Comics

I think you make a good point here, that relates somewhat to the general idea: although we do need to understand the systems we're up against and how to overcome their functioning, we don't need to believe in the myths perpetuated by them of an inherent strength and unwavering power they don't have. At the end of the day, it's humans running these systems and humans choosing to support them in spite of any moral qualms they may have. The inertia of that, and the inertia of the organized violence that protects capital, can be a powerful and dangerous thing, no doubt about it, but it is a kind of inertia and things that disrupt that inertia are going to have an impact, whether it's the impact we wanted or some other one.

Where I'd venture to say the pointlessness of it shows is in isolated acts that are not seized upon in order to make use of how they impact the inertia of things and are instead looked upon naively as a form of damage that will stick, no matter what, and won't be repaired or worked around. As if human society is a jenga tower and if you just pull enough pieces out, it will topple and you'll replace it with what you want instead.

To use an example that relates to the US, Lincoln was far from the ideal figure of taking the US people in an actually good direction, but I do think it's safe to say that if he hadn't been assassinated, the reconstruction efforts probably would have done a better job of dealing with the whitewashing of slavery. Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, however, did not sit around and hope such whitewashing would organically happen in the absence of sufficient opposition to it. They organized and shoved that whitewashing into school textbooks.

So in despicable systems, there is inertia, but there is also those who organize and seize upon that inertia. And the same can be said for systems of liberation and the fight to maintain them against imperialists and against the reaction.