The Dialectic of Struggle

And the Cost of Inaction

Morning Comrades.

To elaborate on Wednesday’s topic of whether staying to fight or fleeing are options in this struggle against the last era of Western Capitalism, we are returning to a few historical analogies. I realise that history often bores people and that is predominately due to the utterly and devastating wrongness of western pedagogy in regards to history ( a bunch of dates, we’re the good guys, we won everything, yay, freedom ) but let’s look at this way: History isn’t there to be replicated, the events that we can decipher serve as introduction to understanding how the past arrived at their conclusion and thus resulting actions and our aim is to see if their methodology can be applied to our current realities and thus build on more informed decisions.

Many people have fought fascism before us and many have won. Yes, reality was different for them and yet a few key truths remain and are utterly applicable to us today. Bertolt Brecht one famously stated: “He who fights can lose. He who doesn’t fight has already lost.” and that struck me this morning. As I look back at 30 years of protests, outer-parliamentary action and work an additional realisation struck me: It is easier to fight to win, than to fight and win back rights that have been taken away by an oppressive capitalist force. Defensive work is absolutely warranted, and only a fool charges with that in mind, but an offensive has the higher probability of winning, and win we must. In the age of late capitalism—defined by mass precarity, ecological breakdown, and increasingly authoritarian governance—these ideas gain renewed urgency. Our current reality points to essential dialectics in political struggle: the cost of inaction, and the steep price of regression. Let’s explore how these two aphorisms, when paired, reveal the contours of our resistance—how they illuminate both the vulnerabilities and possibilities in a world structured to reproduce loss, dispossession, and hopelessness.