Hi, I'm here to announce that everyone pushing the standard Hexbear party line on the protest movement is a loser and wrong. I already know the weak-ass arguments you're gonna make and every single one of them reveals your disconnection from any actual organizing. Let's go through them one by one. If you have another that you think Marx Failed to Consider, please bring it up and I will explain how you are wrong in that way as well.
This was funded by the Waltons
No, one Walton bought an ad in the NYT. Who fucking cares? It has no material bearing on the movement whatsoever. There's no organization money is being funneled to other than the Democratic Party and Indivisble, which is not different in any way. The on-the-ground organizers in most cities and towns are not receiving a penny from the left's George Soros conspiracy. They're just normal people (and, to the next point, lots of leftists).
The Democrats are using this to steal the leftist energy of the masses
The Democrats certainly want to do that, but on the ground reports indicate they are losing all over the country. That's because leftists (especially 
) are not leaving this space uncontested. I have spent an enormous amount of time putting in the work to earn the trust and legitimacy necessary to place a bunch of literal revolutionary communists in the leadership of the local movement. Not in some sneaky, behind the scenes way, but out in the open, succeeding specifically because we are literal revolutionary communists who never shut up about it. The Democrats, by my accounting, are losing the struggle in more places than not. If you refuse to engage because you're afraid the Dems will suck your leftist soul, you're just conceding the struggle and granting them victory. They don't co-opt by pressing a button, they co-opt because they have the resources to take leadership and then defuse. So far they have failed to do so specifically because the space is not empty and the communists are fighting harder to reach the masses (since we actually have an appealing program).
The attendees are all Kamala-loving liberals who just want to go back to brunch
If you had ever bothered to go to one of these events and talk politics to people, you'll discover a very broad array of political perspectives, including a strong trend towards explicit support for socialism. Yes, of course, the PMC bug-eating libs are there - who cares? They are by no means the only attendees. Maybe you're just Too Cool to be around someone who reminds you of your mom, but the rest of us are finding deep political discontent and activating it. When one of my comrades gets on the mic and says "we need to break from the democrats and do a literal socialist revolution", the crowd response, by and large, is incredibly positive. The retired dentists and accountants in the crowd grumble and whine, but they are a minority - and they don't leave. They stay and listen to the arguments we make. They say things like "you're right, I just don't think it's possible". They very, very rarely say "you're going too far".
This is a disorganized mess that's going to fizzle out
50501 and other decentralized spontaneous protest movements never last, but they do give an opportunity for dedicated political organizers to intervene on a stage where thousands of disaffected liberals and Democrat voters are asking "what is to be done?". If you decide not to show up and answer that question, the Democrat machine will coordinate the demobilization of this movement. If you do show up and you deliver the political argument you believe in. If you show up with the AV equipment, safety marshalls, march route, signs, and speaker list - the bare minimum for a halfway serious organizer - then you don't just hand out flyers and talk at a table but set the entire political line of the event. And in doing so, you demonstrate the leadership of the socialist movement and win a lot of those attendees to your side. If you can plug them into actual organizing work, you can bring them into permanent political motion. Does it matter if 95% of these people just go home and never bother to do anything besides another protest? If those 5% join the movement in a meaningful way, that's half a million new comrades.
Mao says: "All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."
Stop thinking about what you want to do and achieve and start thinking about the fact that we needs tens of millions of people to support revolutionary socialism in the US in order to get anything done. They are out in the streets begging for you to explain this to them.
These are just peaceful protests that won't achieve anything because they aren't revolutionary.
Lenin says: "What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, and he was right. We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot."
You're doing the ultra-leftism of conflating tactics with strategy. Our tactic in this moment is to intervene in these protests to convince people of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist political organization as the only solution to our sick society. Right now, mass revolutionary socialist consciousness and organization does not exist in the USA. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out open revolutionary militancy. If the current crop of people who are in some way directly involved in revolutionary socialist organizing (certainly a lower bar than revolutionary guerrilla warfare or sabotage) turned today to armed struggle, all ~100,000 of them would lose. The broader periphery of people who semi-passively support that objective through attendance at events and monetary contribution is probably a few million. The masses who would passively support probably number in the tens of millions, but that passive support is not particularly useful. And the number of people who would simply sit by and watch it happen is probably over 100 million. Every one of those groups needs to be elevated to the next stage - observer to passive supporter, passive supporter to semi-passive periphery, semi-passive periphery to revolutionary organizer, revolutionary organizer to doing the literal revolution. Each of these layers of the movement have a symbiotic relationship with the others that strengthen the entire struggle.
Here's the key lesson: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.
Amerikkkans will never do a revolution because they are labor aristokkkrauts
Ok, thank you for you contribution, you can resume sitting in a hole since your prescription is inactivity.
Please tell me your other weak-ass reasons why you're correct to sit on your ass.
Maybe I'm not making this clear enough. Communists organized many of these protests. That's what we did locally. The No Kings/50501 branding is open for anyone to use, and we utilize it to get people to our events that we run and set the political tenor of.
