The lockstep calls for a fucking war with Russia across the political spectrum, including by probably 99% of the US left, has convinced me that change for the better is impossible in this country and will be for the forseeable future. People still got World Cop mindset and refuse to let it go. Memories like fucking goldfish, like the last 70 years of US interventionism just don't count or some shit. This country needs to be humbled.
Made a whole damn account just to vent because it seems like this is the only place to do it without people saying you lick Putin's boots.
At this point I just don't know if there's anything that can be done. Generations of attempts to change things have failed, over and over and over. This generation of US socialists has already accepted defeat even if we don't want to admit it, and I don't blame anyone for throwing in the towel.
Pretty much every American alive today will die fighting for the last scraps of bread in the ruins of their local supermarket, cheering on the latest foreign misadventure fought by trillion-dollar killer robots.
This is going against the flow for this comm, I know, and the urgency of the climate crisis (among a host of other environmental issues) diminishes this point, but consider this:
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. That means that, if a generation is 25 years, we've had only 7 generations since then. It took about 2 generations for those ideas to filter out into the world, and by the end of the 3rd generation afterward, the first socialist revolution had occurred. The clash of civilizations that occurred following that event took roughly 3 generations more, and now here we are, a bit more than one single generation later. And yeah, things seem pretty bleak right now, especially in the US. But politically, at least, they seemed a ton worse in the early aughts, when Al Franken was pretty much the leftmost voice in US culture.
In essence, the left lost the first global "battle," but the war goes on, and it seems like there is at least some momentum on the left here in the US. It's just, as you say, that things like this Ukraine conflict make it painfully clear how far we have yet to go.
native peoples on this land have been fighting us empire for like 500 yrs. america has always deserved all the scorn.
I still think things need to get worse before they get better. Life in the imperial core can be uncomfortable at times but the treats largely still flow and there's a lot of comfort to be had. Sadly, I think it might get to the "too late" stage before people snap out of it.
Sadly, I think it might get to the “too late” stage before people snap out of it.
Yeah, agreed, unfortunately.
Generally my outlook on life here in the USA is grim. I think capitalism is going to continue of the trajectory it's currently on for the foreseeable future. It'll keep having crisis after crisis but the government will take the shock paddles to it and keep it's zombie corpse alive. I think the quality of life for the poor will continue to fall and the "middle class" what's left of it anyway, will be razor thin. The two major camps in the USA will be the working poor and the billionaires. With politicians still chasing that elusive middle class vote. I think policy will still be the same too with neoliberalism being the dominant form, with flare ups of populism that's close to neo-fascism, think Trump and tucker carlson. Don't expect any reforms because they're never coming.
The class of those who own nothing but do not labor either is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, has the power to bring about a successful social revolution. And now we see that, as the result of a far-reaching colonial policy, the European proletariat has partly reached a situation where it is not its work that maintains the whole of society but that of the people of the colonies who are practically enslaved. The British bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from the many milllions of the population of India and other colonies than from the British workers. **In certain countries these circumstances create the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat of one country or another with colonial chauvinism. ** (emphasis mine)
Lenin
https://readsettlers.org/ch5.html
I've already read Settlers and know that capital-R Revolution will come from the global south first. I'm just venting my frustration over American myopia, even among its "left."
Sure maybe but isn't that a pretty good representation of a large chunk of the US? Do you think what opinions people have on twitter can't be extrapolated out to broader trends of national opinion?
20 percent of usa, but self selected (online nerds and young). Of course people will flip on a dime, they watch twitter, and see twitter (same as with news), but that’s because they don’t really care about it
Sure maybe but isn’t that a pretty good representation of a large chunk of the US?
:michael-laugh:
The twitterverse is an incredibly small and skewed segment of the population. Not saying Americans are good, but spaces like Twitter and Reddit are in no way reflective of the broad swath of the country. These platforms make it seem like Americans are way more engaged (even if they have bad opinions) than they actually are. If you could walk into a random supermarket in the US and probe a sampling of the brains of the people there, you would find most are barely aware of the situation in the Ukraine, and even less have strong feelings about it.
Most people are focused on trying to get by and their own shit to care that much about US politics, much less what is going on in other countries.
