Right, but yoga not possible to “leave imperialism alone” and get rid of capitalism. By getting rid of capitalism, you’ve gotten rid of imperialism by definition.
This argument makes basically no sense to me, because, like you point out, imperialism is a necessary feature of capitalism. Getting rid of US imperialism necessarily requires getting rid of US capitalism. They aren’t separate things.
The owls are not what they seem.
What I’ve tried to impress on them is a.) this wealth is due in no small part to exploiting workers in the global south, and b.) this wealth is also do to unsustainable exploitation of the environment.
I don’t know what your social circle is, but basically everyone I know is a working class person, a person who depends on selling their labor for their livelihood. 60% of Americans can’t afford a $1000 expense without going into debt— the majority of Americans are not living the “middle class” ideal. I’d venture to guess that the people you describe as “middle class” are workers who earn a high enough wage to buy a house or car (like you point out), but it’s unlikely the house or cars are functioning to generate their livelihood (like owning substantial capital would).
Why do I mention this? Because you’re making a moral appeal for these workers to have solidarity with workers in the underdeveloped nations and workers around the world who want their grandchildren to have a habitable planet. The implication of your appeal is that American workers have to give up comfort to do so.
Consumption patterns will probably have to change, but it is not the greed of American workers that drives imperialism or the exploitation of natural resources. Those are inevitable features of capitalist development from which capitalists reap a material benefit that is much more enormous than a house and a car. Even if the table scraps are better eating in the USA than in Bangladesh, workers are still dividing scraps while the capitalists take the vast majority of the pie.
I can’t even imagine a scenario where American workers would not benefit materially from an international proletarian movement that wins socialism.
Based on what appearance?
There’s a few polls on this every year, and a majority of Americans consistently say that the two parties do a shit job and a different party is needed.
From last week:
Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the "parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed,"
The problem is that no mass political alternative has emerged. Even if people want an alternative, if none exists, or there is not a clear path to building one, the status quo wins by default.
That’s why, IMO, the most pressing task for the American left is to build the framework for a class independent, first party of the working class. We have to present an alternative that can actually be recognized as a tangible option.
Same comrade, although a little longer than a week. Withdrawal is definitely a pain in the ass for me, mood stuff, anhedonia, but especially the insomnia.
If you’re able to do so, exercise really helps with those symptoms.
Also, like easier said than done, but as you are conceptualizing the process, don’t give it so much power over you. It’s a temporary state of withdrawal, and you will feel basically normal once you are through that process, if you allow yourself to go through the process. It’s not an all-encompassing state of bad times that will last indefinitely until you smoke weed again.
Weed, for me, is fine/harmless most of the time, but in those periods of life where there needs to be change or adaptation, I’ve noticed it can definitely be a crutch against taking the necessary steps to adapt.
The most odious part of this is the encouragement of self-blame, which I think is also intentional on his part as a self-help fuckwad.
For some reason the 2016-2018 paycheck-to-paycheck articles about 40% of Americans not being able to afford a $400 dollar expense are now written in terms of $1000 expenses. A literal majority of the population of the US cannot afford a $1000 emergency expense without going into (more) debt.
I would guess that ~50% cannot afford an emergency expense of half that amount.
The guy’s business is to go on tv and convince people to hate themselves for a condition shared by a majority of the population that is foisted on us by the most powerful people in the world. I can’t imagine a revolutionary tribunal for this guy would take more than 5 minutes from opening argument to the wall.
We also literally need socialism for the vast majority of working class people to have a comfortable life. Otherwise it’s just figuring out how to best divide the table scraps.
Has something to do with it, but moreover it’s the generalized, spiraling crisis of overproduction. They have no tools to dig themselves out except to assault the conditions of the working class, which in turn reduces the ability of consumer markets to absorb goods—>no incentive to produce—>more assaults on workers and so on and so forth
The perspective of the ruling class, worldwide, is austerity for the foreseeable future. It’s almost not a choice—they literally cannot improve conditions and keep capitalism.
Probably friendlier to the USA, so I would say “maybe Putin is kind of better?”
We really gotta resist the urge to do these sorts of shades-of-gray comparisons of representatives of the enemy class.
