Why are you pro-rioting before a massive rally? The regime WANTS a riot so they can engage in massive retaliation. You’re literally doing their work for them, get smart.
At this point, we aren’t living under liberal democracy and a peaceful rally is more illegal and dangerous than rioting was. The point is to not demonize the language of the unheard when few states will have free and fair elections next year.
The regime is currently kidnapping people off the streets and raiding homes.
They do not need pretext. They will manufacture their own regardless of what we do. You are arguing that we should not remove the boot that is currently pressed on our neck.
No I am not. I am arguing a disorganized riot accomplishes nothing and turns the boot into a machete. If your enemy wants you to do something, why are you dead-set on doing it?
They don’t want us to; they’re perfectly happy killing and kidnapping people without retaliation right now, and know that so long as we never fight back, they can take as long as they want to murder us slowly under the pretext of whatever laws they feel like making up on the spot. We’re slaves with a slim chance to escape our inevitable execution, but you’re so worried about how hard they’ll whip us if we fail that you don’t even want to try until it’s too late.
The very fact that you’re able to march and feel safe enough to not get murdered outright speaks to how you don’t understand that other people are already being removed from the equation just for walking through a park in Chicago. A significant amount of people aren’t safe enough to leave the house, and you think that we’re going to show them our power by peacefully telling the government that’s bad as if they aren’t aware? When they control the laws and have shown that they willfully change them to suit their agenda, what else will stop them but the fear for their own lives? Who will remove a tyrant from power when all forms of enforcement have already bent the knee to him?
Protests are to warn the government that we’re mad and might get violent if ignored. We’ve been ignored for long enough.
The regime can do whatever it wants, without justification.
They do want a riot; that’s why they are talking about enacting the Insurrection Act. They want their use of force and illegal tactics to be justified to their base.
Funny how it’s getting harder and harder to find a job in the US that isn’t 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.
It’s hard to finda a job period right now, and mass unemployment is always so productive to stability and peace.
Yeah, we’re definitely going backwards. Americans blame the unions and worship the billionaires and politicians that are making everything worse.
unreasonable? it is generally categorized as criminal
and being trans can make you a criminal; what’s your point?
my point it is not labelled as only unreasonable, it is actually labelled as criminal
That’s the point. These actions are criminal and demonized, but undoubtedly necessary for us having rights at all.
Yes and the word “unreasonable” underplays how they actually try ro portray it. When some action is called criminal it creates fear. “Unreasonable” not so much.
The response by quasi-normalcy reads like a cherry picked simplification to lead to a likely incorrect conclusion.
The statements suggest all (or most) riots:
- change public policy for the better; they don’t
- are justified by the rioters; they aren’t
Here are some examples:
For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders)[6] who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners’ attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired,[7] and the United States Army, represented by the West Virginia National Guard led by McDowell County native William Eubanks,[8] intervened by presidential order.[9]
In the short term the battle was an overwhelming victory for coal industry owners and management.[52] United Mine Workers of America (UMWA or UMW) membership plummeted from more than 50,000 miners to approximately 10,000 over the next several years, and it was not until 1935—following the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—that the UMW fully organized in southern West Virginia.
This union defeat had major implications for the UMWA as a whole. As World War I ended, the demand for coal declined adversely impacting the industry. [citation needed] Because of the defeat in West Virginia, the union was also undermined in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. By the end of 1925, Illinois was the only remaining unionized state in terms of soft coal production.
So in this example, most of us today would say the riot was justified as the coal miners were seeking safer working conditions under unionization. This riot failed and largely destroyed the union.
So was the riot justified: yes. Did it lead to positive change: no.
