You’ve written a eulogy for a revolution that never really tried to fight. You’ve diagnosed the disease, mapped every malignant cell of the rot, and then sat down in the waiting room to let it run its course. We have failed, you say. We are ghosts, you say. And yet, here you are, still writing, still thinking, still feeling that ember of rage in your chest. That’s not failure, that’s an opportunity.
The so-called "Left" is not dead; it’s just been convinced that playing fair is the only way to win. It has been pacified, self-neutered, and trapped in an endless cycle of moral hand-wringing while the right builds its empire brick by brick. And instead of organizing, strategizing, and imposing consequences on power, we get... this. A beautifully written, poetic surrender note.
But here’s the thing: power does not care about your resignation. It only fears your action.
You talk about how capitalism eats everything. How it adapts. How it morphs. That is true. Capitalism is the Borg, it assimilates, repackages, and sells revolution back to you with a 30% markup. But if capitalism can adapt, so can we. If the right can build institutions, so can we. If fascists can carve out spaces of power through relentless, strategic, unapologetic force, we can do the same.
The problem isn’t that revolution is impossible. The problem is that we stopped fighting like we meant it.
You say anarchism has no vision? Then write one and make people believe in it.
You say we don’t build? Then build something worth defending.
You say we’ve been co-opted? Then stop waiting to be invited to the table, flip the fucking thing over.
You lament how the system absorbs every act of rebellion and turns it into a commodity. So what? The answer is to create acts that it can’t absorb. Acts that impose real costs. Acts that don’t fit neatly into a marketing campaign. You want to fight capitalism? Then you have to make it feel pain.
History is not kind to people who wait. Every gain that workers, women, people of color, and marginalized communities have ever won has been taken by force. We forget that. We forget that the weekend, the vote, civil rights, bodily autonomy, none of it was handed down from above. It was ripped from the system’s grip by people who refused to sit around and pontificate about their own insignificance.
Yes, the right builds institutions. Yes, it organizes. Yes, it deploys its forces with surgical precision while we sit around making memes. But that is not an excuse to lie down and die. That is a blueprint.
What you call failure, I call dormancy. And dormancy only lasts until the right spark ignites it.
So I ask you: Are you ready to fight? Are we prepared to stop getting mired by the weight of imperfect ideas, and start crafting the plan for Project 2026?
I do find the essay a bit amusing, since it's so euro/US centric inspired of its half-hearted mentions of the USSR's demise (which isn't nearly as clean as people make it out to be) and total lack of acknowledgement on the movements in South America, Africa, and southeast Asia.
Every US-white leftist shitposter knows about the zaps, they know about catalonia, they know all that.
What they don't care to know is the people around them in person or the organizations fighting tooth and nail like we should be here in the "western world".
I don't disagree with a lot of this, but I think it falls into black and white thinking at times that is simply inaccurate.
For example you speak of anarchists as "never building, never creating" and say that we act as though the slogan is enough to bring about change - but that completely ignores the reality of over a century of small, local, decentralized ACTION in the form of mutual aid. Just because anarchists haven't taken power and formed an actual state (which would be rather a contradiction in terms) doesn't mean we haven't done countless things and impacted countless lives.
I think your realism has slid into a form of self-flagellation that is actually disconnected from reality. Not that your assessment of our future prospects isn't correct, but your conclusion of how we got here is (not correct).
To expand a bit more on this, I was a full time revolutionary activist for 7 years, and I finally quit because I had to face the reality that all my efforts in the world (actual organizing, not just talking) simply weren't having an effect on the wider society.
The problem isn't the failure of the left. Many of us have literally done everything we could, devoted years of our lives, our freedom, and even our very existence to the struggle for true change. The reason why that has failed is because most of humanity DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. A huge swath of society is willfully ignorant, narcissistic, bigoted and selfish, believing in hierarchy and domination because they truly believe themselves to be superior to others. And much of the rest are wounded children in adult bodies, wanting to be led and refusing to take any responsibility for doing what is best for humanity as a whole.
Yes, those same people are exploited, brainwashed, uneducated and traumatized, and that's not their fault. But what IS their fault is the fact that they continually choose to act to destroy themselves and everyone around them. Our entire modern culture is deeply diseased and our psyches have been infected with a psycho-spiritual sickness, and those few who sincerely do the work to free themselves from it's grip simply aren't enough to turn the tide, to steer the human herd away from the cliff it's dragging us all towards.
You're literally blaming this fate on those who have tried the hardest to change it.
Ditto to everything you’ve said. These same ideas came to mind when I read the article. I’ve never encountered organizations that acknowledge deep human history and recognize our current arrangement as such an extreme outlier. True opposition means understanding that we are no different from those who organized society differently for 99.99999% of history. Like them, we can walk away from systems that fail to improve our lives or make us less free. A society that deprives people of life and liberty isn’t a society at all. Those who aren’t better off within it have no reason to stay—they should walk away and refuse to be exploited.
Great comment. Leftism will always fail because it is an idealistic, utopic project. Given all it's flaws and weaknesses the human animal is incapable of bringing a utopia into being and history shows time and again how every attempt to do so leads to a hell on earth. "Another world is possible" yeah maybe, but in reality there is and will only ever be the world of the here and now that we inhabit. We have to address the world as it is, not as we think it ought to be. The drive for a socialist utopia led to Stalin's Russia, mass starvation, gulags and so on. I remember leftists in the eighties justifying what went on in communist Eastern Europe and Russia as a 'necessary' stage on the way to a proper socialist society.
