How to Stop Them?

 

It's 2020-12-17 at 7pm. I'm tired. I ordered a pizza online (I usually call. Like the old man that I am who wants for there to be jobs for people because you need an income to live in this culture.) And I've had good results from these new "auto-fill" things for your name, email, website that some bloggers have for comments. Once you enter the info, all the options show up and you just confirm if they're all right. So, I go to enter my address and phone number for the Contactless Delivery and all this okay-looking info pops up and I figured I must have ordered online before (it's possible). 

But the pizza's almost an hour coming and I go to my email account and see the confirmation email and look and notice that the address and phone number are completely fuckt-up. Like an AREA-CODE of "164."

So I call them up instead and get it all fixed and now I have another 45-minute wait and I've been hungry for a while. (The postal-code would have sent them to a private school a couple of blocks away from the street that I live on and a mile or two from my house.)

So, last time I wrote a blog-post called "How to Stop Them" but now I've put a question mark on the same title because maybe I don't know. Because I'm so tired. (Working some overtime this week.)

I don't know what to say that isn't what I haven't always been saying. There needs to be a recognition that the electoral politics crowd and the super-radicals have to acknowledge each other's importance. We have to realize that our political system is dominated by capitalism and that long-term exposure to it (as a social-democratic politician f'r instance) is damaging. A progressive politician has to establish a line for themselves that they will not cross as the pressure to compromise and conform begins to be applied. This should be communicated publicly so that people who might vote for that person can have some understanding of the degree to which that person will fight for them as a politician.

Then, when the pressures are building and the politician is considering erasing that line and drawing a new one a little farther out from their own sense of morality, the electorate can say: "We voted for the person who said they'll never do that. If you betray us you will be dead to us."

At the same time, the super-radicals have to learn that there's no way in hell that they'll change things with their tiny demonstration, or their massive one-day rallies, or their incoherent, childish calls for "revolution" or their masturbatory outbursts on social media. It doesn't appear that they'll have much effect peacefully or violently. Not without allies with power. And because our economy is dominated by capitalists, most of our power has to be found in politics. Direct action/extra-parliamentary actions/occupations/petitions/letter-writing campaigns/alternative media, etc., etc., they're important. And, furthermore, if the agents of the oligarchy believe they can break their own laws with impunity (including by breaking the lives of activists) we have to acknowledge the validity of violent responses. Oppressors tend not to be swayed by moral persuasion.

We have to learn to speak to ordinary people. We have to develop a clear strategy for what we want to achieve and how we CAN achieve it. Read my blog posts on "Workers as Citizens" for an illustration of this.