I can’t be the only one who is seeing this fucking pattern on damn loop every few years. First, leftists managed to clobber together a movement. Lets say Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter. Or we can go more recent and talk about 50501 or TeslaTakedown.
Look, I get it. Its a lot of work and coordination to build up these movements. But time-and-time again, the movement rises up. Then the right attacks it.
Then mysteriously a few very violent actors show up (maybe its far-left. Or maybe its right-wing false flaggers). I dunno, but the violence ALWAYS shows up. BLM had groups trying to take over parts of town. I know Trump agitated the protesters with unwarranted acts of force (see the Laffeyette clearout).
But it doesn’t matter “how” the violence begins. The point is some level of damage starts to occur. Its inevitable and we need to not only accept it, but plan for it.
Now what? The violence gets amplified by right-wing media and then… the movement is defeated. I shit you not. Its the death of every leftist movement for the past 15 years. The movements become a symbol of violence in the mainstream’s eyes and loses all power.
We’re entering the same period right now with 50501 and TeslaTakedown. The violence has begun: lots of Tesla vehicles have been smashed and arsons have started to spread.
What we need is a spokesman, who can navigate and sell the situation to the public. Martin Luther King Jr. was the spokesman of the Civil Rights era, and his “branding” was the most important element of all. If you want a violent movement, that’s fine. But create a spokesman. Malcom X, to counter-act and differentiate between philosophies.
Without spokesmen (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X), we conflate the violence and the messages. And ultimately, that destroys our movements.
Please, for the love of whatever diety you worship. Get a fucking spokesman. Now. Sooner is better. Maybe its too late for TeslaTakedown and 50501, but we need movements that truly are rallied behind a singular face who can serve as the ideological leader to the general public.
I feel like everyone else has covered the twin angles of what happened to MKL and Malcolm X, and the whole worry about having a defined leader. So let me talk about another few angles of this.
Let’s face it. The Left is not unified. There are a metric fuckton worth of little factions that have their own goals and their own ideas, and they can’t agree on anything except the Right is bad. If you’re wanting to go back to the Obama or Clinton years, and not recreate a socialist ideal in the USA, you’re panned as a liberal and not sufficiently radicalised by the socialists. If you would rather have a functioning government with government-subsidised healthcare and education, the liberals scream at you for being too radical, while the anarchists scream at you that any organised government is evil and shit. And everyone has their very specific, very defined vision, at least about this one thing they care about, and zero willingness to compromise or trade horses to any of the other factions with their limited view.
This makes leadership at best complicated, if not outright impossible. How can we find someone who will equally represent all factions in our coalition, when the only thing we really agree on is Trump Bad ™?
And how can leadership stop the failure path you have identified above? People think that we’re not being listened to (they’re right, also!). They think the only answer they have is to break shit until people listen to us. We’ve got plenty of people, from the main movers and shakers down to the rank and file, saying ‘hey, we break shit, that just makes Trump and his goons hit us harder, and now with apparent justification.’ Those people scream back at us that peaceful protests and electoralism don’t work, and that the only way we’ll be taken seriously is by breaking shit and making people feel the pain. Do you think a defined leader will make that failure chain go away? I don’t. I think that Trump is banking on that failure chain because the real goal is an American gestapo that goes around beating the shit out of people who don’t toe the line and what better way to form that gestapo than in response to Leftist ‘violence’. And I am not above this. I think that it’s far more effective to just tell people that driving a Tesla means supporting a fascist oligarch, but any time I try to make this point to the kinds of people who want to burn Teslas, we get back into the arguments I allude to in my first paragraph. AND this is before we get into agent provocateurs and COINTELPRO and other stuff.
Finally, any real societal change that is going to stick from the egalitarian side of the fence will come from a grass-roots movement. We don’t want a charismatic leader who can stand up in front of the crowd and shake their fist. We want crowds of people who show up for the silly notion that human beings need respect and that this is not America. Leave the authoritarian charismatic leader for the Right. Egalitarianism is about society, not any one charismatic jerk with a bone to pick.
JMNSHO.
You underestimate the ease at which the right can disrupt leaderless leftist mobs.
We are beginning to see the deployment and coordination of far right individuals to attend things like Tesla Takedown. And unlike you, these far right assholes have a leader and a plan, and know each other.
How will you differentiate between false flag ops done during these protests vs official acts of resistance?
I wish the best for the protesters. But it’s all very dumb. Maybe we manage to defeat Trump in the long term but some very obvious acts of disruption are going to fuck over these protesters.
It’s obvious you didn’t read what I wrote.
And you fail to address my point.
These loose collections of movements are too easily disparaged and negated on the political stage. I wish you the best, but I know what’s going to happen
The violence will escalate and there will be no spokesman to strategize a message.
You haven’t said anything that addresses my core point. You just hope, without reason, that your methods will lead to meaningful change.
I don’t fail to address your point. I am saying your point is wrong and fails to account for how ‘the Left’ is put together and what kind of people comprise ‘the Left’. Your idea works perfectly for the Right because the Right is Authoritarian and driven by control structures. ‘The Left’ is a loose association of people with cross purposes and varying agendas. Your idea is a round peg for a very square hole. And I’m not the only one telling you this. Have a nice day. :)