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15 hours agoI mean, I volunteer with Food Not Bombs, and their politics is well to the left of the DSA. But if you ask them what their accomplishments are, its a pretty straightforward “We feed the homeless people that the police would rather see starved to death”. That’s it. Every week, getting out and distributing food, even if people get arrested for it.
Now, there’s definitely other people who just spend all their days shitposting and doing nothing else of consequence. But they’re not typically the people I meet in person when I’m out trying to make my neighborhood a better place.
These economic levers typically need a critical mass of participation. And one way to get that participation is via buy-in from the government (regulation) or capital (BSD). Random people refusing to shop at Starbucks doesn’t mean much. But when a location is shut down for violating ordinances or because the landlord kicks them out, that’s a material hit to their pocketbook the owners can’t ignore.
Rallying that critical mass of support is difficult and frustrating. I’ve heard more than one organizer describe it as “herding cats”. This isn’t a trivial issue of inconvenience or effort. It requires an industrial scale of activism.
“The Revolution” is a critical mass of critical mass events. Its something you can only really talk about in hindsight, because it requires a bunch of constantly moving social parts to kinda line up at the right moment and move in the right direction together.
Revolutions aren’t uncommon. Large institutional shifts in composition, function, and ideology happen regularly. But they’re a lot easier when the people executing them already have a bunch of institutional controls to operate. “Wanking” often feels like the only thing you can do, because you’re so cut out of the so-called democratic process.