chapotraphouse

The problem is not that people shouldn’t fight, the problem is that the Western left has no strategy. They have no intention of taking political power, and more interested in performative resistance.

The mistake is in thinking that there is an inflection point where, if reached, the masses will have a sudden change of heart and spontaneously rise up against their oppressors and win. This is just liberal idealism.

Without a coherent strategy informed by theory that actually aims to seize political power, and without organized activism, any form of nascent revolution will either fail, or immediately crushed by counter-revolutions. History is full of failed revolutions, most never even got off the ground.

The Western left hasn’t even stepped out one foot yet. They’re still on step zero. They need to first figure out their strategy that actually enables them to leverage the power of the masses to achieve certain political goals.

I have used this example before: during the Long March, more than 90% of the communist party cadres were wiped out by the KMT. Mao was and is still revered today precisely because he was able to synthesize a path forward for Chinese socialism - through identifying the principal contradiction and thus its solution: land reform. He truly believed that land reform could unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses, which won them the ultimate victory against KMT, who suffered from mass defection when it finally came down.

The Chinese Civil War, or the War of Liberation (解放战争), was not won militarily, but ideologically. It could easily have happened the other way and the Chinese communists would have ended their revolutionary effort in failure.

This could only happen within a very specific context of the circumstances in China during that time. And every revolutionary has to figure out the principal contradictions that are specific to their contexts, in order to figure out the very specific solution to their problem.