even be discussing it in support of Palestine were it not for the left.
I’m not sure what the right messaging is, but I think Fatah needs to be seen as a stabilizing alternative to Hamas, and Israel needs to let them try stabilizing Gaza. Israel won’t leave without Hamas losing power, and Hamas won’t lose power without a realistic replacement. But if the US backs Fatah, it’s going to be seen as meddling, and therefore it probably won’t work. So the best approach, imo, is the “we can’t afford to pick sides” argument, both from a fiscal and diplomatic angle. That’s hopefully separated enough from partisan politics to work. But it’s an uphill battle.
We have no option to control any of that. We are disorganized and weak. What is achievable on the horizon of this invasion is to undermine support for the US’ pro-Israeli position, to disrupt arms shipments, to increase mass consciousness of the true face of American empire.
It is not unlikely that the US’ hoped-for path out of this is to effectively take over administration of Gaza, displace UNRWA so that it can control the population further, create some narrative where it pretends Hamas is defeated, and to keep Palestine divided. All of this depends on the US maintaining the ability to do so without a regional war breaking out. It requires the basic consent of the public to not get in the way of any of this. It is our job to get in the way.
FPTP is comparatively easier and would be more impactful long term. It’s not going to help Palestinians today though.
FPTP won’t do anything for any of this. This is core to the material interests of the country. The primary moving force for it. This isn’t up to the task in front of us. Therefore, we must be realistic and plot a course that is sufficient.
It worked for Trump.
No it didn’t. Trump also served bourgeois interests. And Biden has maintained the vast majority of his policies, or even made them worse. Trump is not a charismatic leader that created any kind of movement that took on “the establishment”. Those are just words to him. He cannot call upon them to actually do anything.
The figurehead attracts people with similar concerns, and builds an org around themselves.
The Republican Party already existed and he slotted into it just fine.
King started with a small org that organized bus boycotts, then founded SCLC. He didn’t rise through any ranks, he was an influential community member who decided to do something.
This is a typical organizer trajectory. You begin work in one org among a constellation. And often you then found a new one based on your connections, your fellow like-minded organizers. You then continue working in building your power through the organization.
That’s how Youtubers and streamers who get famous work, and that’s how we’ll get change rolling. That figurehead should build a coalition with existing groups, but I think they need to come at it as an outsider.
YouTubers are not organizers when they do YouTube things, they’re petty bourgeois entertainers whose entrainment is sometimes educational. This is why many of them are also quite politically miseducated. They do not know the work of organizing or the forces you encounter when you try to make something happen, so they spread false idealism about how to achieve goals, how the system works, and who are our allies vs. our enemies in a given situation. This doesn’t mean they are simply bad, and they can be useful, but they’re not going to get anything done whatsoever except help raise some atomized political consciousness.
What most people seem to do after watching thirst videos is to do the same thing they were doing before: nothing. And anecdotally, the people I encounter that rely heavily in YouTubers for political education have a false sense of their own knowledge and are somewhat disruptive when they join an organization. They haven’t had to learn humility or how to disagree with others, they only developed a parasocial relationship in a relatively combative electronic space. This is why I emphasize them entering a political education program before they do much else.
Look at the BLM movement. It’s decentralized and has had incredible impact and reach, but it didn’t actually change policy much outside a handful of areas. They obviously didn’t need a centralized organization to get a popular movement going, so that’s not the issue. The main issue they had is a lack of clear, articulable policy changes. You get that with a good spokesperson. They should have pushed for ending qualified immunity (so it’s easier to hold police accountable) and perhaps legalization/decriminalization of recreational drugs (large reason for police interaction with black people).
But they didn’t seem to want specific solutions, they wanted to end systemic racism, which isn’t something you can really legislate. But organizing worked fine without centralization. They just needed a spokesperson like Dr. King to take that anger and focus it onto tangible solutions.
Trump also served bourgeois interests
That’s irrelevant. We’re talking about a single spokesperson building grassroots support for a cause. His stated cause was “drain the swamp,” and it got people passionate enough to go against their own party (they seemed to want Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush) and nominate and then elect an outsider. The party responded with MAGA rhetoric and candidates to push that rhetoric.
The problem with Trump wasn’t organizing, the problem is he’s a narcissist who doesn’t care about the actual message and just wants power. Had someone more interested in making actual change been in that role, things would’ve been different, but instead we got narcissist nonsense like election denial. And honestly, I’m glad he was ineffective because things could’ve been much worse…
What we need is someone like Trump that can reach a broad audience, but who is focused on resolving social issues. They need to distill anger into one or two policy changes, and go hard on those issues.
typical organizer trajectory
King wasn’t part of some socialist organization. He started with MIA, which was a nonpartisan community improvement org, and that’s where the bus boycott started. He went from there to found the SCLC, which again, wasn’t partisan. He worked with the NAACP, which again wasn’t and isn’t socialist.
In fact, supporters demanded he distance himself from Bayard Rustin in the march on Washington because he was gay, openly socialist, and had ties with the Communist Party (not sure which was more important), which he agreed to. King having socialist views isn’t why he was successful, and it could’ve derailed the whole thing if it was more widely known. The most socialist thing he pushed for in the march was a minimum wage increase, but that’s really it.
