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.
It seems we had vastly different experienced with the no kings protest. Mine was deeply liberal and the vast majority of people there were not open to hearing alternatives. PSL was not present, CPUSA was but all it had was a small table with one person manning it in a corner maybe 3 people visited. The only marginally successful alternative voice was the opportunist DSA. The scheduled speeches were incumbent Democrats. There were comrades in that crowd but they did not have a voice at all and were actively shunned. From my perspective this is not a movement the Democrats are trying to co-opt, this is a movement they created to save their party. My only avenue left is to expose its flaws through critique.
Can this protest not be both an opportunity to gain comrades and a woefully inept co-opted mess?
Who is arguing against a straw man idea that these protests will magically turn into socialism without effort? Or worse, who was actually arguing for that idea?
The people are angry. Sure these are brunch-munching libs, but they are only that because they think that is the Best of All Possible Worlds. They literally don’t know any better. I thought the Hexbear line was “These libs are useless on their own, but some of their number do have genuine revolutionary fervour and with a bit of help will become comrades.” I’m very confused by this whole thing, I saw some people talking about the uselessness of these protests, but I thought it was more about the lib aspect and how they need to be steered towards effective action not just doom posting about how everything is unchanging and eternal and revolution is impossible.
i have had similar thoughts and sometimes share them here. since i’m being worked into an early grave I do what I can with the people i have contact with regularly, many of which would be considered pretty icky and lost causes. i’ve only been to a few protests, not out of lack of desire. so this refers primarily to just direct interaction in general:
in this Age of Alienation, actual human contact weighs a thousand times more on someone’s mind vs. online. you’d be surprised by how interested people are in hearing about alternatives to the system we currently are in. not everyone is a treatlerite.
the core of socialism is a love of humanity, not a rejection of it.
I can see both sides of this
On the one hand my local No Kings protest was mostly libbed up white boomers carrying one of 2 fascist flags (usually
but also more than a handful of 
) but on the other hand I ran into a bunch of comrades there I knew from pro Palestine demonstrations and there were even some others with Palestinian flags and more who supported us when they saw our flagsFunniest moment of the day was when one of our local reps who’s also a pastor at a black church tried to get this crowd of mostly white boomers to sing along to a song and literally none of them were singing along (it was just me and like 3 other people who actually did) she said “I can’t hear you sing!” to try to energize the crowd like 5 times before giving up
A real mixed bag overall
Whites are so afraid of using their voice and just being in community, which are obviously symptoms of individualism and civility brain worms. Reminds me of a personal anecdote:
I remember being at a punk show in New Mexico, and I think towards the end the bands and organizers who were overwhelmingly HIspanic, indigenous and black, wanted everyone to join hands and chant together. Myself and my other white friend were all nervous and shy about it and someone else, looking kinda of annoyed, grabbed my hand and made me start swaying and chanting. I don’t blame them for being annoyed, we shouldn’t have been embarrassed to use our voice and engage in community. It’s really something I struggle struggle with as a white person
Whites have been effectively dehumanized. They’ve been stripped of their roots (English, German, Italian, Russian etc) and lumped in as a hyper-individualistic collective called white. I mean, isn’t it gross? White is a color. You have no culture to fall back on unlike African Americans, Latino Americans and Asian Americans.
Agree with this. I went through a sort of identity crisis in my early 20’s because I never related to being a “Red blooded American” or anything like that and kinda actively despised it as a baby punk. A lot of my close family is Mexican, and at the time that was a part of my upbringing that I became very fond of; I was raised by my Mexican family as a very young child so I kinda started going down that road. I very quickly learned that I shouldn’t start hardcore co-opting culture or anything like that, but it DID inspire me to study Latin American/Latino studies in college as a way to learn about and connect to some rich cultures, and that really radicalized me, so I am grateful for that experience.
Still have that yearning for connection to where I came from, though, since the US isn’t my home (or it isn’t supposed to be)
It’s a little odd to me that people here will decry an organized protest as “libbed up” and a “pysop.” Resistance is resistance. This kind of attitude is reminiscent of “you’re not protesting how I want you to!” from reactionaries. We live in the cradle of empire, most people protesting against the regime aren’t going to be staunch Marxists or some shit. We can use these movements to our advantage; even Lenin wrote about making compromises, zigzags, and the like if a movement weakened a common enemy. They serve as opportunities to raise class consciousness, something especially needed in the west. The list go on. The knee-jerk abhorrence just seems silly to me.
