OP this reads like my 20s so let me tell you what I've seen of that experience in hindsight:
Bitterness comes easy when you're young, especially if you've managed to develop a class conciousness. But as you get older and your body gets shittier and maybe you start a family, you realize that you're not gonna see the end of this thing. That you won't be the one standing over capitalism's grave, you're just another body in the pile our descendants will have to climb to get there.
Realizing that turns all your resentment and spite to ash. Anger's still there, sure, but less at individuals and more at the system itself. You start to see people as products of their environment, whose individual experience of privilege is out of your control and usually not worth the high blood pressure getting angry about.
By all means take your time felling resentful, if that's what you need right now. But those feelings may just fade on their own if you let them.
I think of this as crude class consciousness. The ability to see the injustices of class but the inability to see that the people without class consciousness are being influenced by the system and need to be broken out of it. It's not their fault that they're influenced by the system, their attitudes are a product of being a victim of the system and environment in a different way.
Crude class consciousness grants people the ability to see various injustices and perform class analysis while a true class consciousness grants an absolute love for the class and everyone in it. Fred Hampton's speech here is a pretty good example of this, where he talks about it being a mistake to think you're better than "the people", and how important it is for everything to be based in an absolute love for them.
I think the difference is looking at things from the individual perspective vs the collective perspective.
I don't disagree with some of this, but think I do on a couple parts. I don't want this to come off as a dismissal though, I do agree with a good amount of it.
I think, from my perspective, I've spent a number of decades creating all kinds of different communities, online and offline and also as a job for companies. An aspect of community building is liking the people including the bad ones, in part because there's not a whole lot you can do about them unless you purge them (not always the best approach) and in part because the drama certain elements bring is entertaining, and another part being that over time you can watch these people grow and change too.
I apply this same experience to spreading the red, to lifting more and more people out of ignorance and into consciousness. Yes this sounds very pretentious and you're absolutely right to take a stab at that because describing it that way sounds like dogshit but I do not have a better way to describe it. Education is the only tool we have and education creates consciousness and I have personally watched it create an unbelievable number of reds. Will those reds be revolutionaries? Not right now, I agree. But we have zero ability to affect the material conditions. We can only spread the red until the material conditions are right and then watch and hope that we have spread enough red that flips revolutionary under the deteriorating conditions.
I like the shits in the communities I build, communities are sort of like weird ant farms and I enjoy sitting back and watching them after putting work in to build and foster them. I also like the people, including the shit ones, the ones who haven't yet flipped, etc etc.
As an aside to this -- I really think that the trans community using "egg" has parallels to radicalisation. There is a socialist red egg-cracking that occurs.
OP this reads like my 20s so let me tell you what I've seen of that experience in hindsight:
Bitterness comes easy when you're young, especially if you've managed to develop a class conciousness. But as you get older and your body gets shittier and maybe you start a family, you realize that you're not gonna see the end of this thing. That you won't be the one standing over capitalism's grave, you're just another body in the pile our descendants will have to climb to get there.
Realizing that turns all your resentment and spite to ash. Anger's still there, sure, but less at individuals and more at the system itself. You start to see people as products of their environment, whose individual experience of privilege is out of your control and usually not worth the high blood pressure getting angry about.
By all means take your time felling resentful, if that's what you need right now. But those feelings may just fade on their own if you let them.
I think of this as crude class consciousness. The ability to see the injustices of class but the inability to see that the people without class consciousness are being influenced by the system and need to be broken out of it. It's not their fault that they're influenced by the system, their attitudes are a product of being a victim of the system and environment in a different way.
Crude class consciousness grants people the ability to see various injustices and perform class analysis while a true class consciousness grants an absolute love for the class and everyone in it. Fred Hampton's speech here is a pretty good example of this, where he talks about it being a mistake to think you're better than "the people", and how important it is for everything to be based in an absolute love for them.
I think the difference is looking at things from the individual perspective vs the collective perspective.
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I don't disagree with some of this, but think I do on a couple parts. I don't want this to come off as a dismissal though, I do agree with a good amount of it.
I think, from my perspective, I've spent a number of decades creating all kinds of different communities, online and offline and also as a job for companies. An aspect of community building is liking the people including the bad ones, in part because there's not a whole lot you can do about them unless you purge them (not always the best approach) and in part because the drama certain elements bring is entertaining, and another part being that over time you can watch these people grow and change too.
I apply this same experience to spreading the red, to lifting more and more people out of ignorance and into consciousness. Yes this sounds very pretentious and you're absolutely right to take a stab at that because describing it that way sounds like dogshit but I do not have a better way to describe it. Education is the only tool we have and education creates consciousness and I have personally watched it create an unbelievable number of reds. Will those reds be revolutionaries? Not right now, I agree. But we have zero ability to affect the material conditions. We can only spread the red until the material conditions are right and then watch and hope that we have spread enough red that flips revolutionary under the deteriorating conditions.
I like the shits in the communities I build, communities are sort of like weird ant farms and I enjoy sitting back and watching them after putting work in to build and foster them. I also like the people, including the shit ones, the ones who haven't yet flipped, etc etc.
As an aside to this -- I really think that the trans community using "egg" has parallels to radicalisation. There is a socialist red egg-cracking that occurs.
i think i needed to read this, thanks comrade