Need to vent, just ignore this. If you don't want to listen to a grown man whine, please just answer the title.
Rant
This country sucks. Everything here sucks. Leaving is too expensive, living is 5x more expensive.
- We can't rent because our credit is too shitty, and we can't get jobs because they want us to live somewhere to get mail. The place we WERE getting mail said they wouldn't keep delivering the mail even though the owner is okay with it.
- We can't afford food, but some food banks are now SO busy they're a 3 hour wait. It's gotten 30x worse this winter; we have started seeing some NICE-ass cars here. Some even say we're too well off for free food because we have a car to sleep in (wow thanks)
- We're "too well off" for state assistance, and somehow not disabled enough for fed assistance (rare spine fusing disorder, I look like a pretzel)
USA is giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine. USA is giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel.
- Republicans want us to take some imaginary fairy jobs with our super-bootstraps and buy the nearest $12,000 house.
- Democrats want to suck off the establishment regardless of what they do to us (please don't protest unless they're "legal protests!" You have to vote for the man who made homelessness illegal or the scary orange fuher will win!)
If a 3rd party couldn't win THIS election of all fucking elections, it's never happening without intense violence.
- The good thing is that the surveillance state would never let that happen, whew! Really glad we don't have the gulag here unlike that shitty "communist" country that houses everybody /s.
If we didn't get healthcare reform after Trump's covid party, it's NEVER happening.
- Two of our best friends have severe Huntington's disease and their insurance doesn't cover their meds. But at least their insurance company made $90,100,000,000 in profits this year! WooHoo!!
At least stocks are up biggly!
- I'm sure that has nothing to do with inflation and the collapsing USD!
Meanwhile; in burger-fuck-town, our dumbass citizens weren't educated enough to do anything other than guzzle sugar and argue about their side of the culture-war.
- Maybe it's the 3,000 people who own half of the worlds wealth's problem? Nah, it's gotta be trans people!
- Maybe the 1% is the problem? Nah, it's gotta be those dumbass racist white folk in Alabama's fault!
- Maybe corporations are to blame? No, I'm pretty sure it's the student protestors! They should have known better than to break the law!
Our homelessness is ILLEGAL where we live, and fucking SLAVERY is legal for anybody who had the misfortune of being stuck in housing limbo.
- It's very clear the establishment is pushing people into labor camps and torturing anybody who refuses the labor (I mean who gives a fuck if prisoners kill themselves in solitary confinement, AMIRIGHT?)
The British working class failed to create a socialist republic when their children were getting dismembered during their twelve hour work days, so.
Revolutionary conditions are not simply a matter of "things being bad"
Way, way worse. Like "the average person is literally starving" bad. Where a majority of the military would side with you over the government bad.
Oh buddy it can get a lot worse
Like, we’re not even at Great Depression level of immiseration yet, and that didn’t quite spark an overthrow. Serious threat of one, plus the Russian Revolution had just happened, which is why we got the New Deal. But no overthrow.
Just look how bad things had to get in china and the Russian empire before their revolutions. And they weren’t fighting 100 years of Cold War propaganda. And they actually had functional working class parties.
My only hope for a brighter future is the East Germany route: Lose a war and be occupied by a socialist superpower (China this time)
Fuck I want to live in Chinese occupied North America that sounds like such an improvement
Easier to tell people it's all fine with print media being the only way to know what the rest of the country is doing.
These days you see >90% home ownership countries regularly on the internet.
They can't just "oh it'll be fine" the next great depression (which is realistically right around the corner)
I think the basic minimum requirement is that the US loses its position as the home of the labor aristocracy. Every country and context is different so just looking to past countries' revolutions and trying to impose the formula won't work, but it also can't happen if the US is still top dollar (pun intended) and USians still have actual hope that "it'll be fine". Things would probably have to get to Great Depression levels at least and also be in a situation where the US Empire as such has already collapsed.
Revolution within the Empire, I think, is just an idealistic dream. Another reason why the US is doing everything it can, and will sacrifice anything, not to lose that position to anyone. It's still good to be well-organized already for when the moment happens, but I think anyone who thinks is coming sooner than that is puffing some strong hopium.
Like, something might be on the table when we hit like 10% homelessness and another 20% on the verge, as well as widespread food insecurity.
If Trump actually does the tariffs he’s talked about and we get hit by a couple bad climate-change-related-events though, that could happen sooner than we think.
I honestly think we are either already at or close to those numbers.
I do tend to think the bar for uprising/revolutuon/collapse is lower than it was 100-150 years ago, but we still have a long way to go. And if things do pop off it’ll get much worse for a long time before it gets better.
My bet for where the US will be in 30 years is basically Syria with more guns
Nothing short of an apocalyptic event(s).
The rot.
The propaganda.
It runs too deep.
Things need to be bad enough that the risk of being killed by the government / right wing street gangs is less scary than dealing with the status quo.
US won't change without outside intervention imo
Even if you formed a people's vanguard you would be fighting against patriots militias or whatever. Just a deeply brain poisoned, cursed and cruel place.
