United States | News & Politics

We need to make them fear what will happen to them if they ignore us. Not a potential loss of support or popularity but actual, primal fear of physical consequences.

How do you do this without the organization to lead a coordinated effort? One guy with a gun here and there is an acceptable risk to them, and a useful tool in manufacturing consent.

They do these things not because we haven't expressed our opposition, they do them because our avenues of expressing opposition are toothless and ineffectual by design.

It's not about merely "expressing our opposition" it's about wielding the full collective power of our class in order to enforce our interests. There's nothing "lame duck" about that.

Their tactics of subversion are merely disillusionment tactics; they want us to think organizing doesn't work, because without organization we have no way to pose a legitimate challenge to their power. There are ways around their tactics. People have organized and won significant gains under more oppressive conditions, even within our own country.

Slaves could not have won their freedom without organization, nor women the right to vote, nor workers the 40-hour work week and social security, nor could blacks have defeated jim crow... I could go on. Those in power teach us their own perspective version of history that gives them undue credit for these advancements, minimizing the role played by organized resistance, in order to convince us that we don't need to organize to make change. We must study history from the people's perspective in order to learn what truly works and what doesn't.