There was a huge amount of socialist and communist resistance at the time, so if he made any of that explicit, I highly doubt he would’ve seen much success. Him being socialist is more of a footnote than a recipe for success. Tides have since changed, so maybe a popular socialist movement could work, but it probably needs to focus on democratic socialist policies (more welfare) instead of socialist policies (economic overhaul) since that’s what most people these days tend to mean when they say “socialism.”
Sure, ally with whomever you think supports your cause, but the recipe for success is not ideology, but issues. Issues have far broader reach than whole systems.
No, because there is no organization. The status quo is sitting around and hoping for the aesthetics of past movements to appear. That’s not how it works.
Look at the BLM movement. It’s decentralized and has had incredible impact and reach, but it didn’t actually change policy much outside a handful of areas. They obviously didn’t need a centralized organization to get a popular movement going, so that’s not the issue. The main issue they had is a lack of clear, articulable policy changes.
Untrue. This was a reactionary position spread by an oppositional media. Nearly every major city had a set of clearly articulated demands they printed on pamphlets, turned into chants, and presented to city councils. This was a recycling of the same false rhetoric used against Occupy Wall Street.
What they lacked was enough organization and political consciousness to create a lasting movement that would continue until its policies were achieved and then stay beyond that to defend them, because they will be rolled back otherwise.
You get that with a good spokesperson. They should have pushed for ending qualified immunity (so it’s easier to hold police accountable)
This was a popular Reddit meme but it would do nothing to address this. Ending qualified immunity would just provide another means by which victims of cops could sue the city, county, or state, effectively. Even when qualified immunity is removed, individual cops are indemnified because they are in the act of performing their duties. It would primarily mean getting more money when they murder your child.
and perhaps legalization/decriminalization of recreational drugs (large reason for police interaction with black people).
That’s a specific tactic but the broken windows strategy would remain in place. There are a million “public safety” excuses they will continue to use. Historically they would just use the criminalization of poverty.
Trump also served bourgeois interests
That’s irrelevant. We’re talking about a single spokesperson building grassroots support for a cause.
It’s everything. If your mission is to organize to change that which runs counter to the full might of the ruling class, you will fail if you try to use their tools. You are not in their position. You do not have their money or the backing of the state. You are not class conscious, but they absolutely are. They will coordinate while you flail.
His stated cause was “drain the swamp,” and it got people passionate enough to go against their own party (they seemed to want Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush) and nominate and then elect an outsider. The party responded with MAGA rhetoric and candidates to push that rhetoric.
He offered a false consciousness to whip votes for a major party and then continued to do the whims of the ruling class of which he is a member. His followers still believe in him despite this. He uses the mainstream tactics of bourgeois electoralism and his base of power is the same as Biden’s, Bush’s, McCain’s, etc. He has no grassroots movent, they are just the same group of reactionary people that the GOP has been grooming for decades. You’ll notice that many of their demands are amorphous and they instead believe in fantastical conspiracy theories about the things Trump supposedly did or was trying to do. There is no program, there is no call to action, they don’t actually do anything except pull the lever like every other good sheep.
King wasn’t part of some socialist organization. He started with MIA, which was a nonpartisan community improvement org, and that’s where the bus boycott started. He went from there to found the SCLC, which again, wasn’t partisan. He worked with the NAACP, which again wasn’t and isn’t socialist.
The organizations don’t need to be explicitly socialist to draw from socialist organizing. The skills of being an organizer are of this exact legacy, and the lines drawn are not deep. WEB Du Bois, cofounder of the NAACP, was a communist and drew on his connections and experiences with socialists to frame its external messaging, internal political education, and overall structure. Their rank-and-file organizers drew from the movement, flocking to support as has always been the case, and doing the actual difficult work of organizing. When the Red Scare included the NAACP in its anticommunist purges, it found many examples and the NAACP, then run by liberals, did most of the purging themselves. It has become far less effective over time because they have adopted a liberal NGO model. They have very little power to actually do anything but PR.
The cofounder of MIA along with king was the head of a local union. The union with which it associated was created by a socialist. Organized labor is the bread and butter of socialist organizing and is built on that left spectrum even when people are just following its methods as dogma. It is an incomplete expression of class consciousness, of identifying your real enemy is the capitalist and their cronies, and creating a robust organizational network that uses unified direct action to achieve its demands.
Every modern movement learns the lessons of socialist organizing or perishes, assimilated into a status quo with dramatically incomplete victories and a new set of false storytelling about who they were and what they achieved - stories compatible with the status quo that was their oppressor or even giving credit to that oppressor instead of the brutal antagonistic fight that so many died for. When movements start out with better understanding and organization, they do better. They have fewer stumbling blocks. They don’t have to learn as many lessons through failure. And they have to take fewer risks that their movement will simply dissolve because they are too disorganized.
In fact, supporters demanded he distance himself from Bayard Rustin in the march on Washington because he was gay, openly socialist, and had ties with the Communist Party (not sure which was more important), which he agreed to.
Yes, and this is triangulation that he later regretted. It’s called respectability politics and it’s always a bad idea.
King having socialist views isn’t why he was successful, and it could’ve derailed the whole thing if it was more widely known.