Oh and another reason leftists always lose is down to the amount of time spent arguing and squabbling among themselves. Ironic that Leftists are invariably incapable of putting differences aside in order to work together for a common purpose.
Perhaps leftism is too utopian for the CURRENT (toxic) state of humanity. But it's important to remember that at it's core leftism is seeking a return to the old ways of living and relating before humanity took this dark turn. Because if you look at all of human existence as a species, we lived in a communistic way for 99.999999% of it. And obviously successfully too, or we wouldn't have evolved and survived over the past half a million years.
It's only been in the past few thousand years that humanity has "experimented" with large settlements, agriculture, empire and domination - and in each case that it's been tried, it's quickly failed (relative to the length of time indigenous cultures remained stable, which extends back to the last ice age in many cases). So in truth, it's the conservative ideals of hierarchy, empire, and the nation state that is utopian, creating constant wars and famines and instability everywhere those things have been tried.
Hell, capitalism is responsible for a freaking mass extinction event (the 6th in all of our planets' history), and is putting the very future of our survival as a species at risk. Yes it's been dominant while it's been around (because it's designed to eliminate any threat to itself very effectively) but as far as systems go it is already on it's last legs and it's only been a few hundred years.
So I would argue that the problem isn't that leftism is too utopian, it's that this culture is too far gone to return to the utopian norm that humanity had previously always known, without first experiencing a collapse to free it's stranglehold on our species.
As to your last point, that's a fair criticism when it happens but that only ever describes a certain section of leftists (the ideological fundamentalists). I've been a leftist my entire adult life and I was active in organizing for many years, and while my politics were revolutionary my entire organization constantly worked in coalitions with other leftists. So it's simply not true for all of us, or even most.
Depressingly accurate essay I 100% agree with-what’s more you could have been even more critical of the Soviet Union. By 1919-1920 any hope of socialism arising there had been crushed. But the analysis is spot on, at least of the Western left. There are some interesting movements in the global south doing good work and I think that’s where hope lies because we all know USians, especially white USians, are not doing shit. Ditto for Europeans/Australians/westerners in general.
Leftist politics are the politics of affluence, of luxury. When the luxury leaves a model, the left is lost and then left behind.
All this too will pass. "Progress" as a linear trajectory is and always has been a myth. In all things there is only ever the constant rise and fall, ebb and flow, birth and death.
These tragic narratives are also a luxury. Soon enough we will have neither the energy, the time nor the patience for tragic narratives. Life will become very real again, and we will be busy just getting on with things.
To your first paragraph, I call bullshit. Leftist politics at their core are simply the desire to return to the freedom, autonomy, care and cooperation that humanity has known for 99.999999% of it's existence as a species. The systems of empire, control and domination that we currently live under are extreme aberrations that have only existed for a mere blip in human history. And the cycles of rise and fall that you describe have only ever been true for those aberrations (so-called "civilizations").
This is only true if your idea of "history" extends only to so-called civilized cultures over the past few thousand years. Expand your view to the literally countless cultures who such "history" prefers to ignore, and a very different picture emerges.
Thank you. I am tired of this stubborn idea that "humans can never have peace" like it's true. What, because Europe hasn't managed it in the past 2000 years that makes it an impossible pipe dream?
I wish people would engage with the idea of happiness. We say "you can't please everyone" and because we say it we assume it's true.
But we could. People just want a good life. It's not that hard.
(In case someone reading this goes to the obvious question: hello, I'm a volunteer farmer)
So my experience in organizing is new, but this feels like a perfect example of the very thing you're complaining about. It is our responsibility as a collective to rise to the occasion and support each other (an uphill battle) but it is also our individual responsibility to cement our values, fight for them, and create a future we can imagine being happy in. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. what the fuck else do you want to do?
Wrong emphasis: The Left hasn't failed the world, the Left has been succesfully bashed into pulp by a main stream media that has convinced its halfwitted audience that anything to the left of Genghis Khan is communism and hence shifted the Overton Window so far to the right that it destroys proper debate.
This was always the neoliberal plan and the Left were not prepared for it.
I do agree that the left is not built for this moment. A moment where fascism and authoritarianism has managed to co-opt the Zeitgeist. However, I think this has more to do with the technocratic billionaire class using AI to manipulate and control the public spaces. It barely gets mentioned That over 4.5 million people were thrown off the voting roles just in 2024. Eagle eye software and now eagle AI are busy, throwing even more people off the voting roles. We don’t think about how stacked the deck is against us. We have an electoral college. We have gerrymandering we have citizens united we have multiple propaganda outlets. We have a legalized bribery system we have foreign influence. We do not have free, free and fair elections
While I completely agree with the sentiment behind this piece, I have found that the issue is we're trying to fix global issues, without even bothering to check what our local communities could benefit from most (and 'local' is subjective as it can mean the community outside your front door, or the community you relate to the most). No one can solve every problem, and that is why we are losing. Because we all see the millions of issues and become stuck, unable to help in any of them. The greatest thing I have learned this year (and yes, I did only learn it this year, so no shade on anyone who hasn't learned it yet), is that we each need to choose one thing to focus on. If everyone focused on improving one thing in their community, we would strengthen and become unstoppable.
