live in more rural area but desperate to minimize parasitism, i can barely donate to palestinians as much as i’d like cause my dream job has low pay sadly and i’m stealing more than providing by not giving up everything to them
i want to do things to enemies to vent my anger
This self hatred is a form of liberalism you must combat comrade. It is the capitalist that wants you to cripple yourself in self loathing so as to prevent any real resistance against them. Eating bread made from an underpaid worker does not make you a slave driver. To meaningfully resist Imperialism means to have solidarity with your international comrades. To resist means to live. You do not control the means of the oppression, regardless of your benefits to it. The materials and labor has been exported into your hands and you must use it to destroy the system that extracts it in the first place. Be thankful you are awarded the privileges, and use what you have to fight against imperialism. Your life is valuable, when you give yourself grace you learn how to give it to others and build something bigger than yourself.
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” exists for a reason, and ignoring the neoliberal co-opting to allow reckless consumption, is to explain that you must recognize these relationships and work to fight them. Something that is not done by starving and giving up everything. There’s endless debates over communists crowd funding vs becoming landlords and using the funds towards working class struggle. But this does not start with sacrificing your life and its ability to resist so that you don’t give another dollar to a trillion dollar corporation. There is no math for comparing suffering, but you can offset any harm you cause by organizing and resisting imperialism.
If you cannot directly take part in protests I implore you to educate yourself and others. One cannot begin to resist if they don’t have the foundation to build an alternative system, or the creativity to imagine it. Encourage others to do the same, perhaps provide resources, create posters or assets for comrades to use to get attention. Join up with other organizations, they might be willing to accommodate you. You have a great privilege to resist the imperial core from within, you have the power to make a change comrade.
self-hatred is counter-productive!
please don’t fall into the liberal-moralist trap of believing a socially produced injury to be your personal defect. you did not choose the material conditions you live under! could the average russian worker be blamed for not having achieved as much as lenin?
i understand that in our ideological drive and conviction, we sometimes ask ourselves the impossible, but ironically, this is capitalist indoctrination talking: it is capitalism that pushes us into thinking that only our productive output matters in life, but one should remember that we are all ultimately just human. there is no shame in taking a break for one’s health, and there is no shame in taking part in the society you’re forced to exist in. we are not preaching asceticism!
self-hatred is what the enemy wants us to feel, as it causes demoralisation and helplessness and serves to turn structural pressures into a verdict on one’s own character. instead, direct your anger appropriately: it is not you who caused the world’s problems, but the bourgeoisie.
lastly, i cannot emphasise enough that criticism isn’t the same as self-hatred. you can recognise mistakes and work to change without condemning your whole self.
This.
the average russian worker wasn’t an imperialist parasite whose food, goods, existence, etc. innately involved the exploitation of the global south and therefore provided a net negative to the movement though
do you believe friedrich engels to have been a parasite? do you believe souphanouvong to have been a parasite?
again, marxism does not preach asceticism or seclusion from a society you did not create! marx himself critiqued such attitudes in “the poverty of philosophy”!
it is not a productive approach to belittle one’s own contributions and self-flagellate over perceived imperfections. whatever negative impact you may have materially on others is utterly microscopic in comparison with the bourgeoisie, which is the enemy of both you and your fellow workers in the global south.
so have some priorities, as well as self-respect.
you can argue yes to those questions given they both still relied on goods obtained via imperialism though, like yes the impact they had on the movement is huge but foe example, a simple meal still was obtained by the suffering of the global south if that makes sense which is what i think about every time i consume sustenance
Moralistic self-flagellation doesn’t advance the cause of the revolution or help the global south.
marxism is not moralism; it does not demand of us to swear a moral oath and uphold it like some kind of political vestal virgins. when lenin was in switzerland, he still ate, did he not?
yes, on a rational level, we may analyse how our own consumption affects others, and it is indeed correct to try to reduce harm to the best of one’s ability, but ultimately individualist approaches are ineffective compared with systemic ones, and self-flagellation is an individualist approach.
