Rules for Radicals

Chicago is a horrible corrupt place to live to this day

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polit...

Revolution for as long as I can tell meant violent political uprising to upend some pretty specific positions. Consider Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Algeria, China, India, South Africa, America etc. Zizek spoke on the Kurdish city that was able to obtain something of a utopian order in his latest book “Heaven in Disorder“ but nah, they losing. Socotra, Columbia, Venezuela, Taiwan, Libya, Rwanda, France, etc…

I mean here’s the large pink striped elephant in the room. Power does not give itself up. Maybe the last ten years were better than the ten before that. But these battles are far from deterministic, with a huge asterisk coming.

Socialist ideology could be found in southern mill culture. And it was cool. Mill families could extend credit, borrow money, and rely on the mill community to keep it going. What happened to that? Well, in the face of terminal lung illness, competing against black education, and the real dead end of the mill, people began organizing and asking for rights. This was happening right beside prohibition because women and children were getting their faces knocked off by sad drunk men with nothing else to do. And it worked. Then the companies left, with exception of giants such as Millikan, who my grandmother worked for and got respiratory issues from. Many ideologies compete, contrast, or enhance each other but power has been pretty damn dominant.

Also, remember: the south is dying and the only lifeblood for these cities are capitalist and high-income earners. The rest of the people are a dead class. Useful for atomization and deployment of rhetoric by liberal and conservative media outlets.

If Nial(Neil) Ferguson(idc) and David Grueber can agree that socialist ideology is far more sanguine to a natural human order, ideology seems a less prevalent impetus to organizing than its pragmatic nature.

I think it’s fair to say the revolution will not be televised, but there are no rules. The most palpable revolutionary force in America is an anti-capitalist, racist, right wing fascism. And they have a point.

To jump the question of rules for radicals, who are the loud minority, how does the silent majority live through ecological collapse? This is that asterisk. It seems we’re losing. We being people.

So what is activism? What can it do? Ride around your city at 3-4am.

I’m not discounting activism. But I’d like to forward a more pragmatic mentality inspired by a monologue from The Turin Horse. If everything has been upended and the only real change never happened then where do we go? When can we say we lost? Where should we go after?