(and no, I do not mean “support/found a futile attempt at third-party electoralism”)
Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, MLK, Assata Shakur, Helen Keller, Nina Simone, Lucy Parsons; none of these people were operating under the delusion that voting was the primary route to justice. There is an entire universe of political action that does not involve electoralism; direct action gets the goods.
(and no, this does not necessarily imply violence; strikes and sabotage and non-compliance and boycotts and…)
But evil is everywhere, and can be very good at being deceitful.
Like cops dressed up as hippies (wasn’t it the shoes that gave them away, or something like that?).
Ah yes, that quote. But how do we get the average citizen to care? Does it have to get so bad as to hurt them physically?
People are getting tired protesting this shit.
Note: The neighborhood concerned is not too far from where my father lived growing up in the 1930s. Same thing only worse is going on on the west side of Detroit, has been for ages.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
I realize that Messrs. Engels and Marx thought long and hard on this, but I don’t think they anticpated Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. And whoever’s in third place.
I don’t think Freddie and Karl were saying “this is how you get the middle class to give a shit”.
I think they were saying “if your strategy relies upon the middle class giving a shit than you’re almost certain to lose. Those fuckers are reliably unreliable.”
