US, EU, even China and India. Regardless where you are, the economy sucks, housing is not affordable, prices are high, jobs are stagnant and class mobility is nonexistent (except maybe in China).
US, EU, even China and India. Regardless where you are, the economy sucks, housing is not affordable, prices are high, jobs are stagnant and class mobility is nonexistent (except maybe in China).
I want to be clear here. I am not particularly thrilled that this is my experience of the reality on the ground. I don’t know if this is the ‘best strategy’, but I do know that attaching your wagon to the Democrats, in particular those closely associated with the DNC, is a death sentence for a radical movement. If they lose, people don’t trust you, and if they win then people tune out because the ‘grown ups are back in control’.
You don’t have to discourage your recruits from voting, but you need to emphasize to them that voting does not change the trajectory we are heading towards, hence it’s outcomes cannot affect our overall political strategy. You have to hammer this point home repeatedly whenever it comes up.
There are segments of the population that are inherently radicalized, however they are radicalized specifically in a way to distrust leftists, particularly white leftists because of their general lack of long-term political commitment, and particularly in well organized Latino and African-American (in particular recent Somali) communities. They have their own radical traditions, and it is imperative to be sympathetic to those movements and synthesize yours into their efforts, which have likely been going on for decades.
The most important thing is to say what you are going to do, and do what you said you would do. You don’t have to be clever about it.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking of lol. I’m Black, and I personally had some of that distrust that prevented me from becoming a leftist sooner. If I hadn’t studied the Panthers, no way some white person would’ve convinced me, and I’m pretty sure it still informs a lot of my ideas, particularly since we have been stabbed in the back for the thinnest slice of pie by previous labor movements. But my organizing experience has generally been that white leftists have nearly wholly given up trying to convince Black folk, at least in my area, which has several nearly purely Black communities, or Black dominant ones. That’s also ignoring the general lack of familiarity with black radicalism by white folks in orgs (Then just about all of the black members have read, or at least own and are reading damn near all the same black radical books, having decided to read them completely independently).
I just guess I find myself cynical because I don’t know how white folk finna synthesize anything when they don’t have any familiarity with half of what they’re synthesizing.
As a white person, I don’t personally have alot faith in it. However, there is still a better chance of it happening with Trump in power than a Democrat.
That said, imo it is the primary dialectic that needs to be overcome for larger organized change to occur. It cannot come from white leftists, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be trying to. I certainty do when I can, but I currently live in an area with literally like three black people. My biggest thing that I can do rn is just convincing white people that their interests and those of black people align.
But everybody is frustrated, even your ordinary conservatives. It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here.