United States | News & Politics

Yes, because we don't have that spokesperson.

No, because there is no organization. The status quo is sitting around and hoping for the aesthetics of past movements to appear. That's not how it works.

Look at the BLM movement. It's decentralized and has had incredible impact and reach, but it didn't actually change policy much outside a handful of areas. They obviously didn't need a centralized organization to get a popular movement going, so that's not the issue. The main issue they had is a lack of clear, articulable policy changes.

Untrue. This was a reactionary position spread by an oppositional media. Nearly every major city had a set of clearly articulated demands they printed on pamphlets, turned into chants, and presented to city councils. This was a recycling of the same false rhetoric used against Occupy Wall Street.

What they lacked was enough organization and political consciousness to create a lasting movement that would continue until its policies were achieved and then stay beyond that to defend them, because they will be rolled back otherwise.

You get that with a good spokesperson. They should have pushed for ending qualified immunity (so it's easier to hold police accountable)

This was a popular Reddit meme but it would do nothing to address this. Ending qualified immunity would just provide another means by which victims of cops could sue the city, county, or state, effectively. Even when qualified immunity is removed, individual cops are indemnified because they are in the act of performing their duties. It would primarily mean getting more money when they murder your child.

and perhaps legalization/decriminalization of recreational drugs (large reason for police interaction with black people).

That's a specific tactic but the broken windows strategy would remain in place. There are a million "public safety" excuses they will continue to use. Historically they would just use the criminalization of poverty.

Trump also served bourgeois interests

That's irrelevant. We're talking about a single spokesperson building grassroots support for a cause.

It's everything. If your mission is to organize to change that which runs counter to the full might of the ruling class, you will fail if you try to use their tools. You are not in their position. You do not have their money or the backing of the state. You are not class conscious, but they absolutely are. They will coordinate while you flail.

His stated cause was "drain the swamp," and it got people passionate enough to go against their own party (they seemed to want Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush) and nominate and then elect an outsider. The party responded with MAGA rhetoric and candidates to push that rhetoric.

He offered a false consciousness to whip votes for a major party and then continued to do the whims of the ruling class of which he is a member. His followers still believe in him despite this. He uses the mainstream tactics of bourgeois electoralism and his base of power is the same as Biden's, Bush's, McCain's, etc. He has no grassroots movent, they are just the same group of reactionary people that the GOP has been grooming for decades. You'll notice that many of their demands are amorphous and they instead believe in fantastical conspiracy theories about the things Trump supposedly did or was trying to do. There is no program, there is no call to action, they don't actually do anything except pull the lever like every other good sheep.

King wasn't part of some socialist organization. He started with MIA, which was a nonpartisan community improvement org, and that's where the bus boycott started. He went from there to found the SCLC, which again, wasn't partisan. He worked with the NAACP, which again wasn't and isn't socialist.

The organizations don't need to be explicitly socialist to draw from socialist organizing. The skills of being an organizer are of this exact legacy, and the lines drawn are not deep. WEB Du Bois, cofounder of the NAACP, was a communist and drew on his connections and experiences with socialists to frame its external messaging, internal political education, and overall structure. Their rank-and-file organizers drew from the movement, flocking to support as has always been the case, and doing the actual difficult work of organizing. When the Red Scare included the NAACP in its anticommunist purges, it found many examples and the NAACP, then run by liberals, did most of the purging themselves. It has become far less effective over time because they have adopted a liberal NGO model. They have very little power to actually do anything but PR.

The cofounder of MIA along with king was the head of a local union. The union with which it associated was created by a socialist. Organized labor is the bread and butter of socialist organizing and is built on that left spectrum even when people are just following its methods as dogma. It is an incomplete expression of class consciousness, of identifying your real enemy is the capitalist and their cronies, and creating a robust organizational network that uses unified direct action to achieve its demands.

Every modern movement learns the lessons of socialist organizing or perishes, assimilated into a status quo with dramatically incomplete victories and a new set of false storytelling about who they were and what they achieved - stories compatible with the status quo that was their oppressor or even giving credit to that oppressor instead of the brutal antagonistic fight that so many died for. When movements start out with better understanding and organization, they do better. They have fewer stumbling blocks. They don't have to learn as many lessons through failure. And they have to take fewer risks that their movement will simply dissolve because they are too disorganized.

In fact, supporters demanded he distance himself from Bayard Rustin in the march on Washington because he was gay, openly socialist, and had ties with the Communist Party (not sure which was more important), which he agreed to.

Yes, and this is triangulation that he later regretted. It's called respectability politics and it's always a bad idea.

King having socialist views isn't why he was successful, and it could've derailed the whole thing if it was more widely known.

This is the false logic of respectability politics. You fall into a pattern of giving the enemy their ammunition. You will run into this exact same situation with any movement you join. The ruling class will hire PR firms to declare a supposedly nefarious association, typically with the marginalized groups that make up your work. Will you then abandon them and undermine yourself? If you do pro-Palestine work, will you kick out the "terrorists" (Palestinians) in your organization when they are inevitably called that?

Instead, one of the tasks of your work, to achieve your goals, is to embrace and normalize these elements. You cannot build a pro-Palestine movement while vilifying Palestinians. You cannot build a black liberation that ignores the economic, i.e. that organizes against capitalism itself. King realized exactly this.

The most socialist thing he pushed for in the march was a minimum wage increase, but that's really it.

This is not true. Please review his later work when he was murdered.

There was a huge amount of socialist and communist resistance at the time, so if he made any of that explicit, I highly doubt he would've seen much success. Him being socialist is more of a footnote than a recipe for success.

As I have explained, it was core to the strategies and tactics used and the larger coalition itself was built from the movement.

Tides have since changed, so maybe a popular socialist movement could work, but it probably needs to focus on democratic socialist policies (more welfare) instead of socialist policies (economic overhaul) since that's what most people these days tend to mean when they say "socialism."

You're thinking of social democracy, not democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is still about the overthrow of capitalism, but it focuses in the use of electoral means. Like the project undertaken by Allende. See how nicely the ruling class treated him and the people of Chile.

I think you would benefit from doing some of the readings I mentioned.

Sure, ally with whomever you think supports your cause, but the recipe for success is not ideology, but issues. Issues have far broader reach than whole systems.

These are inseparable. If you merely pick an issue but do not have political theory and good organizational methods you will have a right idea in isolation and then be useless - or even work against yourself. BLM had a very clear issue and, in fact, quite specific demands around defunding and community policing. Demands entirely actionable by local Democratic city politicians that control basically every major city council. They failed because they were not organized and were not politically educated in who their enemy was, what tactics they would use, and how to fight back and maintain momentum. BLM was a failure because they have the same false consciousness you are recommending.