Who suggested this, Larry Summers?

I’m stupid and I feel myself declining every day. Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting a touch demented, given how shot my short term memory is these days.

But on the other hand, my reading comprehension is at least well above that of the average worker, which usually hovers at a 7th grade reading level. Remember the most challenging literature most of these folks in America will ever read is Animal Farm./s

If I love humanity, I am very disappointed in it. I’m disappointed in everyone, including myself.

I don’t trust orgs. Fear or group project energy tbh.

Thank you for your understanding. I appreciate it a bit.

Though I will voice my opinion to give a voice to this feeling in what otherwise would be an echo chamber.

That does appear to be what it looks like. I’m really screaming into a void right there. Maybe it’s my anger at the whole culture of “revolutionary optimism” that I see online. It seems like a mockery when I read about stuff like the continuation of the genocide in Gaza or the beginnings of the ICE kidnappings and the conditions the people they kidnap are kept in. How can anyone be optimistic when vast swaths of the country support this?! How the hell can anyone see the good in people as a whole?! At this point I just see either bumbling and naively optimistic people on the left (as much as I still respect their good intentions, I must criticize this) and literal cold blooded killers on the right who want to slowly pick us all off. And we just go about our lives, going through the motions until it’s our turn on the future. And we’re re supposed to be optimistic about the outcome of this just because a socdem won a primary in New York for a municipal race?!

I’m posting this because I’m sad and angry at society and my peers. I’m angry at the selfishness, cowardice, and incompetence shown by both sides of the issues we all care about, but especially our side because we just keep losing and it keeps getting worse because of that.

I had a great feeling of love that made me think in revolutionary terms and it died inside of me after learning how selfish, stupid, cowardly, and evil people really are and realizing that nothing we can do can stop that.

Yes, it’s so selfish to want to belong in this society instead of just putting all your interpersonal needs aside and just subsuming yourself into a bumbling sectarian cult because of a meme quoting some theorist who died a century ago.

That is exactly what I’m saying. It does work, I always end up being the one keeping it on life support, and I’m not going to be made a fool of by doing so. Especially not by the sort of lumpenized types I see among the left. My dad taught me to have some dignity by not putting myself at the level of such people.

The leftist equivalent of “work out and get a hobby.” How well has that really done anyone? Do we see any less alienated people here because of that?

I don’t know anyone. I don’t really have any friends that have support systems either. And compared to them, I live in a somewhat less sexist, less homophobic society.

Idk, at this point I just feel empty knowing so much of what I believe in was foolish to hope for to begin with. I feel nothing thinking about these other people. Their lives are so similar and meaningless to me, like some sort of blur. And the worst part is that every day, I have to see the end of that process, where people are reduced to the most base form of consumer. Where you spend the last years of your life just eating and being moved around and kept alive to be an input for a whole hierarchy of health care administrators to leech off your pension.

I would prefer the latter. There is security in the familiar, as soul crushing as it is.

At this point I have contempt for everyone. I have contempt for all the treat brained liberal subjects in central Florida, and I have contempt for all The “flawed yet remarkable and ardent people” who are trying to build community and counter systemic politics.

I especially feel anger at the latter because I feel like they’re lying to me when they say so confidently that they can change things. They can’t. At this point, I am beginning to feel a sense of catharsis watching those people fail and get pulled further and further into the grinding maw of the capitalist system. Serves them right for spending years raising people’s hopes with false promises.

I’ll stick with the former.

I’m not saying that I personally believe students are the revolutionary subject of communism, I’m just stating what the situation for organizing has looked like in this country since the 60s. You can’t call a sober observation petite bourgeois for stating that. Ideally, the whole damn movement should come from the workers who run the whole damn economy by coming together to plan their common goals for the whole of the society that they belong to. I don’t really know what the revolutionary subject is or if there’s still even one because again, material conditions have changed raidcally from the last century.

We could potentially even be on the brink of mass swaths of the population further having being made redundant depending on whether the AI thing is a serious game changer for the capitalist or just another money hole the shovel QE funds into. Imagine the wrench that will throw into the thesis of the worker as revolutionary subject when even more of them are separated from participating in production. What then? Good Marxist theory has to be a living tradition that studies and analyzes the evolving paradigm of political economy that we live under. Frankly, it’s that aversion to that and the dogmatic reverence for dead Leninist movements that makes me so averse to joining any organization. People like that aren’t living in reality.