This is the false logic of respectability politics. You fall into a pattern of giving the enemy their ammunition. You will run into this exact same situation with any movement you join. The ruling class will hire PR firms to declare a supposedly nefarious association, typically with the marginalized groups that make up your work. Will you then abandon them and undermine yourself? If you do pro-Palestine work, will you kick out the “terrorists” (Palestinians) in your organization when they are inevitably called that?
Instead, one of the tasks of your work, to achieve your goals, is to embrace and normalize these elements. You cannot build a pro-Palestine movement while vilifying Palestinians. You cannot build a black liberation that ignores the economic, i.e. that organizes against capitalism itself. King realized exactly this.
The most socialist thing he pushed for in the march was a minimum wage increase, but that’s really it.
This is not true. Please review his later work when he was murdered.
There was a huge amount of socialist and communist resistance at the time, so if he made any of that explicit, I highly doubt he would’ve seen much success. Him being socialist is more of a footnote than a recipe for success.
As I have explained, it was core to the strategies and tactics used and the larger coalition itself was built from the movement.
Tides have since changed, so maybe a popular socialist movement could work, but it probably needs to focus on democratic socialist policies (more welfare) instead of socialist policies (economic overhaul) since that’s what most people these days tend to mean when they say “socialism.”
You’re thinking of social democracy, not democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is still about the overthrow of capitalism, but it focuses in the use of electoral means. Like the project undertaken by Allende. See how nicely the ruling class treated him and the people of Chile.
I think you would benefit from doing some of the readings I mentioned.
Sure, ally with whomever you think supports your cause, but the recipe for success is not ideology, but issues. Issues have far broader reach than whole systems.
These are inseparable. If you merely pick an issue but do not have political theory and good organizational methods you will have a right idea in isolation and then be useless - or even work against yourself. BLM had a very clear issue and, in fact, quite specific demands around defunding and community policing. Demands entirely actionable by local Democratic city politicians that control basically every major city council. They failed because they were not organized and were not politically educated in who their enemy was, what tactics they would use, and how to fight back and maintain momentum. BLM was a failure because they have the same false consciousness you are recommending.
Even when qualified immunity is removed, individual cops are indemnified because they are in the act of performing their duties
That’s the definition of qualified immunity. It’s not a law, but an understanding in the courts that cops are special. Ending qualified immunity means passing a law that states cops aren’t special and should be held to the same standards as regular citizens, with grants to do specific things to act in their official capacity (e.g. detain and arrest).
Ending qualified immunity is essential to getting rid of bad cops. And bad cops are who cause issues like George Floyd’s death.
That’s a specific tactic but the broken windows strategy would remain in place.
We should absolutely be fixing broken windows as we come across them.
Just like the civil rights movement didn’t end racism, but instead gave minorities a lot of tools to fix the broken windows they came across, to the point where things are a lot better for POC today than before the CRA.
Ending qualified immunity and legalizing recreational drugs are approachable goals that appeal to a broad audience and will do a lot of good for POC specifically (and everyone generally).
He has no grassroots movent
But he does. He got a lot of people out voting who wouldn’t have otherwise. They didn’t have a clear, actionable goal, but they did have a clear message: “drain the swamp.”
The lack of meaningful change was because Trump (their spokesperson) doesn’t care about change, he just cares about being in the spotlight. We can learn a lot from his messaging and turn that into meaningful change.
Every modern movement learns the lessons of socialist organizing or perishes
That’s just not true. Look at the American Revolution, which was pretty much the exact opposite: classical liberals (individualists) fighting against authoritarianism. That worked because people had a common enemy, so they organized for the purpose of defeating that enemy.
What you need to be successful is an “us vs them” mentality. That can come from a socialist background, but it doesn’t have to.
Yes, and this is triangulation that he later regretted
Yes, but we don’t know if he would’ve been as successful without doing it. Given the political and social climate at the time, I think King made the right call (for the movement, not for his personal convictions).
You cannot build a pro-Palestine movement while vilifying Palestinians
Sure, broadly speaking, but you can kick out specific individuals that will distract from the message. That’s what King did, and I think his movement was successful for it. That’s called compromise, and it works if you’re careful to not compromise on your core message.
Please review his later work when he was murdered.
I’m not talking about his later work, I’m talking about the Civil Rights movement.
You’re thinking of social democracy, not democratic socialism
My apologies, they’re similar terms and I align with neither, so I sometimes confuse them. King appeared to be more of a social democrat than a true socialist, though he did associate with more radical socialists.
BLM was a failure because they have the same false consciousness you are recommending.
No, BLM failed because they didn’t have consistent or lasting messaging. There are multiple ways to get that, and they did none of them. Chants don’t change laws, actual proposed laws do, and protests and whatnot are there to get media attention for those proposed laws.
That’s the definition of qualified immunity. It’s not a law, but an understanding in the courts that cops are special. Ending qualified immunity means passing a law that states cops aren’t special and should be held to the same standards as regular citizens, with grants to do specific things to act in their official capacity (e.g. detain and arrest). […]
Unfortunately, this is not correct.
Qualified immunity means you can’t attempt to sue individual cops when they break the law and do you harm. With qualified immunity, those harmed will sue the city, the county, the state, and so on. The individual cops are not part of this because of qualified immunity. I think we probably agree on that much.