Goddamn they flocked here to prove your points huh
Which of his points did I prove?
People just flooded in with excuses as to why they actually wouldn’t be propagandizing the masses
Chana was literally talking about how they go propagandize to the masses in a more effective way though?
I don't see what that has to do with what I said though
And it still doesn't make any sense to think you will convince anyone if the necessity of revolution with a short conversation at a protest.
My point, which your response does not address, us that the basics of organizing are to build the organization / coalition, and this requires recruiting and pipelining, building a path to joining and acting. If you are organizing a protest and there isn't a "next thing" everyone is being made aware of, the organizers are myopic and likely naive. If you're not building lists, how are you mobilizing for the next thing? If you're not doing direct reach-outs based on lists, how are you recruiting? There are answers to these rhetorical questions, and they are basically the advertising and "they will come to us" model, which is incredibly inefficient.
These are just examples of the mindset and patterns for organizing. Organizing is longitudinal, it is not just protests, and it requires coordinated work. The thing for Hexbears to do is not to withhold criticisms of libbed up events, it is to join organizations and do organizing work regardless of whether therr are liberal branding exercises to try and coopt. And this post itself fails to provide the agitation to do the one thing that is actually organizing, so I question its premise.
we are doing those things
That's good. But do you see the distance between those things and chiding individual Hexbears who stayed home or are critical of these protests? The lack of calling Hexbears to, say, join your organization instead? The protest itself is, at best, a single link in a long chain of organizing. And I think I'm being generous about the potential for organizing impact of any single "No Kings" protest. There is so much better and realistic organizing to do, focusing on just this one libbed up protest is so ridiculous.
Given that you do have longitudinal organizing elements, you also understand this as just another link in the chain, outweighed by the immensity of the overall project, and that there are actual legitimate questions regarding focus and capacity when it comes to how one engages with "the masses", such as coopting scheduled events. It is not just people "sitting on their asses". Reaching "the masses" is not just giving speeches at rallies, that is very different from embedding in community. There is a discordance between the rhetoric, theory, and action to take, and at the center of it is, somehow, a branded liberal electoral march.
I'll extend an olive branch here. I understand the point from the perspective of 'you're all libs, I'm the only Communist here'. I don't have an issue with that, it's like most Hexbear posts and this is already a better and more thoughtful post than most. And if this gets people in Hexbear doing work who are otherwise too nihilistic to get involved, then that's good. Although if it's serious in the regard that we must participate in No Kings type things otherwise we're libs, which I didn't take it to be, then I guess it's a little off.
But either way we always need to self-crit and I think looking at how these protests could be utilizied for revolutionary purposes is good if we're not taking a dogmatic stance that doesn't allow critique.
For the record, Chana, I think we are in probably total agreement but I also think Jack is doing a lot of work and that's also great. I don't want to critique someone or discourage someone for doing work necessarily but it might be helpful to address points of disagreement. My main point of contention, as it always is when strong PSL posting occurs, is the lack of effective power building on the part of PSL. My issue is not with rank and file party members doing the work, but with party leadership seemingly making the decisions that wastes the time and energy of members.
I think the overarching issue is taking things too seriously that aren't actually that important. If the idea is to get people to do organizing work, "No Kings" may be the most absurd place to start, let alone prioritize, and OP repeatedly implies sentiments like that criticizing these libbed up pro-cop parades is to "sit on your ass". OP calls those disagreeing "ultras", not libs, so people who are convinced that it is pointless to engage with "No Kings" for various commie, probably Maoist-ish (or even just ML) reasons. I wouldn't personally say pointless, but it is very far down any realistic priority list for embedding with and organizing one's community (OP keeps talking about "masses"!), so this dichotomy is really just absurd, something enhanced by the lost opportunity for OP to just recruit with positive energy for his org. I think this post is really just an unfair criticism from personal frustrations and, in the sense of being about praxis, contradicts itself.
But really I think folks need perspective. This is a shitposting site for commie nerds. Almost nobody that posts here seems to have much experience organizing, let alone seems to have done self-crit on organizing. So what does it mean to say, "do praxis"? They won't know what to do! When someone says, "general strike!", nobody seems to notice how absurd that is. And when someone says, "participating in No Kings is good, actually, and you are an ultra if you disagree", this atomic group has no action to take except nodding heads and thinking, "holy shit someone here actually does something" and largely accepting it uncritically.
Re: PSL, I have similar and other criticisms of it, but joining it is still better than basically anything else done by people on this site, so I'll skip the criticisms.
Yeah, very true and very good points. And good note on the post calling people ultras as opposed to libs, although they're kinda in the same vein to me.
At the risk of sounding patronizing, most people on Hexbear are pretty young and that entails both inexperience and social alienation due to how terminally online younger people are now. Not to mention how depressing and doomer everything appears now compared to even 15 years ago which keeps people paralyzed. So, I don't hold it against them necessarily if they get motivated or enter through a strange path. I'm just glad they are around and care enough, gives me hope for the future even if they don't see it that way because they are currently in their 'generational moment' at present. This is already the future to me, and I am happy to see young people calling us ultras for not getting down enough, even if I disagree with their points.
