President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia said on Sunday that the country’s House of Representatives had agreed to some policy changes that protesters across the country had been demanding over a week of demonstrations.
Thousands of protesters in several major Indonesian cities have been rallying since Monday in response to the country’s increasing cost of living and rising unemployment rate. Demonstrators demanded that the government cancel the high monthly housing allowances that lawmakers received, which many in the country see as lavish.
Mr. Prabowo’s announcement came after rioters on Sunday directed their rage at the homes of lawmakers and government officials, ransacking, vandalizing and looting the properties.
I’m not an expert in Indonesian politics, but it is kind of funny. A month ago, the only reason the protesters made international news was they adapted the One Piece pirate flag. Now they came true with their promise, looted the houses of lawmakers lol, and the ruling class was immediately rattled. If only we could loot Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream fridge
It’s more difficult in the imperial core because even just the NYPD has more resources than nearly every military on earth.
Please don’t make me laugh. Americans really do think they have it the hardest as though communists all over the world weren’t routinely persecuted, murdered, if not massacred by brutal right wing regimes.
Let me remind you that during the Long March, 95% of the Chinese communist forces were wiped out due to attrition, having trekked thousands of kilometers of the arduous mountainous terrains across China while being pursued by the KMT forces. By the time they settled down in Yan’an, the cadres ranked in the thousands. All urban bases were completely obliterated, and the party had to start from scratch in one of the most remote regions in China.
The level of conviction, determination and resilience required just to fight for an ideology they believe in is just not something you see in the Western left.
The reason it is difficult in the US is not because of NYPD lol. It is because the American left is still too comfortable to give up a life of relative comfort and an inexhaustible supply to treats. They are not ready to give up the comforts and commit to a life that puts their ideological conviction to the true test - of having to organize underground and evade persecution and giving up all other options in life: you either end up winning, or you die fighting for your cause.
The objective conditions of the US have almost no relationship to the objective conditions of China during its revolutionary period. This is obvious. If the analysis ends there then its not very complete. The objective conditions of tsarist Russia were also highly unique and not equatable to China’s without making broad and sweeping generalizations…
That’s also obvious. That still doesn’t explain the conditions of the US in anyway.
There is something to be said about comfort and the role it plays in the suppressing revolutionary spirit and class conciseness. However, that also doesnt fully explaine the issue. It also dismisses the long history of snuffing out truely revolutionary figures in American history.
The Soviets were not giving up comfort for revolution. Revolutionary China wasn’t giving up comfort to start a civil war. These places if anything lacked comfort in mass quantities. The quantitative accumulation of suffering engendered a qualitative shift in the receptiveness of their respective working classes to a revolutionary movement.
The USA as a settler colonial project, one of the largest settler colonial projects, which has dominated the world both militarily and ideologically, for more then a century, isnt lacking a revolutionary energy due to people watching Netflix, its because the economic and social relations havent deteriorated to the point that it impacts all fasets of the settler existence…
Yeah you’re right, 18 intelligence agencies, six branches of the US military, 18,000 Law Enforcement agencies and the most sophisticated media indoctrination apparatus in human history simply has no bearing on the left’s ability to build concrete forces of opposition
The western left simply doesn’t have the will to power, brilliant
The problem with the Western left is worse than what you’re describing: they haven’t even tried, so everything that you’re saying is simply conjecture. They’re not at step one, they are at step zero.
And people are accusing me of being a doomer on the site lol.
Nobody is accusing you of being a doomer, you’re just completely misrepresenting what people are saying to you and coming up with strawman arguments. Like you are literally in this thread downplaying and minimizing the fact that every radical movement in the US has been brutally suppressed and massacred. And not even just the radical ones but just college students protesting the Vietnam war. You are also minimizing the fact that the US police state is far more sophisticated and developed than places like Indonesia. Again this is not an excuse simply the basic material analysis you accuse us of lacking. Your posts here and previously accusing China of being “neoliberal” smack of armchair analysis by someone with no actual skin in the game.
Yeah, we’re here today because hundreds of thousands of people already died fighting for the cause. China is socialist today precisely because our forefathers did not give up despite being close to total annihilation.
I’m not minimizing the oppressive state apparatus in the US. I am saying that claiming so betrays a lack of strategy to confront them. And if you don’t have a strategy, how do you think you’re ever going to win?
Again you are projecting something onto me. Nowhere did I say we have no strategy, nowhere did I say any of the shit you are making a strawman out of. I am simply stating the fact that the conditions in the US are fundamentally different from that in Indonesia and you pretending otherwise is antimaterialist and a bad faith argument. Jesus fuckin christ the fact an anarchist has to explain this to you is very fucking funny.
What’s step one? What does that entail?
Read Mao: Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, 1925
The American left doesn’t even have the most basic framework for a strategy. Start by having an actual strategy to take power, then maybe you would be taken seriously.
Vague posting about 1925 Mao isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked those questions
What is vague about that?
You asked what’s the first step, and I literally handed you the essential reading materials toward formulating a strategy. This essay from Mao is a prescribed reading that every revolutionary movement should start with, and one of the most important essays that Mao has ever written. Hence the first step. If you had actually read the essay, you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying. You didn’t even bother to read what I posted.
Do you even know why you think you cannot defeat the “all-encompassing police state”? Because you don’t have a strategy. And do you know why you don’t have a strategy? Because you haven’t even done the most basic of class analysis yet. That’s why you don’t have a movement.
If you believe simply transplanting the organizational strategies (which you didn’t even bother outlining) of communists from 1925 warlord era China is how the western “left” overcomes the combined might of the various armed forces of the most powerful empire in history, then quite frankly you’re not serious or a materialist
Stop posturing and explain your work
Nobody here is stating that we cannot, only why we have not. This is basic ass material analysis friend.
I didn’t say it’s impossible just that the conditions are significantly different and on top of that Americans are far more comfortable.
You can’t just write off that the forces of repression in the US are far far better equipped than those in Indonesia. That’s just terribly bad faith arguing.