Hello. So this channel has so far been almost exclusively about nerd shit, movies and music because that’s the shit I like. And I wish we had built a world where I could just focus on that and have a good time, all the time. But that is not the world we live in. So, in the interest of clarity, I’m gonna lay it all out on front street. I’m an anarchistic. If you don’t know what that means (don’t worry there will be at least one video on it in the future all about it), to put it simply, I’m about as far left as you can get. I’m everything Fox News has warned your racist uncle about. So naturally, I’m not thrilled about another Trump term. Out of all the bad options, he’s the worst. But no president is ever gonna stop this channel from being a place that is explicitly antifacist, antiracist, pro queer, space for people who aren’t shitty. That’s the line in the sand, so if you can’t get behind that, fuck off. For those left (and I do mean left), let’s talk about what we are gonna do.
First off, I wanna talk to the liberals who might be here. And when I say liberal, I mean the centerist who are not revolutionary and would just like to see some reforms to the current system so we could “get back to the way things used to be”. I know you’re gong through it right now and I don’t want to dogpile. But your time is over. The system you are trying to save is the problem. The good times you want to go back to don’t exist and probably never really did, at least not for everyone. We have tried your way for at least as long as I’ve been alive and now we are here. An election every few years, reforms, and participation in a corrupt system will not save us. At most, electoral politics can gum up the works and slightly slow the march of fascism. The time for begging and asking nicely for a better world is over. We need to start building that world now, by any means.
Where to start? Well if you knew me outside of this channel I think you’d be able to guess what I’m about to say. I’m a big union guy. You spend a disgusting amount of your life at work and I’m willing to bet, it’s far from a democratic arrangement. A union is the way to even out the power imbalance between you, your fellow workers and your bosses. I’m co-chair of agitprop for my branch of the Industrail Workers of The World. The IWW is a revolutionary union that is less focused on organizing a single trade and more in the business of training you to help organize everyone into one big union. So, I may be biased (and a bad Agitprop co-chair) but, I’d recommend joining up and becoming a Wobbly, but really any union is better than no union. It really is one of the front lines in the fight against capitalism and can have a huge impact if done well. So find one that works for you and start talking to your coworkers behind your bosses back.
But a workplace union isn’t the only kind of union there is. If you’re one of the many, many, renters out there, you can also start a tenants union. It’s generally the same idea but instead of withholding your labor as leverage, you withhold your rent. Landlords are a parasite on society and we must do everything we can to starve them. Just like your boss makes money by exploiting your labor, your landlord makes money by exploiting your need to have shelter. If you need it to live (food, shelter, water, etc.), it shouldn’t cost money. These organizations, because they use one of the two languages a capitalist system understands, profit (the other being violence), makes it the other front line in the fight for a better world.
Both of these tactics have the same goal but also the same drawback. The end goal of course is to have such a build up of strikes that it leads to a general strike that starves the parasites of society enough to kill them off, so to speak. We have a saying in the organizing spaces. We are building a new world from the shell (or ashes) of the old. So all these disruptions and demands are not rooted in a general upheaval for the sake of chaos. Things need to drastically change, yes, but we aren’t trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I only say this because I know for some, the idea of revolution or any change is scary. But all this organizing and marching and strikes are to demand that, the people who should benefit from and be in charge of the world we create are the people who do the work to create the world, us.
But something that is scarier than change, at least for a lot of folks I know, is the main drawback for all these tactics of organizing. That is that, you’re gonna have to talk to people. Not just online in your bubble but to your coworkers, your neighbors, strangers. We have to build genuine relationships with people. It’s the only way to figure out who has your back and who you can organize with. You can preach theory at people till the end of time but it is infinitely easier to build solidarity if you like each other. And on the flip side, much easier to dismiss and ignore folks that are strangers to you. You aren’t gonna like everyone or agree with everything others think. Some people are too far gone and I’m no hippie here to tell you that you just need to love them enough for them to change. But you won’t be able to make it through the coming years alone. So find your crowd. I don’t like it either. I’m a vampire loner type too. Why do you think I’m talking to you over the internet? But it’s gotta be done. This new world can only come about and last as a mass movement and mass movements need the masses.
