“We need capitalists because they have all the money”
Where exactly do they get the money from? Their own work? Of course not!
“I can’t get a job because of migrants!”
Employers are the ones who decide who gets a job or not. Blame them, not the immigrants they’re exploiting.
“I don’t want my tax money to go to bums/single mothers/immigrants/xyz group”
But you’re fine with bourgeois parasites freely taking a portion of your labour to enrich themselves?
“Full employment/universal healthcare/eradication of homelessness/cheap transport/anything good is impossible!”
No they aren’t.
“Capitalism isn’t perfect, but gommunism is le hecking evil!”
No it isn’t.
World systems theory helps here. The class interests of imperial core workers (workers with property, investments, high wages and strong benefits, career paths that put them on track for management) are aligned with empire, and so the empire’s interests become their interests. The empire is interested in disciplining peripheral labor as the empire declines, and therefore so are core workers.
This is complicated by internal colonization, of course, so within the imperial core there are internal peripheries and among those workers you’ll find solidarity. Those are the “bums/single mothers/immigrants/xyz group” that other core workers hate. Their relationship with core workers is like the relationship between colonizers and colonized, which makes solidarity difficult.
I’m optimistic that this will decline with the empire as more and more core workers suddenly find themselves becoming part of the periphery. It’ll be ugly, with core workers losing their homes and retirement plans and inflation eating their wages. A lot of management positions will evaporate too, most of them are fake make-work jobs that only exist because of all the investment cash sloshing around in the economy. Some will turn to reaction and blame their internal periphery, but more will turn against empire.
Like all things in capitalism, it only works on the short. The “core workers” only benefit in the short term. If anyone actually had the ability to look at things from the long term, they would see that imperialism doesn’t benefit anyone but the oligarchy. One of the biggest factors is the reduction of labor costs. Which is like eroding the sand beneath a city. The closer you are to the “core,” the longer it takes to get to you, but it WILL get to you, and it will pull you down.
“We need capitalists because they have all the money”
Where exactly do they get the money from? Their own work? Of course not!
Reminds me of a quote from Big Bill Haywood: “The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!”
I’m pessimistic abt youth in America they’re pretty delusional about their ability to attain wealth & the entire boommillenial reich is obsessed with their asset holdings + afraid to look under the rock and see what makes it grow & if it is even really a rock…
You will cope, Comrade. You will agitate. You will find knock out lines that will smash these boot lickers false consciousness.
That is the shape of the issue, the moment that we feel as enemies of the people we are screwed the issue is finding out how to revert that thought, and often it only happens when we get close to people, and if you do, you will probably realise that they will agree with the fact that their work is important and undervalued, that things suck for them, but they also have a dream of not suffering anymore, and they only see the form of that by becoming rich and they understand instinctively that the ending capitalists ends the possibility to become rich and that scares people kills their hope, that is a false hope indeed but it’s their only hope that they know.
So it’s our job offer another hope another way of understanding the world, and I don’t know how it was your journey into communism but many communists once held liberal, or another, capitalist way of thinking, it is natural we are born into capitalism, it’s important not to take it out on the people the schemes of the system
Was more of a vent post than anything. I don’t feel like an enemy of the people, an enemy would want what’s worst for them, to the contrary I want what’s best for all of us. I don’t expect people to be automatically Marxist either, that would be commandist of me. But it grinds my gears how closed minded people are to class consciousness; it seems as if they are impervious to it.
But all this only emphasises the importance of a vanguard, and kills the idea of spontaneity. It seems that no matter how severely capitalism harms a person, it doesn’t mean they’re open to Marxist ideas; there’s no tipping point where conditions will be bad enough that people will automatically do a socialist revolution.
It is frustrating af. Working class people are allergic to class consciousness. And if they get there from an emotional gateway, only a minority of them will actually follow through to learning theory and understanding imperialism. This is how you get self-described “socialists” in the US stanning Kamala and punching to their left.
The only way is through earning their confidence, and that is a hard thing to do, but is where we must put our effort of investigation, it does not matter if we have the best revolutionary project, which is a matter heatedly debated among the various lines of Marxism, if none of us can reach the people, the important part for now is figuring out how to cut through nearly a century of propaganda, and then we figure out where we go, this is the hard task at hand for today
Yeah that is for sure, the spontaneous view is deeply mistaken indeed, and it makes me happy to know that it was mostly a vent, but I need to caution you comrade that it does not necessarily reads as such and there are more than a few so called comrades that do harbor resentment to the people, and they can find validation in such posts, so I felt necessary, and hopefully informative to some to respond like that.
i wish i could offer wise words but i’m right there with you ( @KalergiPlanner@lemmygrad.ml ) right now.
i’ve spent the last 16ish weeks going down rabbit holes related to the epstein files, and one of them made me aware that the freedom of information act has refuted a lot of popularly held narratives.
the fact that 1) these are documents certified to be 100% true by the american government itself — not some random conspiracy theory — and 2) they’ve been in the public domain since 1978, yet the overwhelming majority still believes the mainstream propaganda, leaves me with the depressing conclusion that maga is just a tiny subset of a much larger western liberal cult that encompasses every single person you’ve likely ever met or will ever meet.
it’s one thing for individuals or even groups of people to be intentionally misinformed via indoctrination and by (seemingly to them) questionable sources. but when it’s on a global scale — where the narrative dismisses the information provided by the very ones who created the misinformation — that’s something on a whole other level that i don’t know how to digest.
it also makes me deeply skeptical that reversing this propaganda is possible given how widespread and deeply entrenched it is to reach this scale; effectively rendering a peaceful resolution with others outside the western capitalist world impossible.
