That’s kind of assuming that there’s a single source of political will or energy, that time and energy are limited things. It’s not really on the ballot, but just kind of, as an off-hand example because I’m tired, you could think of like, what if we lowered the work week from 40 hours to 32 with the same amount of pay in the same period? Sure, not a revolutionary position to take, not an overhaul of the economy, nothing would really change. At the same time, this is a pretty big change for most people who now have three day weekends, who get better overtime pay, it’s a pretty big change for people who work two jobs, maybe one full time and one part time.
Do you think that the energy that it took to make that change, do you think it evaporated after the change happened? No, it didn’t. Now, all those people have extra hours in their day which they can then spend on pushing for more shit, for more revolutionary shit. It means they have to participate less in this system which globally exploits them. Sure, I mean, there’s a minor conflict in interest that the better you make the system, the less incentivized people are to overthrow it, but I don’t think that’s actually a serious problem. If you can abolish or reform away the police more, or pass sweeping scale-backs to the domestic military, that makes revolutionary easier, not harder. If you pass free healthcare, that means people are more free to take risks without endangering, say, their whole family with bankruptcy. The more major problem that people conflate with this is one of “fuck the police” turning into “defund the police” turning into “reform the police” turning into “fund the police”, because politics is an insane game of translation and telephone. That’s not because reformism is bad necessarily, as the other side of the coin, as the other side of “dual power”, right, it’s just because capitalism is extremely good at either absorbing or crushing revolutionary sentiments.
It’s not the core idea there that’s wrong, it’s the fact that people hear “I want fascism!”, which to them just means basically like, racism, when you tell them you want communism. Because it gets translated through the smudged lens of anticolonial revolutionary sentiment getting crushed by the CIA, and fascist states coming about in the wake, or because they equivocate communism itself as being the same as fascism, or what have you. It’s people programmed with the mechanisms by which revolutionary sentiment is absorbed almost automatically. Everyone takes the conflation by their opposition as evidence that efforts for reform are totally wasted, but I think that’s kind of bunk.
Oftentimes, it’s not even the case that the actions you would take for both, either reform or revolution, are mutually exclusive. If you want to engage in revolutionary action, joining or creating a union or political action group is sometimes the best stuff you can do. A union slashes tires and throws firebombs just as much as they negotiate, and the two are actually mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive. By fucking shit up they increase the costs of not negotiating with them or ceding to their demands, and the union, by pretending to negotiate, they can waste more company resources, attempt to dispel some amount of clapback, they can attempt to slowly ratchet the company into a position where they will become completely dissolved and bought out by a co-operative. I use the example of a union here, but these same tactics could be employed really at any level.
So, uh, yeah. If I want to extend the medical metaphor, then I say like, okay, say you got shot in the arm, right. Maybe we could argue that it’s more similar to a cancer, but for this example, you’ve been shot in the arm. You do need to probably get the lead out, you do need to close the wound, you do need to examine for internal damage, maybe get a cast if it hit your bone and fractured it, yeah. But, the first course of action, if you’re not in the hospital, if you don’t have the medical knowledge, a doctor, the tools, disinfectant. The first step, if you don’t have those, is to put pressure on it, stop the bleeding, get a tourniquet in place. I.E. the first step is to basically put a band-aid on it. This is a bad metaphor, to be frank, but, yeah.
That’s kind of assuming that there’s a single source of political will or energy, that time and energy are limited things. It’s not really on the ballot, but just kind of, as an off-hand example because I’m tired, you could think of like, what if we lowered the work week from 40 hours to 32 with the same amount of pay in the same period? Sure, not a revolutionary position to take, not an overhaul of the economy, nothing would really change. At the same time, this is a pretty big change for most people who now have three day weekends, who get better overtime pay, it’s a pretty big change for people who work two jobs, maybe one full time and one part time.
Do you think that the energy that it took to make that change, do you think it evaporated after the change happened? No, it didn’t. Now, all those people have extra hours in their day which they can then spend on pushing for more shit, for more revolutionary shit. It means they have to participate less in this system which globally exploits them. Sure, I mean, there’s a minor conflict in interest that the better you make the system, the less incentivized people are to overthrow it, but I don’t think that’s actually a serious problem. If you can abolish or reform away the police more, or pass sweeping scale-backs to the domestic military, that makes revolutionary easier, not harder. If you pass free healthcare, that means people are more free to take risks without endangering, say, their whole family with bankruptcy. The more major problem that people conflate with this is one of “fuck the police” turning into “defund the police” turning into “reform the police” turning into “fund the police”, because politics is an insane game of translation and telephone. That’s not because reformism is bad necessarily, as the other side of the coin, as the other side of “dual power”, right, it’s just because capitalism is extremely good at either absorbing or crushing revolutionary sentiments.
It’s not the core idea there that’s wrong, it’s the fact that people hear “I want fascism!”, which to them just means basically like, racism, when you tell them you want communism. Because it gets translated through the smudged lens of anticolonial revolutionary sentiment getting crushed by the CIA, and fascist states coming about in the wake, or because they equivocate communism itself as being the same as fascism, or what have you. It’s people programmed with the mechanisms by which revolutionary sentiment is absorbed almost automatically. Everyone takes the conflation by their opposition as evidence that efforts for reform are totally wasted, but I think that’s kind of bunk.
Oftentimes, it’s not even the case that the actions you would take for both, either reform or revolution, are mutually exclusive. If you want to engage in revolutionary action, joining or creating a union or political action group is sometimes the best stuff you can do. A union slashes tires and throws firebombs just as much as they negotiate, and the two are actually mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive. By fucking shit up they increase the costs of not negotiating with them or ceding to their demands, and the union, by pretending to negotiate, they can waste more company resources, attempt to dispel some amount of clapback, they can attempt to slowly ratchet the company into a position where they will become completely dissolved and bought out by a co-operative. I use the example of a union here, but these same tactics could be employed really at any level.
So, uh, yeah. If I want to extend the medical metaphor, then I say like, okay, say you got shot in the arm, right. Maybe we could argue that it’s more similar to a cancer, but for this example, you’ve been shot in the arm. You do need to probably get the lead out, you do need to close the wound, you do need to examine for internal damage, maybe get a cast if it hit your bone and fractured it, yeah. But, the first course of action, if you’re not in the hospital, if you don’t have the medical knowledge, a doctor, the tools, disinfectant. The first step, if you don’t have those, is to put pressure on it, stop the bleeding, get a tourniquet in place. I.E. the first step is to basically put a band-aid on it. This is a bad metaphor, to be frank, but, yeah.