Change can't happen in America while the means of production exist mainly in China and the global south. Take away the treats and anything is possible.
People believe what the media tell them, for the most part. There's still hope, but leftists need to learn how to manufacture consent for the truth and exploit algorithms through brigading.
I wonder if your feelings are similar to the feelings any socialists had after seeing people support ww1.
I feel like a general disappointment with people is probably something that echoes down through the ages for socialists.
In that case, the thing to do is build durable institutions that will outlive you. Also preserve suppressed information in such a way that others in the future may find it.
Yeah, but the populace still can't do anything, as their input is completely disconnected from the MIC. The war starts and stops without their input. We likely don't have the capacity to do this war no matter how much consent is manufactured. And even if we did go to conventional war with Russia, China would be the victor, much like the U.S. was in WWII, barring nukes, in which no one would be the victor.
But yeah, change for the better is likely not possible within the foreseeable future, but that has more to do with the continuing generational wealth and multiplying debtors grifts that are propping up the working class in this country. When that fails, then we will see radicalization movements, and the divisions in the country will likely cause the instability nessecery for South America to buck the yoke. What they will then establish remains to be seen.
the divisions in the country will likely cause the instability nessecery for South America to buck the yoke.
Isn't this kind of already happening though? If how Castillo's turned rightward is any indication, I don't know if this is as hopeful as we'd like it to be.
But then again Venezuela's been dabbing on America for like three years straight so what the hell do I know.
Whatever is going on in SA, they are still having to react to the U.S.'s hegemonic dominance over the financial and military systems in SA. Nothing going on now is indicative of what might occur should America actually begin to collapse. We should always be wary of leftist electoralism that doesn't ground its power in it's ability to martial labor though, that is a given regardless of circumstances.
That being said, I'm not trying to give false hope, after all even after the fall of Russia the revolution failed in Germany. I'm just trying to point out that there are still areas that have different propagandizing techniques that are not as intensive as what goes on in the Anglo-sphere. We could see collapse lead to an increase in SA Fascist Nationalism, after all facism is just capitalism in decay, but with global capital unable to support those movements we could also see a rise in the power of indigenous socialist movements. The fact that they are having minor amounts of success in spite of American domination indicates to me that this is not the ceilng of power for these movements, but more of the floor.
What happens afterwards is anybodies guess.
Nothing going on now is indicative of what might occur should America actually begin to collapse.
I want to counter this. America has already begun to collapse, and has been for decades. There are wide swaths of the country where the government is essentially non-existent outside of road maintenance, and even that is falling by the wayside. The postal system takes days to do what it used to take hours to deliver. The hospitals are falling apart. The US's ability to project power globally is in free fall, and this is why Russia chose now to strike against Ukraine. This is why the mercenary attempt in Venezuela failed, this is why the coup attempt in Bolivia failed. Once you stop waiting for "the collapse" and realize it's already an ongoing process a lot of things become clearer. There is already an increased in SA Fascist Nationalism in the Anglosphere, and has been for a long while.
I agree with this, but I am hedging to see what actually occurs during the next major financial crisis, which is likely due either this year or next year. I mean, 'the collapse' is happening, but there are still levers the U.S. can pull if they were not ideologically inclined against it. What is intriguing is the use of MMT by the Biden admin, but it is once again not being used to retrain and invest in the labor capital required to sustainablly run the interior of the country. If something actually changes there, 'the collapse' might turn into stabilization, which again changes the dynamic with SA.
I think the time for MMT is rapidly passing by anyway, as the world experiences dedollarization and the collapse of the petrodollar doing MMT becomes substantially more difficult when the USD is not the reserve currency. We certainly live in interesting times.
Yeah, agreed, the right time to do things was a decade ago, but like with the U.S.'s tariffs on China they are consistently a day late and a dollar short with their plans and solutions. History is always moving, but I think the failure of America to contain COVID provided a test case for countries looking to test the limits of the chain. After all, if what the 'experts' said about America's ability to contain a pandemic were wrong, what else is a bluff?
Not that I really want to see this country succeed, but it would be nice to see things get less bleak for the working class in the U.S.
The only thing that can help the people of the united states is burning g hellfire of freedom :xi-plz:
