https://www.reddit.com/r/Shortages/
/r/collapse is very fertile ground for agitation, more so every year. This new subreddit, specific to the global supply chain collapses, is also a place where we can speak directly to the emotions people are feeling and the material conditions creating them. If it isn't full of socialists it will soon become full of libertarian preppers.
edit: I've also got no part in leadership there. It started popping up in crossposts yesterday.
r/collapse honestly makes me bloomer a lot of the time tbqh. you will REGULARLY see people say openly anti capitalist shit and point out the links between capitalism and climate collapse. you can see in real time people being radicalised by their material conditions
I was a really early subscriber and right off the bat saw that it was the best place on the website to agitate. Agitating online is important because it's the modern equivalent of worker pubs. On there we can make an esoteric social argument that redditors reject outright because it's otherwise benignly reactionary. We can make an esoteric economic argument that is shut down by all the temporarily-embarrassed millionaires and cryptobros on the website. There usually isn't much penetration with either in most subreddits.
In a place like r/collapse, everyone has a visceral connection to what's happening and an intuitive sense of what's coming/what caused it. That can just as easily be hijacked by eco-fascists with more convenient options where scared people get to do nothing. Hippies can hijack it like they did the rage of the 1960s, with eco-centric communes and incoherent utopias and empty hedonism. Liberals can manage it as a place of recuperation like they do Extinction Rebellion. When we're in there, it's easy to link dots and channel anger into something constructive or at least destructive toward the right thing. You can show the practical necessity of organisation because they know the future is being held hostage and that top-down solutions are the hopium of the masses. Even if people aren't won over there, the arguments you refine there are the ones you'll be making in any setting as things get worse.
And because it's not overtly political it's less likely to get banned than consciously socialist subreddits.
I like your point, but it's still a shortcut to full on Doomer in my brain. I browse r/preppers sometimes as an antidote. The Chud infestation is greatly diminished since the pandemic started, and it makes me vaguely hopeful for the future.
a lot of the people on r/collapse do stare into the abyss and break down. but that's the first step, knowing within our current system change is impossible. a lot of people need that crisis of faith in liberalism to accept the need for radicalism. and you see that too, people who have come out of the other side of it knowing What Is To Be Done
Yes, hello, I'd like you to stop telling people my life story please.
I'm glad you got through the dark part to see another world is possible, comrade
the second highest post there right now is a picture of uncle teds shack, which is...something
Ted K is an eco fascist and a lot of people like him, it really sucks. like his ideas aren't even that good, it's just ooga booga turn to monke and also he hates black people on top of that
yeah, although im gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is just a kind of lumpen awareness of "living off grid in the woods and waging war against society doesnt sound so bad, gonna make edgy memes about it" which is the sort of directionless baby leftism that can be turned to something more productive, rather than any deeper association with ted himself or his methods or manifesto (its not like anyone has ever read past the first line anyway)
Not convinced of the potential at r/collapse. Tried dropping agitprop there but got 100% doomer responses.
Had a guy rant at me there that corn wasn't a commodity once and never went back
Last year I finally figured out what r/collapse's deal is, they're downwardly mobile (upper middle to lower middle) suburban millennial kids who discovered capitalism exists, half of them know it as capitalism and the other think it's "cOrruPt hUmAn NatUre"
Facets of reality that would appear "normal" or obvious to people who exist under or just above the poverty line gets confused as signals of impending collapse (which to be fair on a long enough timeline probably are)
Those kids are harmless, but they get worked up real easy, most of them probably never set foot in an apartment until they left for collage
This makes a lot of sense. Huge amounts of individualism over there. I think of it as a liberal prepper sub / sooner depression venting sub.
They get downgraded from Single-family detached homes to Multifamily residentials and those funny duddies think it's the end of the world lol, but there's gonna be a lot more people like them in the future, which could make them assets for American socialists
Doomerism is still viable energy to work with. Sure we probably won't win a revolution that staves off climate change in time, but the alternatives are worse and the one viable option for trying will at least hurt the people responsible for climate change while giving that person's family less suffering even when conditions worsen. The shades of doom between that person's children having opportunities despite climate change and being denied opportunities to further insulate the rich from climate change are very broad. Without an attempt it's the kind of doom a stray dog faces when it's put on a kill list. Nobody will come to help, there's nothing they can do, and the benefits of it dying will never be felt by it. You're still speaking to things that fit into that Kubler-Ross model for the grief they're experiencing.
