Protracted People’s War is not universal and in some places—suicidal- Part 2

By សតិវ ​អតុ

This is a continuation of the article I wrote earlier called: "Protracted People’s War is not universal and in some places—suicidal."

While I built up the case against protracted people's war, I really didn't give an alternative to PPW. I'm not sure there is any one method of revolution we can go to. Here are a few ideas I believe we can consider—Number one, sabotage the economy and do it without using the kinds of violence that can justify the "Rosenberg" style punishment.

Just last week Britain's second-busiest airport had to be closed after drones forced it to shut its runway, sparking chaos and delaying thousands of Christmas travelers. According to ABC News:

"Planes were unable to depart after the drones were spotted, while a number of flights scheduled to land were diverted to other airports, Gatwick Airport said in a statement.

On Friday (local time) the airport said 700 planes were due to take off, although there would still be delays and cancellations.

To try and thwart those causing the disruption, the army and police snipers were called in to hunt down the drones, which flew near the airport every time it tried to reopen on Thursday."

Yes a troop of those toys people buy that can fly around the neighborhood were able to shut down an entire airport, creating genuine havoc. It created economic sabotage. It couldn't have cost that much money to stage this event. It wasn't done for political reasons, as far as I know, but look how effective it was. At times simple tactics may be able to attack the capitalist system and bring it to a standstill.

And that brings me to another form of revolutionary actions—"black block tactics. We don't have to use all of them. We don't need to destroy people's personal cars. Some proletariat people rely on their cars to get to work and to do other important chores. But attacking businesses using groups of people who will destroy economic property and then slip away could be a useful tactic.

Elections! Yes, as part of an overall strategy as long as using elections is not the ONLY strategy. We can not elect ourselves into power. That has never worked in the past and it won't work here today. But a campaign can be used to educate people and produce ideas necessary for staging a revolution. In no way am I suggesting that we abandon all revolutionary tactics and trade them in for running elections. The use of these campaigns is to educate people and not just to pretend we can just elect ourselves into office.

Another tactic we saw a few years ago was the Occupy Movement, which had serious drawbacks but such tactics maybe useful in combination with other tactics, from time to time.

These are just a few ideas. An organization can also have a militarist branch that uses black block tactics while another branch of the organization uses elections as just one of several tactics.

We have to be inventive and try new things. These are just a few ideas to be discussed.

Pix by Libcom.org.