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.
It shows in your comment.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Nailed it.