Between pipelines getting jammed, the slow-motion general strike, protests everywhere all the time, Sheikh Jarrah, mass shootings every day, new covid strains in India, and just the general background noise of life getting worse and worse for almost everyone on the planet, it feels like someone tied a brick to the big "accelerate the contradictions" lever.
Anyone else felt this way lately?
I really can’t tell if the empire is actually just so deep into collapse that all of the facades are falling away or if I’m just old enough and aware enough to see past them now
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” :lenin-sleeping:
So many people are hyping themselves up for some big return to normalness party this summer
It's amazing, there was careful optimism with the vaccines. Like get your vaccine, but please remain socially distanced and stay at home as much as possible. But now I've even seen liberals throwing caution to the wind because they want to get out and go to brunch so bad.
We're nowhere near that point here and everyone still eschews the mask.
Nah, I feel these crises are just fed into our daily lives a lot more through a greater media influence. We're better informed than most as to all the awful stuff happening and generally dig deeper to find the causes, and thus understand them better as a result, whcih makes them feel more personal and interlinked.
The strike cannot be called as such as there's no organization, no concrete demands, and no fallback. It's lasting only because of unemployment payments, but as soon as those dry up or get abolished in the next spat of small business tyrant-lobbied state legislation it'll be back to the salt mines for seven bucks an hour out of desperation. If and when a real general strike occurs, you will know it because nothing, and I do mean nothing, will work except what the unions allow to run, not just a couple of shitty fast food joints.
Life gets worse and worse and more violent for everyone, but only as long as they're in the global south. The west as a whole is still very much stable, and even neoliberal hellholes like europe can compromise with their bourgeoisie just enough to keep the proles from revolting. Equally depressing is that there's no real opposition to any of this. The western left is deader than ever through a steady process of Pasokification in Europe, and the US doesn't know what the left even is.
Yet despite all this, violence is contained, and the bourgeois state apparatus is in full control, and still maintains the monopoly on violence.
Make no mistake, the contradictions are heightening, but it's not as if there's a ceiling they can hit before it all goes to shit; they're very pliable things and they can be held up by the state so long as it feels it needs to tolerate them to maintain supremacy; after all, the ruling classes will never feel even a fraction of the suffering they inflict or allow to be inflicted by capital. We are definitely approaching a crisis point, but I feel the ruling classes are aware and are doing what they can to maintain the illusion of stability, and that tipping point is anyone's guess as to what and when.
There was a disaster every month last year, while covid raged the whole time. That used up all the remaining strength of the system, so now everything it was just barely holding back is seeping through. We need to start working hard now, because I believe this could be our big break. However, I have just barely read a little theory and have not really done any organizing, so feel free to ignore me.
No, you're right. I don't think this is the Revolution yet, but this is definitely the time to be organizing and educating. I'm right with you on trying to read more theory too; currently making my way through Mao's Selected Works.
I think this could be it. We'll never know until everything is over, but things look just about right right now.
I'm not saying "there's a crisis, now we just need to find the communism button." I'm saying that enough things are breaking down that, if we hit the right places, we could win. Yeah, there's a long way to go. But people have started waking up in a way they never have before. It's also worth noting that American history usually sees a great revival-style event go on during crises like this. I've heard an argument that trump's whole thing could be considered a great revival, but it didn't get nearly as big as the previous ones. We are seeing a point where the american cycle isn't repeating per usual. What will this mean? I don't know yet. But if we keep at it, we might see something. Keep in mind, I'm not saying it's the right conditions today, go bomb your police department. I'm just optimistic. I'll either be right or jaded in like 10 years.
In 10 years I hope to be on a commune that is both situated in a location that can reach people in cities and has a model that's replicable in lots of places.
I've noticed my life just keeps getting worse no matter what. My biggest fear is that it's one of those situations where it needs to get worse before it gets better.
I'm in the same boat. But a lot of other people are too, which is kind of comforting.
Yeah, I know. In a morbid way, we're all kind of fucked lol
I think things have been a bit less crazy than they were in 2020, but that might start to change.
Really? I feel like things are even weirder now than they were this time last year.
With :thicc-trump: not around to steal all of the oxygen, I think we're actually hearing about things that would have been drowned out by Trump talk.
The frequency with which he's still brought up is insane. He's gone folks, he can't hurt you anymore, anything that's still hurting you is the system
Not necessarily worse for everyone on the planet… I felt this same sense of impending doom until my opinions on China changed and I started following more closely what’s going on there, which is mostly very positive stuff.
I used to get bummed thinking that revolution would never happen, but now I realize that the most important revolution already happened decades ago, and the product of that revolution is about to become the world’s number one economy.
So yes, things are getting crazier, especially in the US, but all is not lost. On a global level, we might start to see positive change happen more quickly than we realize.
The Bolshevik revolution was the starter motor. The end of the USSR wasn't the end of communism, it was the beginning of the next phase of revolution.
I think it'll turn out to be very comparable to the French revolution's impact on liberalism in the long run
This is the thought process that keeps me hopeful, and therefore sane rn.
WTF someone posted this already and my terminal online brain didn’t notice. Ignore my ass. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
24 News cycle means we hear about all the “nothing” happening prior to the “decades happening”. Build up to a metaphorical dam bursting.
I dont think theres a general strike happening, even a slow one
I think they're referring to all the fast food workers mass-quitting (instead of unionizing :deeper-sadness: )
helmsman@world-computer:~$ nice -20 ./Scripts/2021/CoolZone.sh && wall “TURBO MODE”I've felt this way since the assassination of Soleimani in January 2020.
Maybe things are even faster now and I can't tell because I already reached my limit on being able to process shit.
The difference in posture between Soleimani getting killed and Bin Laden getting killed was astounding.
I remember when Bid Laden was killed, all the politicos were solemn-faced and tons of us plebs were chanting "U-S-A!" in the streets.
Fast forward a decade and all the politicos were cheering about killing Soleimani and almost everyone I know was just kind of shocked that we were just straight-up killing foreign leaders in broad daylight.