And yes, perhaps it is all meaningless with AI and war on the horizon - in fact, I generally believe everything is meaningless when you look at the big picture). But that's why we need to look at the small picture. Can you improve one person's life by collecting their groceries, sharing a skill, just talking to them to lessen the loneliness? If we stop believing that focusing on individual humans is worth doing, then yes, we have lost.
We are all tired, chiefly because of the lies, greed, ignorance, domination, violence and failure of humans to see the reality of Nature. AI is just another techno gadget that will distract us from reality. Our problems are serious, but they can be solved, if we want to.
I am not an anarchist, but to be fair, most people do not understand classical anarchism. I would recommend as a start, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), a collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin.
You might be surprised what he writes, chiefly that cooperation is the norm. Not competition. Humans are the one species that fail to understand this important, and I would add, essential, ingredient to successful adaptation.
The left has been totally gaslit by neoliberal media. And we’ve just let it happen. The problem is the ease with which MSM can do this and not spark defiance. There is nothing wrong with most lefties. It’s the vitriol on the right that captures the imagination of the unaligned younger generations.
I’m afraid AI will only drive us to the brink faster. It’s terrible for our planet. One 100-word ChatGPT translation uses 1 bottle of water. The energy required is astronomical, as well. Data centers will be the new environmental injustice that poor and POC will be impacted by that the rest of us just ignore. Fuck AI. As long as we function in a capitalist society, AI is not the answer.
Great piece though. I agree. We are completely divided and too busy grieving and arguing to come together. I fear it will take climate collapse before folks come together. Social media keeps us isolated and has changed the way we interact in community. Feeling pretty hopeless lately.
Nah , there was no “failure.” The war could never be won, as I’ve been saying since the late 80’s, Of course, nobody wanted to hear it then, and though a few more may be open to the truths in macrofutilism now as in the stunning appearance and popularity of r/collapse, none of us should write for money or acclaim, because boy will we be disappointed.
I bet that was really cathartic to write. I bet it feels really nice to finally say it. But doing nothing? Really? Or rather: Why?
Why spread the doom with nothing to combat it? You're painting a subjective picture that actually isn't factual.
We're out here growing the regenerative gardens already. We're getting ready too, under the surface. Just because you haven't been used to seeing the Alternative, the Next Thing, because you've been caught up in tearing down without seeing the need to build doesn't mean that everyone else has been making the same choice.
We are out here creating fertile, drought resistant soil to feed us all. We are gathering people with abilities that can withstand it all. We are not putting our faith in a corrupt, capitalist political system and instead are living in a parallel society.
You'll find us if the need comes. Look for green forest in places where trees did not use to grow. They can cut down our old sacred spaces, we will build new ones on top of their toxic heaps while mourning, healthily, and generating ever more resistance. We are like the gentle moss growing in places you don't expect.
Stop looking at their circus. They're trying to make you feel despair. If you don't dare to dream you won't have the energy to survive. Don't fall into their traps anymore. Democracy is dead, that's why you're an anarchist in the first place. Because you know better. Don't feed the beast.
There are so many of us. The capacity to feed others grows and grows. It won't be perfect if we have to be an opposition to the status quo, but it will be good enough. We have doctors, we have scientists, we have biologists and do many others. And the rest of us are gardening and planting and there will be enough.
"The little power we had vanishes—we should use it while we wield it."
Yes, we should. What's holding you back from wielding your power today? Whatever it is--fear, depression, frustration, apathy--put it aside for the moment and just wield your power. Do something. Anything. Just do it.
The Economic Blackout Tour began today with the boycotts of large corporations. Let's keep the blackout going and use what economic power we have to bash the billionaires over the head and break their lovely evil capitalist endeavors into zillions of tiny pieces. It's worth a try, isn't it?
It Seems to me the problem is that the 'progressive' left 'won'.... All sorts of progressive notions around equality, diversity, etc are dominant ideas now... . Sure the corporations were always there, but they just followed the power, and the target of thier propaghanda. Somehow, so many progressives have abondonned free speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent, personal privacy, etc as values. . As long as these things target the bad people with the bad ideas! They fell for the easy scapegoats, attacked them, blamed them... Enraged them, and provided powerfully angry mass of the population the right will take full advantage of. And now the classic fascists of yore are in power, and will define 'misinformation' to fit thier purpose.
Talk to people, especially those different from yourself. Make a half an attempt to understand thier perspective. Quite a few people are interested in living in Ursula K. LeGuin's ideal world, defined simply as one where one gets to decide what happens to ones body...
No progressive has abandoned the values of free speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and personal privacy. That's only true in your own head. We just don't define free speech as a Nazis right to make everyone else feel unsafe, or bodily autonomy as the right to refuse basic public health measures like wearing a fucking mask during a fucking pandemic.
Right, so as i said, as long as you get to decide what sort of speech makes others feel 'unsafe', and what defines a 'basic public health measure', you care not at all about these vital, basic freedoms.
And it's both science and common sense that a mask minimizes infection from airborne diseases. Only a selfish ignorant fool would deny that basic fact.
You mean such folk as Angers Tegnell, The Cochrane Review, not to mention the head of my local cdc equivalent, and pretty much all of them about five years ago?
I was trapped in a very small box for some time when i was very small, feeling trapped can give me a panic attack.
The CDC quickly changed their recommendations because they were outdated and not applicable for an airborne pandemic. Yet another bad faith argument. Nice try though!
