It can’t last forever. Sooner or later it will end, one way or another.

Long post coming up.

I started my first full-time blue collar job a few months ago. I live in a purple state. I expected all the guys I worked with to be Trump guys. Only one I’ve encountered has been truly a fascist, though he said nothing about Trump. The rest are just kind of ideologically adrift. A different coworker I’ve mentioned here a few times I’ve been riding with for months. Seven hours a day, five days a week, talking. Personally I like him. I guess I would describe him as an ideologically malleable Berner. Sometimes I despair about changing him. This last week, though, he was really impressing me with some of the things he was saying. We talked about landback, ending America’s imperialist wars, China, Russia, and I’ve even started using the word “communism.” “Communism is about workers running society, what’s wrong with that?” I said. No pushback from him. I have not told him that I’m a communist. But how can he not suspect?

Then a few days ago I talked about the PNN guy on tiktok harassing dickheads on at the Capitol, and my coworker basically said that we should confine our efforts to peaceful protests. (I live in a very rural area and some of these guys are just living in a permanent fight-or-flight mode it seems, they really tense up when I talk about protestors, they all want to live in the middle of the woods, they say they hate people, and they and always empathize with whoever is being protested.) That was where our conversation ended since we had arrived at our job site.

He has little American flags at his house, which his girlfriend (fifteen years older than him) is apparently close to losing; he just bought a truck he cannot afford; he ran out of money and was unable to buy lunch once; he has several kids from two relationships (difficult to keep track) but two of them are trans; he grew up working on farms because he was unable to afford school supplies (he is white). He thinks the government is oppressing him (and has no awareness of which class constrols the government), but has spoken positively of the police. He was shocked when I mentioned that Ansarallah has claimed to have struck the USS Eisenhower multiple times, and said that the military would not lie about getting hit. (Admittedly it would help if we had some photographic evidence to prove this here.)

I’ve just been thinking that usually people do one hour a week of therapy. I’m doing about twenty hours a week of therapy with this guy. I’m not a qualified therapist (most therapists worship Mayo Pete), but I’ve been in therapy, I’ve read Freud and Lacan and Reich, I’m a Marxist (and have studied all kinds of texts for years), I have some organizing experience, and, most importantly, I post a lot on hexbear. Even with all this, I’m still up against this guy’s roughly thirty-five years of existence in a reactionary hellhole. I’m up against Facebook, which he is constantly browsing for treats he cannot afford. I’m up against everyone he talks with, everyone he knows, because there are at best only a handful of communists for a hundred miles in every direction. The hardest thing I’m up against, which my own therapist (a good guy) has told me, is the fact that my coworker doesn’t think he has a problem. The client, the patient, cannot change unless he wants to. Insert lightbulb joke. It’s okay, my coworker thinks, to be ideologically adrift in a raging ocean of fascism. I like him but don’t trust him and don’t consider him a friend. He would ditch me for his job in a heartbeat. There is no solidarity at this place. And while my coworkers might be ideologically adrift, they might not be interested in voting for Biden or Trump, they always come down on the side of white supremacy and helping the company’s owners get richer.

Think about hexbear’s demographics. I SUSPECT, but am not sure, that most of us here are radicalized labor aristocrats. Most of us are white with college degrees, which means, in this apartheid society, that most of the people we know are going to be the same. And let me tell you, the life of the labor aristocrat, even in this shithole, is a good one. I’ve seen so much fucked up shit in this job, heard so much fucked up shit you wouldn’t believe. It basically amounts to people working full-time but either being homeless or on the edge of homelessness, having no access (forgive the term) to necessities. The vast majority of labor aristocrats have no awareness of this. They, we live such pampered lives, it blows my mind. To get up, drive to work, spend all day sitting in an office doing unproductive labor, chatting about TV and restaurants and weekend nonsense at the air-conditioned water cooler, and then to come home and watch Netflix, the biggest worry being your impostor syndrome, ah, how easy that is. I used to do it until I moved back to the USA from overseas, and found that even as a qualified white liberal, I couldn’t get a good job. So I radicalized.

If you live this kind of life, why question it? Why change it? Come out as a communist, risk your career for Palestine, and you’re in for a world of pain, at least in the short term. Friends, family, and career will all abandon you. It’s always been easy for labor aristocrats, so why risk that ease? Things have always been the same, so how could they change?

