I just feel like: if my life isn't where I wanted it to be by this point, why should I be courteous to others. There's no reciprocity from them anyways. All I do is live this rut of go work, home and sleep. I know nobody nearby who I can relate to. It drives me crazy how I haven't met any of these milestones for career, family, or friends. I'm just by myself, screaming explitives into a digital void.
I just don't like anybody because of that. I don't like my coworkers and their simple Maga brains, I don't like my rural locality and it's dependency on service work for the elderly. I don't like any of the workers in those services because of how cowed they are and how short they sell themselves. Part of me thinks they deserve their misery for putting up with it all the time. I don't like the conservative culture of my area and how it limits who I can relate to on a personal level. All this just makes me not like people in general and I feel myself becoming more embittered these days. And even if was more amenable like I used to be, experience has told me that people still wouldn't want to bother with me anyways. Idk, these days I have such a jaded view of everyone around me.
you have to organize, and you have to move somewhere that it's possible. join a party, get a job in a real working class unionized sector, and do community work. you're dying on the vine and you have so much more life and joy to bring to the world than getting it out on the internet!
you will be so much happier, even if it's hard you have to try. it'll take time but it'll be worth it i promise you
What unionized sector, there are none here. This ain't New York, this is where New York sends all its lower class failsons. They all think they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires and don't need anyone to help them out.
Look at teamsters unionized warehouses, package delivery sectors, bus driving, and worst comes to worst find a craft trade sector. I know plenty of floridians that are building real revolutionary organization, you definitely will need to move to an area thats less petty bourgeois though it seems that aligns with what you want in your life anyways.
I can tell you want working class connections, and youre gonna have to leave petty b areas if you dont want to slowly lose your mind with them. You might have to sacrifice a bit, but it will be worth it i promise. Ive known plenty of people in your exact situation and all of them even the ones that work rough jobs are much much happier in their lives and all their loved ones can tell too.
I don't want to associate with anyone, really. I despise the professional fields because they think they're better than me because they're educated and have a job corresponding to their degree and I don't. I hate the management and petite bourgeois because of their conservative politics and their faux country suburban aesthetic. EVERYTHING has to be deer camo, F150s, and Kid Rock to these people who make up 40 percent of the population. Hell, Kid Rock even came through my area in the boiling sun. The way they preen themselves at their churches like a bunch of local notables on pagan times would.
And I especially despise the working class for several reasons which I can summarize as it's ignorance, undignified cowardice, and it's confident embrace of a lumpenized aesthetics and attitudes that my father (a long time factory worker) taught me to reject. The working class in this country is constituted of a bunch of broken families who drive broken cars and live in morose and broken communities. They have no perspective beyond their own immediate concerns and the ones that do are often religious conservatives. The constant state of precarity they live in leaves them unable to do nothing more than work and care for their children. The god they ask to ameliorate their conditions will sooner bring about paradise on earth than these people will ever take it amongst themselves to resist their oppression.
Some of them engage in every habit I keep away from, from excessive indulgence in alcohol, to an unhealthy consumption of the most unhealthy of foods, to the smoking of all substances both licit and illicit and even further use of drugs. My father has always chastised them in general for never being able to match his work ethic. And I feel if I associate with such people, their misfortunes will become my weight to bear.
Experience has shown me there is little reciprocity from people who constantly are in a state of their own crisis. This is not the constituency to build any sort of counter systemic force, frankly the constant state of crisis they're in probably just conservatizes them more and reinforces capitalist maxims. You can't save these people, and neither can the Teamsters or milquetoast public sector union that represents the school bus drivers in my county. Capital has won. That is the reality we will always live with.
You despise the petty bourgeois rightfully, but you carry their ideology around with you with your resentment towards the working class. You need stronger class analysis which i dont blame you for not having cuz the left in this country has incredibly weak class analysis in comparison to international groups. You make a lot of correct analyses but youre blinded by the lack of clarity in the relationship between strata.
Youre correctly analyzing that the lower strata of the working class is too immiserated by the conditions of existence to effectively organize, while the upper strata and petty bourgeois have too much disdain for the working class and too much self importance to make a difference. The reason why i point towards unionized working class sectors is because the unions provide stability and an extra working class association to organize in.
Unions can only ever prevent losses to the working class, and yet every win in a union both provides real benefits to people and teaches working class people how to struggle against the enemy. However unions only staving off immiseration is why we need a real communist party, and we need to build one in this generation so next generations dont get handed down the same problem.
Ultimately imo it all boils down to you being an individual. You will not be revolutionary and you will not be a communist if youre not in a party that can effectively facilitate your transformation into a revolutionary. You can either contribute to the cause of revolution in this country - the heart of empire where we can deliver the most possible damage to imperialism - or give up on being a communist, which to be clear is fine. Our subjective life experiences determine how much we can contribute to the struggle in our lives. From what ive heard, i would love to have you in my party and your class background and upbringing would make you an incredible fighter, but its ultimately up to you whether your personal life trajectory lines up with this cause or not.
