But how come revolution?

until now thought slime videos have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change it this week we're going to be doing something a little different we're gonna focus on revolutionary strategy direct action and anarchist praxis for an entire month except for the last week of the month which will be a Halloween special so get ready for seditious September but thought slime you say it's October September was last month fuck your rules man do you let the calendar tell you what to think I follow my own calendar a revolutionary workers calendar where it's whatever month suits our revolutionary ideals so I ask you what do we want revolution when do we want it when the conditions arise specifically when the majority of the working-class body politic understands and upholds revolutionary ideals it's not it's not catchy but that's when we want that to happen so probably about now you might be a little freaked out because the word revolution conjures up some pretty dark images you might picture the guillotines rolling out mass murder the streets running red with blood I don't want the streets to run red with blood I don't want to hurt nobody I want the streets to run red with communism that being said any potential revolution will probably require violence at least defensive violence not because revolutionaries are violent or because we want revenge against the dicks who've been ruining the world we might have perfectly peaceful ambitions but the people in power aren't going to let go of that power without a fight and they also own a lot of guns and bombs and tanks and drones and chemical weapons and they control the police and military and all the fighter jets and tanks and nukes here's the thing though avoiding a revolution isn't a peaceful option either the state and capital wage a relentless and violent war against the rest of us to keep us pacified and profitable they take what they want and crush anyone who gets in their way most of the world is still trying to recover from centuries of colonial pillaging and now they have to deal with the greatest imperial war machine world has ever known bearing down upon them to make sure that they keep exporting oil cobalt bananas or whatever natural resources they have at prices low enough to enable rich countries like mine to live exorbitantly wasteful lifestyles like buying about 11% of the world's population lives without easy access to properly sanitary water but if I want to order a 12-pack with bottled water from Amazon CA despite having unlimited free clean water in my home I can have it delivered to me within two days for just $2.97 the water is brought to me by Nestle a company that probably uses child labor they can't say for sure whether or not they do and also doesn't believe water is a human right probably because they happen to profit off of the privatization of aquifers and sale of water as a commodity that's cool and normal in the United States there are about six vacant homes for every homeless person the only reason that anyone is homeless is because the state enforces an economic system that prioritizes someone's right to own unlimited homes and accumulate limitless wealth over someone else's right to have a roof over their head to survive a cold winter's night unless do you think we're coming for your beach house or whatever you ought to know that most vacant homes are the result of foreclosure meaning they're left to rot by banks because whoever lived in them couldn't pay up heaven forbid we take away houses from some rich asshole and give it to somebody who might literally die without it but the bank can throw you out of your home the second you stop paying them whatever extortionist price they've decided is fair truth is every single person that dies of exposure on the street every single person that starves to death when supermarkets are throwing out a third of their perfectly fine food every single person that dies from infection caused by unsanitary water every single person that succumbs to illness because they couldn't afford treatment have all been murdered murder is the status quo we could easily provide adequate food water shelter and clothing to every single person on earth with the resources we currently possess but we don't because withholding those things lets enormous multinational corporations make billions from our suffering ha thought slime you might say I read some bullshit by Steven Pinker actually everything is getting way better way fewer people are poor now the World Bank says only 10% of people are living below the poverty line the lowest number in human history obviously capitalism is pulling people out of poverty a little commie ingrate and and you know how they arrived at that number they decided that anyone that lived above the international poverty line which they also decided was a dollar ninety US a day wasn't living in poverty globally speaking they're not poor so if you make six hundred and ninety four dollars a year according to the World Bank you're not poor tell me does your monthly budget consist of more than fifty eight dollars and ninety cents the World Bank itself has suggested raising the number to five dollars and fifty cents u.s. a day roughly two thousand dollars a year a hundred and seventy month now if we use this still depressingly small figure more than half of the global population lives below the poverty line hey you know what else is weird roughly 1% of the population owns half of the wealth on the planet so half of the people on the planet are impoverished and half of the world's money belongs to a few people weird coincidence don't you think no matter what numbers they cook up to convince you otherwise the existence of rich people and massive wealth requires the existence of poor people and exploitation that wealth doesn't come from nowhere they didn't build it like they'd have you believe they took it from someone else as the saying goes every time someone gets a dollar that didn't work for someone else works for a dollar they didn't get in the face of this enormous cruelty this completely arbitrary waste of human life the bloodshed necessary to end it seems kind of trivial but no violence