Tulsa race massacre aka Tulsa riot
The Tulsa race massacre was a two-day-long white supremacist terrorist[13][14] massacre[15] that took place in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, between May 31 and June 1, 1921. Mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials,[16] attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses. The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.[17][18] The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as “Black Wall Street.”[19]
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days.[20][21] The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead.[22] The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records.[23] The commission reported estimates ranging from 36 up to around 300 dead.[24][25]
So in this example most of us today would say the riot was NOT justified as the black residents were just trying to live their lives in peace and prosperity before the white supremacists came in with violence and murder of black residents.
So was the riot justified: no. Did it lead to positive change: no.
The original premise by that poster is questionable as only through the lens of history can we pick out specific riots that lead to positive policy or positive societal change.
You aren’t going to win every battle, even if you end up winning the war. And obviously, winning any battle is never a foregone conclusion, but sometimes you have to fight anyway.
The Tulsa massacre is a wild example, because while it led to no positive change, it did help accomplish the white supremacist’s goals of keeping Black people from building generational wealth. The terrorism of the KKK and non state sanctioned attacks against native Americans played a crucial war in building all the inequities of America. The injustice wasn’t inevitable or even based on legal discrimination alone, but bolstered and reinforced by extrajudicial actions they knew the state wouldn’t stop.
Does this mean the left can do anything close to the same thing as the KKK? Fuck no, we’ll pay extra in jail time and executions. The state allowed an encouraged that evil. It does make the moralizing bullshit about illegality being the only way to change things even more hollow.
it led to no positive change, it did help accomplish the white supremacist’s goals of keeping Black people from building generational wealth. The terrorism of the KKK and non state sanctioned attacks against native Americans played a crucial war in building all the inequities of America. The injustice wasn’t inevitable or even based on legal discrimination alone, but bolstered and reinforced by extrajudicial actions they knew the state wouldn’t stop.
I agree with 100% of what you said here. It is an absolute travesty that this occurred at all, but then was hidden from mainstream recorded history for decades.
Does this mean the left can do anything close to the same thing as the KKK? Fuck no, we’ll pay extra in jail time and executions. The state allowed an encouraged that evil. It does make the moralizing bullshit about illegality being the only way to change things even more hollow.
I wasn’t defending the “illegality” argument. I was pointing out that the supposition of the thread post ascribes riots as the primary driver of liberal democracy. I’m pointing out that that is only true if you pick out specific riots and ignore dozens of others that don’t support the thesis. Even riots whose outcome could have shaped liberal ideas but didn’t like Blair Mountain have to be ignored for the thread post to be true.
I also reject that riots were the only shaping device of liberal democracy in the USA. I would argue FDRs New Deal was a bigger driver of modern liberal democracy than any riot. While the New Deal was certainly influenced by protest from the Bonus Army, but there was no riot from that. Further, the Race Riot of 1943 had occurred in Detroit under FDR’s watch, but FDR stayed silent on it and I’m not aware of any changes in policy that occurred because of it though I admit I only know of the riots occurrence and not much more.
Why is this yellowed like it’s been in a smokers house for the last 15 years?
Someone spilled water on their phone and now the meme is moldy
memes from the 80s
40s
80s got that 40 years of smoke to get it ripe and yellow
Your back hurts too asshole!
Red light filter?
Screenshots can be affected by the overlay.
Yep, generation loss is a killer.
This is why you use your phone’s built-in blue light filter, rather than a 3rd party app that just slaps an ugly red hue over your entire screen.
Built-in filters don’t show up in screenshots, and more importantly, don’t filter pure black, so your OLED screen still looks good with it enabled.
some phones dont have a built in blue light filter my old phone didnt have one had to use a 3rd party app
Last time I saw a phone without built-in blue light filtering was literally a decade ago. It’s been a feature in Android since Nougat (7.0)
yeah i was not exactly rich so i had to have a severe downgrade
Sepia tone is the JPG artifacts of the past
I think it’s a picture of a monitor.
Woe to the vanquished !!
the names of our heros, and our defiers, will last forever !!
Which is why we will always need heroes.