The first part you said checks out, my dad tried to run his own restaurant after cooking in his brother's for 15 years. Almost failed a year into it and cut his losses. Then it was thirty years of factory production and janitorial work at minimum wage. He despises idleness to a great extent with a petite bourgeois eye for efficiency.
Now, let me make something very clear: Capital won, there will be no revolution, no union is going to save you and certainly no communist party will either. The historical context that made all those things possible does not exist anymore and won't come back. People in America think communists will come to pillage their ~~farmsteads~~ front lawns and shit because that's what a century of propaganda and propertarian settler brain does to a society. There will never again be a functioning communist party in America that has more than idk, 2000 members (I can't remember the exact figure from Varn's analysis of the history of communist parties in America exactly). For God's sake, workers aren't even the revolutionary subject for communists to recruit from anymore, university students are and have been since the post war period.
Frankly, can the state just put the American labor movement out of its misery already by mass decertifying all the labor unions with a Supreme Court decision? It's not like they need them to be a counter weight against a strong communist movement anymore. Then we can all just get on with our lives because we will finally have all the delusions of labor's emerging relevance dissipated in one fell swoop. I won't have to hear anymore about how a couple of baristas at Starbucks are the reincarnation of the Bolsheviks.
This is gonna be my last reply cuz theres not really anywhere else for this conversation to go. Its either through the experience of your life that the ideology of the working class - communism and marxism leninism - makes sense to you or you smash together a hundred ideologies like the petty b.
Your ideology is petty b, and not close to marxist leninist, or even communist. To believe students are the revolutionary force in this country is literally the ideology of the intelligentsia and petty b. I dont know how much more apparent that can be.
You cant claim to know the fate of the working class in this country without having even struggled against the enemy. People learn through struggle, and you cant call the shots of history from the caboose without even participating.
The issue with the left in this country is that its largely a movement from the upper middle strata to the petty bourgeois, meaning the socialist movement and the working class movement are entirely separate entities making both extremely weak and easy to push aside. If we can succeed at fusion of these two movements we can have the type of communist movement youre imagining. As marxists we start from our objective conditions and unless you want the next generation to suffer the exact same struggle as you with previous generations suffering from petty b ideology and skipping out on struggle, we have to build a real communist party thats representative of the working class. You either participate, or let others do it for you.
I'm not saying that I personally believe students are the revolutionary subject of communism, I'm just stating what the situation for organizing has looked like in this country since the 60s. You can't call a sober observation petite bourgeois for stating that. Ideally, the whole damn movement should come from the workers who run the whole damn economy by coming together to plan their common goals for the whole of the society that they belong to. I don't really know what the revolutionary subject is or if there's still even one because again, material conditions have changed raidcally from the last century.
We could potentially even be on the brink of mass swaths of the population further having being made redundant depending on whether the AI thing is a serious game changer for the capitalist or just another money hole the shovel QE funds into. Imagine the wrench that will throw into the thesis of the worker as revolutionary subject when even more of them are separated from participating in production. What then? Good Marxist theory has to be a living tradition that studies and analyzes the evolving paradigm of political economy that we live under. Frankly, it's that aversion to that and the dogmatic reverence for dead Leninist movements that makes me so averse to joining any organization. People like that aren't living in reality.
Youre correctly looking at the link between the intelligentsia and the left, but instead of seeing it as an issue youre seeing it as fact. People go to college, have the opportunity and environment to learn about this stuff, and then enter the left; unfortunately with their class position intact. Hence the reason why the left is all college educated upper middle strata and why the means of life create a petty bourgeois ideology that vacillates and makes it weak.
Theres a whole merry go round of union staffers and non profit workers who do nothing to create the conditions of struggle that constitute the left. This exact current reason is why all the left from the New Communist Movement of the 70s and 80s liquidated into adventurism or the democrat party. They were all students who instead of transforming the movement into a working class one never challenged their class conditions and followed the spontaneous ideology of their strata.
I dont have optimism because i dont need it, because i see the sections of our society that are revolutionary and i organize in them. Your life is miserable and you dont see a way out, because youre accurately assessing the dead end of the strata and class around you. Im telling you if you can figure out how to change the political economy of your life, you will be proud of yourself and happy to be a communist in this country. Youre smart and picking up on the right things - ive met a lot of leftists that havent picked up on half of what youve mentioned - and i want you in this movement, but our social being conditions our social consciouseness and you will have to change the political economy of your life if you want to be happy. I can see how you can be happy, and i hope you are able to figure it out too.