is trivial nobody should get hurt why do any violence why not just perform the government bit by bit and that way we don't have to worry about all this messy revolutionary business wouldn't that be better wouldn't that result in fewer people getting hurt couldn't we just regulate away these problems until they until it stops being bad and just for the sake of argument I'm going to put aside the issue of whether or not people are suffering and dying in the meantime while we fight for these regulations this position is called reform ISM and revolutionary leftists like me don't have a very positive view of it and I want to be clear here I'm using the word revolutionary leftist to mean leftist who wants a revolution not a leftist who has built a revolution there are two meanings to that word I'm not trying to give myself the cooler meaning of that word in a lot of ways reform versus revolution is a false dichotomy supporting small reforms doesn't preclude one from holding revolutionary ideals and having revolutionary ideals shouldn't mean that you oppose reforms that make people's lives less shitty I believe in having a diversity of tactics and I think taking some of the edge off of people suffering gives them a bigger window to participate in revolutionary action so I guess I'm like a reverse acceleration Asst that being said reform might help in some ways but it's never going to solve the problems of the state and capitalism because the methods of making these small reforms are entirely owned and controlled by the state and capital they will not allow themselves to be regulated out of existence they will not present us with a choice to vote on that represents a meaningful challenge to their power you can maybe pass a regulation that raises the minimum wage and I think that will be good I would support that but you're never going to somehow regulate away wage labor itself because that conflicts with the interests of capital and capital can exert a tremendous amount of power over the state to act in its interests you might notice that a lot of politicians are very very rich you might notice that neoliberal governments from parties on both sides of the aisle tend to install policymakers that come directly from major corporations you might notice that when capital has a crisis it feeds freely from the public trough with absolutely no Democratic oversight in 2008 the world was plunged into the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression and how did our leaders respond by bailing out the financial institutions that acted so recklessly with the world economy and giving them billions more dollars with virtually no strings attached and they funded it all by asking the rest of us to live with austerity you may believe government or any democratic government you can think of does the will of the people but that's not true policymakers are elected policy isn't those policymakers need funding they need media coverage they need all sorts of things that only the rich and powerful can provide even if they enter into politics with the best of intentions and they probably won't they either play the game or lose the people footing the bill aren't going to lend their support money or airtime to someone they can't get what they want out of that means even within supposedly free elections your choices are limited to whatever little issues don't truly affect the bottom line of the rich and powerful even if by some miracle the political will is raised to make a meaningful change there's absolutely nothing stopping the next thing is empower from reversing it there's also nothing stopping them from using the same reform process to suit their interests instead of yours dismantling whatever meager protections you've accumulated from them or just outright taking whatever they want from you several polls show seventy percent of people in the United States support Medicare for all that's a three to one ratio a higher percentage of Americans support Medicare for all then believe in evolution if their democracy truly reflected the will of the people why on earth with so many Democratic candidates including occasional racist grandpa frontrunner Joe Biden opposed it in fact why do Americans have to rely on the whims of elected officials to make the decision in the first place if these officials are meant to represent the people then the people have spoken what gives them the mandate to disobey and this is why a lot of anarchists will tell you that electoral politics and reform ISM are kind of a waste of time and energy they channel all the political will of the populace all of the anger all of the outrage all of the passion and funnel it towards avenues that are recuperated by capital now frankly I'm a bit of a moderate in this case I will generally hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil and I would encourage you to do the same but I don't believe that elect officials have much leeway or incentive to make things better they sure as hell have a lot of leeway and incentive to make things worse and to the best of her abilities I think it's important to mitigate that when possible but the ballot box is not the be-all end-all of political action getting to choose between two human-looking husks whose platforms have been carefully manicured by capital is not the best we can help for it's not the best we can do these institutions are enormous and overwhelmingly powerful but remember they get their power from us we fight their wars we grow their food they can't even scrub their toilets without us you hear that it's like some kind of scratching noise it's so loud that's driving me crazy it's deafening make it stop [Music] hello and welcome to the eyeball zone I come from a distant land where eyeballs reign victorious using the unlimited mystical power of eyeballs I grant boons to smaller lefty projects that need attention now Christopher Sabo is a pal of mine so maybe I'm a little bit biased here but it kind of butters my biscuits a little bit that they're putting out tons of terminally under eyeballed videos you want an turkeys theory they've got that you want to chill out and talk about retro games they got that too you want to talk about cartoons