• translated from a Mayan tablet ca. 802 CE

In the imperial core, maybe. The onanistic FIRE economy is not fertile ground for a socialist revolution along any template we have seen before (masses composed of agricultural peasants or industrialized factory workers). People, even frothing fash who have fox news pumped directly into their eyeballs for a staggering number of hours per day, are not willing to cast aside their comfort and die (or even go to prison) for a cause. It is what it is.

One interesting historical point. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. The Russian revolution didn’t happen until 1917, thirty-six years later. The leadup to these things is long. And things in the US are very far away from the equivalent of the Tsar being assassinated.

However, we have the time constraint of climate change. The material reality will either act as a forcing function for revolution or it will not. Impossible to predict.

hope isnt dead

It’s not just a matter of hope or not, we will try change only when it is too late and you’ll get people trying to scam themselves(self-delusional grifters trying to “succeed” under capitalism) and society.

What I mean is 25 years from now you’ll get some very normal and cool WSJ article about “top 10 booming new ideas for the prospering new real estate market” and it will be about valuation of lands/cities with more natural resources and cooler climate. Heck you can even predict literal articles about how the rising sea will change the beach front property market.

The other point is there is hope for avoiding complete and utter extinction and destruction and then hope of avoiding billions of deaths. Even if somehow we can stop the planet from crossing 2.5C we will still get migrations, wars and economic collapse. There is no hope in avoiding that.

Its the sad realization that despite the struggle sessions here about killing white people or whatever(I don’t bother with those threads) the reality is the well fare of people in the west is bound to the fate of the revolution elsewhere in the world, i.e without a significant shock and destruction of the current capitalist system the global revolution is impossible and you know that means yes sadly people in general, workers in the imperial core will suffer for it.

That suffering should be used for socialist radicalization, but again sadly, this suffering is instead being used to radicalized further towards fascism.

Finaly maybe I’m incredibly naive, but I never thought I’d see real, actualy existing Nazis straight from WW2 actualy being cheered by liberals. Yes maybe I’m that naive that I thought Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers etc meant that open Nazism was truly already a tabboo issue. That Polish guy incident was a bigger mask off moment than most things in the Ukraine war. It is funny given the “are we the baddies” meme, the Hitler bunker memes(still a great format if used well IMO) was such a hit and so long ago now too lol.

The Ukraine war itself I can kind of understand if someone has a bad take rooted in ignorance, I didn’t know or particularly care about things going on in Eastern EU before either, but to see the articles about the nazis were all there gives me the same dreaded feeling over the articles about climate change today becoming our testemony to how much we fail, how much we suck and how much we don’t care enough.

I dread thinking 20 years from now and telling young people “hey look at this article and this documentary! See we knew and we were both cowardly and powerless to do anything about it”.

Eh, life goes on, immerseration will continue, and people will continue to resist. Only in retrospect will one be able to say if it really was doomed. Meanwhile, people must live believing the actions they take can be meaningful.

agreed

either you’re right and it doesn’t matter, or you’re wrong and actively discouraging comrades. why risk that?

Nah, things just have to get much worse before the core will revolt. Also, people without coherent ideology will only join something that looks like it’s winning. As China pulls ahead of the US, expect Socialist thought to suddenly become more attractive, as will the “China isn’t actually Socialist but also Socialism is bad and Chinese” rhetoric

Maybe, probably even. Doesn’t really matter. We still have a lot to do in the time we have.

“Smoke 'em if you got 'em; shoot 'em when the cops come.” – That Handsome Devil

We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.[2] The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.

Lenin, What is to be Done?