you did not create or choose colonialism, or unequal exchange! any benefit you may receive from its existence does not paper over the fact that you are yourself exploited and have a common class interest with all other workers on this planet, not to mention the fact that the main cause of harm and the main benefactor of those systems is not you, but the capitalist!
also, i would like to push back against the notion that people in the first world have been “given” the benefits from capitalism:
The truth is, that nothing was ever given to you. The founding fathers didn’t give you your rights! Women weren’t given the right to vote! You always hear [that] women were given the right to vote with the 19th Amendment. Women struggled for a hundred years. For a hundred years, from the 1820s when they mobilised the first convention—and by the way, the vote wasn’t even their major demand—they had a whole host of demands related to the treatment of women, labour and child labour, property rights, inheritance rights, and all that sort of thing, including legal rights.
Women struggled for a hundred years; they agitated, marched, got arrested, beaten up, roughed up, and chained themselves to the White House gates. They were thrown into jail; some of them died of pneumonia, were force-fed, and endured all manner of brutal treatment. Only after a hundred years of struggle were they “given” the vote—this great gradualist process.
[…] Workers were not given free trade unions either; they had to fight for them. They had to fight against goon squads, Pinkerton detectives, terrorists, state militia, the National Guard, and the US Army. And that is how they achieved it, with their blood and their struggle.
–michel parenti
even third-worldist analysis does not condemn global-north workers morally! it merely seeks to analyse, explain, and criticise certain political realities and bring to light the additional difficulties and injustices third-world people have to face. but no global-south revolutionary would ever deny you the title of worker or perceive you as an enemy on the same level as they perceive the capitalist.
to love and help others, it is helpful to love and help yourself.
but why wouldn’t they is what i don’t understand
i’m sorry, but i don’t quite get what your question is referring to. could you please elaborate?
like why wouldn’t global southerners condemn all of the global north after all we’ve done and continue to do, it’s only logical to me cause i’d do that if i were in their shoes
So you should starve? Brother, regardless of whether or not you eat that specific meal, it will not change the overall exploitation you’re talking about. It’s like trying to get people to become vegan to save animals; that’s nice, but the means of production under capitalism will still produce that cow to live a horrible birth, raised in cramped spaces, and eventually slaughtered. No amount of individual action can ever change the structural inequalities and exploitations. You’re worrying over and emphasizing an extremely idealist view of you as a human, that is taking up more and more of your mental capacity that can be used to actually organize or do whatever you desire. You’re not wrong, but you’re pushing away any productivity that you actually desire. Not trying to be rude if it seems that way. Give yourself grace.
wonderfully put! but i just wanted to let you know that she goes by she/her pronouns.
should i starve? i mean my gut says maybe, but my brain says to at least try an imperialist-only diet first /lh
self-flagellation helps no-one
do what you can, large or small
Focus on your immediate surroundings and use your knowledge of theory to subtly drop hints to people around you. Take advantage of the spaces you are forced to cohabitate with people to get the discussions going. Get people thinking and asking questions themselves. “What is all of this for?” in the break room at work. “I don’t feel like this is really giving me much helpful information for later in life, shouldn’t we be thinking and learning about this other thing instead?” in the school lunch room. “It would be kind of nice to be able to take a bus if my car breaks down, don’t you agree?” Talking to people on their level is key, and anyone can learn how to do this.
When I was working as a volunteer with Standards Not Force, something we were encouraged to do was something called “Gift Giving Mondays”. Where people were meant to do something small, the example Dr. Dillard gave was a gift card for neighbors that basically said something along the lines of “Hello neighbor, I hope this finds you well and I hope you have a great week. You are loved, you are seen, please remember that”. And the idea behind this gesture was to start cultivating a community back into neighborhoods be it suburban, rural or urban. I have since stopped working with them, but the practice I carry on into my own org as it stuck with me enough. It does work. This in itself may seem silly and small, but in fact nurturing your community into an interconnected health instead of the hyper-individualistic nature so many are in is in fact one the most important first steps to a revolution. This works in tandem with my previous paragraph to start unlearning the capitalist programming in people, without the use of the scary buzzwords that set people off. These two notes are key to any successful movement, and they are so easy that you can do these things from your very own living room.