The problem is that the actual cop themselves will not receive any direct consequences from a suit even with qualified immunity removed. This is because they are indemnified by being on-duty. There are precedents for this and the individual cops didn’t have to pay jack. It still came from the city, county, or state.
Realistically, cops cannot be reformed in this way. There are a very large number of roadblocks baked into the system. You will basically have to repeatedly lose, not actually gaining the desired reform, until it escalated to a very high level and passing a very high bar of organizational work on our parts. It’s difficult to maintain momentum when you have to lose 1000 times before winning your goal. You’d need a stronger approach that keeps up energy and finds material intermediate wins.
The most practical thing we can fight for in the immediate future is to defund the police and redirect the money towards the root material causes of crimes (and to decriminalize many things that shouldn’t be crimes in the first place). This can be done at a local level by going after city councils and running proposition campaigns and so on.
We should absolutely be fixing broken windows as we come across them.
There are more radical and correct framings but even mainstream analyses know that broken windows theory is really just a racist criminalization of poverty that throws a ton of people in jail over minor “offenses”.
But he does. He got a lot of people out voting who wouldn’t have otherwise. They didn’t have a clear, actionable goal, but they did have a clear message: “drain the swamp.”
Like I said and you are now saying, he just has people that will vote for him. That is every single Democratic or Republican candidate. That is not actually a movement. He can’t actually mobilize them. They aren’t involved. They don’t train each other. They aren’t organized. They don’t have an agenda. They’re just good sheep to pull a lever.
The lack of meaningful change was because Trump (their spokesperson) doesn’t care about change, he just cares about being in the spotlight. We can learn a lot from his messaging and turn that into meaningful change.
Trump is a part of the ruling class. One among many grifters that make large piles of money based on other people’s work, knows that Washington really works through money. His self-interest is the same as the rest of the class. He’s just ruder and more direct about it, not being a classy liar.
He didn’t change much because yes, he didn’t want to and therefore received institutional backing and did not confront substantial pushback from moneyed interests. Just like every other President.
That’s just not true. Look at the American Revolution, which was pretty much the exact opposite: classical liberals (individualists) fighting against authoritarianism.
The American Revolution was an inter-bourgeois civil war, more or less. The national bourgeoisie of the colonies wanted to rule itself and keep its cash and whipped up a fervor based on that. They succeeded at that, indeed. They were just as “authoritarian” (a word that means almost nothing in liberal discourse). There is nothing more authoritarian than shooting your enemy in the face so that you get to be in charge now. Remember, the liberal “individualists” we’re talking about were slavers and settler-colonial genociders. Their words are a fairy tale, a myth, used to manufacture consent for ruling class interests, namely sending your kid off to fight in a war.
As a bourgeois revolution, it was relatively top-down in nature. It received its support from a large faction of the existing ruling class, not ground-up organizing against the ruling class. This is not the kind of movement we are talking about and I hesitate to even call it a movement.
Yes, but we don’t know if he would’ve been as successful without doing it. Given the political and social climate at the time, I think King made the right call (for the movement, not for his personal convictions).
I do because I organize. I see how respectability politics tends to result in self-marginalization and defeat, usually crushing attempts in their infancy. A front group is fine, but when you begin to excise your comrades that know how to build from a coherent material base you only hurt yourself. Your movement will peter out. And the civil rights fight did. It was mollifies via legalization of some protections, the targeted murder and blacklisting of its leaders, and the integrating of some of its leaders, usually junior ones, into the ruling class order as politicians that told defanged false histories (ones compatible with using the false promise of ruling class tools) so that correct and useful strategies are not rediscovered.
Sure, broadly speaking, but you can kick out specific individuals that will distract from the message. That’s what King did, and I think his movement was successful for it. That’s called compromise, and it works if you’re careful to not compromise on your core message.
Every time you try to organize, the ruling class will hire a PR firm to identify how to split your groups up and therefore interfere with your ability to act in unison and to make use of more effective strategies. They will promote the least effective groups and strategies, the ones they can control and defang, and demand the exclusion of the more effective groups by using marginalization and vilification. “Kick out specific individuals” is not an accurate framing of how this functions.
The Civil Rights Movement benefited from already having substantial momentum and a subset of socialist organizing tactics by the time the purges began. Had it happened earlier to the same effect it would have been crushed just like it was several times before.
I’m not talking about his later work, I’m talking about the Civil Rights movement.
That doesn’t change the relevance of my response.
My apologies, they’re similar terms and I align with neither, so I sometimes confuse them. King appeared to be more of a social democrat than a true socialist, though he did associate with more radical socialists.
King identified as a Democratic Socialist and became more radical over time as he recognized the same lessons I’m talking about.
No, BLM failed because they didn’t have consistent or lasting messaging.
This is a counterproductive nagging that mirrors the criticism of the white moderate made by King. I’ve already explained how it’s factually inaccurate, but it is also wrong in its basic emphasis. It is the reactionary Obama tut-tuting that would do nothing because it did nothing. Every major city I helped in had unified and clear messaging. It did not get the goods. It is the logic of our opponents who pretend to be our allies but do nothing to help and actually instead promote the logic of self-defeat and false rationalizations. It has no basis in the on-the-ground reality and constitutes inventing realities rather than embedding with the actual people impacted and following the course of events.
