Analysis & the Far Left Situation, Part 2
“To carry on a concrete analysis of each concrete situation is the essence of Marxism.” -Vladimir Lenin
“The art of revolutionary leadership consists in correctly analyzing the situation, defining the moment when the masses are ready to move, and leading them decisively.” - Leon Trotsky
Part 1 Synopsis: The relative lack of revolutionary Far Left / Antifa activity is not solely or even primarily attributable to lack of funding. "It’s the funding, stupid” is a simplistic explanation that misses other, more important drivers. Funding is the least important part of autonomous direct action, and even if it were the most important:
Local direct action is relatively low cost and is not dependent on big money.
Groups still have access to both direct and indirect sources of funding.
Local direct action is still taking place (Frederick, MD and Seattle, WA, for instance) just at lower levels.
There are far better explanations for the lack of Antifa rioting.
You can read Part 1 here.
In today’s post, we’ll look at the full range of factors and identify the real reason why Antifa isn’t rioting every weekend.
Part 2: You Are Here
Section 1: A trip down memory lane
The biggest reason why 2024 wasn’t, and 2025 won’t be another 2020 is because we’re aren’t experiencing the same conditions that led to the 2020 riots. This is something that a great many people failed to conclude.
The Summer of Love — 100+ nights of rioting and $1 billion in total costs — was the result of a set of extraordinary circumstances culminating over the course of five years:
Starting around 2015, the Alt-Right came into national prominence and promoted public rallies and marches, which ignited a response from the revolutionary leftists known as Antifa and the broader “antifascist” movement. The result was often street fights and clashes with police, which raised the social temperature.
Although Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013, its largest cases of unrest prior to 2020 began in 2014 and 2015 in Ferguson, Missouri. The movement obtained institutional backing under the auspices of being a social change vehicle, but it was an inherently revolutionary movement from the start.1 Protests often gave way to political and social violence.
Starting in 2016, anti-Trump marches and rallies gave cover for political and social violence, especially against Trump supporters. Inauguration Day 2017 (J20) could rightly be called an insurrection as Far Left revolutionaries intended on disrupting the Inauguration. Most of those cases were dismissed. The one-two punch of rioters operating from within protests continued into 2020.
Starting in March 2020, state and local governments began enacting COVID lockdowns which kept people home from work and school.
A lockdown-induced economic recession put millions out of work, resulting in high youth unemployment (a near-universal early warning indicator of civil unrest).
The country was subjected to four-plus years of incessant media coverage, propaganda, and agitation against all-things-Trump, which accelerated civil unrest and political violence.
Combined, this was probably two decades of social pressure condensed into a single year. It was bound to explode (image below2).
So when people started predicting that 2024 or 2025 would be Summer of Love 2.0, I asked, What social pressure is built up to a point that we’ll see an explosion of political violence and 100+ nights of rioting?
In other words, what factors did we see in 2020 that we could repeat in 2024 or 2025? Approximately zero:
Antifa is inactive or struggling.
BLM is a non-entity, and is pretty famously ‘sitting this one out.’ (I can’t even remember the last BLM protest that mattered. Probably neither can you.
*** I don’t know the details or if it’s even real, but there’s apparently talk about a presidential pardon for Derek Chauvin. And it could obviously re-activate BLM. This is an edge case that could generate national protests and unrest, to include rioting.)
There are sustained anti-Trump protests but they haven’t eclipsed the intensity of what we saw in 2017 much less 2020.
There are no COVID lockdowns.
There is no recession (officially, not yet).
And the media coverage of Trump remains one-sided but toned down. A growing number of Americans see mainstream news as no longer credible, and more people get their news from alternative media sources now. In short, the traditional media lacks the power it once had to heat up the social temperature.
So the point that I’m trying to make is that social factors played a huge role in Antifa’s ability to riot night after night. Political violence became socially acceptable for some segments of society. For the most part, these people weren’t being arrested. There was “room to riot,” so you got riots.
We don’t have those underlying social factors today, not at the level we saw from 2016 to 2020. That’s a far better explanation as to why Antifa is not out rioting and firebombing Starbucks and Chase bank right now.
There are, of course, other reasons that have to do with the internal dynamics of Antifa and the broader revolutionary left. I’ll cover that below.
Section 2: But wait! There’s more!