So much has been happening the past few years, and especially lately: the US getting ready to bomb Venezuela, starting its new phase in the forever war against Latin America, Iran is basically in submission, Cuba is in deep crisis, China and Russia can’t bother to confront the west over Gaza’s occupation, Europe is locked into a cucked doom-spiral of military build-up, Democrats are (worse than) useless as always with conditions at home slowly but surely getting worse, etc. etc.
So those of us who are communists in the good ol’ USA, are we all that’s left? Are we going to have to be THE domino that actually gets humanity off this fucking train ride? It really feels to me like there is no external saving grace here (and it was foolish of me to think otherwise); China doesn’t want to rock the boat, the rest of the Global South is still trapped at the low-end of the global value chain, and climate crisis is just barely starting.
I’m not trying to express some idealist left-American exceptionalism or white-savior crap, but when you look at the global balance of power, and geographical reality, socialists in the imperial core are the only ones who could realistically do anything at all at this point (especially with the USSR gone). Maybe that’s already obvious to everyone here, but idk, this realization feels… daunting. We live in a completely deproletarianized society where people still largely view themselves (whether consciously or unconsciously) as consumers rather than workers and there exists basically zero connection to the radicalism of the New Deal era.
At this point, my pessimistic prediction is that the Abundance libshit Democrats and Nazi psycho Republicans synthesize a Fortress America plan, business hums along as usual, while everything south of the Rio Grande turns into a fucking blood bath. Waking this stupid place up–and I mean truly waking it up, not just voting for some careerist shitheel like AOC–seems like a Sisyphean task. The Mamdani election gave me some hope regarding general class consciousness, but the relentlessly extractive and exploitative nature of the global supply chain is by far the greatest contradiction of this whole thing; Americans just asking for cheaper shit is not enough. I think the lazy Third-Worldist in me was hoping the Global South could unshackle itself and us BurgerReichers would reap the consequences, but that was naive.
Idk, I’m just venting. Shit feels especially hopeless and I don’t know what to do beyond keep on my daily grind and get the bag. As far as I can tell, the people in my social circle are too comfortable to be concerned about any of this (and I can’t really blame them!). My life is not bad by any means but I can’t escape the feeling of being on this ladder and seeing the sewage slurry below slowly but surely rising as I try to climb up, up up.
we’ve never stopped the empire from doing anything
Fortunately, you’re not correct. If we never stopped the empire from doing anything, then chattel slavery would still be the norm. It was people’s power that was able to end things like mass chattel slavery in the United States, it was people’s power that was able to bring about a semblance of democratic rights in this country, it was people’s power that ground the United States to a halt in its genocide against the Vietnamese people, and acted as a huge buffer against its worst excesses during the Iraq war.
If the opinions or actions of the public had truly zero effect, then the United States would have already invaded Venezuela, already invaded Cuba, already invaded any country in Latin America that even gestured itself as socialist. Regardless, even if nothing that had ever been done by people in the United States had affected the overall orientation or direction of the empire, it’s still our responsibility to organize against it. It quite simply is our duty to fight for freedom.
We didn’t stop slavery, the industrialized northern bourgeois did. The civil war was an inter-bourgeois conflict between the rural southern agrarian slave owners and the northern industrialists.
They also didn’t really care about the Vietnam protestors.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/05/23/kent-state-in-1970-columbia-university-in-2024/
Marx wrote an entire collection of essays on the American Civil War.
The semi-feudal slave economy of the American South saw a resurgence due to the Industrial Revolution in Europe, demanding large quantities of raw materials (e.g. cotton) for their proliferating textile industries. It became a threat to the industrial economy in the North, hence a Civil War was needed to end slavery.
Without the Industrial Revolution, the slave economy would have faded away by itself as they were uncompetitive against the much better industrialized economy in the North, but the sudden surge in demand for raw materials changed the balance, allowing the plantation owners of the South to amass large quantity of wealth.
Marx supported the industrialized North because he believed that it would eventually lead to the proletarianization of the American working class under a capitalist system, as opposed to a semi-feudal slave economy. That’s what “progressive” actually meant.