For me, material conditions. I have spent my life under the poverty line and that shit sucks. I recognise that I and the people I love are being taken advantage of and that things clearly aren't right, so I started reading about that and seeking answers - I expect most communists have always been similar.
wtf is everyone else's excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?
Material conditions. A lot of people in the west (certainly anyone whose voice would be applified by media) are comfortable and understand that their quality of life and access to excess would decrease under communism, and people who aren't comfortable think that their quality of life would decrease under communism. As well as that, working class people, especially people in particularly bad situations who would otherwise be particularly sympathetic to leftism, are driven too hard to have time to research, too hard to have energy leftover to investigate the foundations of the world they have always lived in. The current system seems to more or less function and thats enough for now, because fuck they have a job to do and kids to deal with and etc etc.
Politics is not currently life or death for the vast majority of people in the west, but simultaneously we don't typically have the resources and leisure to investigate it just for the sake of being informed (and many of those who do are wealthy enough not to want to). Hence, until material conditions get markedly better or worse, a stalemate.
I think that it's worth emphasising this point. In the Anglo West, most white people have been materially much better off than most of the world. This is probably declining a lot, but there's still a huge demographic of people who can focus on treats and avoid living stress, unlike much of the world for whom daily survival is still rather stressful. Amerika has been successful by moving much of the hardship onto its colonised non-white people. It's very telling that most of the revolutionary movements in the US came from non-white people. (Although I'm not going to discount that there were genuine white revolutionaries and revolutionary movements.)
Real problems in the US will happen when most of its white population becomes protelariatised. The upcoming fascist movements are reaction to the growing class consciousness of the average white Westerner.
For me, material conditions. I have spent my life under the poverty line and that shit sucks. I recognise that I and the people I love are being taken advantage of and that things clearly aren't right, so I started reading about that and seeking answers - I expect most communists have always been similar.
Material conditions. A lot of people in the west (certainly anyone whose voice would be applified by media) are comfortable and understand that their quality of life and access to excess would decrease under communism, and people who aren't comfortable think that their quality of life would decrease under communism. As well as that, working class people, especially people in particularly bad situations who would otherwise be particularly sympathetic to leftism, are driven too hard to have time to research, too hard to have energy leftover to investigate the foundations of the world they have always lived in. The current system seems to more or less function and thats enough for now, because fuck they have a job to do and kids to deal with and etc etc.
Politics is not currently life or death for the vast majority of people in the west, but simultaneously we don't typically have the resources and leisure to investigate it just for the sake of being informed (and many of those who do are wealthy enough not to want to). Hence, until material conditions get markedly better or worse, a stalemate.
I think that it's worth emphasising this point. In the Anglo West, most white people have been materially much better off than most of the world. This is probably declining a lot, but there's still a huge demographic of people who can focus on treats and avoid living stress, unlike much of the world for whom daily survival is still rather stressful. Amerika has been successful by moving much of the hardship onto its colonised non-white people. It's very telling that most of the revolutionary movements in the US came from non-white people. (Although I'm not going to discount that there were genuine white revolutionaries and revolutionary movements.)
Real problems in the US will happen when most of its white population becomes protelariatised. The upcoming fascist movements are reaction to the growing class consciousness of the average white Westerner.