Saying Americans are too comfortable is just reinforcing US propaganda that the USA is this free capitalist paradise where food and luxury rains from the sky. It ignores the psychological war constantly being waged against the working class in the heart of the empire. Yes they have food, but they're malnourished because it's made of cheap plastic slop. Yes they have circuses but even cavemen had entertainment, that's not a luxury. I can't believe I have to tell leftists that 'but you have iPhone' isn't a sign your life is easy. Especially because half of these 'luxuries' are just tools that:
- You can't take part in society without.
- Everyone fucking hates them but you're damned if you do, damned if you don't (good luck getting a job and feeding yourself without a phone, car and social capital of being a good consumer).
Ask the people working three jobs just to afford rent if they're comfortable.
Ask the people living in tent cities in they're comfortable.
Ask the young people grimly joking that they're going to die before they retire if they're comfortable.
Ask the people on the kill line who are one medical bill away from being on the street if they're comfortable.
Are there countries where life is harder? Yes, but playing the suffering Olympics ignores the real material conditions that the US (and it's vassals) face and we would be stupid to ignore it. Ignoring mental anguish and the exsaution of being human cattle just because they aren't being physically bombed is downplaying the severity of psychological violence. Telling the single mother burnt out working multiple dead end jobs worried if her kids are going to ever have a home or even a habitable planet that she's too comfortable is fucked and isn't going to create the vanguard.
Nearly every single person I talk to (excluding the owning class) is running on empty. Everyone is sick. Everyone is depressed. Everyone is hopeless. They have seen countless protests amount to nothing. They have seen our rulers commit every single unspeakable crime and go unpunished. They've watched the surveillance state grow and record their every move. They know, they fucking know. But their hope has died. The lack of riots over the Epstein files isn't the inaction of someone who has it too good to care, it's the inaction of a beaten spouse who knows their place.
They're doing nothing because their spirits are broken, not because they're too well fed. From their perspective they're too busy making sure they have the energy to put food on the table to start a revolution.
My point is that downplaying the struggles of the US working class is ignorant, reactionary, and ignores material conditions and therefore is unhelpful in mobilising anyone. I think this rhetoric needs to change if we are to be effective.
Marx thought European proles were going to have a revolution over a century ago because of their material conditions, instead those same proles chose fascism. Lenin's analysis of Imperialism begins to explain why, those imperial core workers are a part of the imperialist machine and by and large they would rather help that machine continue to reap the benefits than try and stop the machine. Workers in Europe a century ago had objectively worse conditions than westerners today and without short form videos and other slop to pacify themselves, and they still chose fascism instead of revolution. After that, the USSR defeated the fascists for the europeans and what did they do? Choose fascism again, and again, and again. It doesn't have to be that those people are living like well fed royalty to choose fascism, the ideological component allows them to live like serfs but still feel like royalty in comparison to the nations they plunder.
This is foundational Marxism-Leninism, revolution doesn't happen in the imperial core, it never has, and it isn't going to. The west will eat itself and the revolutions will happen in the nations they are forced to retreat from. Lying to ourselves that fascists will somehow not be fascist because modern living sucks isn't going to produce a revolutionary analysis which is in line with revolutionary theory and in guidance of revolutionary action.
Which conditions?
If we look at things like physical health, intensity of labor, education, etc. then yes absolutely their conditions were worse. However their conditions were bad for a very long time without any revolution happening at all.
Poor conditions are not in themselves sufficient for revolution. That is also "foundational Marxism-Leninism". Marx expected revolution not merely due to poor conditions of labor, but also due to the contradictory tendency of capitalist production to produce the conditions for revolution, e.g. to concentrate all these workers into a single workplace where they can organize an effective resistance. Bourgeois society had transformed production from something spread across the country, in guilds or on isolated farmland, into Modern Industry with all of these objective factors of production under one roof. Then, a single strike can completely cripple production with far less effort than it would have taken to coordinate a strike across an entire country of loosely connected serfs and peasants. That's what Marx saw in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.
Now as Marxist-Leninists we have to look objectively at the entire situation, not reduce it to some single Badness quantifier, but to understand exactly what potential exists for revolutionary activity to occur. And I think what @Dort_Owl@hexbear.net posted about here points to some of the obstacles unique to the modern society which are quite new and different from the conditions faced in 19th century Europe.
Yes you are essentially expanding upon what I said. The "poor conditions" alone are not enough obviously, we have seen and continue to see worse conditions without revolution. Even as you are saying, the proletarianization of workers wasn't enough for revolution and that was a core of Marx's theory which he was wrong about. Proletarians aren't making revolution, in fact it was mostly yet to be industrialized nations who had not gone through proletarianization that rose up. It was peasants, farm workers, students and even PB like lawyers and doctors who were often central to revolution before proletariat. Outside of Russia, proles hardly existed in many of the nations that had communist revolutions. It was the proles in Europe enabling capitalists to super exploit underdeveloped nations that created the conditions for those underdeveloped nations to revolt.
What OP described is certainly different now than it was in 19th century Europe but they are not, in my opinion, reasons to think revolution is somehow possible in the imperial core. I would say they are more reasons why it is especially unlikely.
This is a good response. I don’t have much to add except that in my opinion the question in the imperial core is not revolution, not immediately. The question is how to undermine imperialism and to aid those most affected by it, including those at home. I dont excuse the lack of revolution but recognize that its way harder to bring down an empire at its core than it is to kick it out on the periphery.
Anti-imperialism at the core is fundamentally different from, but linked with the decolonial struggle abroad, in the same way that a white man can not really be the representative of a black or women’s liberation movement but nonetheless can find ways to support it. It’s a hybrid global struggle.
