It seems like nobody is willing here in the US to actually throw themselves into a revolt or meaningful change because our conditions are just good enough.
I still see everyone around me going for the best social status, the best job, the best car, the biggest house, and completely ignoring all the major flashing red lights.
I feel like a crazy person, like one of those people that’s missing the point. I feel surrounded by lunatics and typically that means you’re the crazy one but I just know I can’t be in this situation, it makes no sense.
Why is it like this? Why do I feel surrounded by NPCs? I can’t connect to pretty much anyone here. It all seems so trivial.
I don’t want to sound elitist or anything I just can’t see how people still don’t see the full picture
What to do?
You can read Rainer Shea blog, he write a lot of doomerism about USA, but in quite different angle and meaning. You can try to compare.
Multipolarity will strike a huge blow on the US and probably launch popular movements across the country as living conditions further deteriorate. Now yes the sad thing is that countless good hearted liberals will die because of the militarized police and fascist militias, and that’s why I would advise to not take risks during that phase. However eventually state violence will be met with revolutionary violence.
The most propagandized ones you are talking about will all react in different ways, and you must keep in mind that all political movements at their base contain a non negligible amount of people who are here for the wrong reasons and blindly support what came to them first. That’s just how it is. Keep in mind that humans a especially unpredictable and that the US only survived until that point because of its hegemony.
Here’s a simple test to see if you’re the crazy one who’s overreacting or not: If you don’t give a shit about the Chinese weather balloon, then you’re completely fine.
Depends what you mean, but I don’t think people should be willing to throw themselves into a revolt. First they need to ‘organize, organize, organize’, in the words of Kwame Ture.
They should want meaningful change, but they won’t for as long as the majority is in the labour aristocracy and benefits so much from imperialism. Use your effort for something more productive. Bring class consciousness to those who are ready for it and want change. I can’t remember the exact quote, but Lenin said, to paraphrase: ‘Haters gonna hate; better fewer but better.’
In a way, it doesn’t really matter. I’m a little nihilistic with this kind of thing: it will take a long time, but the US cannot survive it’s own contradictions. No empire can. It’s just a matter of time and while people in the US could hasten it’s dissolution, nobody in the US can prevent it, whether individuals see and care about the flashing red lights or not. It doesn’t matter much because none of us can do anything alone.
The most important things are getting experience organizing, creating communities of care, and supporting the most oppressed peoples, because they already have it a lot worse and are going to get it a lot worse until meaningful change arrives. That means being ready to argue, etc, against imperialism and in favour of neocolonial subjects outside the US, even when the ‘radical orgs’ argue for a greater slice of the imperial profits. Within the US (looking from the outside at least), that seems to be humbly joining the Indigenous struggle and the struggle against the military-prison industrial complex. The former, especially, is organized, alive, and kicking.
My visual picture of it is that Americans have eternally been conditioned to “capitalise” on everything possible, and since USA is reaching its final conclusion in the chapter of superimperialist capitalism, people are probably subconsciously thinking of it as capitalising off of the remains of their country as it collapses away. Seems to me like a perfectly fitting end to the last bastion of Anglo empire.
That last sentence does seem cathartic in a sense, but only until you realize that if that occurs, the ones who will suffer are the millions of workers, parents, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, and the countless other regular people who all lead lives just as valuable as everyone else’s. What will happen to those people in the collapse? Yes, if they are right wing or neo-liberal it can be easy to handwave them away as “justified” loses. But what about the rest? The one’s doing the capitalizing will simply pack up their bags or call it a day, far removed from the suffering they have caused.
It is a very saddening train of thought.
It sounds mean, until you realise these people enable US government only to enjoy their rich lives thanks to the overseas profit-generating genocides and foreign regime changes, never commit revolution against their state, conveniently screamed the past year how Russians should have overthrown Putin and his party so NATO could balkanise Russia, and demonise China everyday when after centuries they finally get to enjoy better quality life in the past few decades.
This does not stop with Russia, China and war machinery business. They see outside of Europe (now they are even exploiting Europe) and themselves, rest of the countries and continents as cattle meant to serve them either as slave pets or as beef. Now, one could say, it is the state, but it comes back to proletariat committing revolution, instead of which they chose to enjoy American/white privilege.
Until 2008 crisis, and even after that, they loved their privileged environment gained by all the exploitation and genocide, and you can even see this in the form of nostalgia they sell the world in the form of “oh before 2008/09 it was all bliss and merry, wish those times were back”.
The ones who lose, only have themselves to blame, for they could have chosen to forgo the comfort of genocide-derived privileges, and committed revolution against the state. It was a matter of picking the greater, longer good but they chose to pick the shorter happiness, because USA apparently in their heads was an infallible Goliath.
To add a little, I value more the importance of 5+ billions of lives over 0.35 billion lives.
Edit: I think I missed something important. Not every average common person is a deranged Twitter liberal, however, it does not excuse them of being revolutionary. They choose to be, and openly admit being passive in drawing room discussions. If they had an excuse of being vulnerable from state actors due to having family/children, well now they and/or their children will face the consequences of their inaction.
I agree with many of your points here, but I am still weary of a lot of your discourse. Especially the “they” classification. Who is “they”? Would I be part of the “they” simply for being an American not by choice? Would American comrades be part of the “they”? Would people that have never been exposed to leftist thought and do not know any better be part of the “they”?
You just keep mentioning that this group of people, the “they”, believe all these things, when truly it is only the ruling capitalist class. The population is just kept complicit by immense propaganda that serves to protect those capital interests. Do you think that majority of people in the US generally think about or wish to exploit other countries and continents? Or that the people of the US have any method of action that could stop NATO or the IMF in its tracks? To magically fight back against the most extreme state intelligence apparatus in history to stop the horrific actions of their government? They do not. They are as subjugated as the exploited overseas. The only ones who benefit are the capital. So how do they only have themselves to blame?
You also mention “comfort” and “privilege” many times throughout and how that is preventing people in the US from stepping outside their comfort zone. I’m sorry to tell you, but that is not true at all. That privilege is a shiny fake veneer. There are of course some well off groups of people who live in million dollar homes with lavish luxuries and privilege, but the vast majority of the US population is struggling. Everyday on my drive to class I see countless people living in absolute squalor, children in tattered unwashed clothing, shuttered stores, and brutal policing of the poor. There are swaths of people working 3 full time jobs to barely pay rent and feed their children, massive numbers of people with rotting bodies that are unable to receive basic medical treatment or sanitation, massive homeless populations, and countless more failings of a capitalist system. There is no “short term happiness” here, or do you think those people are happy?
Their is no “they”, there is only the proletariat and those that oppose them. The people of the US are not your monolithic enemy. They have just been subjugated, brainwashed, and oppressed by the will of capital. So counting 350 million people (an absolutely absurd number), as “acceptable losses” and “deserving of punishment” is cruel and Non-Marxist.
As Sankara said, we must never stop explaining ourselves and we must never stop fighting. Another group of proletariat are not the enemy, they are instead comrades that have been led astray or oppressed to the point that they cannot fight back. Yes there will be those that will defend capital to their last breath, and those that will not able to be rehabilitated, but that number is minuscule compared to the number that can be saved.
