There’s no organizing potential in the USA at all. Everyone only thinks social democrats are the most radical option. Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here. I’m scum for being born in this country. I know it at this point, I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism, we’re all labor aristocrats, so why bother? I don’t even feel the strength to get out of bed anymore. I just want to lay here until I die or until I get evicted and die on the streets. I’m to scared to kill myself, so may as well. I’m just so tired of everything, of seeing the rights of my closest friends being peeled away and there being no viable way to stop it because, again, everyone here only thinks voting is the way out.
But seeing as I benefit from the blood of children being spilled, why should I want to do anything other than set myself on fire?
This kind of thinking is still privileged. You do not recognize your responsibility to the people of the world and selfishly want to anihillate yourself to save yourself from the trouble of doing the hard work. This is ingrained american exceptionalism and you should reflect on that. I do not write this to “dunk” on you, but I live in an equally if not MORE anti-communist country, and what? Do I complain? Do I resign? No. Our organization is small, but it’s the little Davids that stand up against Goliath every day, get beaten down and rise back again. Because if not us, then who? You will not be saved from the outside, and resignation is admitting defeat, and giving away the win to the ruling class without a fight. Do better.
Nah, this is a shitty thing to say to someone whose mental health is obviously in a dark place. Telling someone who is struggling a lot in part because they are internalizing guilt that they are essentially being selfish because of having dark thoughts, is an asinine approach to mental health, that will just reinforce the guilt they already feel.
Depression and self-harm are not problems confined to westerners and doubling down on insinuating somebody is particularly bad for being a westerner who is already internalizing that as a horrible thing, is the opposite of helping.
Not everything is about hard work, ffs. Take a step back and reframe this as if you are talking to someone who is bedridden and then maybe it will make more sense what’s wrong with it. You’re completely erasing the potentially disabling mental health conditions they are operating under and talking as if a “tough love” speech will fix them.
Well damn, you do cut to the core of it, huh? Well, if what you say is true and that it truly is easier to annihilate myself, then I will do just that and stop being a drain. Thank you for the motivation to end my cowardice and embrace oblivion. Goodbye.
Stop romanticizing your despair. You are not a martyr, and you are not ‘evil’, that framing is a convenient escape hatch. Calling yourself scum lets you off the hook because it declares you irredeemable before you’ve even tried. That isn’t humility, it’s narcissistic fatalism. The global oppressed don’t care about your American guilt complex, they care about whether you’re useful.
‘No organizing potential?’ That’s lazy defeatism dressed up as realism. The US has millions of exploited workers, tenants facing eviction, and queer kids losing rights. The potential is there, buried under the same rubble you’re too tired to lift. Did you expect the masses to deliver themselves to your doorstep? The vanguard isn’t handed out, it’s forged in the exact exhaustion you’re feeling right now. If you can’t do grand strategy, do logistics. If you can’t do logistics, do mutual aid. If you can’t do that, then your only job today is to survive and show up tomorrow. That is a tactical order, not a request.
I am not going to coddle you. But I will tell you a hard truth: checking out is the ruling class’s favorite outcome for radical Americans. They want you dead or paralyzed. Staying alive and doing one tedious, miserable task today is an act of war against them. So stop spiraling about your inherent evil, that is a bourgeois luxury problem, and start thinking about your next tactical move. Eat a meal. Make a help-line call. Send an email to them. Just don’t confuse self-pity with political analysis. Get up. Not for the party not the cause, but because lying down is exactly what the Empire wants you to do.
This is not the message of my comment.
If what you care about in this case is the lives of children, setting yourself on fire saves exactly 0. In rest, you should discuss how to process and cope with things outside your control with a mental health professional because you seem to have things going on that strangers on an obscure communist website aren’t equipped to help with.
Imagine a tug-of-war played over a deep pit. On one side stand the imperialists and their lackeys. On the other, the third-world communists. If they should win, and the Empire is dismantled, then you lose some privilege.
(Of course, you’re also being stolen from. A full victory would be in your actual benefit. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore that, thought).
You’re standing on the side of the Capitalist. You recognize that them doing well makes “your side” win. What should you do? Should you pull the rope to your side? Surely not, you don’t want your side to win.
It seems your answer is that you should jump into the pit yourself.
My answer is this. Sitting the contest out is the same, why not do that? That’s what everyone around you does already. You can also pull the rope the other way. You don’t have to pull your arms of to make a difference.
You are not at fault for what side of the pit you find yourself standing on. Don’t pretend you are. Find others who also want ‘your side’ to lose, and talk to them. They are going through the same guilt you are. They can help you directly, and you can help them too.