It is unserious and a bad faith argument. I suspect you are just repeating it based on hearing others say it and don’t mean it in bad faith yourself.
There are multiple ways to get that, and they did none of them. Chants don’t change laws, actual proposed laws do, and protests and whatnot are there to get media attention for those proposed laws.
There were 4-8 very clear bulleted demands shared by every city movement I worked in that could be implemented with relative ease by any city council. For example, cut the police budget 50%. This does not require, in any way, some technocratic approach or special legalize. Councils are constantly in the business of changing the police budget, they do it as a matter of course. The demand and leverage are all that is needed. Their messaging was consistent and they had dedicated media teams presenting the information and having everyone redirect the press to media liaisons. There were occupations with those demands clearly laid out and tabling to engage community members.
They had exactly what you say was needed. They failed because of your ideas. In thinking that would be anywhere close to enough. In failing to understand leverage and the necessity of having your demands in-hand before giving up anything. And that all of this necessitates core organizing competencies and a coherent internal political line that identifies the enemy correctly, because otherwise you will lose to the internal continents that use your exact logic to defang and break the movement. To focus on messaging and the assumption of good faith from politicians. Of being surprised when you are met with maximum pressure from your alleged liberal allies. Of not knowing on which side their bread is buttered and how to organize to create the power they can’t take away from you using their preferred tools, or asking you to give up your leverage in exchange for their false promises of what your power looks like and how it’s built.
You wouldn’t have the civil rights movement were it not for the socialist movement and MLK’s understanding from it and organizational methods built from it. These are not separable qualities and it is why the approach you are suggesting does not work. Your suggestion is actually the status quo. There are many single-issue abortion rights groups out there. They are small and disorganized.
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist at all. He is a social democrat. He also failed to organize, as he only knew the aesthetics of the left and not the organizing content. He’s actually another pretty good example of why your suggested method fails.
As I mentioned before, MLK was a leader and organizer within a much broader context of civil rights organizations both constituted by socialists and learning from their methods, including the methods of organized labor.
He left it out at first and then regretted doing so. This is why he pivoted to the Poor People’s Campaign. It’s also why liberation was dramatically incomplete. He arrived at a more accurate analysis and radicalized over time. He learned the exact same lessons that everyone does when they fight too idealistically, without a grounding in how the material forces work against you.
Of course, MLK was not the entire civil rights movement. Socialists were a major driving force the entire time.
No presidents are guilted into helping. Change doesn’t come from a convincing speech. He responded to leverage and, as has been the pattern, sought to mollify the movement to prevent it from doing even more. This is the same government that blackmailed MLK and blacklisted, marginalized, and killed civil rights leaders.
But like I said, that’s not how it works in reality. The base of power and leverage dictates the change, not popularity of a candidate. There are plenty of places without FPTP. There are places where representation comes from voting for a party and they get proportional seats. They still face the same fundamental problem.
Yet having a mass organization can get results even without much electoral representation.
The right is reactionary and conservative, the left seeks to overthrow that order. To pursue justice you must be on the left. There is no fence-sitting nor valid pretense that these issues are isolated.
The ideas mean nothing without organization and neither does any notion of respectability politics or framings. It is also not unfortunate that this is leftist. The bourgeois electoral parties and their followers are anti-leftist and generally quite racist towards Palestinians. I interact with them often. It is only the left that correctly understands and advocates for the national liberation of Palestine. We would not even be discussing it in support of Palestine were it not for the left.
We have no option to control any of that. We are disorganized and weak. What is achievable on the horizon of this invasion is to undermine support for the US’ pro-Israeli position, to disrupt arms shipments, to increase mass consciousness of the true face of American empire.
It is not unlikely that the US’ hoped-for path out of this is to effectively take over administration of Gaza, displace UNRWA so that it can control the population further, create some narrative where it pretends Hamas is defeated, and to keep Palestine divided. All of this depends on the US maintaining the ability to do so without a regional war breaking out. It requires the basic consent of the public to not get in the way of any of this. It is our job to get in the way.
FPTP won’t do anything for any of this. This is core to the material interests of the country. The primary moving force for it. This isn’t up to the task in front of us. Therefore, we must be realistic and plot a course that is sufficient.
No it didn’t. Trump also served bourgeois interests. And Biden has maintained the vast majority of his policies, or even made them worse. Trump is not a charismatic leader that created any kind of movement that took on “the establishment”. Those are just words to him. He cannot call upon them to actually do anything.
The Republican Party already existed and he slotted into it just fine.
This is a typical organizer trajectory. You begin work in one org among a constellation. And often you then found a new one based on your connections, your fellow like-minded organizers. You then continue working in building your power through the organization.
YouTubers are not organizers when they do YouTube things, they’re petty bourgeois entertainers whose entrainment is sometimes educational. This is why many of them are also quite politically miseducated. They do not know the work of organizing or the forces you encounter when you try to make something happen, so they spread false idealism about how to achieve goals, how the system works, and who are our allies vs. our enemies in a given situation. This doesn’t mean they are simply bad, and they can be useful, but they’re not going to get anything done whatsoever except help raise some atomized political consciousness.
