This is a thread specifically for the war, not a general megathread (use the pinned /c/genzedong thread for that).
Please keep related news in this thread rather than making separate posts. Remember to include sources and avoid spreading rumours.
This is a thread specifically for the war, not a general megathread (use the pinned /c/genzedong thread for that).
Please keep related news in this thread rather than making separate posts. Remember to include sources and avoid spreading rumours.
I think this is the most resonant analysis of the US mindset/conditions I’ve read to date. People tend to cover the “giving up” side a lot, the “not doing enough” side as well, and typically the conclusion drawn is that people are too comfortable and don’t care enough to rebel; but those other limited narratives don’t get at what you did, the rationale behind holding back because of the belief that the risk won’t actually pay off and that it will be for nothing.
As an example, we have people like Aaron Bushnell to look at in fear. This guy who martyred himself for Palestine and it was a blip of attention in a sea of spectacle. To the point you make about atomization, if most people in the US saw Aaron Bushnell as a brother, as family, they would not only have been aware of what he did, but been spurred to action. Instead, he’s “just a name.” Some people try to honor what he did, but they aren’t in military buildings, breaking things in them as a consequence for the military creating a world where one of its own would choose to do what he did.
People are conditioned instead to look at things like “I got mine”, or at most, “I got mine for me and my immediate family / circle of friends.” Minneapolis appears to be a situation where that attitude didn’t hold and people started seeing Minneapolis as one and ICE as outsider invaders.
As communists, we like to talk about building class consciousness and that does matter, but this train of thought makes me wonder if the more pressing consciousness is US people coming to understand the US state apparatus as like invaders. Substantively, it is like invaders for the indigenous population, since its inception. And the ramping up of policing/ICE/militarization/etc. may make the US state more like invaders for the general population as well. This is perhaps a reason why Minneapolis stands out.
The conditions are already coming, already there for some people, that the state is turning its conquering nature inwards, but people need to learn still to not scramble to get out of the way and hide, and instead find solidarity with the indigenous and their priorities; they are the ones who have known invasion for the longest time.
This feels a bit rambly, but anyway, great analysis, gets me thinking and is somewhat cathartic to have that feeling named, of wondering how worth it is, to risk.
That is class consciousness. Class consciousnesses is just the realization that the ruling class are a separate group from the workers and that they oppress us and they are the enemy.
Right, but in the case of a settler state, they are also an occupying force, which complicates it beyond bougie and worker, and that’s the part I’m trying to get at that’s important in the US context. In a way, it’s another angle of looking at the patsoc problem: where people view things as working class and elite, but their vision of better is the working class getting more of the imperial spoils. They haven’t internalized/accepted the state as an occupying entity and only see it as one that exploits the working class.
For comparison, current Russia is capitalist, but it is not “occupying Russia”: it’s local bourgeoisie ruling over local working class, but it’s native Russian forces carrying this out, not colonizers. In the US, it is both that and occupation, and the history of the US shows that when the local working class push for better without addressing the settler contradiction, it plays out as mild reforms that struggle to stick, usually at the expense of dumping the needs of a group on a lower rung.