So, what actually happened: Initially, it was 'known' that masks were not effective. This is what the experts said, and this was based on a few decades of research that found masks were not effective at stopping the transmission of flu-like illness. Surely you remember 'my mask doesn't protect me, it protects you'? This was based on the idea that a surgical mask might reduce droplet spread, believed to be how covid was spread. One of the initial criticisms of masks was that covid was likely airborne, surgical masks were not going to do anything to stop that, being (obviously) designed as a physical barrier to keep junk from the faces of people performing surgery from getting into their patients, not at all to stop the spread of viruses...
At first, when masking was proposed, it was with the caveat that it was important that people that have difficulty wearing them not be forced to do so. Being claustrophobic, I wasn't worried, and assumed people would remain decent to people like me and follow such a common sense approach. When it was clear that was no longer in the cards, I started reading all the masking studies I could, thinking I might 'logic' myself into some way where wearing one would be less of a nightmare.
So I read dozens of masking studies. Have you read many? All those studies that apparently 'proved' the scientific consensus has been wrong for decades actually turned out to be either observational studies, mechanical studies, or studies based on models. These types of studies are considered 'low-quality' evidence for good reason. Observational studies are very prone to bias, this is well known.
One of first big studies 'proving masks work' was done on US states, showing introduction of mask mandates reduced covid infections by 'x' amount. It certainly sounded good, even tho it was an observational study. My partner, who happens to be an epidemiologist, took the data from that study and graphed it for each state. In nearly every single case, mask mandates were introduced AFTER the peak of infections, and continued to do so at the same rate. There was no inflection point related to the introduction of mandates. Sure, infections decreased after mandates were introduced, but at the same rate they were already decreasing, so it is VERY unlikely that decrease was actually because of masks. Many people produced these sorts of graphs all thru the pandemic... showing a fairly consistent complete lack of correlation between the introduction of mandates and the number of infections/rate of change.
Another study in Canada looked better, using areas much smaller than states. But it was done in the context of very low infection rates, used very complex statistics in it's methods. And the authors stated right in the discussion that the reason they did the study was that since there was limited evidence supporting mask effectiveness, they did the study to provide that evidence... remember the trouble with bias in observational studies? Usually the authors don't make their very strong bias quite so obvious....
Yet another study widely touted as proof, I saw even the lead researcher of a huge mask model say this study was a huge deal because it showed great mask effectiveness against sars-cov-2. Obviously the fellow had not read the paper his grad students were using... at was a really good study, but it was done before covid... the sars virus in the study was the cold virus we all know, and the study actually had three arms, the other two with RSV and the flu virus. Only one of three arms showed any mask effectiveness at all. Another study he claimed was a big deal and added to their model because it showed a large mask effectiveness turned out to be not a very large number of people, who had responded to questionnaires... there was a very small number of people actually infected, so the relative effectiveness appeared very large.
All those model studies made grand predictions based upon these studies, that masking would reduce infections by huge amounts... yet this never actually happened in the real world, in many places, cases skyrocketed, despite widespread masking....
I could go on, but we have that Cochrane review, y'know the 'gold standard' of evidence based medicine'? They did what they always do, looked at the best avail evidence, and concluded based upon that evidence that "masks probably don't work, but confidence in the conclusion is not high because very little high quality research has been done to date".
Bad faith argument? I mean your claim above isn't actually correct. Maybe you just misremembered? Or haven't looked into it all that closely yourself, perhaps?
The one time I've swung a fist with full force and follow thru to another's face was a pretty good one, no doubt satisfying in a way...fucker called me names, shoved me down, my things strewn into the dirt. Y, I put him down, lots of blood, tooth thru his lip. 'Tis true no one bullied me for being short and small ever again.
Yet ten minutes after the event, I was sobbing with anguish and confusion.... Why did I do that? What might happen if I really let loose...? What terror to consider what I might do were I just one member of a mob...
What worries me is that it would seem you worry only about your own face, while quite unwilling the contemplate the damage done by your own fists.
Perhaps not the most pithy aphorism one might offer. Why swing your fists a'tall? I can't imagine this is a particularly efficient mode with which to communicate one's ideas and meaning to others.
Personally, this is why I speak with my words, and not with my fists. I've found ears and eyes useful tools for the purpose as well. I highly recommend you try it out!
Swinging your fist at someone's face in self-defense, to stop them from attacking you, is not what I meant and you know it. And how the hell can you possibly equate requiring people to temporarily wear masks with swinging a fist at their face? Bad faith argument all around, and if that's all you've got in response then you clearly have nothing.
No culture on earth except the US considers the protection of hate speech to be an integral part of free speech. The reason is that as important as freedom of speech is, it's not about "freedom TO (say whatever you want)" but rather "freedom FROM (oppressive government censorship)."
If someone is choosing to publicly attack and verbally oppress other people and are prevented from doing so, they are not victims but oppressors, and other people's right to exist FREE FROM their verbal attacks trumps their FREEDOM TO engage in those attacks.
What i refer to specifically was the the collusion of corporations and governments to censor opinions and ideas and research, and the public demands for such. Hate speech is something else, but 'what makes others feel unsafe', who defines that?
Oh come on. You are seriously arguing that we can't know what speech qualifies as hate because feeling unsafe is subjective? Seriously?? At this point you're just a Nazi apologist.
You’ve written a eulogy for a revolution that never really tried to fight. You’ve diagnosed the disease, mapped every malignant cell of the rot, and then sat down in the waiting room to let it run its course. We have failed, you say. We are ghosts, you say. And yet, here you are, still writing, still thinking, still feeling that ember of rage in your chest. That’s not failure, that’s an opportunity.
