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.
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.
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.
What exactly are you implying about working at McDonald’s or wiping shit out of toilets? I clean shit out of toilets, and it pays well. It allows me to own a home and keep a roof over four heads. Someone has to clean up after you, and someone has to feed you too.
Let me know what you do so I can be sure I talk badly about it.
I didn’t mean it that way, it’s just that those have a low bar to entry in comparison to many other positions. I cut meat for a living. Hardly glamorous, similar bar to entry, and the main thing I dislike is the fact that management is composed entirely of assholes.
But getting a cushy office job or one of those do nothing email jobs when you have a criminal record? Forget it. They won’t let you in the door. Forget respectability, that’s just bad for finding work by the numbers.
That’s obviously not what they meant and you are being intentionally disingenuous, arguing in bad faith, unnecessarily hostile, and frankly just waiting for an excuse to show off your income if you think being a minimum wage custodian, as was the clear implication, is enough to own a home and support a family of four anywhere in the USA.
By the way, you ain’t the only professional making money here. The rest of us just don’t talk about it. And demanding users under federal monitoring to dox themselves should be a bannable offense.
lol.
They meant it exactly as they said it. Imagine thinking it’s alright to talk down on what others do to put food on a table. You’re actually defending that behavior to boot. What’s wrong with you?
I don’t think he meant to imply people working those jobs are lesser in anyway nor that that we don’t need janitors and restaurant workers, just that working these jobs tends to really suck, you will be abused by your employer and often thrown away like trash when they are done with you, and in most cases they do not pay a living wage.
deleted by creator
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.
proles chose fascism
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.
This is foundational Marxism-Leninism
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
deleted by creator
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
-
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
100%
Workers in Europe a century ago had objectively worse conditions than westerners today
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
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.
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.
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.
As this is Yankee excuse hour I’ll chime in with my analysis of why there isn’t much of an antiwar movement (yet):
- This was fairly sudden.
- 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
I’m not so much trying to excuse Yanks as reframe why so we can more efficiently address the problem
The Iraq war also involved the beginning of much more sophisticated mass monitoring of the public.
the much more mobilized anti-war movement in 2003.
and that didn’t accomplish anything at all. we have no power over foreign policy and I don’t think we actually did 50 years ago either when we were at our most powerful in that regard.
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.
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?
Atomisation is a huge problem that the left needs to figure out.
i have no irl friends idk how i’m supposed to get anyone in town to mask, and that doesn’t take any effort on their part.
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.
Turns out joining a lib union doesn’t undo a lifetime of propaganda.
I don’t think it’s about the effectiveness of the propaganda (which I’m not denying, it’s why the state does it), it’s more about first world workers deriving direct material benefit from imperialism especially when they’re organized enough to demand a larger share of the loot.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
I’m gonna be real with you, one of the reasons I can’t be bothered to finish that article is because it gets dropped in scenarios like this. I’ve already gotten into a whole struggle session over venting about it before so we don’t need to get into it but, ya’ll use it like a thought terminating cliche.
Go watch yourself a copy of Harlan County U.S.A. [Trailer] and you tell me that a modern day union member has even the slightest sliver of Class Consciousness that those folks did. Y’all keep expecting modern day libs to manufacture whole-clothe internationalist concepts out of, not even thin air, but an environment that is purposely designed to be caustic to the concepts. And it’s just silly.
i think it’s worth noting that Day is also wildly secterian, which to me kind of detracts from these essays as the hexbear staple that they are
Internationalist concepts such as “Arabs are people and we shouldn’t steal their shit and destroy their countries.” Yeah, I kinda do.
You don’t wanna engage with the concepts in the article fine but you’re never getting anywhere until you realize mass slaughter in the third world has direct material benefits for white workers in the US especially unionized ones and labor aristocrats.
Internationalist concepts such as “Arabs are people and we shouldn’t steal their shit and destroy their countries.” Yeah, I kinda do.
