as a leftist and dissenter. Should i have my passport ready to flee?
It’s driven by the massive spike in the cost of living, especially the cost of food / housing / energy, which no party is interested in addressing, so yeah, it’s a fucking problem that isn’t going away.
Easiest broad net material analysis right here. There’s all kinds of more nuanced bits, but this is the core.
It’s also driven by the declining rate of superprofit as the BRICS further decolonize the world, which in turn is causing the prices of food/housing/energy to rise. That, along with climate change, are sending us straight into a crisis of capitalism.
Mr. Big shot over here with the means to flee the USA that’s rapidly descending into fascism.
I’m ready to bounce. As individuals we’re not going to tip the scales one way or another. If we can retreat/regroup to places where it’s safer to organize, there’s nothing wrong with that. Revolutionaries throughout history have gone into exile. An actual revolution will take people who’ve left and exert pressure from outside, and those that stay to exert pressure within. Do what suits your abilities and means.
As individuals we’re not going to tip the scales one way or another. If we can retreat/regroup to places where it’s safer to organize, there’s nothing wrong with that. Revolutionaries throughout history have gone into exile.
a group of individuals is a collective is an organization. We are not remotely in the illegal phase of organizing where it is reasonable thinking about “going into exile.” The PSL is running an open presidential campaign; on top of organizing a revolutionary movement and being on the streets near every day across the nation. We are not in an illegal phase where anyone is “going into exile” by packing up and leaving the working poor to fend for themselves.
If people who can afford to want to leave for elsewhere for the benefit of their own life opportunities and ease of experience for themselves or their families, that is a personal choice which everyone who has the means to is free to make — but I would deride anyone trying to mask that, by donning a cloak of “revolutionary exile” on themselves, as stolen revolutionary valor spitting on the face of the BLA and BPP and AIM members who have spent decades in solitary confinement refusing to ever give up the struggle; and the ex-BPP members (BOOMERS) who are still organizing to this day; who I’ve had the good fortune of engaging in sister-organization activities with. Packing one’s bags and passport in hand lining up opportunities to leave the country willingly because it seems better elsewhere is not the same as Assata Shakur escaping prison and seeking refugee status in Cuba with a $1million bounty being placed on her head; and trying to provide that veil as if it is so for others is shameless opportunism.
Preparing means of leaving if one can afford it for when things do reach illegal phases and one is specifically targeted can make perfect sense — it is good planning and one must gauge how to maximize their own effectiveness and sometimes retreat is necessary; but (and this is not remotely targeted at specifically you, if you want to leave you do you) the naked defeatism and opportunism in this thread and a few others today makes me want to reach through the compuer and shake the lot of you. People aren’t respecting and realizing that the rhetoric they are engaging in is actively counter-revolutionary. It does more to smother the nascent revolutionary movement in its crib than ANY FASCIST COULD DREAM to be saying “oh it’s all lost, there’s only decay, there’s not going to be revolution, why bother, let’s all flee or die.” The revolutionary movement which is and has been being built every day for years by many people and groups dedicating much of their lives and in cases their freedom, is killed by these defeatist and opportunist attitudes more than any pig or proud boy.
This is a rise of reactionaries that admire some fascist aesthetics and positions, not fascist themselves. There is no left for them to fight. It is liberals vs. liberals vs. liberals with the more right wing ones capitalizing on neoliberals’ unpopular policy outcomes.
All of the liberals will come for us when there is crisis. They often already do, it is just normalized as the “criminal justice system”. See: Germany’s crackdown on criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinian liberation.
It is a good idea to be prepared to flee if you do any kind of left work. It is a better idea to do this as part of an org, to go through threat models and preparations with your org, to identify where you would go and to begin building relationships with people in those nations. If you do international work and go to spicy locations using proper precautions, you will learn useful skills for moving around and hiding your plans.
Don’t just focus on the farther-right liberals. The first group to come after you could just as easily be mainstem left liberals. Scratch a liberal…
When Burgerland has MAGA vs Wish Dot Com MAGA going on and at the same time the smug Euro assholes looking down their noses at unwashed Burgerlanders are rolling out the red carpet for Hitler 2.0 because of scary immigrants:
Maga chuds. i love living around them.
Where would you flee to? If fascists are cracking down on refugees and immigrants, those refugees and immigrants from the global South will end out needing somewhere else to go and I’d prefer they did that before someone fleeing cause they are afraid of danger but in less immediate danger, especially a leftist who should be fighting fascists, not running away from them.