This state of affairs is not especially surprising – if it were the popular belief that violence is justified to change society in some particular way, then society would already be changed in that way. Just like how no stock on the market can be widely seen as undervalued.
This is why class consciousness is important.
It’s also why it’s vital to meet people where they are. Propaganda that works often begins not with big ideas but targeting emotions and one’s perception of their everyday life, and if you aren’t engaging in propaganda then your opponent who is is defining the narrative unopposed
I think it’s worth pointing out that calling these riots isn’t really appropriate. When we think of riots, we think of unfocused, unplanned, unmanaged, etc. Highly organized protests sometimes wind up turning into riots because capitalists use violence, but it’s not the norm.
Super This:
Organized, non-violent protests are not riots. They are people, in mass, using their freedom of speech to complain about something.
A common issue is that some people, either within the protest group, or outside instigators, will then prod the protest into violence in order to discredit it. Two examples:
- Police using rubber bullets/tear-gas/pepper-spray to disperse a lawful gathering. This escalates and adds tension. Not everyone is prepared to weather abuse to stay non-violent. Gassing a peaceful protest is going to make at least some of them really mad and is a pretty trivial way to turn a peaceful protest into something else and remove it’s message, making it just a “riot.”
- Agitators claiming to be within the group, but who are actually against, it performing actions such as property damage or violence in order to discredit the whole event. If a non-violent march is walking down a street and some dick throws a rock through a store window and steals something, the whole march is called a riot by the media.
It’s important that if you are involved in a protest that you stay calm despite what is thrown your way. The protest is the message and fighting back during that event is only harming your message. Please do things like capture pictures/videos of people inciting violence, of police using crowd control on peaceful protesters, of generic unfair treatment; but during that event, the goal is to be calm. Afterwards, you can take all your grievances to the medias. If you’ve been harmed during a protest, find a lawyer – many will work pro-bono for cases like this and if your first pick doesn’t… fuck 'em: Name and shame – and then fight back after the event, when you have legal standing.
Your grievances are real. Your pain is real. The people in power will use every trick to discredit your issues. Don’t give them ammo.
Labor movements in the 19 th and early 20th centuries also literally organized riots, where the express purpose was to destroy property. It used to be a legitimate protest strategy against the owning class.
Civil disobedience for the sake of it is just stupid. When we retroactively look at civil disobedience in history, we intentionally filter out the vast majority and just highlight the few examples that we’re done in ethical ways, for the right causes, and achieved results. Civil disobedience is not a virtue nor is it uncommon. What actually matters are the motivations, principles, and methods used behind the civil disobedience.
Trying to say that all the ones that failed did it wrong instead of realizing that no matter what if you succeed or fail they’re only going to elevate the ‘right’ moments and demonize the ‘wrong’ ones based on the needs of the ruling class.
Funnily enough there’s a very similar situation to the US that’s going on in Serbia, where a canopy falling and killing a bunch of people due to government cheapening out led to lots of outrage and exploded into a massive student movement against the president due to corruption, election rigging, suppression of dissent and executive branch abuse.
At first, they did peaceful protests, blocked roads and all that jazz constantly, but after seeing that it had led them literally nowhere (they got nothing except for a fake concession that was some minister resigning) except on getting arrested and beaten up in jails, they decided to give a green light to civil disobedience, violence, trashing ruling party’s headquarters all over the country.
What did this escalation result in? A whole load of nothing except cracked skulls, mostly for the students.
If you’re looking at reformism ‘fixing’ things during the course of history, civil disobedience the vast majority if not all of the time was noise. What eventually got implemented or changed wasn’t because the ruling class got scared, but because they were either getting major gains in terms of compromise as a result of the reform, or the reform itself was beneficial to their interests and only a small minority didn’t want them to pass.
If you’re looking at reformism ‘fixing’ things during the course of history, civil disobedience the vast majority if not all of the time was noise. What eventually got implemented or changed wasn’t because the ruling class got scared, but because they were either getting major gains in terms of compromise as a result of the reform, or the reform itself was beneficial to their interests and only a small minority didn’t want them to pass.