I agree with everything you said and said things like it myself over there. Responses were 100% negative.
I've had better luck with liberal vegan subs.
Authoritarian nihilists over there
There are definitely socialists and anti-capitalist sentiments too though
As a country we need to start focusing on how dependent we are on others.
National resource and supply chain security should be our single most important policy issue. We need to move away from discussing who can pee in what bathroom and start talking about how we reinvigorate domestic resource management, manufacturing, and infrastructure.
But that doesn't get as many Likes on facebook
Reddit never changes
If it isn’t full of socialists it will soon become full of libertarian preppers.
This is important to recognize. When people figure out that business as usual has no answers, they go looking outside the political mainstream. This is one of the rare groups of people who are (at least momentarily) willing to significantly change their worldview.
But what they hear earliest, most often, and most persuasively can lock them into another entrenched worldview where change becomes difficult. We can pull them left now, and if we don't, they might get sucked into some garbage ideology (e.g., libertarianism) for years until they're reachable again.
It's definitely not uniform. Individual shipping, railroad, and trucking companies are prioritising rarer/more expensive containers to areas with driver shortages. Just-in-time logistical practices mean individual supply chains are hit at random with cascading effects when they're components for something else. Raw resources like lumber are fucked which causes construction shortages. Here it's similar to what you're experiencing, also with a lot of impact to the meat supply and random grocery/tradecraft/appliance items. We're also along a major urban corridor with local freight rail so it's probably cheaper to keep this area supplied than one where you're trucking things an hour away from the rail-yards.
We're also dealing with a limited version of them. As far as I know the root cause of the current shockwaves was Chinese manufacturing shutting down during their first COVID outbreaks. That wasn't long. They've already shut down one major port this week that ships a lot of components and consumer goods due to an outbreak and we've got much more infectious varieties that could escape control efforts. If things go offline there for a longer stretch then shortages will be very visible even before the panic buying.
I’ve seen shortages myself for innocuous things I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed if I wasn’t specifically looking for said thing. Like the other day I noticed the entire juice aisle of the grocery store was hollowed out because I was trying to get some pineapple juice, same day they were out of rum at the liquor store. Completely out of it. I’d never seen anything like that before. Felt eerie, like things are getting worse in a way we all know but no one is allowed to acknowledge
Within my industry I'm seeing shortages in ways I didn't expect. I'm in [manufacturing] and recently it's become increasingly difficult to find some of our raw materials. Normally it's an issue of a particular company being out of something but they know when they restock and it could always be found at a different company for slightly more. Now, it's that no one has it and none of them have any idea when it will be back. My boss has been getting increasingly nervous about availability and costs of the other raw materials as well.
Edit: I should add that these raw materials are domestically produced so the issue isn't something like shipping from China/internationally being fucked up.
Well, it might be. Key gear/inputs further up the production chain might be from China and causing shortages down the line. If there's some essential solvent or whatever used to extract a resource and that's made in China, that could be an issue.
I'm sure the capitalists are thrilled with their hyper efficient™ system right about now.
To the best of my knowledge China has no influence on these particular raw materials. I would guess the problem is more of a climate change/labor issue than anything else.
One factor to watch is companies cutting corners on stocking and variety to save money, but then blaming it on "shortages." They can get away with that now where they couldn't pre-covid.
or like my workplace we simply don't have the labor to actually stock the shelves (we are like 2 days behind) and just tell customers "shortages". it's not lying. just a shortage of people.
Go for it, it's already full of libertarian preppers and some open ecofasc. Lots of reactionary defeatism to overcome, that's going to be your biggest obstacle (and the biggest boon to any reactionaries trying to snap up some folks since fascism is a philosophy of death and decay). The place used to have a good amount of anprims, idk if its still like that. I remember there was this one regular that would argue people had the right to be uneducated and all and any education system serves primarily as a child molestation ring.
I tried my luck few years ago but idk how many I shifted over well, I just had to leave left before the pandemic hit since I knew it'd be extra special toxic. Maybe one day I'll rejoin their discord community, and start up agitation and teaching again. Maybe. Today isn't that day.
I like posting what I see in shortages since there's been plenty of them around me ever since this all started and its good to know its not just because of my geographical location.
Shame r/redpreppers is dead, preppers isn't looking as rugged these days since it's been flooded with regular people rather than bourgeois and petite bourgeois chuds. Everyone should 'prep' to the degree they're able, at least keep a week or two supply of food and things on hand. Just buy things you'll eat anyway that keep, like rice and beans for example.