Those who are forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it and it seems like there’s a lot of repating of history from failing to learn going on. If you have the means, leave the sinking ship that is delusional that it is perfectly fine. There is not going to be a great socialist revolution here. Only decay.
Sorry comrade but, regardless of how justified it feels to engage in this, this is defeatism and naked opportunism the likes of which would make Kautsky blush. And this isn’t directed specifically at you, but at these notions and consciousnesses of everyone in these threads today who are holding and furthering this (what is it about today?).
Revolution does not “happen” it is built. People are building it every day, even in the imperial core. The PSL has seen its numbers grow. The CPUSA had grown so much to the point of exceeding its capability to internally manage the contradictions between much of its rank-and-file and national’s fed-ass-opportunism-and-revisonism and recently had a split, or more accurately a national top down purge of huge sections and entire branches of committed communists around the country, over these branches issuing petitions against electoralism-for-genociders and over the colonial question and black nationalism. These communists, if truly committed and surrounded by others to motivate them, and critically NOT HEARING FROM THEIR COMRADES “It’s hopeless, it’s pointless, there will be no revolution, let’s all flee or die,” pulling them into the same defeatist mire and having them retire to individualist opportunism as well; they’ve been many of them leaving to start their own local groups to hopefully build into wider networks, or being onboarded into the PSLs et al. who are themselves on the streets every day, protesting, agitating and educating, petitioning and door-knocking, and helping organizing communities and workplaces.
People are and have for years been out there every day building revolutionary movements and class consciousness, alongside groups and organizations of varying political bents and tactical and strategic angles attacking the core contradictions of the colonial regime and its empire. There are BOOMER Ex-BPP members who are still in the struggle every day; I’ve participated in events and actions hosted by them and sister organizations. There are ex-BPP and BLA members still languishing in prison who engage in agitating and organizing and publishing whatever notes they can get out and have faced years or even decades in solitary confinement for it. There are more communists who’ve been doing active agitation and education and engaging in the struggle to organize actions against capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, prisons and cops, and organizing for revolution than your corporate media will ever let you see or comprehend — demonstrated in the fact that even in the context of 3rd party electoralism they deliberately only mention Stein, West, and RFK Jr. glaringly leaving out PSL (~I wonder why~). They will never give us the full truth. Most haven’t even touched Uhuru being repressed by COINTELPRO because then they’d have to talk about Uhuru, their politics, and then the countless black nationalist and communist organizations who’ve been rallying in solidarity for them. The media landscape is not reality; it is what the ruling class wishes us to see as reality so we fall into positions that make their lives easier for them to continue in the way of things, rather than harder or even impossible.
People had already been so fed up that even Bernie’s milquetoast liberal-imperialist ass having mud slung at him and obstructed by the DNC in 2016 made a lot of communists. And even he was already a compromise candidate for a lot of people who supported him. I guarantee you events in France made even more radicalized individuals and communists, especially if the communist organizations involved in the coalition work were reading their Lenin and agitating that this shit would happen. People have been and are primed for it and have only become more so. The George Floyd uprising was an unprecedented national (and international) event; which was so dire for the ruling class they had to pull prison guards from federal prisons to deal with the DC protests. Those prisons, where individuals sit and have sat who in literal terms “have nothing to lose but their chains,” in all the relevant implications for those who have read their own history of struggle, and the theory which inspired it and has continued to be inspired by it (and yes, there’s work being done and to be done in prisons on many fronts; some orgs listed on AbolitionNotes. From IWOC, CURB, IDOCWatch, ALC, JLS & others I won’t name here).
These levels of mass sustained protests against imperialism and Zionism, and for the decolonization of Palestine and an end to arms-dealer profiteering in universities would never have happened like this ten years ago; and organizations like PSL are on the ground in these protests where individuals are coming out against the genocide and US-financed atrocity-carnival in the Levant — helping these protestors develop an understanding of the wider systems behind the genocide and onboard them into, if not the organization, into revolutionary theory and analysis to elevate their class consciousness and develop their sympathies and awarenesses of the common allies against our common enemies, who reign over the capitalist death machine of murder and exploitation.
