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.
There's plenty of people on Hexbear for me to get mad at without making anybody up.
Look I don't think #2 is non-existent, but I think it's extremely overblown in lieu of #1 and even moreso when you get down to the rank and file. The general public shift on a dime all the time with whatever the latest Hegemonic narrative is. The same folks who were proudly putting on cloth masks to 'flatten the curve' in 2020 will now tell you masks don't work while researchers are publishing studies comparing Covid to AIDS. And yet despite all that, Social Media organically circumventing Corporate media's presentation of the genocide in Gaza showed a massive shift in support of Palestinians in an extremely short time.
Oh, is that all.
I guess I don’t really understand thinking it barely exists when every major union in the US has behaved in a way to prove the hypothesis.
Point taken on how nigh insurmountable the task of breaking unilateral capitalist hegemony is. It’s not gonna be any one of group of us that does it, just the system collapsing itself under its own contradictions. Guess the main thing we have to do is try to be ready for when it happens.