We should write a "What is to be Done?" For 2024
We should write a "What is to be Done?" For 2024
Just thinking about what quick, digestible document I could throw at libs who are panicking and desperate for something to hold on to and i can't really think of something that's written for treat demons but still actually communist.
Any thoughts?
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I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.
Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.
The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove
From the introduction of the piece:
How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?
In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.
It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.
And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:
By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.