Covid vaccines being gated behind insurance, on top of life saving medications like China’s diabetes treatment being blockaded by capitalist pharma is making communists and nascents. The failures and disgraces behind the suffering of the Carolina floods are making communists and nascents. A few years ago a highrise condo in Florida COLLAPSED, killing many and orphaning children; the investigators said they couldn’t even pinpoint the point of failure because so much was unmaintained; and when new regulations were pushed to force renovation of residences, the “association”(cartel) of landlords complained it was too expensive and government overreach was hurting business. These are all not just hopeless events of forever-inevitability, they are the results of capitalist contradiction reaching rupture points and are WHAT MAKE COMMUNISTS. The Floridian communists’ job then, is to, while the least advanced segments of the working class affected as victims are falling into despair and hopelessness, to instead act as the most advanced segment to motivate them and organize them against this SOCIAL MURDER and pooling support, pressing for damages and criminal convictions of those responsible — obstructing and pressuring politicians and judges to force them to show in full view of the victims of capitalism that they side with the open-fang capitalists not just passively but actively; — and the pigs work for them — and seeing this being the undeniable case, they will understand why this happens and What Is To Be Done to stop it, by educating the people in understanding the underlying systemic reasons; such as how commodified land exchange-value and rent exchange-value incentivize disinvestment, and the states’ role, through bureaucratic disenfranchisement and a monopoly on violence, in defending and upholding private property and profits at the expense of the propertyless workers.
Everyone living in the west here, looking around seeing things go to shit and feeling the despair and rage YOU ARE NOT UNIQUE — so is everyone else having the same thoughts and feelings and all they need is connection into a wider movement, of which there are, and will continue to be. What we need is continual development of class consciousness pulling people out of this kind of dead-end counter-revolutionary defeatism and despair which does more to undermine the building of the revolution and sap energy for mass movement than anything the reactionaries could do. Join whatever orgs you can; in the US the PSL, join the IWW, or join FRSO or even a trot org I don’t care. The more communists in active organization, the more people seeing shit constantly collapsing and getting worse around them who can look out the window and see us on the streets, or seeing us agitate in forums, seeing us getting news interviews and disrupting bourgeois meetings/conferences, can have their consciousness elevated and their rage tied to understanding and action; and the more this happens and the more omnipresent it continues to become, the more others will see there is movement toward something better and join. There are countless working, and countless waiting. Gen Z and upcoming Gen Alpha(?) have never known a future that they might have, not even known the future that GenX and Millenials have watched be torn away from them for the benefit of capital. The new generations have only ever seen the end of the world coming. They are necessarily radical. What they need is revolutionary perspective and inspiration to win the world they deserve; and we don’t everyone continuing the GenX trend of letting the world continue to be destroyed and moping about it. What the younger generations need from each other and older generations is active, present, thoughtful, educated, dedicated revolutionaries to bring them into the growing communist movement so there can be the effective and energetic vanguard that there needs to be.
uhh…
You should get your passport in order and, like… idk, 3-4k in gold.
I’m looking for a way out
We have renewed our passports for sure. The only other option here is just doing ideology atm, no material analysis whatsoever. Just today I saw a political lib post about how groundbreaking it is to consider how right wing populism is about rhetoric and how with rhetoric they are getting all this support.
The leftish parties just point at these rightwing nuts in outrage with no alternatives given, and then move on to the next outrage. They aren’t engaging in an analysis of the material conditions of these movements because if they did, they would get an answer they don’t like. And this is why I think things are going to get very bad before they get better.
Even if ur going to flee if u anticipate fascism is coming then you should be outting everything into building real working class organizations now
I’m stuck in the USA for at least another 8 years but I’m starting to wonder if exit strategies are something I need to be considering more strongly. At the very least I think maybe I shouldn’t stay in texas. I don’t know exactly what the timeline is and I don’t think there’s going to be a full masks off fascist coup overnight in the next year or anything but l if we all accept the premise that material conditions are only going to worsen then we should all be pretty fucking concerned that the fascists are a hell of a lot more organized and proactive about laying groundwork than we are.
we should all be pretty fucking concerned that the fascists are a hell of a lot more organized and proactive about laying groundwork than we are.
Of course they are, they are the govt. and institutions across the west, after all. The military, the police, the various alphabet agencies, and the established cores of almost any political parties of relevance (US democrats and UK labor ofc, but also Canadian NDP, German Greens, etc), they’re all fascist and very actively engaged in laying the foundations for the fascist consolidation and repression that’s to come. There is no way to remotely compete with that organization and groundwork from within the imperial cores (and they will change laws or disregard them to ensure it) apart from declaring open war on the state and creating the material foundations of a revolutionary state.
I regularly consider exit strategies
I dont have the means to leave, but i do have a gun with one bullet
there’s more fascists than that, friend
Yeah you’re gonna need way more bullets.
What if you have only one bullet but it’s the bullet from the “Freak on a Leash” music video
Time to buy more bullets
Some of these fash have their own bullets… take “meal team six” out to Cracker Barrel, get some free guns & ammo, repeat
i mean why not but realistically where on the globe are you going to get away from american influence