But I fully agree with you. I mostly also keep the critique of PSL to myself, it really only comes out in these moments. Seriously wish the PSL stepped up though, then I'd go to No Kings or whatever other dumb shit they'd assign to me to if that was the case.
Ha ha, I guess it depends on how old a person is, but my impression is that Hexbear is a somewhat evenly distributed for ages 15-40 and then dwindles off. And I don't really have any idea what the age distribution is on organizing here but I would not be surprised if the younger people had more experience and practical knowledge. A lot of millennial commies are burned out ex-Bernie supporters that never took many steps past canvassing and arguing online (no shade, this is a mass phenomenon with understandable causes). Of course, only older Hexbears can have decades of experience.
I do prefer to think of libs and ultras as being very different, though I acknowledge their formations are shaped by similar forces. Ultras are failed socialists, they made an attempt and reached wrong conclusions that, not coincidentally, tend to align with what the feds would want them to do. They are usually truly sympathetic to "the cause" and, outside of opportunist formations, can be reached and reintegrated into praxis without needing to be convinced of the necessity of socialist revolution. I have had lots of success integrating ultras into an ML cadre. Libs can be basically anything remotely allowable under the status quo. Gotta really suss them out during onboarding.
Personally I haven't been called ultra by any younger people. But I've been called a lib! The only person that comes to mind who called me an ultra was a middle aged Trot that literally could not frame agitation in any way that wasn't electoralist and didn't mention Bernie Sanders.
I think you were called an ultra by a young person today! Haha
I'm not that old but at the same time it seems this site has a lot of 20-25 year olds, or younger, which I consider the young adults of the moment. This is their time and some definitely seem to have better theoretical grasp than most of my cohort did, but I feel like the experience is lacking at scale. But I guess that could be said about pretty much any time period.
No offence taken about the millenial Bernie thing though, that is very true, but I was never into Bernie and predate the DSA type crowd that came to socialism via Bernie. I do like to argue online sometimes though, but mostly like to just get stoned and enjoy redditish quips from a pinko perspective with the occasional thoughtful post.
Totally agree about ultras/libs, though. I just casually lump them in the same category but it's sloppy of me.
Haha, a feather for my cap. I exist in the ultraleft-liberal superposition. Good on you that you were cool before the SocDem Bernie Buzz.
I think the challenge with young people isn't that they inherently have less experience due to being young but because they are surrounded by counterrevolutionary forces and don't have many discoverable mentors of quality. They have to figure it out alone surrounded by careerist activism, adventurist tendencies, idealist affinity groups (aesthetic), etc etc. Older people are more likely to have gone through this already. But if you get young people into a good program they can run circles around veterans in just a couple years!
I think you're right, although I also think both of our points could be said about earlier generations so I'm not sure if we're getting to the true essence of the problem. I'm not sure what is specific to this time that is the issue. All generations lack experience as they come up, generally, and millenials were also surrounded by reactionary forces at every turn. The manosphere for example wasn't as developed but it was certainly developing and an issue when talking to men. Adventurist stuff was around too and idealism has lived a long life.
To your point, I don't think I was that cool, I just went through my incorrect phases already with some good takes here and there. I even remember going to my friends' communist group in high school and thinking it was dumb, so clearly I have made my mistakes. Haha
I think it's less extreme of a problem now than it was within the last several decades. The US is recovering from settler idealism and the red scare, with reproletarianization leading the charge. The Starbucks union kids were some of the earliest and most militant pro-Palestinian groups in the US after Oct 7, for example. But they aren't getting much help in the way of seasoned organizers (outside of SEIU bureaucrats), let alone socialist ones. They make mistakes and figure it out on their own. Who would bring them into coalition and develop their approaches? The largest ML groups basically ignore them and the groups that do talk to them (like DSA) are routinely incompetent at organizing. PSL is insular (a Trotskyist tendency holdover) and FRSO is very focused on Teamster boondoggles. So this radicalizable group is basically ignored as a whole, with individual members joining orgs ad hoc, and has challenges developing. The things I listed, like adventurism, are the course that people take when they aren't brought into socialist organizing.
Ha, nice. I had a socialist acquaintance in high school that put me off it for a bit. They didn't actually know anything about socialism, they were just an asshole who was critical, on a personal level, of everyone else's choices as "bourgeois". Telling them to keep their shoes on their stinky feet was bourgeois. Having a job was bourgeois. I went the Socdem direction at first, having no concept of imperialism or the mechanisms of capitalism.
“And this post itself fails to provide the agitation to do the one thing that is actually organizing, so I question its premise.”
Keep debating comrade! If you’re correct enough we’ll delete this post, IP ban the user, and let you wear the “one true leftist” crown for a whole week!