A lot of people who call others libs who need to read theory could use some theory to learn about the concept of dual power.
As someone who started a big thread shitting on the No Kings protesting, I will half self-crit and admit I didn’t narrow down my frustration enough, and did criticise the whole endeavour as fruitless. So very fair point and upbears for that - I was wrong. I do my best to avoid doomerism and didn’t really do my best enough there (I will also plead recent onset serious illness as my mitigation).
I’ll be honest, some of this kind of assholeish name-calling rhetoric may be fun but really doesn’t make me eager to self-crit either. Obviously doesn’t change that I was in the wrong. I’ll applaud correctly calling out hypocritical inaction and harmful thinking 'round here, myself included. Also obviously going out and doing actual organising is the coolest shit and I’ll never not respect it.
i will always say this here: good socialists will be salivating at the opportunity these protests present. either capital coopts this again, or we do.
just stole a brand new printer
It sounds like what you’re arguing is that the No Kings protest is an attempt by libs to coopt radical energy and has the involvement of countless moderates, but that radicals must engage with it because it can readily backfire on the liberals and produce more radicals. I completely agree with such a sentiment. The capitalists will sell us the rope.
its fun to laugh at liberals for being ineffective and cringe but yeah the way many people are painting these protests just reads to me like they’re trying to convince themselves its okay to just sit on the sidelines. that they’re not being lazy or not taking action but actually they’re “protesting the protest” because they’re actually just too principled of communists to fall for the liberal psyop.
nobody thought the protests were going to solve anything. the point is to show the government there are many people who are opposed to this. i just went and stood to add to the crowd size of my smallish southern town.
i get refusing to vote out of protest because at the end of the day anybody the powers that be let come to power is gonna fucking suck
but protesting a protest and trying to act like some 200 year old left wing theory book told you to do it is cope. mfs are just being lazy and they’re not about political change the way they think they are. just because that protest didn’t kick off the revolution doesnt mean it didnt heighten revolutionary potential or create potential revolutionaries
Refusing to vote is very foolish if there is a third party to vote for who has a good platform, which is usually the case in Presidential elections at least. May as well show what you actually support instead of being indistinguishable from someone who stayed home because they were too busy jacking off. Comrade Onan has not swayed very much public opinion with his protests.
in my opinion many people do believe that not voting is “showing what they believe in”. if the material result is the same anyway i can see where they’re coming from
i went to vote for PSL, turned out my georgia voter registration was rendered invalid. im sure my middle eastern name had nothing to do with that, but point is, that’s the system i was giving legitimacy to by attempting to participate to the extent you’re suggesting others should do, and all it got me was time wasted
in my opinion many people do believe that not voting is “showing what they believe in”
It’s a fact that many people believe that, but communication isn’t just about how you feel, it’s about what the other person interprets. The popular opinion is that non-voters are jack-offs who just don’t care or are assuming Their Guy will win regardless (or in some cases that their vote was suppressed, like yours was). It is not that not voting is an act of protest, because it usually isn’t.
if the material result is the same anyway i can see where they’re coming from
This is vulgar materialism. Just because voting for Gloria de la Riva or whoever doesn’t mean that suddenly your neighborhood turns red does not mean nothing happened. Simply contributing to the voting record is doing something, it is showing something that people will always be able to point to to indicate the popularity of the socialist position over liberal positions among some people, and gives a more accurate estimation of how many people hold such a stance. I’m sorry it doesn’t grant you an AR-15 and license to assassinate one politician of your choice, but you can’t let your politics be decided by Pavlovian conditioning when you have the capacity to understand it in a higher-order way.