Why? I’m just a sardonic alligator thumbnail.

All my beliefs have been crushed. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. My interest in being an educator was born out of a liberal interest in helping nurture informed citizens and that belief carried over as my politics shifted well to the left. Now I realize most of the public are ignorant drones that can easily be fooled with appeals to prejudice and scape goating. Got a systemic societal problem caused by capitalism, well I can guarantee you that at least forty percent of the American population will think it’s the Jews criminal illegal immigrants./s For every one student you help, at least 25 more grow up to be apathetic or supporters of the fascist regime.

The first part you said checks out, my dad tried to run his own restaurant after cooking in his brother’s for 15 years. Almost failed a year into it and cut his losses. Then it was thirty years of factory production and janitorial work at minimum wage. He despises idleness to a great extent with a petite bourgeois eye for efficiency.

Now, let me make something very clear: Capital won, there will be no revolution, no union is going to save you and certainly no communist party will either. The historical context that made all those things possible does not exist anymore and won’t come back. People in America think communists will come to pillage their farmsteads front lawns and shit because that’s what a century of propaganda and propertarian settler brain does to a society. There will never again be a functioning communist party in America that has more than idk, 2000 members (I can’t remember the exact figure from Varn’s analysis of the history of communist parties in America exactly). For God’s sake, workers aren’t even the revolutionary subject for communists to recruit from anymore, university students are and have been since the post war period.

Frankly, can the state just put the American labor movement out of its misery already by mass decertifying all the labor unions with a Supreme Court decision? It’s not like they need them to be a counter weight against a strong communist movement anymore. Then we can all just get on with our lives because we will finally have all the delusions of labor’s emerging relevance dissipated in one fell swoop. I won’t have to hear anymore about how a couple of baristas at Starbucks are the reincarnation of the Bolsheviks.

Yeah, I went to college there. Won’t matter, transient student population and domineering state government. The working class in Florida couldn’t even organize a hurricane party, nevermind a union. They’re just a bunch of seashells in a bag, they don’t constitute anything that could stand up against power.

I don’t want to associate with anyone, really. I despise the professional fields because they think they’re better than me because they’re educated and have a job corresponding to their degree and I don’t. I hate the management and petite bourgeois because of their conservative politics and their faux country suburban aesthetic. EVERYTHING has to be deer camo, F150s, and Kid Rock to these people who make up 40 percent of the population. Hell, Kid Rock even came through my area in the boiling sun. The way they preen themselves at their churches like a bunch of local notables on pagan times would.

And I especially despise the working class for several reasons which I can summarize as it’s ignorance, undignified cowardice, and it’s confident embrace of a lumpenized aesthetics and attitudes that my father (a long time factory worker) taught me to reject. The working class in this country is constituted of a bunch of broken families who drive broken cars and live in morose and broken communities. They have no perspective beyond their own immediate concerns and the ones that do are often religious conservatives. The constant state of precarity they live in leaves them unable to do nothing more than work and care for their children. The god they ask to ameliorate their conditions will sooner bring about paradise on earth than these people will ever take it amongst themselves to resist their oppression.

Some of them engage in every habit I keep away from, from excessive indulgence in alcohol, to an unhealthy consumption of the most unhealthy of foods, to the smoking of all substances both licit and illicit and even further use of drugs. My father has always chastised them in general for never being able to match his work ethic. And I feel if I associate with such people, their misfortunes will become my weight to bear.

Experience has shown me there is little reciprocity from people who constantly are in a state of their own crisis. This is not the constituency to build any sort of counter systemic force, frankly the constant state of crisis they’re in probably just conservatizes them more and reinforces capitalist maxims. You can’t save these people, and neither can the Teamsters or milquetoast public sector union that represents the school bus drivers in my county. Capital has won. That is the reality we will always live with.

I’ve never really had long term friends. Frankly I just feel it’s easier to accept the capitalist paradigm that all the people around me are self interested little units that don’t live beyond their own self gratification. The workers don’t want solidarity and community, they want Popeyes, they want Disney cruises, or at least they want their next cigarette break They want treats and will burn down the world to get them. They don’t give a damn about me beyond what I can provide for them (probably free pizza). They have no time to think beyond that and are being conditioned to only think in those terms.