From the perspective of the working class, neither is a way forward.
But it doesnt matter what those poor uneducated browns think, eh?
Yea, but in the case of both NGOs and literal governments, that’s not what we’re talking about, and you’re making the same theoretical error as the person above.
Also a big fuck you for implying I’m a racist, and I’d be surprised if I’m not the only “brown” involved in this discussion.
How do you deal with that?
Dealing with ethnic, national, and religious divisions is a key part of the project of building socialism, and something that can only be dealt with on a proletarian, socialist basis. The idea is to raise conditions for all workers by involving all workers, regardless of background, in the project of socialist transformation via working class control of the economy and society.
China is obviously not resolving these divisions on a socialist basis, which is why, sensationalized takes on genocide aside, you can see the Uighur minority facing real inequality, discrimination, and degrees of repression in China. This is much like how minority groups face inequality, discrimination, and repression in other capitalist nations. Capitalism breeds these problems by pitting worker against worker, and the dominant social/productive relations in China are capitalist.
And there are concrete examples of this question being resolved from the USSR—it’s not a question that exists only on the frictionless plane of the internet.
There is not a SINGLE Muslim nation that will condemn this situation at the UN
I’m sorry, but like why are we, as socialists, trading in the fiction that capitalist states/governments with majority Muslim populations are advancing the collective will and interests of those Muslim populations? You have to sever anything approaching class analysis or Marxist analysis to talk about “Muslim nations” as if the religion is the guiding force behind the actions and positions of those states.
The government of Pakistan isn’t like an avatar for the moral or political preferences of working class Muslim people in Pakistan, it literally exists to keep those workers subjugated.
Much of which your saying may be true, but isn’t fixed by the persuasion of “leftists.” The scale of the working class is just too massive.
Consciousness is mainly developed through people’s lived experience of their conditions and major events. The job of socialists is to give full expression to the consciousness as it exists, by tying it to the broader class struggle. You’re not really persuading people as much as giving them a framework to understand a class struggle that they are already aware of on some level.
You can do this on a massive scale by political means, putting forward platforms, demands on the state, and so on. Building a political alternative that people can actually see and gravitate towards.
Check out Chapter 2 of the Communist manifesto, it’s specifically about this.
Don’t worry about people rising to lead the left, when the left is ready they’ll appear.
It’s not really about rising to lead the left, it’s about the political leadership of the working class.
Not to mention killing black people disproportionately through his narcissistic mismanagement of a public health crisis.
It’s an Amanita Muscaria and that cat is feeling sleepy, relaxed, dissociated, and vaguely poisoned.
It’s a basic principle of communist organizing to work with the working class as it actually exists and in the spaces it actually exists. This doesn’t mean you indulge bigotry, but this is the basic avenue by which you raise the political level—you connect the dots between ordinary people’s lived experiences and the broader historical struggle to which we all belong, consciously or unconsciously.
I’m not saying like proper communist organizing was taking place on the subreddit, but it was probably the most active left online space on one of the largest websites on the internet. This directly tracked the popularity of the podcast itself, which itself tracked a deep and massive shift in consciousness across the US working class following the crisis in 2008. Chapo traphouse, in podcast or subreddit form, became popular for broadly the same reasons that Bernie Sanders became popular.
Are any of these perfect expressions of a working class political project with crystal clear political consciousness?
No, obviously not. But people don’t immediately jump to conclusions that they have no experiential basis to draw.
These were the ideas and spaces that were available, and the growth in popularity reflected the growth of a layer of the working class that is looking for socialist ideas and spaces to discuss them.
On the subreddit, it was entirely possible to present a proper Marxist analysis of the futility of working in the Democratic Party to a receptive audience of hundreds or thousands of people. People who literally had not ever thought of the problem from a class perspective. Like for something as low-investment as internet posting, if you are a principled socialist you couldn’t really ask for a better place to “waste” a few hours.
I’m not talking about converting or coddling reactionaries here, I’m talking about engaging with people who are upset with the status quo and genuinely looking for an idea of the way out. Honestly the chapo name might not make much of a difference for this site’s trajectory, but my point is that it doesn’t hurt to cast a bigger net.