effort

Good post. I just don’t see how we get anywhere by giving anyone outside of the ruling/owning-class immutable and intrinsic morality. People can be evil of course but I think the average person is much more of a dumb sad little baby than most people on this site would lead you to believe. I don’t know how we’d organize a revolution, let alone run functional socialism without extending some trust and grace to our neighbors who have just done the only thing they’ve ever known and have been forced a steady diet of propaganda their entire life.

As mentally exhausting as it is we do maintain a bit of privilege over these masses be it from education, trauma, tism, what have you, we’ve seen the truth about our world and believed it.

It's more accurate to say that they're afraid of doing things any differently.

To admit that you've been going down the wrong path means giving up on a large part of your life that you've invested in. And on a deep level, the investment outweighs the disaffection.

I think a major aspect I would critisize the working class and poor in america is the historical and present disconnect that especially white people have regarding Black abolitionist / slave revolts and uprisings, anti-Indigenous sentiments, being anti-trans, generally supporting eugenics and discrimination against disabled people, and covering up / enabling abusers.

I feel that the recent uprisings against the ruling class aren't taken seriously enough in that regard (George Floyd, Ferguson, etc) as a legitimate pathway to revolution, already laid down. Everyone's favorite white abolitionist followed a path already laid down.

While the lower classes are suffering, there are also layers to the suffering; for example, I will point to the internalized colonies in the americas, where the people living there are effected by environmental racism and generally have worse living conditions and access to food/medicine/jobs than their poor white counterparts, and are preyed upon and targeted, or their neighborhoods are gentrified.

I am also reminded of when the recent hurricane devastated rural communities and people were happy that the "evil southerners" were being taken out, ignoring the fact that there are people living in poverty there without internet or phones. Some who don't get notified when floods come through town.

Not intended as a full response but any discussion about this subject really has to reckon with the fact the secured workers do get a little organized in the states they almost without fail support the most bloodthirsty imperialist actions in order to benefit themselves.

Something the left here has totally forgotten is the importance of organizing workers as workers (and let me be explicit here and say I mean organizing unions of workers with or without government sanction). Every time there was something even remotely close to a revolution in the US was because proles (or slaves) revolted, almost exclusively organized by unions or in similar formations. Lenin and Marx both saw worker organization and militancy as essential to revolutionary action and history proves time and time again that it's the essential foundation of revolution in the industrialized world. The new left ignored these facts because organizing workers is hard, organizing students was easier, and incorrect readings of Mao and Lenin gave justification to do the latter instead of the former. We've been fucked ever since.

This doesn't mean just organizing workers into government sanctioned collaborationist unions, but even the most reactionary unions develop class consciousness of their members. The fact that there are (supposedly) 100k DSA members and not even one tenth as many salting campaigns says everything that needs to be said about the modern American left. How do we expect to project and wield the power of the proletariat if the proletariat is comically disorganized?

I agree that a revolution is possible it just won't be white

They ain't the ones getting systemically executed

"Not since the serfs of ancient Perikarnassis has History produced a more inert social class than the Martinaise proletariat. The rest of Revachol at least pretends to rebuild, these people still live in ruins..."

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.

The main reason I don't engage in protests near me is that to get to them I have to drive to like an hour to two hours depending on traffic and then pay for parking and I have to pay for gas and then if I actually get arrested at this protest which is a possibility I will have to deal with legal fees not to mention medical fees from getting the shit beaten out of me by the cops. Having a criminal record will make it more difficult to find a job. Any job. Like working the fryolater at McDonald's or wiping shit out of toilets. I already don't make enough money to pay rent anywhere in the state on my income and still feasibly drive to work instead of sleeping in my car.

I am honestly at a loss as to what I could materially do to stop the war machine that leeches off my paycheck when every action I take costs me money which I don't even have enough of to cover my existing medical expenses and vehicle maintenance. When I get home, driving through windy canyon roads with LED headlights blinding me every 30 seconds, I feel too exhausted to do much apart from drown my sorrows in ethanol and THC and video games and YouTube slop.

I feel weak and impotent and morally complicit through inaction but mostly I just feel tired. Spent. Rage burns you out after a while. I watched this government march millions of poor people to their death rather than implement robust pandemic protections, throw children into concentration camps, fully fund a genocide being broadcast to the world in real time, and move heaven and earth to protect a cabal of child molesters. I know I'm fucking overwhelmed and exhausted and I also know a lot of my fellow Americans genuinely do not fucking care about any of this shit and it enrages me even further but I feel lost and alone and what little energy I do have I would prefer to save for protecting my nonbinary partner from all the horrific shit personally affecting them in the midst of this nightmare.