Yeah, the only uprising in amerika will be a reactionary one not a revolutionary one.
I think the only thing you can hope for is a town in the middle of nowhere being taken over and made marginally better
The majority of the world is living in much worse conditions than the US and we don't see revolutions popping off. It takes organizing for that to happen, it isn't a spontaneous thing that occurs once a certain threshold of suffering is reached.
Yes and this also means it can happen given an economic crisis or crisis of legitimacy, proper organizing and the right balance of power between classes.
it isn't a spontaneous thing that occurs once a certain threshold of suffering is reached.
Absolutely! It's weird how often this simplistic "threshold of suffering" view of revolutions is just assumed without any theoretical basis. It explicitly goes against Lenin who rejected spontaneity and insisted on organizing.
A historic materialist analysis of revolutions does not rely on anything as subjective as suffering. It is concerned with objective contradictions inherent in the mode of production, class analysis, class consciousness and organizing. And no, suffering alone does not suffice to create class consciousness. Without organizing it can lead to despair, passivity or fragmented resistance.
In a successful revolution, seeds of class consciousness lead to political action which leads to more class consciousness which leads to more action and so on.
And those seeds are planted right now in the boring everyday struggle. In every strike, protest and action. And organizing them builds structures and alliances from which a revolutionary potential might someday emerge.
Capitalism is not sustainable and keeps producing crisis and moments that can be captured. History is full of those moments when the ruling class seemed invincible - right up until they were overthrown.
Agreed, although I'd go as far as to say that even organizing itself isn't enough to sow the seeds of revolution if not tied to explicitly revolutionary theories of change. Labor unions have organized for over a century and many have mostly fought for better gains for themselves without having an understanding of their part in the greater class of workers. In the US most organizing spaces are dominated by people who explicitly follow counter revolutionary ideologies, and those people will push out those with revolutionary lines while building coalition with overt reactionaries.
Of course, without there being material conditions worse enough to push people to want to organize over maintaining the status quo, they won't do it. So it's not that the threshold of suffering isn't real, it's just that it isn't the mechanism of triggering revolution in and of itself. People who have nothing to lose will be more willing to fight against a seemingly insurmountable foe, and people who are relatively comfortable and have a lot of treats to keep their dopamine levels high aren't going to go out of their way to do much of anything, especially something that seems impossible at first glance. Without some understanding of how and why change happens, and how people have historically succeeded and failed in attempting to change the world for the better, people can spend lifetimes organizing to no avail.
theoretically adavanced proletariat, which is also very hard to get
The real reason why amerikans are illiterate.
I mean, there was a popular uprising in 2020. The biggest protests in American history. For a few weeks or months, things actually felt hopeful? Its only real achievement was burning shit down and getting George Floyd’s murderer put in prison. But Smeagol did it once…
I honestly have no idea how people aren't fully doomer, given the situation. How am I supposed to have hope
The good guys are winning. China is ascendant, having proper multipolarity will do a lot of good for a lot of people
Yeah but there's the non-zero possibility that the US will take the rest of the world down with it, seeing as they have nukes
If we had infinite time, sure, but climate change exists. Can China destroy America and establish global communism in like 5 years?
something something everything under heaven is in utter chaos, the situation is excellent
The imperial core will never have a revolution until after (probably long after) the empire has fully collapsed in on itself.
Ah, a rant eh? Mind if I join you. I've had a really shit year.
This country sucks. Everything here sucks. Leaving is too expensive, living is 5x more expensive.
Tell me about it, it fucking pisses me off because how the hell is any of this worth MORE!?
USA is giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine. USA is giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel
This is what I point to a lot. It's never been about "financial feasibility" it's been about literally humoring spoiled billionaires and their delusions of grandeur
Republicans want us to take some imaginary fairy jobs with our super-bootstraps and buy the nearest $12,000 house.
LMAO same. I try to tell people no one is fucking hiring in this piece of shit country and no one believes me. The real kicker is that I have been told "You should look into starting your own business. hire yourself!" on more than one occasion. I fucking hate it here and too many MFs are stuck in Lalaland
At least stocks are up biggly!
Every day when someone goes on about "muh stonks" I have to resist the urge of going postal. Sure, being thrown in jail might be an improvement: I finally get a job and housing. Bro, at this point the stock market being up is a BAD THING!
Fuck this country. "Land of opportunity" my fat fucking ass.
When capitalists can literally destroy our planet, fuck up our health, rob us, take every one of our needs and make them unattainable, send us off to die in wars that no logical person can find the reason to fight in, but people somehow care more about how "authoritarian" China is, or how many people the gulags are said to have had, things are going to get incredibly worse.
The
run so deep all over the western world that I really fear that revolution will take miracles to happen anywhere inside it.You have to give it to the imperialists, they have mastered propaganda for a very long time now, it takes some extreme mental blindfolds to be fucked by capitalism so hard yet being completely unaware of it.
Times and conditions do change though, so maybe I'm just being a
and venting