I do think that Lenin made a great contribution by re-framing Marx through the lens of imperialism. Anti-imperialism is what brought about every socialist revolution, in my opinion even the USSR when considering the degree to which the disaster of WW1 helped bring out the Bolshevik line in sharp relief against the social-democratic forces which, without WW1, very possibly would have won out first. We would have had a century of social democracy instead.
I think that is true as well and mentioned it in another comment here. Sabotaging fascism/imperialism and building logistical networks to protect colonized and marginalized people are more pertinent than trying to convince proletarians in the west to overthrow capitalism
No, lumpenproletariat and petit-bourgeoisie chose fascism. The proletariat chose social-democrat and communist. At this map which shows where which party was relatively stronger shows that more industrialised regions (like the Ruhr-area) where red, not brown.
No, that's just Settlers, a book which tells Americans that revolution is impossible for them (so don't even try, it's wasted energy!) while using radical rethoric.
social-democracy is the moderate wing of fascism. by your own numbers, more german "leftists" chose moderate fascism than communism, which puts the two fascist parties at a strong majority of votes at the time. obviously we all know the part SDP played, right?
I've never read Settlers, my analysis is concretely and firmly in the ML tradition. Just because the only revolution Americans are getting is a fascist revolution doesn't mean you shouldn't organize, but trying to organize a worker's revolution means spending your last days before the fascist revolution in a way that does nothing to prepare you for life after the fascist revolution. The only thing to organize now is the sabotage of fascism and the survival of whoever isn't a fascist. The workers revolutions will be happening in the periphery as the US rattles
Agreed, and I think the major disagreement that i see in this discussion generally (and you and OP are good examples) is twofold.
Talking about labour aristocracy and the treats of empire does not mean that nobody has a hard life in the empire. It's an analysis that the benefits of imperialism will be lost if it's overthrown, and westerners are aware of this. And that's why they often choose fascism as the option to maintain at least that benefit to themselves. It's a real incentive structure which we need to account for in our analyses.
We have to be strategic and tactical, which means throwing this in the face of people occupying both the labor aristocracy class and the proletariat class is not the best idea. At least not in the unstrategic way that some do: "you're a treatlerite and that's why you don't love China." It's just not useful in that way. It must be a pillar of western theory, but with the goal of finding the positive message we can bring forth: "yes, it's a net positive to you in the short term if we let Libyans be enslaved for empire, but you get a much larger benefit of more free time, more meaningful work, and less poverty destroying your towns if we choose the other way". Many forget to say anything like the last part in any tangible, believable way.
yes I agree.
it seems that some people think having the type of analysis I said means you are not trying to organize at all or that you do but you walk up to a stranger and say "hey you fucking traitor to the workers of the world, if you don't join my book club now you'll just be forced to do it later in the reeducation camps."
the reason why having an accurate analysis of these conditions is important is because cadre need correct theory to plan strategy. not understanding this theory is why western leftists say shit like "we need to figure out how to organize rural white workers, they're workers too!" or "we need to elect more socialists and fight to push the democrats left!"
I would guess that a super majority of self identified leftists in the west are legitimately propping up capitalism more than opposing it because they have no real analysis of how to organize and often think that leftists that do are worse than reactionaries.
We agree entirely! I just think we don't really disagree with dirt owl either, or at least, we wouldn't if we all understood that these perspectives are complementary. In fact, I think dirt owl is making a useful point (don't just go around yelling that the US is labor aristocrats who have no revolutionary position). I just agree that this doesn't mean that the analysis of labor aristocracy is wrong, just the lazy application of it
are people really doing that though? people post that way online but I'm not sure if anyone who is actually motivated enough to try to organize people would speak to them like that.
Well I'm also of a pretty strong opinion that we can't just give ground to the enemy in the public square, which nowadays is located squarely in the online platforms. So people on Twitter getting attention for saying it has to be taken seruously, because we are judged by their faults anyways. So yeah, I've only seen people do it online, but that's just as important as the public squares were in Lenin's time. I say this all with a heavy heart because I wish it weren't so. Ive had people in real life act like all leftists thought that, so we have to treat it as a real movement to be struggled against
If the online narrative weren't important, the ruling class wouldn't be spending so much effort trying to control it.
It makes me cringe, but I think it might be true.
I am 100% sure it's true. It's very important to the ruling class, and we have to be better at it. Hexbear is not the example (it's hardly a public square and more an alley we use to talk about the public square). I've have said it before, but Roderic Day tried for years to treat Twitter like Lenin would've (in this analogy of public squares). It eventually failed (X turned shit, Roderic quit or something) but it was a serious attempt. Prole wiki tried to make an information source, and still could be more useful. I have no great ideas, personally, but know we need to do better
Got a bit off topic, but yeah, people saying the "you're a treatlerite" online are hurting us and should be either reformed or somehow separated and isolated
Fascism is also very good at telling a miserable population that its the fault of a minority group. Its much easier to rally people against an enemy that is easily beaten than to convince them to fight an enemy as all encompassing to their lives as capitalism.
Add to that in west you have neoliberals posing as the left choice convincing people that defeating capitalism is a laughable concept and to just settle for the lesser of two evils and you have a paralysed public that can't imagine a better world.
yes this is all why organizing logistics networks and decolonial programs with colonized and oppressed communities is the priority if you live in imperial core. before things get worse, now is the time for relationships and trust building with community leaders, creating medical clinics, food production and distribution networks, education programs, etc. By engaging the masses with their material struggles and providing solutions to their problems, politicization happens in turn
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