Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
I like to think of it as depression on the societal level, which has only gotten worse and more widespread amongst the population over the decades. The stagnation of living standards, decline in real life third spaces, and the failure of liberalism to explain away the symptoms of empires decline might cause psychological distress of the likes of Doomerism. Why do I say that?
I think the definition of doomerism as the last standing leg of individual liberalism, that nothing ever gets done, and oneself cannot influence the realities they are confronted with, is really helpful to be expanded from the individual to the masses.
As we, as society, are forced to revise our models of thinking about the world and the place we all take in it, we are essentially stripping us of our old abilities to cope, and questioning every source of stability we have taken for granted. While changing our tools of thought, even the space of our own mind begins to shed of its old identity, being stripped of the now unstable foundation.
I think that for some, the pandemic might have been the push from the habitual, albeit relative psychological safety, to the presumed maliciousness of those that practice the now dying western culture.
As a kid i didn’t understand what some call ‘culture’, and guess I still don’t, but what I’m certain about is that it is dying with this current liberalism. The capitalists repression of new generations participation in society, their hopes of a better future, that is build with them, may play a big part.
Heck, I see a lot of my peers struggling with the ability to talk to each other, how do we then even create new culture then? We don’t party, we don’t meet each other, most of us don’t even know how to make friends, nor how to grow up and become a person that we aspired to be as kids.
I just wait for the climate crisis ramping up again this summer. Real fun.
Tl;dr:
Tbh we cooked. Old cultures dyin, everyones feelin it. Either we all remain blind to the demise capitalism forces upon our present societal structures, or we get rid of those damn contradictions, and may have a cultural revolution
(god this time better be good or we dead)Best I can figure on the points you touch on, is that the sheer scope of it is part of what’s going on. That it’s not just capitalism in decline, it’s not just empire in decline, it’s hundreds of years of colonialism finally reaching a point where it is struggling to continue. And the death of colonialism means the death of a long-running social framework for the, what gets categorized as, “white” west. On the surface, it might not look like that; people might assume colonialism is only the practice of going out and colonizing, like they might assume capitalism is only the practice of accumulating capital and exploiting the working class, but these systems become a pervasive part of the social fabric, embedded in all aspects of a society.
So as that fades, what are we (in the west) left with? Those who are non-white and still have heritage to something else may be able to cling to it for support. But for somebody like me, some blend of “white” European living in the US who is too far removed in ancestry from the people who originally came to the US to have citizenship to a European country, I’m a big nothing as heritage goes. People like me have to figure out how to go from being hollowed out for colonialism/empire/capital to being filled with something that matters. Right now, I think eastern Marxism may be the best bet for inspiration.