One thing I can already tell you about those conversations is you’re gonna find that most everyone is struggling. Being alive is too expensive and everyone is one missed check away from their life completely falling apart. This is where the next thing, and probably the most empowering thing, you can do comes in, mutual aid. The idea of a strike or any disruption to the delicate balance of their life is impossible when it could get you fired, evicted or worse. The powers that be have sent the last 50 years dismantling the social safety net so no one has the energy or inclination to do anything but survive. So we have to build our own support systems outside of the official systems and, to put it simply, take care of each other. Free food, rent parties, childcare, skill trades, tool sharing, transportation. All these things we can do for each other and make it easier for people to take risk. Capitalism has turned all these things and more into commodities that exist solely to turn profit. We need to do it because, to put it simply, it’s good to take care of people. I think you’ll find too that, after some initial awkwardness, you’ll find something all of us have been lacking in this modern age, community. So after talking to folks around you and figuring out what everyone needs, join or start a mutual aid network and start helping. All these years you’ve been giving your power away in the voting booth to people who do not give a single shit about you. Stop waiting for permission to build a better world and get out there. The less we rely on the power structures we have today, the less power they have. Like Tinkerbell, if we all stop applauding, they’ll die out.
Most of this so far has been targeted at people shocked by the election result and searching for a different way forward. But now I want to talk to all the folks like me out there who have been radicals a long time. Look, I know it’s hard but this is not the time for a told you so’s or for any “I’m more left wing than you” dick measuring contest. No one wants to join a revolution full of self righteous pricks. I think all the late night host have proved we are not gonna lecture and ridicule our way out of this. No Reddit thread comment or sick subtweet is gonna destroy the fascist threat. We also have to accept not everyone is gonna read Marx and Lenin or Goldman and Kropotkin for that matter. It’s our job to know the theory so well that we can break it down in simple and effective strategies and messaging for folks who don’t want to read 170 year old dry ass tomes. FD Signifier has a great new video that I’ll link below that explains this better than I probably can but we must be making our own cool art, podcast and communities. We need to lead the masses to revolution but we gotta have fun doing it. Joy is in itself an act of resistance. So let’s wait until after we’ve stomped out the fascist to start telling the liberals that we could have had our better world 20 years earlier if they listened to us. For now, we got work to do.
So in case you needed to know where me and this channel stand, this is it. I hold only a few simple maxims close to try and find my way through this increasingly hostile world. One, no one has the inherent right to rule over another. No kings, no presidents, no bosses. You are your own authority, so act like it. Two, all power should be limited and temporary. Power itself is illegitimate until proven legitimate. For example, say you wanted to fix the potholes in the street but only your neighbor Rick knows how. Everyone would come together and say, ok Rick, you’re in charge of fixing these potholes. Tell us what to do. Rick would be in charge but only to tell you how to fix the potholes and once they were fixed, Rick has no more authority. Instead of how we do this today which is beg the city to fix the potholes, no one does it, you run an expensive campaign to elect Rick to some position that can tell someone else to fix the potholes but he’s also in charge of a million other things for several years. The former seems like a better system to me. Third of my closely held beliefs, not my circus, not my monkeys. What I mean by that is, unless you’re funding me, fucking me or friends with me, what you get up to isn’t really my business. So if you’re gay or trans or religious or whatever, as long as it’s happening between consenting adults, not my business.
Lastly and really, most importantly for our discussion today is, if we are gonna have society and a human civilization, its purpose should not be profit. Civilizations purpose should be twofold. To alleviate human suffering and to maximize leisure. We are currently burning the planet and everything on it in the name of making a few already rich pricks even richer. This just doesn’t make sense. It has just never made sense to me that we use so much energy and ingenuity just to make money. With just a simple change, from profit to human wellbeing, we could solve so many problems. A green energy transition will be too expensive? Who cares! Automation and AI are gonna take my job? Good! One less thing I have to do. We don’t want to hurt the healthcare industry’s bottom line? That’s an insane thing to say in a world where we take care of people because they are people and not a profit margin. Since I was a kid, the fact that some have too much and some have nothing has never made sense. Why are we doing this society thing if it’s not to make it easier for everyone to have a good life? We have enough to feed, cloth and shelter everyone if we just stopped trying to make a buck while doing it. For me, that’s what it all boils down to. After all, the economy is a human invention. Why shouldn’t work for all humanity?
Look, I‘m not gonna lie to you and say it’s all gonna be ok. It’s not. Things are gonna get much worse before they get better, if they get better at all. I’m an eternal pessimist. What keeps that pessimism from becoming nihilism is a healthy mix of spite and a love of humanity. Everything I talk about on this channel, art, music, games, food, has all come about because humans broke free of their existence to create something beautiful or silly or dumb. I would love for the world to become a place where everyone could take part in that creation. But if instead we continue down the path towards our demise, I’m at least gonna go down swinging. In the description I’ll leave links to some stuff to help you get started. Until next time, death to the algorithm and death to fascism. See you in the streets.
