As leftists, we tend to assign a lot of blame to systems, and that's good because that's where a lot of problems come from. But the coronavirus nonsense in the US has made me reconsider and wonder how much of our problems are really because our systems are fucked up, and how much is because people suck. Obviously, the government bungled the coronavirus response and made things considerably worse. But even if they hadn't, it's kind of hard to imagine that Americans would actually work together for the common good and not be entitled shitheads about it. As another example, while climate change certainly is a big systemic problem, it's also true that Americans tend to have larger carbon footprints than people in other developed countries.
I was watching Luna Oi on Youtube and she talked about Vietnam's coronavirus response. Some of what she said had to do with the government's swift and effective response, but she also talked about ordinary people taking it seriously and chiding people to wear masks. I've also thought about culture and Vietnam whenever chud libertarians use the Vietnam War as an example for how they could fight the state, and it's like, if you put an American chud next to a Vietnamese guerilla, they're about as different as two people can be, and if you consider those differences for two minutes it becomes clear that it's completely unrealistic for the former to fill the latter's shoes. To a certain extent (though certainly less so), I think the same critique can be applied to American leftists who make the comparison.
So with electoralism being such a dead-end, and with revolution looking pretty dicey, I wonder if it's worthwhile to work on things that may not solve problems directly, but might shift the way people think and act to be less, uh, you know, American. I don't know what that looks like exactly - maybe like community gardens or something. I know that climate change has us on a clock and that there are many other urgent problems right now, but it's hard to picture how anything gets solved with the way things are, so I figure it's worth looking at things from another angle. I don't really know what can be done about straight-up chuds though.
Idk, kinda just rambling/brainstorming here, thoughts?
The Germans were the ones who introduced Culture to the anthropology in the first place, and Marx read Morgan and wrote a book heavily influenced by Morgan's Ideas (the German ideology) to the point where Engles asks readers to read him in the footnotes. Marx was almost certainly knowledgeable in the discourse around culture at the time, and even talked about an "asiatic mode of production" as distinct from capitalism and feudalism. He never flushed it out, but it definitely points to someone thinking about culture, even if he wasn't writing about it.