So, in your opinion the woman’s suffrage movement, or LGBTQ activism, for example, were just wastes of time? These people didn’t need to do or say anything since the bourgeoisie were about to give them everything they wanted anyway?
If they held no benefit to the ruling class, then no. LGBT opens up more industry focused on identity (via pride merch, medical needs) which means more profitable industry for bourgeois, while women’s suffrage legitimizes capital’s rule further by allowing more people to vote + liberates capitalist women which is what bourgeois feminism is primarily about.
Whether these reforms would have happened without the noise though, can’t really say - there’s no mirror that looks into alternate realities. Still, these kinds of reformist mass movements are usually a result of bourgeois infighting, not some spontaneous working class action - just look at who organizes and funds them.
Thats not to say liberal working class are idiots for joining them and acting as footsoldiers, no - there are definitely benefits to be had for one’s identity no matter the class, like in the case of LGBT, but the things won aren’t full-on liberation, just specific compromises that are capital-friendly(women getting voting rights but still being discriminated against to encourage births/staying at home and raising more workers, LGBT getting essentially bare minimum recognition and care to be sold merch but not enough to significantly attack the traditional family for child-raising). Therefore, true liberation can only happen via the abolishment of the class society, else it’s gonna be endless compromises that miss the mark.
I think workers should own their workplaces but tbh I don’t see that by itself automatically fixing all forms of prejudice and discrimination. Certainly not on a personal level, but probably not even at a systemic level either. Though I agree that the present conditions definitely forment reactionary thought.
Yeah it won’t, because commodity production, markets, accumulative money and therefore capital won’t be abolished, meaning that the incentives to oppress certain groups of people for growth will remain.
Only after we overcome the production for profit model and replace it with production to satisfy people’s needs will capital fully be replaced and dead, removing any incentives to discriminate (aka systemic discrimination). Will it change prejudices that people have immediately? No, but it will certainly disappear over time given how the central source of these prejudices is now abolished + a revolution and development like that is only possible in a class conscious society which produces solidarity with other workers no matter their features (USSR is a good example of this when looking at Oct Revolution - women were viewed as fellow comrades, led the charge on most influential mass protests, and once revolution happened they got a ton of systemic freedom in terms of abortion rights and legal autonomy, while the rest of the western world was still on legal guardianship).
To give a bit of hope to the liberals in the US though, what’s happening there isn’t new and the state of things from before (as in liberal democracy functioning normally) is going to sooner and later return, it’s a cycle that happens every now and again due to falling rate of profit, crisis and rise of reaction that happens as a result.
Eventually, liberal capitalists will start fighting the conservative capitalists to get their place in the sun again, maybe it’s going to happen electorally or maybe there’s going to be a slaughter of millions of workers in the name of liberal democracy or anti-fascism, after which wholesome democracy will reign supreme once again and the countdown towards another crisis and rise of reaction will start once again. Isn’t that lovely?
Remember to thank your local anarchist for the 8 hour work day.
Personally I wish they’d rioted a bit more because frankly I’m usually done by about 1:00 p.m.
I’d say it was more the union organizers than the anarchists. There was a lot of overlap. But not all labour organizers were anarchists. It could even be argued that the anarchists hurt the movement more than they helped it. Some of the anarchists like August Spies were attempting to disrupt the status quo, but were trying to do it relatively non-violently. He even refused to show up to speak at the rally if workers were told to arm themselves. On the other hand, August Spies was part of the labour/anarchist movement that wore military uniforms and marched around with muskets, so it wasn’t like he was completely non-violent. Around the time of the Haymarket affair though, he was less radical than some of the anarchists, who were expressly violent and wanted to start a revolution using bombs and guns.