And that’s why I think you and the other folks that drop that link all the time are silly. Because this is the context you’re putting it in. And I’m not saying there’s no material benefits involved, but most of y’all are not engaging with your own survivorship bias. Everybody but me, as the one true leftist that was decanted out of a vat from Havana, had their own intellectual and ideological hurdles just to get to the point of even being on this website. Which if we’re being honest, is still just like a step above rad-liberalism.
WeI mean, y’all are very fucking lucky just to have reached this level of resisting our environment. But this is certainly not the end point and frankly the context y’all are constantly creating around the article, regardless of its contents, I think would have both
and 
shining.Without going into my own ideological development (which if I’m being honest it’s a miracle I’m not a chud), I think you’re making up a guy to to get mad at.
Two things can be true. 1. It takes a near perfect storm of exposure to information and perspectives, and the right accidental mental state, for a white worker in the US to land anywhere even remotely near communism. 2. White workers in the US, especially organized ones, benefit massively from overseas mass slaughter, and because of that almost without fail support it.
So the only winning move is to shatter imperialism first.
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.
So the only winning move is to shatter imperialism first.
Oh, is that all.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
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.
Plus, everyone is in debt. It makes keeping those jobs even more precious, because otherwise you end up as one of the homeless you pass on the way to work, and then life is even harder as many of our hexbear comrades can attest to. And then if you have a family to take care of it’s even worse.
“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…”
deleted by creator
I’m pretty well off but a lot of this stuff just sounds like cliche. It’s like the equivalent of thinking “why don’t the serfs and peasants just rise up against the rulers?”
Ask the people working three jobs just to afford rent if they’re comfortable.
Not a significant portion of the population as far as I know.
Ask the people living in tent cities in they’re comfortable
Is it a large enough number of people to change anything? There are very few people proportionally who are homeless on the street.
Ask the people on the kill line who are one medical bill away from being on the street if they’re comfortable.
Probably not a very large portion of people. Most people aren’t having life-altering medical problems they can’t pay for. It’s definitely ruining a bunch of people’s lives, but is it significant enough to mean anything, or has the ruling class made an accurate calculation so far?
downplaying the severity of psychological violence
There just is no comparison between the physical violence of actually dying or being hurt and psychological violence of having your life kinda suck and not being able to change it.
The vast majority of people are employed and make enough money to live on. Which is why the US is as stable as it is right now. People are generally not under thread of starvation or murder. Throw in some spoils of empire and that’s what this country is.
But you’re right it’s all stuff to organize around. It just feels weird getting mopey about how hard people have it. My thinking is definitely affected by my own privilege though.
I think left-wing orgs definitely have very little mojo right now. But I also think the country’s population just isn’t there either. Like, if people’s “spirits are broken” while being far and away the most privileged poor people on earth (this is simply true lol, with the exception of the peeps that literally live on the street), I don’t really know what to say. I think people still just “have it too good”.
I’m in Seattle though, where the median income is literally over $100,000 (and I am quite privileged myself) so that definitely affects how I think about things.
t just feels weird getting mopey about how hard people have it. My thinking is definitely affected by my own privilege though.
I think that privilege and the circles you run in can have a major impact on how well you think others are doing. Also it wasn’t my intention to be mopey, it’s about trying to accurately observe peoples circumstances in order to better understand and change them.
of having your life kinda suck and not being able to change it.
This is extremely dismissive of how mental health impacts people. There has been a massive increase in SSRI, opiate abuse, depression and self harm in recent years and I don’t think that happens just because people lives only ‘kinda suck’. The ruling class have invested in psychological warfare to control their own people as much as they have invested in weapons to use against foreigners.
People are generally not under thread of starvation or murder.
Yes they are. The majority of the working class are one missed paycheck away, that’s literally how capitalism maintains a cheap workforce.
