this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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Reminder though. The hippies and beatniks lost, and lost badly.
Yes, did they accomplish anything actually? It's a theory that has never been put into practice with successful results as far as I can tell.
If you applied this in Venezuela it'd work to get the US to invade. But without such a thing, idk how this will lead to any victory?
People argue that they helped end the Vietnam war, but they are ignoring that the Vietnamese are the ones who ended the Vietnam War, demonstrating their effective control of the countryside during the Tet Offensive.
Mostly what this movement did was sell clothing, books, music and movies.
Edit: and pretend that 'real communism' is when you do utopian socialism on a compound in the woods.
Exactly
Which invests bourgeoisie into your movement as their eyes turn into dollar signs.
These colour revolution projects can be compared to startups in a way, except the CIA are usually the first of the angel investors.
yea i dunno how someone looks at those images and thinks it was effective at doing anything. The only thing that ended the Vietnam war was people getting sick of it going on for forever.
And the Vietnamese demonstrating that despite nearly a decade of war, the U.S. was no closer to achieving any of its objectives.
Yeah what happened to them?
seems like most of them are republicans now
They are the biggest libs ever now.
They didn't really lose because they were not committed to a specific left cause in the first place. They were about aesthetics and self-gratification, which included avoiding barriers to that, i.e. the draft. As the war on Vietnam wound down, they simply continued their project by getting professional jobs, doing drugs, and buying shiny objects. Importantly, they were not organized, so "they" doing anything is not a concerted action taken on purpose, but was itself the result of wider social forces and of course capitalism. They were manipulated by these forces originally and continued to be manipulated by them afterwards. Their "counterculture" came complete with branded clothing and millions of hot-off-the-presses vinyl to listen to at the local bead door-bedecked sexpest house party.
Fair enough, but my point is that why should we be looking to them for a strategy that actually affects change on the world, not to quibble if these people lost or not.
Understanding them as not even trying to effect change, but rather satisfy their personal wants (which were slightly reduced by capitalism/imperialism), explains why not to look to them. They weren't on the left exercising a failing strategy, they were using a successful strategy for their own needs, Vietnamese (and black) people be damned. This should change how we think about their approach: it worked for a different goal, so it could be strategically deployed by us given appropriate circumstances and needs. If a restoration of some liberal norm or PR move serves us, then have at it. If it is instead better to agitate, then it is to be avoided.
In that light it is better to look at the current protests as achieving a similar aim.
Maybe aimed at something similar but I don't think they are succeeding even by the self-soothing metric. Everything seems like more of a toned down prelude to something worse or, similarly, a way to let off steam while ICE raids ramp up.