it really is this. the geography of class conflict in the US is one of reinforcing the systems that exploit labor in the zones of high labor drmand, and vague social democracy for places where finance capital managers like to live.
the rust belt was dismantled for its criminal resistance to capital and is rapidly being reconstituted in The South, the perennial internal colony of western capital formations. where the great mass of workers are, there will be hollowed out public infrastructure, poor civil/human/reproductive rights, and many appendages of the carceral apparatus ready to surpress and stifle insurrection.
blame for it's subjugation will be laid at the feet of those who toil under it by the smug sucdems of glittering finance, insurance and real estate hubs that extract value from it.
Sorry, I know this is a big question and one theorists and activists have been grappling with for more than a hundred years now, but who do you think the revolutionary subject in the US is? I don't disagree with anything in your comment, but an overwhelming majority of American proletarians still seem to think of themselves more as consumers and market actors more than a working class that's in fundamental conflict with capital. I'd say that anti-police brutality and the broad appeal of hating the expanding police state is the most live wire in the American masses towards change, but that was before the George Floyd uprisings got co-opted and defanged by the Dems and Biden winning and vowing to "fund the police" to huge applause at his first state of the union.
There was a moment after that Minneapolis precinct got torched where that polled better than either Biden or Trump where I felt like we might actually be on the verge of prolonged mass unrest against the state like '68, but that seems to have all but fizzled out now except for small coordinated efforts like Stop Cop City. I feel like organizing against the carceral state and the militarization of the police is one of the most viscerally felt inroads to people's day-to-day lives in the US, and linking that to the treatment of Gaza and American police ties to the IDF and the Zionist entity's treatment of Palestinians to American police's relation to PoC in places like Ferguson as functionally internal colonial relations where they function more as counterinsurgency forces than law enforcement is key to building a mass movement in the US against capitalism and the state.
I've seen a ton of regular people without solid political ideological foundations who were fully onboard with stuff like police defunding and abolition and mass criminal justice reform with pardons for any marijuana convictions in 2020 get deactivated politically and go back into lesser evil electoralism bullshit.
Sorry man I talk too much, I should go now idk, I'm just rambling
I think you are onto something with the revulsion for the carceral state. I think that is the flashpoint, the lightning rod that so much is connected to... whether it be brutality, extrajudicial executions, immunity, to the Cop City/urban pacification, militarization and kill house training with international murder squads and the colonial apparatus, or the judicial corruption, prisons with private equity, criminalizing immigration, and forced labor systems. such a high portion of the population is touched by this institution and everyone but the most elite fear it reaching, without accountability, into their lives.
a thing about fear and the socialization of masculinity is that we are indoctrinated not to acknowledge our fears, even to ourselves, creating a blind spot for us conceptually. this is confused with "strength" and it is sold to everyone as the preferred response to feelings of fear.
I think it bubbles to the surface as anger when it finally erupts. what I remember most from 2020 was the anger and how righteous it was. we walk around for years with this lead ball burning our insides, but we can't allow ourselves to admit it. so when the moment comes where we feel able to strike at those who put it there and rid ourselves of it, there are people from many walks of life erupting with fury.
yes the apparatus was successful in stamping it down, in the middle of a global pandemic no less when we held our breaths at an unseen killer ripping through us. that's what I remember most: the way the system didn't care much about the pandemic until it could be used to discourage the logic of protest and direct action by large gatherings.
combined with media framing desperately trying to make cops look reasonable (while they are arrested and peppered with rubber bullets) and protestors as crazed maniacs, they managed to diffuse many into the ballot box. and then we got Cop Prez and Cop Prez Jr by fiat.
personally, I think they got really lucky in 2020 with the constellation of events around the George Floyd protests, and all we need is one moment where their luck doesn't hold. that phrase: they have to get lucky every time, we only have to get lucky once.
we all know they are going to kill someone publicly again in front of cameras with people pleading for them to live. the system needs its unrepentant sadists and they will never be muzzled for long. once it happens and goes wide, we will be right back where we were, in the full knowledge that nothing fundamentally changed.
