At Last! The Left Rises!

It seems that everywhere you look around the world these days, the Left is gathering strength and taking the streets, often organizing and acting outside the constraints of standard-issue electoral politics. The issues they address are international, issues that the People can unite around worldwide: neoliberalism, austerity, fascism, militarism.

Everywhere except in the United States, that is. Here in the Evil Empire, what passes for even a merely "progressive" Left is turned inward, all about the "election", all about "beating Trump", pouring all of its available energy into getting one guy elected President. Said "sociailst" hero will, of course, once again — as in 2016 — cave at the Convention and endorse whatever vile-ass, useless centrist the Democrats want to serve up, and leave the Left with nothing.

Now, I didn't graduate PoliSci — I was just some hippie arts major — but it would seem to me their time and energy would be better spent breaking out of the prison of American electoral "democracy" and organizing and acting around the global issues and building international solidarity instead of pissing it all away on a process known to be compromised by capitalism, and rigged against the People.

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Yellow Jacket

In solidarity with the French revolutionaries of the Gilets Jaunes.

Much of the US Left points to the Gilets Jaunes as proof that protest works, but they couldn't be more wrong.

Protest doesn't work; insurrection does.

The Gilets Jaunes didn't put Macron on the run and achieve a rollback of the regressive "carbon tax" by putting on a big police-permitted march on a Saturday afternoon and returning to work on Monday; they did it by totally disrupting business as usual, by tearing up the streets and burning the motherfucker down, by making the posh shopping districts unshoppable, and making the country ungovernable week after week.

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