The so-called "Left" is not dead; it’s just been convinced that playing fair is the only way to win. It has been pacified, self-neutered, and trapped in an endless cycle of moral hand-wringing while the right builds its empire brick by brick. And instead of organizing, strategizing, and imposing consequences on power, we get... this. A beautifully written, poetic surrender note.
But here’s the thing: power does not care about your resignation. It only fears your action.
You talk about how capitalism eats everything. How it adapts. How it morphs. That is true. Capitalism is the Borg, it assimilates, repackages, and sells revolution back to you with a 30% markup. But if capitalism can adapt, so can we. If the right can build institutions, so can we. If fascists can carve out spaces of power through relentless, strategic, unapologetic force, we can do the same.
The problem isn’t that revolution is impossible. The problem is that we stopped fighting like we meant it.
You say anarchism has no vision? Then write one and make people believe in it.
You say we don’t build? Then build something worth defending.
You say we’ve been co-opted? Then stop waiting to be invited to the table, flip the fucking thing over.
You lament how the system absorbs every act of rebellion and turns it into a commodity. So what? The answer is to create acts that it can’t absorb. Acts that impose real costs. Acts that don’t fit neatly into a marketing campaign. You want to fight capitalism? Then you have to make it feel pain.
History is not kind to people who wait. Every gain that workers, women, people of color, and marginalized communities have ever won has been taken by force. We forget that. We forget that the weekend, the vote, civil rights, bodily autonomy, none of it was handed down from above. It was ripped from the system’s grip by people who refused to sit around and pontificate about their own insignificance.
Yes, the right builds institutions. Yes, it organizes. Yes, it deploys its forces with surgical precision while we sit around making memes. But that is not an excuse to lie down and die. That is a blueprint.
What you call failure, I call dormancy. And dormancy only lasts until the right spark ignites it.
So I ask you: Are you ready to fight? Are we prepared to stop getting mired by the weight of imperfect ideas, and start crafting the plan for Project 2026?
I do find the essay a bit amusing, since it's so euro/US centric inspired of its half-hearted mentions of the USSR's demise (which isn't nearly as clean as people make it out to be) and total lack of acknowledgement on the movements in South America, Africa, and southeast Asia.
Every US-white leftist shitposter knows about the zaps, they know about catalonia, they know all that.
What they don't care to know is the people around them in person or the organizations fighting tooth and nail like we should be here in the "western world".
I don't disagree with a lot of this, but I think it falls into black and white thinking at times that is simply inaccurate.
For example you speak of anarchists as "never building, never creating" and say that we act as though the slogan is enough to bring about change - but that completely ignores the reality of over a century of small, local, decentralized ACTION in the form of mutual aid. Just because anarchists haven't taken power and formed an actual state (which would be rather a contradiction in terms) doesn't mean we haven't done countless things and impacted countless lives.
I think your realism has slid into a form of self-flagellation that is actually disconnected from reality. Not that your assessment of our future prospects isn't correct, but your conclusion of how we got here is (not correct).
To expand a bit more on this, I was a full time revolutionary activist for 7 years, and I finally quit because I had to face the reality that all my efforts in the world (actual organizing, not just talking) simply weren't having an effect on the wider society.
The problem isn't the failure of the left. Many of us have literally done everything we could, devoted years of our lives, our freedom, and even our very existence to the struggle for true change. The reason why that has failed is because most of humanity DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. A huge swath of society is willfully ignorant, narcissistic, bigoted and selfish, believing in hierarchy and domination because they truly believe themselves to be superior to others. And much of the rest are wounded children in adult bodies, wanting to be led and refusing to take any responsibility for doing what is best for humanity as a whole.
Yes, those same people are exploited, brainwashed, uneducated and traumatized, and that's not their fault. But what IS their fault is the fact that they continually choose to act to destroy themselves and everyone around them. Our entire modern culture is deeply diseased and our psyches have been infected with a psycho-spiritual sickness, and those few who sincerely do the work to free themselves from it's grip simply aren't enough to turn the tide, to steer the human herd away from the cliff it's dragging us all towards.
You're literally blaming this fate on those who have tried the hardest to change it.
Ditto to everything you’ve said. These same ideas came to mind when I read the article. I’ve never encountered organizations that acknowledge deep human history and recognize our current arrangement as such an extreme outlier. True opposition means understanding that we are no different from those who organized society differently for 99.99999% of history. Like them, we can walk away from systems that fail to improve our lives or make us less free. A society that deprives people of life and liberty isn’t a society at all. Those who aren’t better off within it have no reason to stay—they should walk away and refuse to be exploited.
Great comment. Leftism will always fail because it is an idealistic, utopic project. Given all it's flaws and weaknesses the human animal is incapable of bringing a utopia into being and history shows time and again how every attempt to do so leads to a hell on earth. "Another world is possible" yeah maybe, but in reality there is and will only ever be the world of the here and now that we inhabit. We have to address the world as it is, not as we think it ought to be. The drive for a socialist utopia led to Stalin's Russia, mass starvation, gulags and so on. I remember leftists in the eighties justifying what went on in communist Eastern Europe and Russia as a 'necessary' stage on the way to a proper socialist society.
