The author presents some excellent lessons to be learned from experiences of past anti-capitalist movements. We must study the history of each movement to build on their successes and to eliminate their weaknesses, or we will go down with the capitalist ruling classes in their final acts of self destruction.
I especially liked this passage that emphasized the need to build networks and organization based on bottom-up principles:
... dire need to continue to develop networks of alternative media that provide a bottom-up account of radical social movements. Sites like Révolution Permanente, Wikipedia, and Mediapart are providing some of the more reliable coverage in French, along with Enough Is Enough, CrimethInc., and IGD in English. But these platforms could have greater visibility and support, and be part of a larger network of resources to help educate and agitate for revolutionary social transformation. They are an essential part of the anti-capitalist toolkit, and we need to continue to build autonomous but federated activist media platforms that can inform the public by developing the counter-narratives necessary for the coordination of mass revolutionary movements.On the other hand, I haven't had much sympathy for anarchists. I think too many of their actions have been informed by a profound lack of historical information. From my experience, the average anarchist suffers from myopia, that is, they can only see in what is in front of them, or their immediate experience of repression. They lack years of study of authentic material that might give them insights on battling the far more sophisticated ruling classes. Thus, they are often deceived and led down paths that accomplish nothing constructive.
A recent post from this website entitled "The Threat to Rojava: An Anarchist in Syria Speaks on the Real Meaning of Trump’s Withdrawal" offers an illustration of this. The author(s) is/are much too close to the Kurds to maintain any objectivity, and his/her/their lack of understanding of the geopolitics of the region also permeates this perspective. The author/authors can only see what is in front of him/her/them.
An effective revolutionary movement must understand what they are doing because the ruling capitalist classes have abundant resources and highly skilled upper-middle-class people, who they have pampered and co-opted, to mislead them down dead-end paths of activity. We must do our political homework to be effective! We must build our own organizations of independent journalists and educators, which are always informed by bottom-up organizing principles, to help us understand what is really going on in the world, and we must support and defend these journalists (Julian Assange is a prime example) and educators from persecution from capitalist authorities.
A sound revolutionary movement will have successes, and these successes will lead to other successful outcomes. You can't expect comfortable, highly educated, upper-middle-class people to abandon their advantages without some promise of success.
