What Is To Be Done?
Afternoon Comrades.
If you are looking for the usual hopeful dispatch today you will be disappointed. To be sure, I am a little tired from the weekend and the usual day-to-day bullshit is pre-occupying my mind and at the same time, upon checking my phone this morning I was informed that a person in the US had set themselves on fire, an act of self-immolation in protest of their country’s responsibility for the an act of genocide in Gaza.
Blame it on exhaustion but I cannot force myself to say anything other than the blatantly obvious anymore. Everyone in charge, across whatever imaginary political lines is not only responsible for the ills of this world but they are actively supporting it. Furthermore, seemingly, nothing we have done in the last 60-70 years, protest, marches, speeches, intellectual debates, the creation of alternative more inclusive philosophies etc. etc. etc. has stopped THEM from being the most brutally violent psychopaths this planet has witnessed and they will / have killed anyone and everything for profit. Even an act of self-immolation that on one side is being heralded as an incredible act of martyrdom and on the other side will just be gleefully ignored can and will only achieve a hopeful change of public perception - and then what?
I don’t know a single person that gives a flying fuck about the politics and the politicians that rule over us - everyone knows it is a shit show, a lie and a brutally oppressive system that forces into slavery for their profit. Our “western” heroes of democracy have since the end of WW2 engaged in countless acts of moral depravity, murder of genocidal scales across the globe for their profit. Speaking of which, back when I was young and just starting to work, you could still technically ignore the ills of our “society” and make money, get rich even, but even that is over. Most people I know, including myself, are working harder and harder, more and more for less and less of our fucking pie. The point being, nothing that has been done - especially on a cultural level has or will change their reality that they enforce on us.
They can carpet bombs entire countries for decades ( Iraq, Afghanistan, Laos and Vietnam for example ) destabilize, putch and kill democratically elected people for profit ( the entirety of Central and South America ), loot and kill at their will in the name of bringing civilization ( all of Africa ) and all the sacrifices we have done “for a shift in public perception” has done jack shit, materially, and this is me looking in the mirror and most definitely not punching down.
Again, some person just lit themselves on fire to protest the US’ government complicity in genocide and it won’t achieve jack shit. An unfathomable amount of people have been killed, maimed, raped and murdered for a settler colonial project to open up new beach houses and shitty pizza joints run by some delusional fuck from Brooklyn, a huge amount of people around the world step up and protests, which they allow and frankly give zero fucks about. This is where I am getting towards, what’s the point of having half a million people march across a capitol, yell at some old colonial palaces and then go home? The fucks in power will ignore it in any case, and it will be business as usual on the next working day. Said protest are entirely ineffective, as we have been changing peoples hearts and minds since Vietnam and all that’s done is produce a generation of boomers that mostly deserve a wall, unless they - and again I mostly mean myself here - become willing to get change who is in charge. Madly enough, I am self-censoring here only because the sheer volume of people reading this - but I am certain you can guess where I am going without having to spell it out.
We are at a point of capitalism’s trajectory where it is us or them. They have the gun and we have the numbers.
You do the math.
The answer to the question of what needs to be done is clear and simple. The question of non-violence, cultural subterfuge all have been answered. No one is coming to change this, no one will come to save us all. We have to. As Kwame Ture so aptly called it:
Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption:
In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.
The United States has none.”
Neither does Capitalism.
Yours, ragingly,
V.