sure why not and here in seditious September I can think of no better video of theirs to highlight then organize today which outlines the importance of IRL real-life direct action they outline their frustrations with the online left and echo my frustrations with me myself personally it's the exact same sentiment that inspired seditious a temper in the first place now I can flap my mouth talking about anarchist watch my Kaulitz none of that means a hot toot if we're not out there in the streets so send your eyeballs their way and see some of their suggestions for how we can do that mark my words the eyeballs will return I have seen a grim portent a vision of the days to come a storm of eyeballs swallowing the land freeing their brethren from the skulls of the unworthy where you're going eyeballs don't need you to see this is probably the question I get more than any other aside from has anyone ever called you thought slime yes that yes they have and it's a very frustrating question because I really don't know what people want me to say the way that we win is by getting enough people to fight on our side it's the same way that any group wins a fight as for how we get people on our side I clearly don't know this is this is me trying to do that this is the best I can do oftentimes people will ask well how would anarchists do this or that thing and the answer is usually same way it's done now except more people will be involved in the decision-making process how would anarchists farm they put the seeds in the ground it's the same it's the same I don't understand the question it's kind of a weird situation to be in because someone will ask me a very vague question and I'll try to answer it and then look at mad that I didn't go into enough detail and thus in their mind dodged the question so allow me to answer about 90% of these questions categorically to make decisions people would vote for things if a certain task required a supervisor or manager of some kind that task would be assigned to her a callable delegate for as long as that was required if the position was always required and granted some sort of unfair privilege or powers to one person it could be rotated among a group of people now please I beg of you before you ask how a certain industry could work under Anarchy ask yourself what is the impediment that you believe anarchist principles present to this industry and did me saying those things already resolve that question but since we're on the topic of revolution I think there's one area where people get stuck on this the most the military how are we going to have a decentralized horizontal military military's requires strict obedience discipline and a rigidly enforced chain of command for some reason militaries require discipline and organization of course no one could dispute that that's just common sense and occasionally militaries will need someone to make decisions allowing that person to be decided by consensus could lead to problems so too could letting that person be decided by Fiat it's also pretty a historical to suggest that militaries must be centralized to have any sort of success you can look to centuries of indigenous resistance to colonization for examples of smaller decentralized militaries striking huge blows to larger more powerful groups with superior firepower and I want to be very careful when I say that in no way am I suggesting that these groups were anarchist I in no way claimed to be part of a shared ideological lineage with indigenous freedom fighters what I am saying is that modern-day anarchists should study and employ the tactics these groups used and you don't even have to look backwards in history to find examples indigenous people are leading the way right now in this struggle against the state on Capitol look at the work of water protectors you think there's a central command of water protectors in some smoky room somewhere where they're moving little wooden guys around on a map but we can look to history so I'm gonna do it anyway I'm gonna read verbatim from Peter Gill de luces anarchy works or rather this pamphlet that I got that's just the part about revolution and also is the same color as my green screen so it's glitching out right now where's my face where did I go even more impressive than the example provided by the Mac noticed is the victory won by several indigenous Nations in 1868 in a two-year war thousands of warriors from the Lakota and Cheyenne nations defeated the US military and destroyed several army forts during what became known as Red Cloud's war in 1866 the Lakota met with US government at Fort Laramie because the latter wanted permission to build a military trail through the Powder River country to facilitate the influx of white settlers who were seeking gold during the negotiations it became apparent that the US government had already started the process of building military forts along this trail without even having secured permission for the trail itself the Lakota war chief Red Cloud promised to resist any white attempts to occupy the area nonetheless in the summer of 1866 the US military began sending more troops to the region and constructing new forts in the summer of 1867 US troops with new repeating rifles fought the Lakota to a standstill and to battles but failed to carry out any successful offensives in the end they asked for peace talks which Red Cloud said he would only grant if the new military forts were a Benton and the US government agreed in the peace talks they recognized the rights of the Lakota to the Black Hills and Powder River Country a huge area currently occupied by the states of North Dakota South Dakota and Montana during the war the Lakota and Cheyenne organized without coercion or military discipline but contrary to typical dichotomies the relative lack of hierarchy did not hamper their ability for organization on the contrary they held together during a brutal war on the basis of a collective self-motivated discipline varying forms of organization in a Western Army the most important unit is the military police or the officer who walks behind the troops pistol loaded and ready to shoot anyone who turns and runs the Lakota and Cheyenne had no