/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

What is required of us, as revolutionaries, in these times is tantamount to Sisyphus hoisting the boulder up the mountain, but we have failed to even grip the rock, to gain leverage over the boulder. Let's be completely real. There is no national program. No true revolutionary party. No unifying narrative for the masses, for us as revolutionaries to rally around. There has only been reformism and endless, seemingly insurmountable suffering. There has, for as long as I've lived, been nothing but violence against the people, from police brutality, to poverty, to industrialized sacrifice zones and genocide abroad, and now it has reached another fever pitch. 40 million people will lose their SNAP benefits in less than 5 days, why? Because the government has shut down. Warships are still arriving in Venezuela as I write this; there are some parts of the government that never shut down, even if those working there aren't getting paid, the imperialism must continue. The regime cannot and will not provide for the masses, but it will and must provide death for workers all across the planet. And now? We see that death brought home. We are facing conditions not seen since the Great Depression, this is reality, not spectacle, there is no algorithmically curating starvation.

One of the most purchased items with SNAP is baby formula. Those with babies who are losing access to SNAP will be staring down the barrel of state-mandated infant starvation. Imagine, a newborn, dehydrated, unable to cry, rooting around in despair for nutrients. This is an acceptable loss to the regime, to the United States Government; after all, they had no problem starving newborns in Gaza, it made the rich even richer to do so, and that is all that matters to the regime. It has become increasingly clear that the pseudo-representative government of the United States will not be re-opening for business, and in its place, a new authoritarian order has been created. You will be too busy dealing with your neighbors starving to deal with the encroachment of fascism. Too concerned with your own ends to worry about your neighbor being sent to a concentration camp. They do not believe we have the solidarity to with stand their siege. Did you know that over 50% of the food produced in the United States is destroyed to maintain prices? Food grown, cultivated, and destroyed to assure you go without, and a capitalist has more money in his Scrooge McDuck-esque vault. This is the anti-life regime at work.

The labor aspect of this intentional working-class starvation tactic cannot be ignored either. Wal-Mart is notorious for having workers sign up for SNAP benefits when they are hired; fast food giants like McDonald's are the same. These service industry jobs make up the bulk of steadily declining employment in the US. Thus then, it has never been a better time to advocate for disruptive unionization and organizing tactics. The government of the corporation is no longer subsidizing the wage slaves of these corporations; the raw deal of the working class has never been more exposed. This is the most fertile the soil has been for radical labor organizing in the last quarter century. The corporation, without the regime's subsidies, will be forced to either increase wages or deal with the consequences of subjecting millions to brutal, humiliating wage slavery. But it falls upon the revolutionary to organize, to agitate, to assure those consequences come to pass. There was a time in this country where men like Todd Vasos, CEO of Dollar General, would be tarred and feathered for his actions against the working class; perhaps we need to remind men like Todd, and all of the other vampires, that they too have hearts that can be staked.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” - Kwame Ture

What is violence if not forcing a mother between feeding herself and her child? What is violence if not stealing bread from the poor to add another table to the infinite buffet of the rich? What is violence if not breaking up families, snatching men, women, and children off the street using armed soldiers of the regime? They are waging a war upon the working class, in order to sow repression and, knowing we have begun to organize knights to slay the dragon, the dragon has begun to protect its horde. Will it be violence when mass shoplifting occurs? Will it be violence when a local supermarket is occupied, the supplies taken and given directly to the community? Will it be violence when the police and their federal-backed goons attempt to reclaim that shopping center? Or will it simply be the next stage in this class war, a war forced upon us by these dragons, these ruling oligarchs, these capitalists?

All failures of organization within the working class fall on the left; the revolutionary must bear the burden of these failures. We must look at our material conditions and see clearly what we lack, why we lack it, and how we can gain it. This means applying the collective mindset to the individual. While we lack a national program, we still have a whole lot of ground game with all of these mutual aid organizations. We still have seen a myriad of victories with unionizing jobs in the service sector. We have numbers on an individual level. It takes 1 person to create an underground cell of 6 people. It takes those 6 people nothing more than popular support within their local communities and good planning to take what labor created and give it back to the working class. They want us to go without food, but they do not plant the fruit, nor do they water the fruit, nor do they pick the fruit. The capitalist class can only steal, and in my opinion, it's time we take back some of what was stolen.

This is a class war, and expecting your enemy to feed your people is simply ludicrous. The regime's government does not represent me, nor you, nor anyone else within the working classes. Our people are the masses, and the regime has made it clear that it only exists to extract profit value from us, without regard for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. The shutdown, the collapse into fascism, the wars waged abroad, the direct violence against the working class every. single. day. This iteration of the American project has shown, for over 2 centuries, that it does not exist to service any people other than the hyper-rich capitalist class, and we the people will always be enemies to that class. It is time to be revolutionaries, to throw our bodies into the battle that is class war; if you have the message, then you have the weapon. This message is to those who see themselves as against the machine; if we are the revolutionaries we claim we are, then it's time to get to work.

We need to be in our communities using our time, labor, and resources to bolster the resilience of them. Who is going to be going hungry? How can we use this to further community trust? Is the solution a localized community pantry within the third space? Is it moving from feeding people in the park once a week to three times a week? Is it distributing educational materials? Does your community really know what mutual aid is? Or why this collapse is happening? When the police come to burn the food, will someone be there to attempt to stop them? Can we move from filming the brutality to attempting to stop it? If they won't feed us, then why are we letting them operate their ports of economy? Labor runs the ports, and labor can collapse their economy, if it was organized. Their economy of death, humiliation ritual, and bureaucratic social murder does not serve us. We die, their line goes up. If the revolutionaries, however small we may be in number, fail to put our bodies, our minds, and our lives on the line, then we have failed the masses and this failure fails squarely on our shoulders. Time to step up.