Oh and another reason leftists always lose is down to the amount of time spent arguing and squabbling among themselves. Ironic that Leftists are invariably incapable of putting differences aside in order to work together for a common purpose.
Perhaps leftism is too utopian for the CURRENT (toxic) state of humanity. But it's important to remember that at it's core leftism is seeking a return to the old ways of living and relating before humanity took this dark turn. Because if you look at all of human existence as a species, we lived in a communistic way for 99.999999% of it. And obviously successfully too, or we wouldn't have evolved and survived over the past half a million years.
It's only been in the past few thousand years that humanity has "experimented" with large settlements, agriculture, empire and domination - and in each case that it's been tried, it's quickly failed (relative to the length of time indigenous cultures remained stable, which extends back to the last ice age in many cases). So in truth, it's the conservative ideals of hierarchy, empire, and the nation state that is utopian, creating constant wars and famines and instability everywhere those things have been tried.
Hell, capitalism is responsible for a freaking mass extinction event (the 6th in all of our planets' history), and is putting the very future of our survival as a species at risk. Yes it's been dominant while it's been around (because it's designed to eliminate any threat to itself very effectively) but as far as systems go it is already on it's last legs and it's only been a few hundred years.
So I would argue that the problem isn't that leftism is too utopian, it's that this culture is too far gone to return to the utopian norm that humanity had previously always known, without first experiencing a collapse to free it's stranglehold on our species.
As to your last point, that's a fair criticism when it happens but that only ever describes a certain section of leftists (the ideological fundamentalists). I've been a leftist my entire adult life and I was active in organizing for many years, and while my politics were revolutionary my entire organization constantly worked in coalitions with other leftists. So it's simply not true for all of us, or even most.
Depressingly accurate essay I 100% agree with-what’s more you could have been even more critical of the Soviet Union. By 1919-1920 any hope of socialism arising there had been crushed. But the analysis is spot on, at least of the Western left. There are some interesting movements in the global south doing good work and I think that’s where hope lies because we all know USians, especially white USians, are not doing shit. Ditto for Europeans/Australians/westerners in general.
Leftist politics are the politics of affluence, of luxury. When the luxury leaves a model, the left is lost and then left behind.
All this too will pass. "Progress" as a linear trajectory is and always has been a myth. In all things there is only ever the constant rise and fall, ebb and flow, birth and death.
These tragic narratives are also a luxury. Soon enough we will have neither the energy, the time nor the patience for tragic narratives. Life will become very real again, and we will be busy just getting on with things.
To your first paragraph, I call bullshit. Leftist politics at their core are simply the desire to return to the freedom, autonomy, care and cooperation that humanity has known for 99.999999% of it's existence as a species. The systems of empire, control and domination that we currently live under are extreme aberrations that have only existed for a mere blip in human history. And the cycles of rise and fall that you describe have only ever been true for those aberrations (so-called "civilizations").
Actually if you look at history its always consisted of a few people using violence or the threat of to subdue and coerce the majority.
This is only true if your idea of "history" extends only to so-called civilized cultures over the past few thousand years. Expand your view to the literally countless cultures who such "history" prefers to ignore, and a very different picture emerges.
Yes that´s a fair point. Thanks for responding.
Thank you. I am tired of this stubborn idea that "humans can never have peace" like it's true. What, because Europe hasn't managed it in the past 2000 years that makes it an impossible pipe dream?
I wish people would engage with the idea of happiness. We say "you can't please everyone" and because we say it we assume it's true.
But we could. People just want a good life. It's not that hard.
(In case someone reading this goes to the obvious question: hello, I'm a volunteer farmer)
So my experience in organizing is new, but this feels like a perfect example of the very thing you're complaining about. It is our responsibility as a collective to rise to the occasion and support each other (an uphill battle) but it is also our individual responsibility to cement our values, fight for them, and create a future we can imagine being happy in. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. what the fuck else do you want to do?
Wrong emphasis: The Left hasn't failed the world, the Left has been succesfully bashed into pulp by a main stream media that has convinced its halfwitted audience that anything to the left of Genghis Khan is communism and hence shifted the Overton Window so far to the right that it destroys proper debate.
This was always the neoliberal plan and the Left were not prepared for it.
I do agree that the left is not built for this moment. A moment where fascism and authoritarianism has managed to co-opt the Zeitgeist. However, I think this has more to do with the technocratic billionaire class using AI to manipulate and control the public spaces. It barely gets mentioned That over 4.5 million people were thrown off the voting roles just in 2024. Eagle eye software and now eagle AI are busy, throwing even more people off the voting roles. We don’t think about how stacked the deck is against us. We have an electoral college. We have gerrymandering we have citizens united we have multiple propaganda outlets. We have a legalized bribery system we have foreign influence. We do not have free, free and fair elections
While I completely agree with the sentiment behind this piece, I have found that the issue is we're trying to fix global issues, without even bothering to check what our local communities could benefit from most (and 'local' is subjective as it can mean the community outside your front door, or the community you relate to the most). No one can solve every problem, and that is why we are losing. Because we all see the millions of issues and become stuck, unable to help in any of them. The greatest thing I have learned this year (and yes, I did only learn it this year, so no shade on anyone who hasn't learned it yet), is that we each need to choose one thing to focus on. If everyone focused on improving one thing in their community, we would strengthen and become unstoppable.