What most people seem to do after watching thirst videos is to do the same thing they were doing before: nothing. And anecdotally, the people I encounter that rely heavily in YouTubers for political education have a false sense of their own knowledge and are somewhat disruptive when they join an organization. They haven’t had to learn humility or how to disagree with others, they only developed a parasocial relationship in a relatively combative electronic space. This is why I emphasize them entering a political education program before they do much else.
Yes, because we don’t have that spokesperson.
Look at the BLM movement. It’s decentralized and has had incredible impact and reach, but it didn’t actually change policy much outside a handful of areas. They obviously didn’t need a centralized organization to get a popular movement going, so that’s not the issue. The main issue they had is a lack of clear, articulable policy changes. You get that with a good spokesperson. They should have pushed for ending qualified immunity (so it’s easier to hold police accountable) and perhaps legalization/decriminalization of recreational drugs (large reason for police interaction with black people).
But they didn’t seem to want specific solutions, they wanted to end systemic racism, which isn’t something you can really legislate. But organizing worked fine without centralization. They just needed a spokesperson like Dr. King to take that anger and focus it onto tangible solutions.
That’s irrelevant. We’re talking about a single spokesperson building grassroots support for a cause. His stated cause was “drain the swamp,” and it got people passionate enough to go against their own party (they seemed to want Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush) and nominate and then elect an outsider. The party responded with MAGA rhetoric and candidates to push that rhetoric.
The problem with Trump wasn’t organizing, the problem is he’s a narcissist who doesn’t care about the actual message and just wants power. Had someone more interested in making actual change been in that role, things would’ve been different, but instead we got narcissist nonsense like election denial. And honestly, I’m glad he was ineffective because things could’ve been much worse…
What we need is someone like Trump that can reach a broad audience, but who is focused on resolving social issues. They need to distill anger into one or two policy changes, and go hard on those issues.
King wasn’t part of some socialist organization. He started with MIA, which was a nonpartisan community improvement org, and that’s where the bus boycott started. He went from there to found the SCLC, which again, wasn’t partisan. He worked with the NAACP, which again wasn’t and isn’t socialist.
In fact, supporters demanded he distance himself from Bayard Rustin in the march on Washington because he was gay, openly socialist, and had ties with the Communist Party (not sure which was more important), which he agreed to. King having socialist views isn’t why he was successful, and it could’ve derailed the whole thing if it was more widely known. The most socialist thing he pushed for in the march was a minimum wage increase, but that’s really it.
There was a huge amount of socialist and communist resistance at the time, so if he made any of that explicit, I highly doubt he would’ve seen much success. Him being socialist is more of a footnote than a recipe for success. Tides have since changed, so maybe a popular socialist movement could work, but it probably needs to focus on democratic socialist policies (more welfare) instead of socialist policies (economic overhaul) since that’s what most people these days tend to mean when they say “socialism.”
Sure, ally with whomever you think supports your cause, but the recipe for success is not ideology, but issues. Issues have far broader reach than whole systems.
No, because there is no organization. The status quo is sitting around and hoping for the aesthetics of past movements to appear. That’s not how it works.
Untrue. This was a reactionary position spread by an oppositional media. Nearly every major city had a set of clearly articulated demands they printed on pamphlets, turned into chants, and presented to city councils. This was a recycling of the same false rhetoric used against Occupy Wall Street.
What they lacked was enough organization and political consciousness to create a lasting movement that would continue until its policies were achieved and then stay beyond that to defend them, because they will be rolled back otherwise.
This was a popular Reddit meme but it would do nothing to address this. Ending qualified immunity would just provide another means by which victims of cops could sue the city, county, or state, effectively. Even when qualified immunity is removed, individual cops are indemnified because they are in the act of performing their duties. It would primarily mean getting more money when they murder your child.
That’s a specific tactic but the broken windows strategy would remain in place. There are a million “public safety” excuses they will continue to use. Historically they would just use the criminalization of poverty.
It’s everything. If your mission is to organize to change that which runs counter to the full might of the ruling class, you will fail if you try to use their tools. You are not in their position. You do not have their money or the backing of the state. You are not class conscious, but they absolutely are. They will coordinate while you flail.
He offered a false consciousness to whip votes for a major party and then continued to do the whims of the ruling class of which he is a member. His followers still believe in him despite this. He uses the mainstream tactics of bourgeois electoralism and his base of power is the same as Biden’s, Bush’s, McCain’s, etc. He has no grassroots movent, they are just the same group of reactionary people that the GOP has been grooming for decades. You’ll notice that many of their demands are amorphous and they instead believe in fantastical conspiracy theories about the things Trump supposedly did or was trying to do. There is no program, there is no call to action, they don’t actually do anything except pull the lever like every other good sheep.
The organizations don’t need to be explicitly socialist to draw from socialist organizing. The skills of being an organizer are of this exact legacy, and the lines drawn are not deep. WEB Du Bois, cofounder of the NAACP, was a communist and drew on his connections and experiences with socialists to frame its external messaging, internal political education, and overall structure. Their rank-and-file organizers drew from the movement, flocking to support as has always been the case, and doing the actual difficult work of organizing. When the Red Scare included the NAACP in its anticommunist purges, it found many examples and the NAACP, then run by liberals, did most of the purging themselves. It has become far less effective over time because they have adopted a liberal NGO model. They have very little power to actually do anything but PR.