Am I wrong in saying that trots are at least better than the DSA? If they actually did things (other than sell newspapers, splinter into smaller groups, and criticize AES) I would support them.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery with regard to that second graphic there, but I guess people from across the political spectrum imitating communists is nothing new.

Tokamak is a Soviet word

I saw multiple people with American flags billowing outside their cars today and it’s really been years since it’s been like that here. There are also flags in so many places and so many houses. This is an elderly purple area of a rural purple state.

Back when I used to talk with my dad he would get so angry if I called him a boomer (even though that’s what he is). My kids and I call each other boomers whenever we have the slightest problem with technology.

Class matters more but most boomers are bourgeois and vice-versa. At the same time, republicans blame immigrants for the USA’s problems while liberals blame boomers.

My job isn’t high-paying yet but it has potential to be in the near future if I can hang on and not fuck things up. But together my spouse and I are basically at the bottom of the top ten percent in the USA. I have more money and financial security now than I ever have. And I’m just continually amazed at encountering people every day who think that this country is normal or that it has a future. I’ve been riding around with one of my coworkers for weeks. Imagine spending thirty hours a week with a hexbear who is trying to convert you to communism without using any Marxist trigger words. I was full of despair with this guy a few weeks ago. I even talked with my therapist about it. He told me the true cliché, that a patient can’t change unless they want to. And my coworker owns next to nothing. He is so much closer to homelessness than he realizes. And he still put out little American flags for Memorial Day at his house. Lately however things have gotten better. I’ve started using words like “communism” and told him about my desire to live in China. I don’t get any pushback. At the same time I know that he’s not a Marxist, he looks at Facebook for treats all the time despite the fact that he is broke and his girlfriend is heavily in debt, that without guidance or study he’ll drift straight back into deep reactionary thought. He could also just be humoring me. Personally we like each other. But sometimes it’s amazing how much you can get white male Americans to agree with, at least temporarily. Yesterday I told him that if the USA stopped fighting imperialist wars and if it gave all its land back to Native Americans, it would cease to exist. No pushback. No “that would be bad.” On the other hand, he said something super ignorant about how the government is trying to brainwash him with propaganda. He’s not wrong, but the idea that the government is just one of many tools used by the ruling class to enslave humanity—that just doesn’t register with these people. They love the police and military but hate the government, even if half the government budget goes to the police (while the bourgeoisie steal 99% of the value that American labor aristocrats generate).

I agree with others here: if you get rich and cease to be a communist, then you were never one to begin with. At the moment I’m donating as much as I can to Palestinians without pissing off my spouse.

Hari Seldon has a red book.

I’m kind of divided about this because I was once hardcore coveting my neighbor’s cattle but once I read the Ten Commandments I decided to just go to church every Sunday instead.

It’s her turn

For real though it doesn’t even matter who they run. The democrats are petite bourgeoisie who believe whatever the corporate press tells them. They’ll fall in line behind whatever dogshit candidate the DNC chooses because whoever the RNC chooses will somehow be worse even though they’ll actually be the same, just with slightly different definitions of what constitutes politeness.

A couple of years ago a local landlord here needed some kind of operation. He was super unhealthy and the doctors here refused to do the operation, saying it was too dangerous. He left our northeastern state and got a doctor in Florida to do the operation instead. And then he died haha.

It’s healthier for people not to wear seatbelts and then to get into car crashes at least a few times per year.

Yeah this is definitely just the bourgeoisie wanting to cull the weak. I also think that anti-masking is coming from liability concerns. If everyone is masking, that means that people are in danger, capital accumulation cannot proceed, and workers will have grounds for lawsuits (at the very least). Any sort of universal policy or program is also a danger to the bourgeoisie, which maximizes profits by atomizing people into individual consumers.

Failing to updoot this post is the fourth type of liberalism.

Seriously what is up with bigfoot being everywhere these days. Maybe it’s just where I live but I see bigfoot bumper stickers every day. Always on trucks. There’s a place I pass on my commute which has a striking cement statue of bigfoot out front. I feel like it must be connected to the emasculation of the american male. “I’m a big strong hairy manly forest man,” I think as I willingly surrender 99% of the value I create to the capitalist class.

If global communism isn’t a thing, that means we need to fight much harder.

I feel like the Soviet satellite just lying randomly in the middle of an irradiated desert was kind of another victory lap for capitalism.

Humbaba was a victim of Sumerian imperialism.