We need to be able to figure out how to work around these challenges or we’re no better than boomers lecturing people to bootstrap their way out of a problem.
I’m pretty well off
It shows in your comment.
Probably not a very large portion of people. Most people aren’t having life-altering medical problems they can’t pay for. It’s definitely ruining a bunch of people’s lives, but is it significant enough to mean anything
Every single person knows someone, probably several people, who have gone into debt for due to medical-financial reasons. Everyone knows someone who relies on a gofundme to pay for something medical. And it was significant enough that when someone executed a CEO of one of the top medical insurance companies in the street, the entire American internet was celebrating it. Reddit had to ban the use of the alleged assassin’s name. Everyone knows the healthcare situation in this country is evil, libs and chuds alike recognize it and say it openly (even if some of them still try to make excuses for why it has to be evil).
The vast majority of people are employed and make enough money to live on.
As @Dort_Owl@hexbear.net already pointed out, the vast majority barely make enough to live on, an like Dort_Owl, I’m shocked a leftist and a regular commenter on the bear site would say that people are not under threat of starvation, because like they said, that is a basic premise of capitalism. Regardless of that, the vast majority of people in the US are worked to the bone. It’s why the “hustle-grind” culture has become so overwhelmingly prominent in American culture. And it has been a significant change generationally, such that it’s a common refrain to note that people’s boomer parents were able to afford a family and a house on a single income where now those who had been in that same social strata of wealth, who expected a similar level of comfort and ease in exchange for full time work following a college education can barely afford rent with two incomes, let alone have enough to start a family. I know we sometimes tend to downplay it as Marxists because it is something even liberals recognize and talk about it (still falling short of reaching a genuine understanding because they lack the actual class analysis part), but it’s not wrong. That shit is real.
As Marxists we use the term class to refer to a group’s relationship to the means of production which is by far the most useful way to consider class. But that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as what liberals refer to as a “middle class.” It is a material reality that there existed a large portion of proletarians who had enough wealth/buying power/luxury that they did not have the kind of material concerns as those proletarians who struggled to live despite their work. The former was the “middle class,” a higher social strata within the proletariat. And then of course the upper class which liberals will incorrectly blend with the better-off proles as if there is just an unbroken spectrum with an arbitrary line that delineates upper and middle class but that’s wrong. True upper class were always those whose wealth was enough that they did not need to work because they owned enough money already or enough private property to live off that alone - as we all know, the bourgeoisie. This middle ground was and is a materially meaningful strata of the population even if it is not a class in the Marxist sense. And it was this middle ground that mostly placated Americans enough that they would advocate for the status quo rather than advocate for any sort of change. But that middle social strata (middle “class” to liberals) IS shrinking. The line between those people in precarity (balancing on the edge of poverty, or hustle-grinding like a stone being skipped on a pond to avoid sinking into poverty) and those people in the group who still have to work but have enough to live comfortably and securely, is shifting so that more and more people are being pushed below it, and the number of those who exist above it is declining. When people say “the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing” or even “the middle class is shrinking” are correct. It is valid, if incomplete, analysis. And it’s a big part of the reason why we do have more people who are advocating for change over the status quo, which in turn is part of the increase in open domestic fascism because we have a social political apparatus that allows for rightward change but will never allow leftward change. The decline of neoliberalism is real. Trump, despite being just another tool of the ruling class really was something of a spanner thrown into works for the liberals in 2016, but that’s why a major part of his appeal to those who were below the that middle strata line, he promised a change, just the usual fascist lie of a change back to the good old days (another side note here, because yes we know the good old days are a total lie to anyone who didn’t enjoy the benefits of US imperialism, be they ethnic minorities or the poor end of the white working class, but for much of that middle strata, it was the good old days). Bernie’s popularity is another example. Even Obama’s bullshit promise in his slogan was foreshadowing for how much people in this country were beginning to genuinely want to ditch the status quo.
It just feels weird getting mopey about how hard people have it.