And yes, perhaps it is all meaningless with AI and war on the horizon - in fact, I generally believe everything is meaningless when you look at the big picture). But that's why we need to look at the small picture. Can you improve one person's life by collecting their groceries, sharing a skill, just talking to them to lessen the loneliness? If we stop believing that focusing on individual humans is worth doing, then yes, we have lost.
We are all tired, chiefly because of the lies, greed, ignorance, domination, violence and failure of humans to see the reality of Nature. AI is just another techno gadget that will distract us from reality. Our problems are serious, but they can be solved, if we want to.
I am not an anarchist, but to be fair, most people do not understand classical anarchism. I would recommend as a start, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), a collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin.
You might be surprised what he writes, chiefly that cooperation is the norm. Not competition. Humans are the one species that fail to understand this important, and I would add, essential, ingredient to successful adaptation.
The left has been totally gaslit by neoliberal media. And we’ve just let it happen. The problem is the ease with which MSM can do this and not spark defiance. There is nothing wrong with most lefties. It’s the vitriol on the right that captures the imagination of the unaligned younger generations.
I’m afraid AI will only drive us to the brink faster. It’s terrible for our planet. One 100-word ChatGPT translation uses 1 bottle of water. The energy required is astronomical, as well. Data centers will be the new environmental injustice that poor and POC will be impacted by that the rest of us just ignore. Fuck AI. As long as we function in a capitalist society, AI is not the answer.
Great piece though. I agree. We are completely divided and too busy grieving and arguing to come together. I fear it will take climate collapse before folks come together. Social media keeps us isolated and has changed the way we interact in community. Feeling pretty hopeless lately.
Nah , there was no “failure.” The war could never be won, as I’ve been saying since the late 80’s, Of course, nobody wanted to hear it then, and though a few more may be open to the truths in macrofutilism now as in the stunning appearance and popularity of r/collapse, none of us should write for money or acclaim, because boy will we be disappointed.
I bet that was really cathartic to write. I bet it feels really nice to finally say it. But doing nothing? Really? Or rather: Why?
Why spread the doom with nothing to combat it? You're painting a subjective picture that actually isn't factual.
We're out here growing the regenerative gardens already. We're getting ready too, under the surface. Just because you haven't been used to seeing the Alternative, the Next Thing, because you've been caught up in tearing down without seeing the need to build doesn't mean that everyone else has been making the same choice.
We are out here creating fertile, drought resistant soil to feed us all. We are gathering people with abilities that can withstand it all. We are not putting our faith in a corrupt, capitalist political system and instead are living in a parallel society.
You'll find us if the need comes. Look for green forest in places where trees did not use to grow. They can cut down our old sacred spaces, we will build new ones on top of their toxic heaps while mourning, healthily, and generating ever more resistance. We are like the gentle moss growing in places you don't expect.
Stop looking at their circus. They're trying to make you feel despair. If you don't dare to dream you won't have the energy to survive. Don't fall into their traps anymore. Democracy is dead, that's why you're an anarchist in the first place. Because you know better. Don't feed the beast.
There are so many of us. The capacity to feed others grows and grows. It won't be perfect if we have to be an opposition to the status quo, but it will be good enough. We have doctors, we have scientists, we have biologists and do many others. And the rest of us are gardening and planting and there will be enough.
"The little power we had vanishes—we should use it while we wield it."
Yes, we should. What's holding you back from wielding your power today? Whatever it is--fear, depression, frustration, apathy--put it aside for the moment and just wield your power. Do something. Anything. Just do it.
The Economic Blackout Tour began today with the boycotts of large corporations. Let's keep the blackout going and use what economic power we have to bash the billionaires over the head and break their lovely evil capitalist endeavors into zillions of tiny pieces. It's worth a try, isn't it?
Power to the people!
That was the roast I have been waiting for 🤣🤣🤣👏👏👏
It Seems to me the problem is that the 'progressive' left 'won'.... All sorts of progressive notions around equality, diversity, etc are dominant ideas now... . Sure the corporations were always there, but they just followed the power, and the target of thier propaghanda. Somehow, so many progressives have abondonned free speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent, personal privacy, etc as values. . As long as these things target the bad people with the bad ideas! They fell for the easy scapegoats, attacked them, blamed them... Enraged them, and provided powerfully angry mass of the population the right will take full advantage of. And now the classic fascists of yore are in power, and will define 'misinformation' to fit thier purpose.
Talk to people, especially those different from yourself. Make a half an attempt to understand thier perspective. Quite a few people are interested in living in Ursula K. LeGuin's ideal world, defined simply as one where one gets to decide what happens to ones body...
No progressive has abandoned the values of free speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and personal privacy. That's only true in your own head. We just don't define free speech as a Nazis right to make everyone else feel unsafe, or bodily autonomy as the right to refuse basic public health measures like wearing a fucking mask during a fucking pandemic.
Right, so as i said, as long as you get to decide what sort of speech makes others feel 'unsafe', and what defines a 'basic public health measure', you care not at all about these vital, basic freedoms.
And it's both science and common sense that a mask minimizes infection from airborne diseases. Only a selfish ignorant fool would deny that basic fact.
You mean such folk as Angers Tegnell, The Cochrane Review, not to mention the head of my local cdc equivalent, and pretty much all of them about five years ago?
I was trapped in a very small box for some time when i was very small, feeling trapped can give me a panic attack.
The CDC quickly changed their recommendations because they were outdated and not applicable for an airborne pandemic. Yet another bad faith argument. Nice try though!
O really? On what evidence was that?