The fact someone threw a bomb gave the police the excuse to crack down on the anarchists. The crackdown prevented the aims of the protesters from being achieved. But, the fact that the justice system hanged the anarchist leaders led to them being seen as martyrs. That made them famous, which made May Day famous, which eventually did help lead to the 8 hour work day. Would the 8 hour work day have been achieved faster without the bomb being thrown? It’s hard to know. The immediate result was a major setback for the cause, but the long-term result of the overreaction to that bombing was a contributing factor to the 8-hour workday eventually being achieved.
Dude! You need a YouTube channel.
Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
The only reason we have 5 day work weeks, 8 hour workdays, overtime pay, benefits, workplace health/safety/environmental regulations, unions, health care, paid time off, vacations, etc. is because our grandfathers and great-grandfathers busted heads, and got their own heads busted, fighting corporate goons in the streets - and WINNING!
Those heroic workers would be ashamed at what their grandchildren have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs have done to America. They fought hard to keep those psychopaths under control, and we not only let them up, we helped them take full power.
grandfathers busted heads, and got their own heads busted, fighting corporate goons in the streets - and WINNING!
No one won anything. The massive militant strike actions in the USA in the early 20th century usually were losses. Wins tended to be pyrrhic, with the company cleaning house a couple months later or simply reversing the won benefits.
Things were brought to a head by the depression. The solution was simple, the most militant leaders were arrested, reforms were done to buy off the less militant, and the anger was channeled into marching all of us off to war (with the support of the non-militant collaborationist unions, of course).
Except that in the end, we still have the 8 hour workday/ 40 hour work week, overtime, benefits, etc. None of those things existed before the labor riots, so things didn’t get rolled back as much as you claim, and the most important ones stuck permanently.
The Labor Riots were extremely successful, and completely reconfigured the American workplace for the rest of the century, and beyond. MAGA wants to revert to the old days.
Yup. Poor MAGA thinks they’ll get 2 hour work weeks if they went back to the good old days.
The truth is that they whites will all be working the fields again without holiday, cheap medical aid, and so on.
A lot of them think they’ll be slave owners again. I’m sure there are a few yokels who think the day is coming when they can just go grab the nearest black neighbor and declare him their property, and force him to get to work in the fields. After all, that was the original reason those Africans CHOSE to come to America ILLEGALLY right?
Well, he’s got a trailer, so maybe he just makes his new slave pick up the house, make the bed, and wash the truck.
Everyone I know works more than 40 hours a week because its not enough to live on. Overtime is barely doled out and “benefits” account for either expensive PPOs or slightly cheaper HMOs (which suck, fyi). And I live in a state with strong labor protections. In all of the country its entirely possible to work more than 40 hours a week and not receive any overtime pay at all. Or be misclassified, or be subject to illegal wage theft.
All that changed is the worst jobs got sent overseas and a certain section of careers for the college educated exist that provides some semblance of “good benefits and good hours”.
Yeah, corrupt corporations are exploiting the system, with the help of the corrupt government. What’s new? The fact still remains that the work environment we generally accept as normal, was created by those Labor Riots, and we are still better off for them. Even if MAGA manages to roll back the workplace environment to the 19th century, they will always have to compete with the memory of America’s peak, and will look bad in comparison.
You have false nostalgia for a time you weren’t even alive as things have always been shit for working people especially in the United States.
You are stuck on your biases, and can’t even consider the idea that labor issues were terrible in the 19th C/ early 20th C, and it was labor riots in the second quarter of the century that ended the old way, and began a new workplace environment. It is definitely not perfect, but it’s far better than it once was, and it’s ridiculous to argue otherwise.
Has this been aged? Lol looks like sepia
Yes, because it’s long been true and people didn’t fucking listen. Now my country doesn’t even really have liberal democracy, and people are still himing and hawing about disruption being bad and lawbreaking being bad
I was just trying to make a pithy joke about the discoloring
It’s just UV damage from exposure, nbd.
People really need to stop leaving their memes out in the sun.
Cursed