If you give a shit about what happened to your registration, find out why it was rendered invalid! If you are right about why and there is even a trace of evidence, there are civil rights groups who might take up your case for free and make a much greater positive impact than if you were able to vote in the first place. Even if the case was lost, if it’s for bullshit reasons, you have contributed to the record of evidence of direct and willful voter suppression by the state of Georgia, which is useful for organizers and agitators across the state and even country. You don’t need to do this, but don’t just sit at the first roadblock and say there’s nothing to do and it’s great for not just you but anyone encountering this situation to give up. Just say you personally don’t want to bother rather than frame it as an equally-effective course of political (in)action.
my registration was rendered invalid around the same time as a few hundred thousand other (mostly PoC registered democrats) people had this happen in GA. it was a whole huge scandal the GA GOP did to rig elections
A huge scandal among the GOP is a benefit and an opportunity, so I don’t think voting turned out to be a waste of time at all. Even if voting was all you did, you still helped.
I agree with this. As communists, we should be absolutely pleased with the opportunity to recruit new people and attempt to influence these protests in any way we can, whether it is in an individual or organized fashion with a party. Just sitting on the sidelines while mocking protestors for protesting incorrectly, isn’t just counter-productive, but also ironically a seventh type of liberalism. Mao would like to have a word with those people.
I found the jump from “one member of the Walton family took out an ad supporting the protests” to “the protest was paid by Walmart” very silly
I haven’t been reading much besides the news mega recently, were people really saying that on here, or was that just the general “online leftist/marxist” milleu?
I saw one post with moderate engagement, no clue on sentiment since I’m only reading the news mega.
ew. I mean some good discussion going on there but more dumb guy shit than I expected
What the 2017 lib protests didn’t have was Palestine flags and a general disdain for “billionaires” and “oligarchs”. Things are moving in the right direction however slowly
Reiterating my point that if the protest is within walking distance, it’s alright to attend, but if you have to drive 40+ minutes and pay for parking, you’re better off spending that money on Palestinian gofundmes.
If you want a more “leftist” reason, once you’re spending 40+ minutes to drive to another location, that really isn’t your community anymore, so everything that various people, both socialists and progressives, say about building community is not applicable for the simple reason that community is only applicable to people within walking distance (or a short <10 minute drive if we’re talking about suburbia since suburbia is hostile towards pedestrians).
Reiterating my point that if the protest is within walking distance, it’s alright to attend, but if you have to drive 40+ minutes and pay for parking
that’s the worst fucking thing about American protests. Everyone get in the car, we’re driving to the protest.
This is the biggest thing keeping me politically demobilized. I really need to grow the fuck up, move out of my parents’ house, and move to the city.
Agree. Same goes for Palestine protests as well. Talked to a well-meaning person who said she took an hour long uber to attend.
It wasn’t my place to speak, but if you’re spending $100+ in transportation just to attend an event, it might be worth spending that time and effort in mobilizing your own community
Your argument makes sense if the protest has no chance of really accomplishing something. If it does, you would be justified in spending more than that to support it.
Thank you for your service!
100 % agree! I picked up those vibes too, like a vibe was building around justifying to not do anything. It used to be different, right? Everyone used to keep saying:“Get organized!”
And yes, everyone on hexbear who is physically and mentally able and has the necessary bare minimum of resources and time should at least try to get organized and/or contribute in some (not online only) way that fits them. There are so many unique, individual ways to participate. We just have to find ones that fit us long-term without getting burned out.
And of course moments like this should absolutely be used to agitate and to win more comrades and raise class consciousness and in the imperial core: to lower acceptance for imperialist wars. Even if the outcome is not revolution in the US, lowering acceptance for wars can harm hegemony enough to save literally millions of lives outside the imperial core. It worked for Vietnam.
Not American, but where I am, I often feel like, I’ve let things slide too. Only been to like two protests this year and not really active anymore in the orgs I’m in. I used to do more. I always feel guilty when I’m in a period where I do less politically and of course there are always good reasons. Point is, it’s not about feeling guilty, it’s about at least trying to go out there. Just this week I reconnected with a comrade and activated some friends and we’ll go to some leftish/semi-lib Pro-Palestine protest soon and we’ll see what we can do/who we can connect with.
I actually support every protest because I enjoy the violence
I personally am trying to thread the needle between my opinions of “This is another protest that isn’t going anywhere.” and “We need to be out there agitating and organizing in moments like these when people are paying attention.”
This is a protest movement that likely won’t last, but these are excellent ways to connect with agitated people who are looking for a solution. If you want to organize a revolution, you don’t organize “the left” by only participating in the most pure and sacrosanct whatevers; YOU NEED TO ORGANIZE THE WORKING CLASS.