it really is this. the geography of class conflict in the US is one of reinforcing the systems that exploit labor in the zones of high labor drmand, and vague social democracy for places where finance capital managers like to live.
the rust belt was dismantled for its criminal resistance to capital and is rapidly being reconstituted in The South, the perennial internal colony of western capital formations. where the great mass of workers are, there will be hollowed out public infrastructure, poor civil/human/reproductive rights, and many appendages of the carceral apparatus ready to surpress and stifle insurrection.
blame for it's subjugation will be laid at the feet of those who toil under it by the smug sucdems of glittering finance, insurance and real estate hubs that extract value from it.
Sorry, I know this is a big question and one theorists and activists have been grappling with for more than a hundred years now, but who do you think the revolutionary subject in the US is? I don't disagree with anything in your comment, but an overwhelming majority of American proletarians still seem to think of themselves more as consumers and market actors more than a working class that's in fundamental conflict with capital. I'd say that anti-police brutality and the broad appeal of hating the expanding police state is the most live wire in the American masses towards change, but that was before the George Floyd uprisings got co-opted and defanged by the Dems and Biden winning and vowing to "fund the police" to huge applause at his first state of the union.
There was a moment after that Minneapolis precinct got torched where that polled better than either Biden or Trump where I felt like we might actually be on the verge of prolonged mass unrest against the state like '68, but that seems to have all but fizzled out now except for small coordinated efforts like Stop Cop City. I feel like organizing against the carceral state and the militarization of the police is one of the most viscerally felt inroads to people's day-to-day lives in the US, and linking that to the treatment of Gaza and American police ties to the IDF and the Zionist entity's treatment of Palestinians to American police's relation to PoC in places like Ferguson as functionally internal colonial relations where they function more as counterinsurgency forces than law enforcement is key to building a mass movement in the US against capitalism and the state.
I've seen a ton of regular people without solid political ideological foundations who were fully onboard with stuff like police defunding and abolition and mass criminal justice reform with pardons for any marijuana convictions in 2020 get deactivated politically and go back into lesser evil electoralism bullshit.
Sorry man I talk too much, I should go now idk, I'm just rambling
I think you are onto something with the revulsion for the carceral state. I think that is the flashpoint, the lightning rod that so much is connected to... whether it be brutality, extrajudicial executions, immunity, to the Cop City/urban pacification, militarization and kill house training with international murder squads and the colonial apparatus, or the judicial corruption, prisons with private equity, criminalizing immigration, and forced labor systems. such a high portion of the population is touched by this institution and everyone but the most elite fear it reaching, without accountability, into their lives.
a thing about fear and the socialization of masculinity is that we are indoctrinated not to acknowledge our fears, even to ourselves, creating a blind spot for us conceptually. this is confused with "strength" and it is sold to everyone as the preferred response to feelings of fear.
I think it bubbles to the surface as anger when it finally erupts. what I remember most from 2020 was the anger and how righteous it was. we walk around for years with this lead ball burning our insides, but we can't allow ourselves to admit it. so when the moment comes where we feel able to strike at those who put it there and rid ourselves of it, there are people from many walks of life erupting with fury.
yes the apparatus was successful in stamping it down, in the middle of a global pandemic no less when we held our breaths at an unseen killer ripping through us. that's what I remember most: the way the system didn't care much about the pandemic until it could be used to discourage the logic of protest and direct action by large gatherings.
combined with media framing desperately trying to make cops look reasonable (while they are arrested and peppered with rubber bullets) and protestors as crazed maniacs, they managed to diffuse many into the ballot box. and then we got Cop Prez and Cop Prez Jr by fiat.
personally, I think they got really lucky in 2020 with the constellation of events around the George Floyd protests, and all we need is one moment where their luck doesn't hold. that phrase: they have to get lucky every time, we only have to get lucky once.
we all know they are going to kill someone publicly again in front of cameras with people pleading for them to live. the system needs its unrepentant sadists and they will never be muzzled for long. once it happens and goes wide, we will be right back where we were, in the full knowledge that nothing fundamentally changed.