My fondest hope right now is this war humiliates us on the global stage and costs us all of our allies and the machinery of the empire degrades to the point that we're straight up less capable of evil. I don't dare fool myself imagining more might happen.

very good post. if you can't go out into the world and talk to people without thinking about how they're all irredeemably evil treatlerites and you tell yourself you only feel that way because of "materialism" (ie you read some internet lenin's essay or watched a youtube) you're not going to organize anything more than that disco elysium communism book club. it's hard work and it's going to take a long time and that sucks, so come here and let off some steam, but if you live in the west, don't just automatically give up on everyone in whatever hellcountry you live in. if you can't find an org, volunteer for something useful and integrate yourself just a little bit into whatever community exists where you are. if that's too much, and all you can do is gently nudge a couple of people in the right (left) direction, you're still doing something real, even if it feels small. even if you're not in a place to do any of that, there's still value in reframing the way you think about these things and maybe eventually getting to the point where you have the capacity to do more. but you can't do that if you're envisioning the person who drives an uber for 6 hours after their wendys shift as an intractable foe drunk off the riches of imperialism.

Whether or not a revolution in the imperial core is possible is not something I dare to comment on. But organising the working class in the imperial core is still possible and necessary because of the reasons you gave. A working class that is well organised on marxist and anti imperialist principles weakens the capitalist class and limits their power overseas.

Not American, Australian, but this also applies to US vassals.

Additionally, a lot of the iPhone style tools people have require constant subscriptions and money spent for the "service" so people are nickel and dimed out of every bit of money they earn. They might make a total amount more money than elsewhere in the world but also end up losing the overwhelming majority of that just to afford to continue to exist.

And sometimes these companies just say "fuck you" and screw you over, like my phone bill this year has a 5 times price increase of what it used to be because they just got rid of the plan I was using and there isn't a single phone plan provider that offers anything close to the price I was previously paying. And I can't just not have a phone, because that completely isolates a person socially and professionally.

And that's just one part of this, everything in the west is like this, everything requires you to pay more and more and more and it is mandatory to do so, there's no escape, no chance for a break, any money you make just goes straight into a black hole, you want to help people but don't have the money or the time to do so, because you're barely able to keep yourself afloat.

And you can't organise with people because people are so atomised and hyper-individualised over here that they view mutual aid as a scam half the time and if you mention the scary "S" word, or god forbid, the "C" word, you'll end up with people screaming at you, red in the face with rage, for thinking there is any other option than this.

We aren't comfortable, any luxuries people buy(and you have to buy them! Can't do anything for free over here) are just a form of self-medication, a quick easy distraction from the nonstop pain of existence.

As this is Yankee excuse hour I'll chime in with my analysis of why there isn't much of an antiwar movement (yet):

1. This was fairly sudden.
2. The left is maxed out on capacity.

People contrast the absence of antiwar movement now to the much more mobilized anti-war movement in 2003. People also will contrast the absence of any top-down PR campaign to sell the war in Iran to all the stunts the Bush admin did to justify the 2003 Iraq war. My thesis is those are cause and effect. All that campaigning in 2003 essentially gave anti-war movement enough warning to mobilize in response. If the war drags on an anti-war movement should develop. As usual, the more Americans that return in boxes the faster it will develop.

I can't speak for the entirety of the US but in my corner of the US left wing, we just grew rapidly in response to those ICE murders and theres still BDS movements and electoralists planning the next Zorhan. "Caught us in a growth spurt" isn't much of an excuse but there is existing momentum.

To top that off, the anti Iraq war movement did diddly shit to stop the war. You can't publically organize around

Of course that's harmful to the US left, which pursues "raising awareness", Christisnity-inspired charity, a dead collaborationist union movement, democratic party tailism, rent control, and minimum wage. Pounting out that your comfort isndirectly proportional to concessions frpm your leaders is the very first step of turning towards the real objective.

The current left project is chasing after concessions that went awat with Seinfeld and Friends' popularity and no amount of moralizing will chanhe that.

The currwnt "worker movemrnt" doesn't even account for homeless and declassed people and can only fform "coalitions" by sacrificing recruitment and leverage to the setablishment

You DO live off of stolen labor hoursm Obtaining more is the sgated goal of your movement and no amount of rentier extraction recouping those slperprofits will alter that dynamic it will enforce yournsubservience.

1.) Productive forces

2.) fuckinf dying

which one. which one. which kne.

It's not comfort, but they have something to lose i.e. three jobs is better than no jobs. They're keeping their heads down to preserve what scraps they have, because they know it can all be taken away if they don't behave. It's a very effective system of control.

At least, it's effective as long as there are jobs.