Hello everyone, I wanted to reach out to anarchisticially thinking people because quite frankly I am very worried. I am worried about the rise of fascist and fascist-aligned governments around the world, obviously.
But on the flipside I am also worried about leftist reactions and quite frankly the absolute failure of leftist politics to capitalize on the brief window of momentum we had in the period of 2011 to around 2023. We had political momentum, we had the sympathy of much of the western world, we had many governments. What did we do with it? Not much. Now, the dialectical tide is turning as state power is in the process of being handed back to the right. Perhaps for good.
So how do we deal with this new reality? The worrying reaction I see in most leftist spaces is nothing but defeated groaning, meaningless phrases and ideological posturing. Do we have a plan? Do we have coherent guiding principles? Forms of organization? How do we get there?
I realize those are big and open ended questions, but I believe in our collective ability to think big. Because otherwise we might be doomed.
Then who is the left? Twitter Marxists? Anarchist Telegram groups? I’m not trying to be offensive or contrarian, i’m just trying to get at what exactly we’re supposed to do. Like I said, at every point in time there were policy decisions to be made that were more left and served an agenda that would serve humanity more than other policy decisions. There were candidates within a party that were more left than others who could have been supported.
This remains true today, i’m principally against defeatism, but it was even more true from 2011-2023. But leftism failed, clearly. We had an opportunity to shift more left, instead we shifted right. The convenient reaction to this fact could be to become conspiratorial and blame liberals who are in lieu with fascists. But the fact is that liberals are simply opportunists. They’re not fascists, but they can be bought by fascists. So did we fail to buy the liberals? Is state politics doomed from the start? And if so, then what?
This is what i’m getting at. Blame games are useless.
We have reached a situation which traditional leftists like to call late-stage-capitalism and due to both internal contradictions in our economic model as well as ecological pressure from the increasingly dire climate catastrophe, politicians that are insisting to keep operating within the capitalist logic are forced into a zero sum game even if they are well intended.
Thus what you call a window of opportunity was a mirage, as it is impossible to reform capitalism from within.
Okay, sure. But again, then what? A violent revolution is a method, not a goal. And even then, like I said in response to mydude above. If one starts a war, one should better be prepared to win it. Are we prepared? The fascists are going to go full force in response to any insurrection. Do we have anything in response?
No, I didn’t say revolution or war is the only alternative, but for politics to effectively qualify as leftist they need to be anti-capitalist.