My initial response to this is “Fuck off, you don’t know how many people DO have it hard and HOW hard we have it.” But since you seem to recognize this is because you are priviliged enough that you are part of that upper strata still, I’ll try not to be so harsh. I used to work in an academic office setting and even carried the title of “director” for a while. Now I’m on food assistance. I haven’t had real employment other than temporary one-off hard labor jobs since before covid. I actually wrote a lot more about my situation but I realized I don’t really want to reveal those things about myself and the details don’t matter. I struggle in ways that anyone who tells me “I have it good” makes me want to punch them in the face. You are just fucking lucky. Do poor people in the global south have it worse than I do? Damn right they fucking do. But it shouldn’t be a news flash to any Marxist that the global south suffers to a greater degree than the imperial core does, each taken as a whole, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t millions of Americans literally living in abject poverty and millions more struggling to keep themselves from falling the shockingly short distance from where they are now into that abject poverty.
I think people still just “have it too good”.
Some do. But far fewer than did 3 decades ago and it their numbers are in rapid decline. Your problem is you are drawing that as a base line across all working Americans, and in that sense, your opinion and analysis is full of shit. I can assure you, I do not “have it too good” when I struggle to eat and wonder if I should buy a tent now to live in for when my own luck inevitably runs out.
I think left-wing orgs definitely have very little mojo right now. But I also think the country’s population just isn’t there either.
They have no mojo because the left was obliterated in this country and it is still prevented from organizing at the scale necessary to become a challenge to existing power. The red scares worked. The infiltration, murder, and annihilation of the Black Panthers worked. The infiltration and coopting of every group no matter how small that was to the left of Clintonesque politics worked. Now when people want change, the only avenue that seems open to them is rightwards. It is my opinion that our main focus and biggest obstacle is not convincing people that we need drastic change, it’s that we need leftward, communist change. And I would agree with you that that is such a tough nut to crack that I fear it may not be possible until after fascism has its way with the working class first.
privileged poor people on earth (this is simply true lol, with the exception of the peeps that literally live on the street),
“You think you’re poor now? Well, do you want to become like those people living in those tent cities you see on your daily 2 hour commute or do you want to be like those starving people you see on TV in Africa?” That’s the threat. Yes, the working poor have higher privilege than the people starving on the street (and there are more of them every day too who used to be in the working poor - it’s a threat with real teeth), and yes they have higher privilege than the starving masses of the global south, but they are kept in line because they DO face the threat of being that bad off. I can’t believe someone on the bear site is saying that with an “lol” to talk about how good we have it. Privileged indeed. TBH, I really hope you make a lot of donations in the mutual aid comm because you do have it really fucking good to have said the things you’ve said.
(and I am quite privileged myself) so that definitely affects how I think about things.
Nailed it.
Ask the people on the kill line who are one medical bill away from being on the street if they’re comfortable.
Probably not a very large portion of people. Most people aren’t having life-altering medical problems they can’t pay for. It’s definitely ruining a bunch of people’s lives, but is it significant enough to mean anything, or has the ruling class made an accurate calculation so far?
another article said 37%
non-life altering medical shit can hit $400 easily. or a car problem, a kid. not 100% of these people would be on the street after but it’s still precarity
2/3 of people living paycheck to paycheck. some of that’s bad budgeting but a lot of it isn’t.
the problem with organizing anything is that the country is too big geographically
deleted by creator
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.
dumb sad little baby
babies are curious
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
I always hated the fixation on raising awareness. My first thought is always “OK, everyone is aware. Now what? Give them the next step!”
my awareness is honestly a little too high, I’m having trouble functioning
autism experience with raising awareness is people asking you to rub yourselfnwith sandpaper in public until Things Change also sorru for the edits and potentially agitating tone Inam agitated and toned
Haha yeah, can relate. It ain’t easy.
It’s all good. We can dowbgrade to just toned
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
