Hello, chapos.
I'm posting from Dubai, and I hate everything this country stands for. I was born and raised here to immigrant Indian parents, and my dad owns a business, with a small number of migrant labourers under him. He pays them "more than what they'd get somewhere else" and that basically amounts to "send some money back home and live on the cheapest most affordable food" wages.
My mother is a manager at a company, and I recently saw her reprimanding a group of workers who came to raise a silent protest about their wages being halved. I stood there silently and cringed helplessly.
In this hypercapitalist cyberpunk (it is indeed low life, high technology sans the lawlessness) dystopian hellworld, racism, sexism, homophobia and classism is a way of life; and if it isn't overt, it is most definitely covert. I have been suffering from depression, suicidal ideation and mood disorders for the better part of a decade now.
After getting exposed to Marxist theories, the idea that I have been brought up on the fruit of surplus value stolen from labour weighs down on my mind. I also consider myself an ecosocialist, and that in itself is enough for me to hate the hellhole that I stay in. On the few occasions where I have tried to talk about my leftist ideals to either friends or family, I have been mocked, belittled and disregarded as a crazy fucking loser (been NEETing for 3 years now, I haven't been able to find a job with my college degree, and my mental illness makes it hard for me to persist/commit to anything) who is simply bitter and lazy, and is anyways just living off his parents, and is not to be taken seriously. Or they accept that I'm probably right, right before they sarcastically wish me good luck with a revolution.
I'm sick of living like this. I don't fit in anywhere, and when I do, I feel like I'm faking it. And oh yeah, to top it all off, I'm a closeted queer and an ex-Muslim atheist. I feel like I have very little to look forward in life. Doom-scrolling through r/collapse, seeing how the world is being overtaken by neoliberalism, the hate for minorities back in India led by the current fascist government, climate change denial ensuring a shittier quality of life down the decades in the region I live right now, lack of real social connections with irl folks...
I have been seriously considering suicide for the last week, and it feels like more than ideation. I think I've reached that stage of being at peace with suicide, and I think this post is some half assed attempt to reach out for help. I weirdly relate to a lot of the things you dudes say, so I thought I'd post here.
First would just be not following in my family's footsteps. Second would be the things I've already said, + donating to various organizations. I could do so much more but social anxiety is a fuck. If I didn't mind potentially getting a life sentence I could easily do... certain things but violence bad haha parody. Taking suggestions for more shit to do. It just feels like I could have much more of an impact than I do now.
While adventureism is rad is is ultimately not productive. There are effectively infinite neoliberal ghouls to replace any handfull that could be removed. So you dont actually have to feel bad for not going out in a blaze of samurai glory.
The biggest thing you could do would be to start a mutual aid fund. Imagine if you started a regular credit union and after paying the employees well you just pushed the profit into simply paying for peoples transitions for example.
I pick this kind of example specifically as you are likely to know the kinda people that can get NGOs to slide cash into a project with liberal appeal such as this.
Really, I think you are in a better position to investigate how yo turn your access to resources and highly placed people into the kernal of a dual power system.
Here in the heart of neoliberalism the start of any revolution will be a big pile of money that can be invested and grown untill ebough power is acrued to threaten the system. If you look it up, every projection for how much money it would cost to fix global warming is less than Bezos, or Musk's fortune. If they wanted to, they could just do it.
So imagine you go Musk wild and make a solar powered robot farm that takes in darpa money to build robots and trians them to hunt mosquites and give the food they grow to people.
I am under the impression anything like this is fully within the means of a 1%
Or comedy option. Embezzle as much as you can and defect to cuba will enough money to double their GDP or something. It would actually be hard to find better praxis than this as well.
God damn. The part about speculating how it would probably cost less than Bezos or Musk's fortune to fix global warming, and the rest.
And the things you said about the dual power system. Like I read somewhere, the revolution will require both capital and labour, so you're not doing anyone a favour by pauperising yourself.
A recent united nations report said that fixing climate change could cost 300 Billion. So if musk and Bezos cooperated. They do could the UN plan and have tens of billions left over.
Why not expose them all?