These marches are absolutely filled with working class people asking “what is to be done” and even if 90% of them won’t join or be fit for a movement, that still leaves giant numbers who are suddenly now reachable, in person!!!
This comment could summarize the whole thread honestly (positive)
It’s the PSL party line (rightfully) and what every branch has found through practice. Correct ideas come from practice, and baby, I’m practicing
Yeah, my post history might not show it, but offline this is my position as well. I mean, you have to be where the people are, right? The Sanders rallies, I think, are the real revolutionary lightning rods. There are too many people attending these protests for them to be highly effective lightning rods. Too large to totally dominate the message at the local level.
but offline this is my position as well.
I suspect this is exactly why the disconnect here is occurring.
People, who ultimately know they must organize amongst the masses, bemoaning the obnoxious liberal chauvinism on display at these rallies…on the sole internet forum where you can openly shit on liberals without the fash jumping in and ruining the fun.
Meanwhile, every super serious™ Lenin enjoyer or mass line enthusiast here reads the complaint as if they are saying “we can’t organize here” and throwing in the towel because garden variety American liberals are uniquely unreachable.
It’s a similar frustration to the one that plays out when one person in a relationship is trying to vent while the other party only offers suggestions toward a solution. Yeah, your solution might be correct, but I just wanted to commiserate and feel validation that my feelings aren’t in isolation.
The one problem I have with Hexbear site culture is how often someone will read a post that is either lamenting the state of affairs, expressing frustration with the actions (or lack thereof) of the anti-imperialist bloc, or wishing for an unlikely outcome is met with hostility as if it were indicative of actual organizational strategy of utmost importance and not just a mere expression of anxiety, cope, or zealous optimism.
For most of us, this is the one place people have to seek validation or shared sentiment on current events without being dogpiled by annoying libs, and it makes me sad to see so many people called a doomer or “nothing ever happens guys” or idealist or an ultra for sincerely utilizing that outlet to vent their feelings. Especially when people create meta drama threads taking the least charitable interpretation of their takes.
Shit dog you fucking nailed it. That’s exactly why I’m here. I keep a cool and level head most days and this place allows me to get that pent up energy out. My SO can be that sounding board too, but you can’t keep that up forever, its exhausting.
This connected space can also do the opposite too. Look at my post history. You can see what I’m talking about. Try to discuss lib shit and get called a Nazi in return. That’s a new one for me. I’ll chock it up to high tensions but still.
You have expressed my thoughts better than I could lol. This is where I come to vent frustrations with comrades who understand them not where I come to express genuine organizational strategy. I need to get it out here or I might actually blow up at someone in person.
libbed up things like this are recruiting opportunities for actual orgs and radicalizing events for baby protestors who do all the cargo cult shit and get abused by pigs regardless.
they made no demands, they advocated no policy, they took a walk with 400-20,000 of their friends through downtown instead of to an ICE facility
The idea that a couple days of protest are the time to organize and agitate is itself somewhat liberal. Of course exploit moments of “political” activity if it is strategic, but organizing is constant work, not something that comes and goes based on whether some liberals are wearing pink hats or a sassy sign at a pro-cop march. By the time anyone is arguing about whether to use this kind of event, it will usually already be over! If there was a train, you missed it! What was needed was healthy organizations experienced and ready to go, making deliberate choices internally and executing on them. This thread, to me, reads like armchair generals yelling at each other about what “should happen”, detached from the realities of organizing! The question of what to do about a lib cop-escorted event is really one to ask internally at an org, immediately raising capacity questions.
For folks reading this post: the best thing you can personally do is join and contribute to an org, the libbed up protest doesn’t really mean anything on a personal practical level.
Right? As if the only mechanism for organizing is solely using a megaphone to expose normies to communist agitation. Show up for a day, convince some people of some things, and soon enough it will snowball into everyone holding their own megaphone for Lenining.
Chances are, if you have any specialized skill whatsoever, you will have far greater impact using that skill semi-regularly to contribute to your org and the masses. Everyone wants a mass radicalization event where simply hearing arguments for an hour will net you twenty dedicated, cadre-ready revolutionaries. There is no shortcut or cheat code. Organizing takes work. Day after day.
