if you are able to educate, agitate, organize working class organs or even the beginings of a party today, then do that but don't shit on other people who are not ready because honestly the vast majority of the working class, whether disabled or clinically depressed or not is simply not there yet either.
just screaming "organize" at them won't work. it might work for some people who are in a similar headspace as you but being hyper online is hardly the only way to isolate yourself from real people, you might be a in a party organizing and still have zero ability to connect with other workers on a real level, so think about why that might be
also, i didn't read the article, but self care is good, actually. you can't maintain any level of discipline without it. breaking down your ability to do self-care is one of the first things you do when you want to break a human and its something that capitalism does naturally through alienation and overwork and inducing disorders by demanding ways of thinking and living that are not good for us in order to have pliable workers and inducing massive amounts of stress by forcing us to either pretend or otherwise convince ourselves that we can make a broken system work.
revolution doesn't only take disciplined cadres, it also requires conditions where the working class will be ready for the necessary unrest, conflict, violence and discipline. the conditions for revolution will come when the conditions are so bad that the working class in the imperial core can't be lied to anymore and cannot take it anymore and has given up on the defanged unions and is ready for street fights and illegal mass strikes and is aware and ready to fight the counter reaction.
that does take disiplined cadres that will assist and guide in that process and but that sort of cadre work is not for everyone. under those kinds of conditions the little sects that we call "parties" today will either show themselves relevant or not and we'll just have to see if your favorite sect or mine will have any relevance or not or whether its someone else or maybe even the fascists that will win. the profit rate of the imperial core nations keeps dropping and the climate crisis keeps deepening, so we will see those conditions happen in our lifetime
not so much on the self-care is shit part. i think anyone who has been involved in any kind of revolutionary organization has figured out that self-care is an important element of it if you expect to have any longevity. self-care and solidarity (or mutual aid if you wish to use that terminology) strenghten each other. anyway based on the other comments here it seems you have changed your tone so i won't harp on that but if you have had experience with people who have a deep "learned helplessness" due to decades of poverty and the system failing them and have tried to help them you will know that the rhetoric you were using is both ineffective and heartless but i'll stop at that.
i mean self care in the sense used in the article, and in the many liberal discourses it criticizes; that is, ascribing a deep political significance to the individual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. i'm not advocating for a bootstraps mentality, and i'm not denying the real fact of our collective and individual disempowerment, but if we wish to pull our fellow workers up out of the muck, we need to begin from a place that assumes some degree of agency.
yeah, that particular definition is shit too imo. that said, when it comes to these types of things the amount of agency varies extensively, depending on the conditions you are facing. when i say self care i mean doing what is necessary to secure the bottom rungs of the maslow hierarchy more or less. if you are not able to get food, clothes, shelter, meds, sleep etc your agency even over your own mental state become severely reduced and because most people attempt to acquire those things through selling labor or getting SSI/SSDI checks that may not pay enough for that to happen. capitalism literally robs many people of most of their agency and its a downward spiral from there on and can lead to maladaptive behaviors like drug abuse etc.
liberal outlets that promote hedonism as self care only make this worse. solidarity and mutual aid can help us break through some of that but mostly we are left to fend for ourselves, which is why i am not against a better definition of self care that can be more useful if still very limited in its ability to meaningfully increase agency for many people. much of psychiatry and self-help coaching is similar to be honest, it only works for a small subset of people and is much more likely to work if socioeconomic factors have been guaranteed to begin with, which is not a safe assumption in our system of capitalism
if you are able to educate, agitate, organize working class organs or even the beginings of a party today, then do that but don't shit on other people who are not ready because honestly the vast majority of the working class, whether disabled or clinically depressed or not is simply not there yet either.
just screaming "organize" at them won't work. it might work for some people who are in a similar headspace as you but being hyper online is hardly the only way to isolate yourself from real people, you might be a in a party organizing and still have zero ability to connect with other workers on a real level, so think about why that might be
also, i didn't read the article, but self care is good, actually. you can't maintain any level of discipline without it. breaking down your ability to do self-care is one of the first things you do when you want to break a human and its something that capitalism does naturally through alienation and overwork and inducing disorders by demanding ways of thinking and living that are not good for us in order to have pliable workers and inducing massive amounts of stress by forcing us to either pretend or otherwise convince ourselves that we can make a broken system work.
revolution doesn't only take disciplined cadres, it also requires conditions where the working class will be ready for the necessary unrest, conflict, violence and discipline. the conditions for revolution will come when the conditions are so bad that the working class in the imperial core can't be lied to anymore and cannot take it anymore and has given up on the defanged unions and is ready for street fights and illegal mass strikes and is aware and ready to fight the counter reaction.
that does take disiplined cadres that will assist and guide in that process and but that sort of cadre work is not for everyone. under those kinds of conditions the little sects that we call "parties" today will either show themselves relevant or not and we'll just have to see if your favorite sect or mine will have any relevance or not or whether its someone else or maybe even the fascists that will win. the profit rate of the imperial core nations keeps dropping and the climate crisis keeps deepening, so we will see those conditions happen in our lifetime
i think we're broadly in agreement then
not so much on the self-care is shit part. i think anyone who has been involved in any kind of revolutionary organization has figured out that self-care is an important element of it if you expect to have any longevity. self-care and solidarity (or mutual aid if you wish to use that terminology) strenghten each other. anyway based on the other comments here it seems you have changed your tone so i won't harp on that but if you have had experience with people who have a deep "learned helplessness" due to decades of poverty and the system failing them and have tried to help them you will know that the rhetoric you were using is both ineffective and heartless but i'll stop at that.
i mean self care in the sense used in the article, and in the many liberal discourses it criticizes; that is, ascribing a deep political significance to the individual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. i'm not advocating for a bootstraps mentality, and i'm not denying the real fact of our collective and individual disempowerment, but if we wish to pull our fellow workers up out of the muck, we need to begin from a place that assumes some degree of agency.
yeah, that particular definition is shit too imo. that said, when it comes to these types of things the amount of agency varies extensively, depending on the conditions you are facing. when i say self care i mean doing what is necessary to secure the bottom rungs of the maslow hierarchy more or less. if you are not able to get food, clothes, shelter, meds, sleep etc your agency even over your own mental state become severely reduced and because most people attempt to acquire those things through selling labor or getting SSI/SSDI checks that may not pay enough for that to happen. capitalism literally robs many people of most of their agency and its a downward spiral from there on and can lead to maladaptive behaviors like drug abuse etc.
liberal outlets that promote hedonism as self care only make this worse. solidarity and mutual aid can help us break through some of that but mostly we are left to fend for ourselves, which is why i am not against a better definition of self care that can be more useful if still very limited in its ability to meaningfully increase agency for many people. much of psychiatry and self-help coaching is similar to be honest, it only works for a small subset of people and is much more likely to work if socioeconomic factors have been guaranteed to begin with, which is not a safe assumption in our system of capitalism