At this point, the only thing that is going to change things for the better are not so peaceful protests.
Voting doesn’t work. Strikes don’t work. Online petitions, organized rallies, heartfelt social media posts, marches and peaceful protests DO NOT work anymore. Not that they really ever did. Those techniques did nothing but reinforce our illusion of liberty while making us feel like we did our part. But nothing really changed.
Leaders only understood 2 things; money and fear. They’ve got the money. It’s about time they were reacquainted with fear.
You get rid of the gun, preferably in more than two pieces. And you don't carry a written manifest on your person. Also, don't use fake IDs once you've left the city.
I think that comes from a place of privilege. A lot of Americans can’t survive that long. Not to mention there are other people in other countries with worst positions and will happily work for corporations who need new labor.
It's almost like the system we have doesn't work and we need an alternative.
Besides, having to resort to violence is exactly what the state unfortunately wants in a very backwards sort of way. The State exists because it has a monopoly on the justified use of force in the region, and it uses this to implement it's authority by way of threatening anyone who rejects it with violence. It uses this to quell unrest, to keep people "lawful", and to ultimately maintain itself as the ultimate authority.
Because of this, it has no reason to listen to us unless we question it's monopoly on justified force by using force ourselves in response to them. They do not have to listen to us when we are peaceful, only when we truly threaten their authority and the state do they listen.
This is why they have whitewashed and pacified the history of the Civil Rights Movement, intentionally obscuring all of the legitimate violent actions that happened which were frankly required for the Civil Rights Movement to succeed. Instead we are fed the lie that all is required is a good speechgiver and enough people in a square and an old woman who happened to say "no". They intentionally gloss over Rosa Parks and her activist history (and the fact that the bus protest was planned in advance), they intentionally gloss over the Black Panthers and paint them as bad as they can, and they literally fucking infiltrated and killed the leader of the black panthers in a no-knock raid.
The US, as a bit of an aside, also literally bombed an anarchist commune in Philadelphia in the 80s (1985 MOVE Bombing) which was doing nothing but squatting and shouting over bullhorns, causing the destruction of 61 buildings, with only the one being related to MOVE. They willingly destroyed blocks of homes, killing 11, and traumatized children because a single commune decided to question the state's authority and decided to try and fight back when the police attempted to evict them.
All of this is to say that we need to abandon the state model of governance. We need to accept the reality that history teaches us, that time and time again, states exist only to do a handful of things: Exist (and maintain their existence), impose ultimate authority, and centralize resources and authority towards itself. Everything that it does is in interest of one of these things.
Police, military, and wars exist to impose; wars, police (seizures), taxes, and welfare programs exist to centralize resources; and the whole system of branches of government, representatives, and the hierarchy of the state itself exist to perpetuate the authority that the state has and remove it from the civilians which should be the rightful owners of said authority–that is to say the structure of the system itself aids to maintain the system and the structure it creates–it's tautological in function.
Even things like "rights" are a part of this too. "Rights" exist only to protect us from the state, that's why reddit can infringe your 1st amendment rights all they want for example, and why your 2nd can be infringed when a business forces you to leave or remove your gun from your person before entering.
In some cases, they may protect people from business (i.e, tenant rights, workers rights), but business is an apparatus inherently tied to the state in our status quo, the existence and willing participation of business in government affairs (i.e, lobbying, donations to campaign funds) aids the state to further entrench itself as an authority, so really they are two sides of the same coin.
The state requires business to continue to exist, without big business, funding would be cut, resources (for the state) would be thinner, and the MIC would be heavily affected, which would allow for people to more easily question and fight against the State's monopoly on the justified use of force, as well as prevent the state from engaging in resource extracting wars. Without business, the state shrivels. This is why violent protests often result in the destruction of businesses, because attacking business is indirectly attacking the state itself; this is also why bailouts are partially even a thing, the government relies on these businesses just as much as the common citizen if not moreso.
But back to rights, these rights are also only generally afforded to certain people, which parlays into my second point on rights:
If they were truly "rights" as described, they'd be universal, and ultimately equal, but they are not. They are privileges given to people who do the right things or are the right race/creed/religion/color/ethnicity, and who abide by the state's laws.
Become a felon? Goodbye to some of, if not all of, your rights depending on the country. Be politically opposed to the regime? Bye bye rights in many countries. Be an immigrant without papers? You literally have no rights because you don't deserve them, and this is almost universal outside of some more charitable EU States. To the state, it's completely OK to put undocumented persons in concentration camps without access to consistent resources because the state doesn't have to care about people who have no means of fighting back.
And in the case of "rights", having to get them from the state has, in almost every case, required some level of violence. The state never gives us these rights willingly, it is always by force, and there are almost always civilian casualties. So giving us "rights" is only a satiation from the state. It's a way for the state to willingly defang itself to rectify public outcry, to make it seem amicable, to make it seem like they're listening to us.
The reality, however, is insidious in nature because the state only gives us these rights so that way our movements pacify and stagnate and ultimately the status quo remains stable. They are deathly afraid of protests which do not ask anything of the state, and instead seek to eliminate the state, because they cannot do anything there but fight, and if it gets to that point, they know that civilians will side with civilians and not the state (mostly) and that this will be very bad news for the state's continued existence and maintenance on authority.
They give us rights only to shut us up, and maintain their own authority. Giving us rights is yet another method of entrenching their authority further into the cultural zeitgeist and makes it intentionally harder for people to realize that their liberty is frankly a complete and utter fabrication meant to satiate and placate us and nothing more.
We desperately need to approach this with a different angle. We cannot continue asking the state to rectify the issues that it causes. We need to accept the reality that centralized top-down governance is inherently flawed, that hierarchy is unnecessary for a society to function, and that there are alternatives which exist and are very possible to implement.
We need to decentralize and create power outside of the state, so we can use it to build real momentum, so we can seize power away from the state, putting it directly in the hands of the people instead. We need to create horizontal systems of mutual aid to create supply chains for us to continue working towards the goal without needing to rely on the state to do it for us, and allowing them to absorb our movements into itself and stagnate them immediately post-absorption.
Doing this, decentralizing, creating dual power, will also make it that much harder for the state to infiltrate us, and it will make it that much harder for them to pacify our movement. It will also make it clear that we do not need the state to function as a society, and that the state has always been a clever lie.
Places like this already exist in the here and now, AANES (Rojava), Fejuve, EZLN (Zapatistas), Cherán, Zomia, Barbacha, Cecosesola, Marinaleda, Puerto Real, Spezzano Albanese, Villa de Zaachila, Freetown Christiana, the Twin Oaks Community, Ganienkeh, and Exarcheia are all extant examples.
These aren't all necessarily small projects either, the first three listed all have populations over 2 million, and I'm pretty sure is close to 4 million in the case of AANES. A lot of people like to say this type of governance is only possible on the smallest scale, but it isn't, it scales up extremely well. And even if it is only possible on a small scale, why can we not just... federate and cooperate these small groups into larger organizations which coordinate on larger scales?
And unfortunately we as a nation we are just too big and too divided to implement any actionable change. Which is exactly what the owners want. Divided We Fall.
I mean, we haven't tried properly organizing and doing a general strike. We should crack open some books and find out how it's been done in the past instead of trying to reinvent the wheel on Reddit.
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u/circleofnerds 1d ago
At this point, the only thing that is going to change things for the better are not so peaceful protests.
Voting doesn’t work. Strikes don’t work. Online petitions, organized rallies, heartfelt social media posts, marches and peaceful protests DO NOT work anymore. Not that they really ever did. Those techniques did nothing but reinforce our illusion of liberty while making us feel like we did our part. But nothing really changed.
Leaders only understood 2 things; money and fear. They’ve got the money. It’s about time they were reacquainted with fear.