The cofounder of MIA along with king was the head of a local union. The union with which it associated was created by a socialist. Organized labor is the bread and butter of socialist organizing and is built on that left spectrum even when people are just following its methods as dogma. It is an incomplete expression of class consciousness, of identifying your real enemy is the capitalist and their cronies, and creating a robust organizational network that uses unified direct action to achieve its demands.
Every modern movement learns the lessons of socialist organizing or perishes, assimilated into a status quo with dramatically incomplete victories and a new set of false storytelling about who they were and what they achieved - stories compatible with the status quo that was their oppressor or even giving credit to that oppressor instead of the brutal antagonistic fight that so many died for. When movements start out with better understanding and organization, they do better. They have fewer stumbling blocks. They don’t have to learn as many lessons through failure. And they have to take fewer risks that their movement will simply dissolve because they are too disorganized.
Yes, and this is triangulation that he later regretted. It’s called respectability politics and it’s always a bad idea.
This is the false logic of respectability politics. You fall into a pattern of giving the enemy their ammunition. You will run into this exact same situation with any movement you join. The ruling class will hire PR firms to declare a supposedly nefarious association, typically with the marginalized groups that make up your work. Will you then abandon them and undermine yourself? If you do pro-Palestine work, will you kick out the “terrorists” (Palestinians) in your organization when they are inevitably called that?
Instead, one of the tasks of your work, to achieve your goals, is to embrace and normalize these elements. You cannot build a pro-Palestine movement while vilifying Palestinians. You cannot build a black liberation that ignores the economic, i.e. that organizes against capitalism itself. King realized exactly this.
This is not true. Please review his later work when he was murdered.
As I have explained, it was core to the strategies and tactics used and the larger coalition itself was built from the movement.
You’re thinking of social democracy, not democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is still about the overthrow of capitalism, but it focuses in the use of electoral means. Like the project undertaken by Allende. See how nicely the ruling class treated him and the people of Chile.
I think you would benefit from doing some of the readings I mentioned.
These are inseparable. If you merely pick an issue but do not have political theory and good organizational methods you will have a right idea in isolation and then be useless - or even work against yourself. BLM had a very clear issue and, in fact, quite specific demands around defunding and community policing. Demands entirely actionable by local Democratic city politicians that control basically every major city council. They failed because they were not organized and were not politically educated in who their enemy was, what tactics they would use, and how to fight back and maintain momentum. BLM was a failure because they have the same false consciousness you are recommending.
That’s the definition of qualified immunity. It’s not a law, but an understanding in the courts that cops are special. Ending qualified immunity means passing a law that states cops aren’t special and should be held to the same standards as regular citizens, with grants to do specific things to act in their official capacity (e.g. detain and arrest).
Ending qualified immunity is essential to getting rid of bad cops. And bad cops are who cause issues like George Floyd’s death.
We should absolutely be fixing broken windows as we come across them.
Just like the civil rights movement didn’t end racism, but instead gave minorities a lot of tools to fix the broken windows they came across, to the point where things are a lot better for POC today than before the CRA.
Ending qualified immunity and legalizing recreational drugs are approachable goals that appeal to a broad audience and will do a lot of good for POC specifically (and everyone generally).
But he does. He got a lot of people out voting who wouldn’t have otherwise. They didn’t have a clear, actionable goal, but they did have a clear message: “drain the swamp.”
The lack of meaningful change was because Trump (their spokesperson) doesn’t care about change, he just cares about being in the spotlight. We can learn a lot from his messaging and turn that into meaningful change.
That’s just not true. Look at the American Revolution, which was pretty much the exact opposite: classical liberals (individualists) fighting against authoritarianism. That worked because people had a common enemy, so they organized for the purpose of defeating that enemy.
What you need to be successful is an “us vs them” mentality. That can come from a socialist background, but it doesn’t have to.
Yes, but we don’t know if he would’ve been as successful without doing it. Given the political and social climate at the time, I think King made the right call (for the movement, not for his personal convictions).
Sure, broadly speaking, but you can kick out specific individuals that will distract from the message. That’s what King did, and I think his movement was successful for it. That’s called compromise, and it works if you’re careful to not compromise on your core message.
I’m not talking about his later work, I’m talking about the Civil Rights movement.
My apologies, they’re similar terms and I align with neither, so I sometimes confuse them. King appeared to be more of a social democrat than a true socialist, though he did associate with more radical socialists.
No, BLM failed because they didn’t have consistent or lasting messaging. There are multiple ways to get that, and they did none of them. Chants don’t change laws, actual proposed laws do, and protests and whatnot are there to get media attention for those proposed laws.
Unfortunately, this is not correct.
Qualified immunity means you can’t attempt to sue individual cops when they break the law and do you harm. With qualified immunity, those harmed will sue the city, the county, the state, and so on. The individual cops are not part of this because of qualified immunity. I think we probably agree on that much.
The problem is that the actual cop themselves will not receive any direct consequences from a suit even with qualified immunity removed. This is because they are indemnified by being on-duty. There are precedents for this and the individual cops didn’t have to pay jack. It still came from the city, county, or state.
Realistically, cops cannot be reformed in this way. There are a very large number of roadblocks baked into the system. You will basically have to repeatedly lose, not actually gaining the desired reform, until it escalated to a very high level and passing a very high bar of organizational work on our parts. It’s difficult to maintain momentum when you have to lose 1000 times before winning your goal. You’d need a stronger approach that keeps up energy and finds material intermediate wins.
The most practical thing we can fight for in the immediate future is to defund the police and redirect the money towards the root material causes of crimes (and to decriminalize many things that shouldn’t be crimes in the first place). This can be done at a local level by going after city councils and running proposition campaigns and so on.
???
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-journal/blog/how-to-actually-fix-a-broken-window/
There are more radical and correct framings but even mainstream analyses know that broken windows theory is really just a racist criminalization of poverty that throws a ton of people in jail over minor “offenses”.
Like I said and you are now saying, he just has people that will vote for him. That is every single Democratic or Republican candidate. That is not actually a movement. He can’t actually mobilize them. They aren’t involved. They don’t train each other. They aren’t organized. They don’t have an agenda. They’re just good sheep to pull a lever.
Trump is a part of the ruling class. One among many grifters that make large piles of money based on other people’s work, knows that Washington really works through money. His self-interest is the same as the rest of the class. He’s just ruder and more direct about it, not being a classy liar.
He didn’t change much because yes, he didn’t want to and therefore received institutional backing and did not confront substantial pushback from moneyed interests. Just like every other President.
The American Revolution was an inter-bourgeois civil war, more or less. The national bourgeoisie of the colonies wanted to rule itself and keep its cash and whipped up a fervor based on that. They succeeded at that, indeed. They were just as “authoritarian” (a word that means almost nothing in liberal discourse). There is nothing more authoritarian than shooting your enemy in the face so that you get to be in charge now. Remember, the liberal “individualists” we’re talking about were slavers and settler-colonial genociders. Their words are a fairy tale, a myth, used to manufacture consent for ruling class interests, namely sending your kid off to fight in a war.
As a bourgeois revolution, it was relatively top-down in nature. It received its support from a large faction of the existing ruling class, not ground-up organizing against the ruling class. This is not the kind of movement we are talking about and I hesitate to even call it a movement.
I do because I organize. I see how respectability politics tends to result in self-marginalization and defeat, usually crushing attempts in their infancy. A front group is fine, but when you begin to excise your comrades that know how to build from a coherent material base you only hurt yourself. Your movement will peter out. And the civil rights fight did. It was mollifies via legalization of some protections, the targeted murder and blacklisting of its leaders, and the integrating of some of its leaders, usually junior ones, into the ruling class order as politicians that told defanged false histories (ones compatible with using the false promise of ruling class tools) so that correct and useful strategies are not rediscovered.
Every time you try to organize, the ruling class will hire a PR firm to identify how to split your groups up and therefore interfere with your ability to act in unison and to make use of more effective strategies. They will promote the least effective groups and strategies, the ones they can control and defang, and demand the exclusion of the more effective groups by using marginalization and vilification. “Kick out specific individuals” is not an accurate framing of how this functions.
The Civil Rights Movement benefited from already having substantial momentum and a subset of socialist organizing tactics by the time the purges began. Had it happened earlier to the same effect it would have been crushed just like it was several times before.
That doesn’t change the relevance of my response.
King identified as a Democratic Socialist and became more radical over time as he recognized the same lessons I’m talking about.
This is a counterproductive nagging that mirrors the criticism of the white moderate made by King. I’ve already explained how it’s factually inaccurate, but it is also wrong in its basic emphasis. It is the reactionary Obama tut-tuting that would do nothing because it did nothing. Every major city I helped in had unified and clear messaging. It did not get the goods. It is the logic of our opponents who pretend to be our allies but do nothing to help and actually instead promote the logic of self-defeat and false rationalizations. It has no basis in the on-the-ground reality and constitutes inventing realities rather than embedding with the actual people impacted and following the course of events.
It is unserious and a bad faith argument. I suspect you are just repeating it based on hearing others say it and don’t mean it in bad faith yourself.
There were 4-8 very clear bulleted demands shared by every city movement I worked in that could be implemented with relative ease by any city council. For example, cut the police budget 50%. This does not require, in any way, some technocratic approach or special legalize. Councils are constantly in the business of changing the police budget, they do it as a matter of course. The demand and leverage are all that is needed. Their messaging was consistent and they had dedicated media teams presenting the information and having everyone redirect the press to media liaisons. There were occupations with those demands clearly laid out and tabling to engage community members.
They had exactly what you say was needed. They failed because of your ideas. In thinking that would be anywhere close to enough. In failing to understand leverage and the necessity of having your demands in-hand before giving up anything. And that all of this necessitates core organizing competencies and a coherent internal political line that identifies the enemy correctly, because otherwise you will lose to the internal continents that use your exact logic to defang and break the movement. To focus on messaging and the assumption of good faith from politicians. Of being surprised when you are met with maximum pressure from your alleged liberal allies. Of not knowing on which side their bread is buttered and how to organize to create the power they can’t take away from you using their preferred tools, or asking you to give up your leverage in exchange for their false promises of what your power looks like and how it’s built.