So, what actually happened: Initially, it was 'known' that masks were not effective. This is what the experts said, and this was based on a few decades of research that found masks were not effective at stopping the transmission of flu-like illness. Surely you remember 'my mask doesn't protect me, it protects you'? This was based on the idea that a surgical mask might reduce droplet spread, believed to be how covid was spread. One of the initial criticisms of masks was that covid was likely airborne, surgical masks were not going to do anything to stop that, being (obviously) designed as a physical barrier to keep junk from the faces of people performing surgery from getting into their patients, not at all to stop the spread of viruses...
At first, when masking was proposed, it was with the caveat that it was important that people that have difficulty wearing them not be forced to do so. Being claustrophobic, I wasn't worried, and assumed people would remain decent to people like me and follow such a common sense approach. When it was clear that was no longer in the cards, I started reading all the masking studies I could, thinking I might 'logic' myself into some way where wearing one would be less of a nightmare.
So I read dozens of masking studies. Have you read many? All those studies that apparently 'proved' the scientific consensus has been wrong for decades actually turned out to be either observational studies, mechanical studies, or studies based on models. These types of studies are considered 'low-quality' evidence for good reason. Observational studies are very prone to bias, this is well known.
One of first big studies 'proving masks work' was done on US states, showing introduction of mask mandates reduced covid infections by 'x' amount. It certainly sounded good, even tho it was an observational study. My partner, who happens to be an epidemiologist, took the data from that study and graphed it for each state. In nearly every single case, mask mandates were introduced AFTER the peak of infections, and continued to do so at the same rate. There was no inflection point related to the introduction of mandates. Sure, infections decreased after mandates were introduced, but at the same rate they were already decreasing, so it is VERY unlikely that decrease was actually because of masks. Many people produced these sorts of graphs all thru the pandemic... showing a fairly consistent complete lack of correlation between the introduction of mandates and the number of infections/rate of change.
Another study in Canada looked better, using areas much smaller than states. But it was done in the context of very low infection rates, used very complex statistics in it's methods. And the authors stated right in the discussion that the reason they did the study was that since there was limited evidence supporting mask effectiveness, they did the study to provide that evidence... remember the trouble with bias in observational studies? Usually the authors don't make their very strong bias quite so obvious....
Yet another study widely touted as proof, I saw even the lead researcher of a huge mask model say this study was a huge deal because it showed great mask effectiveness against sars-cov-2. Obviously the fellow had not read the paper his grad students were using... at was a really good study, but it was done before covid... the sars virus in the study was the cold virus we all know, and the study actually had three arms, the other two with RSV and the flu virus. Only one of three arms showed any mask effectiveness at all. Another study he claimed was a big deal and added to their model because it showed a large mask effectiveness turned out to be not a very large number of people, who had responded to questionnaires... there was a very small number of people actually infected, so the relative effectiveness appeared very large.
All those model studies made grand predictions based upon these studies, that masking would reduce infections by huge amounts... yet this never actually happened in the real world, in many places, cases skyrocketed, despite widespread masking....
I could go on, but we have that Cochrane review, y'know the 'gold standard' of evidence based medicine'? They did what they always do, looked at the best avail evidence, and concluded based upon that evidence that "masks probably don't work, but confidence in the conclusion is not high because very little high quality research has been done to date".
Bad faith argument? I mean your claim above isn't actually correct. Maybe you just misremembered? Or haven't looked into it all that closely yourself, perhaps?
Another way of saying this is your right to swing your fist ends when it hits my face.
The one time I've swung a fist with full force and follow thru to another's face was a pretty good one, no doubt satisfying in a way...fucker called me names, shoved me down, my things strewn into the dirt. Y, I put him down, lots of blood, tooth thru his lip. 'Tis true no one bullied me for being short and small ever again.
Yet ten minutes after the event, I was sobbing with anguish and confusion.... Why did I do that? What might happen if I really let loose...? What terror to consider what I might do were I just one member of a mob...
What worries me is that it would seem you worry only about your own face, while quite unwilling the contemplate the damage done by your own fists.
Perhaps not the most pithy aphorism one might offer. Why swing your fists a'tall? I can't imagine this is a particularly efficient mode with which to communicate one's ideas and meaning to others.
Personally, this is why I speak with my words, and not with my fists. I've found ears and eyes useful tools for the purpose as well. I highly recommend you try it out!
Swinging your fist at someone's face in self-defense, to stop them from attacking you, is not what I meant and you know it. And how the hell can you possibly equate requiring people to temporarily wear masks with swinging a fist at their face? Bad faith argument all around, and if that's all you've got in response then you clearly have nothing.
I have no idea how this relates to what I have said above.
No culture on earth except the US considers the protection of hate speech to be an integral part of free speech. The reason is that as important as freedom of speech is, it's not about "freedom TO (say whatever you want)" but rather "freedom FROM (oppressive government censorship)."
If someone is choosing to publicly attack and verbally oppress other people and are prevented from doing so, they are not victims but oppressors, and other people's right to exist FREE FROM their verbal attacks trumps their FREEDOM TO engage in those attacks.
What i refer to specifically was the the collusion of corporations and governments to censor opinions and ideas and research, and the public demands for such. Hate speech is something else, but 'what makes others feel unsafe', who defines that?
Oh come on. You are seriously arguing that we can't know what speech qualifies as hate because feeling unsafe is subjective? Seriously?? At this point you're just a Nazi apologist.