need for discipline imposed from above they were fighting to defend their land in their way of life in groups bound by kinship and affinity some fighting groups were structured with a chain of command while others operated in a more collective fashion but all of them voluntarily rallied around individuals with the best organizational abilities spiritual power and combat experience these war Chiefs did not control those who follow them so much as inspire them when morale was low or a fight looked hopeless groups of warriors often went home and they were always free to do so if a chief declared war he had to go but no one else did a leader who could not convince anyone to follow him to a war was engaging in an embarrassing and even suicidal venture in contrast politicians and Generals in Western society frequently start on popular Wars and they are never the ones to suffer the consequences lots of people will look over the history of anarchist revolutions see them get crushed and conclude that they were crushed because they didn't have sufficiently hierarchical militaries or whatever I would argue that these revolutions failed in spite of the advantages of their organizational methods not because of them I think the numerous accomplishments of groups like the Magna vests revolutionary Catalonia the Zapatistas or even non anarchist or libertarian socialist groups such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy demonstrate the resiliency of decentralized militaries even in the face of overwhelming odds even if most of them were eventually defeated it wasn't because their tactics were bad being decentralized allows the military to be more flexible keep fighting even when parts of it are destroyed the not have to worry about its command structure being knocked out because it doesn't take orders from a centralized body that is easy to capture or destroy and there also ain't nothing stopping them from establishing temporary and voluntary command structures to gain the advantages of hierarchical structures should the tactical need arise though I think that would probably happen far less than people might expect it's easy to imagine a scenario where a horizontally structured military will run into a problem is easy to imagine lots of things it's easy to imagine spider-man but what if people can't agree on a course of action in time to make some sort of critical maneuver what if everyone is deadlocked between two mutually exclusive possibilities what what if all of the people that are making the decision together are all misinformed and those are problems that we will end up having to deal with I don't want to pretend like I think there are easy answers I think the organizational model I am proposing does present logistical problems that we will need to find solutions for however we must keep in mind that there are just as many problems with a vertically organized military and more because what if the people in charge can't agree on a course of action in time to make some sort of critical maneuver what if the small group of people in charge are deadlocked between two mutually exclusive possibilities what if they're misinformed and for that matter if they make a bad call should their underlings just go with it do they disobey and just undermine the command structure that your military relies on or do they obey and risk wasting the lives of their comrades and resources what happens if the higher-ups are all captured and there's no clear successor who do you appoint what happens if they don't have the best interests of the general population in mind yeah they usually don't by the way what happens if just a few of them are in line with the enemy there are advantages and disadvantages to either tactic and all things being equal I put my money on the decision-making prowess of the entire community rather than handing it off to a few people and hoping they do what's best with it it's important for us to think about these things in advance but I don't think a revolution is coming anytime soon might not happen in our lifetime doesn't seem like most people agree with us doesn't seem like most people want a rev or at least they don't know that they want a revolution right now anyway that doesn't mean there's no revolutionary activity we can take part in at this moment and we'll talk about that during seditious September oh boy the end of another thoughts line video that's all the video you get this week right wrong did you know that I have another channel now called scaredy-cats where I talk about horror movies you can watch my first video about what is horror over there at youtube.com slash scaredy-cats TV youtube.com slash scaredy-cats was taken please go watch that I worked very hard on it and I would like you to see it thanks for watching and thank you because I assume you have clicked the like button and subscribe to me here on YouTube calm that was real swell yeah I really appreciate you doing that for me hey not to be a bother but did you know that I have a patreon at patreon.com slash thought slime that's where people go to give me money to keep these videos coming recently doubled my workload that's got to be worth something all of these drawings these that's people that gave me some money you can also get a little flat line paper toy you I also stream every Thursday at twitch.tv slash thought slime I'm on the road to becoming a twitch affiliate which will be very good for me this week we're playing only spooky games over at twitch because in addition to being seditious September it's also spook tober the spooky month of Halloween don't be scared it's me still

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 83,018

Rating: 4.9300065 out of 5

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Id: m-2xv5Yfehs

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/WatermelonWarlord]

A thing that bothers me when anarchists talk about the military is that they always talk about fighting in reactionary terms, where your military is fighting guerilla-style warfare.

Is that how you want to fight your wars? Even if it’s a valid and effective form of fighting, what nation wants to fight on its own turf like a rebel group in its own home?