When you focus on the area you can immediately influence, you may find yourself more powerful than you think. From there, once you get enough support, you can start talking about how you as a community can host a community center if your community lacks one. It’s all about seeing to people’s needs in your area. Giving a safety net where people obviously are truly lacking. Giving relief from the parasitic system that oppresses us now is how we give people the energy to start working together for a better tomorrow.
Edit: I know this is long, I kind of just got carried away! Hopefully this is helpful to anyone that wants to start making a difference in more than just posts on the internet. :) I’m of the belief that the sooner we abandon the internet for our cause, the better. We are surveilled here, after all, and the first rule of security culture is to be wary of any and all electronic communications. The internet is full of a lot of noise and pollution, trying to organize on it is like trying to set up a meetup in a mosh pit. Sure, you can probably do it, but most of the time there’s so much noise and bumping around that you’re more likely to drop your phone! Hence my focus on the local and in-person stuff a person can do!
The internet makes it possible to organize more through online. Consider this instance you’re on, or prolewiki. These are online resources. They aren’t on their own a replacement for in-person organizing, but they can still help a hell of a lot.
You don’t need to be exiled to Siberia to be like Lenin. You don’t need to go down in a blaze of glory to prove you’re a true revolutionary. Look at what you can do in the context of where you’re at, what you can help build, even if from a distance. And if what that amounts to is too far from what you want to be able to do, then shift your focus toward moving some place where you can be closer to the heart of it.
Your main problem is conflating your material conditions with your own self worth. You need to keep being an efficient communist and cultivating virtues like self-love in the two separate spheres apart, only then can you blossom in each. Your obsession with your own emotions is a form of liberalism. Read “Combat Liberalism” by Mao, go meditate/exercise or whatever makes you feel calm, collected, and grounded, and when you feel OK start working again. As for what you should work on, just feel your way through the river on the stones, and don’t stress about it, just do the work.
the problem is i loathe the idea of self-love for myself, it’s fundamentally dangerous for me given the circumstances but i appreciate your concern
Why would self-love be dangerous?
it makes me forget my role in harming the global south, and fuels my need to destroy enemies of the movement if that makes sense
I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I practice loving language with myself on a daily basis and it has not made me any less interested in liberation. And I live in the US. If anything, doing such has helped me feel more emotionally stable on the whole, so that I am able to see things more clearly and be more supportive of others. I have low moments still, but I feel more capable of treating the struggle as a marathon rather than a sprint.
As for harming the global south, that’s more about belief than it is about whether you hate or love yourself. Belief in the extent to which you are directly responsible and can do something about it. The reality is, most of it is abstracted to the extent that blame gets shifted around and hidden. But the primary offenders are the administrators of empire, not working class people who barely know what’s going on.
The primary contradiction is imperialism, not you. Do you see what I’m saying? If you are Donald Trump or something, hating and destroying yourself may do the world a lot of good. But it’s clear you aren’t. And most people who are part of that class have no interest in turning their resources toward supporting liberation because it means upending their entire life; a life that is very comfortable and powerful relative to the masses, far more than any idea of comfort based on having air conditioning or something. These are people who can buy politicians, orchestrate military action against other countries, destabilize an entire region because they want to make more money and own more of the world. The gap between you and them is so big that it’s hard to fathom. The gap between you and the working class of the global south is much, much smaller.
If you are working on weapons that get used against the global south or something, that’s a reason to reconsider what you’re doing and find other work. But if you’re looking at supply chains or something and going “I’m bad because I use products that are made in part in the global south and the global south is exploited”, you basically can’t function if you get twisted up in that kind of thinking. Global capitalism is pervasive and near impossible to avoid. And the aim of liberation is not to cleanse yourself of any perceived wrongdoing, but to end exploitation and help the masses thrive. But who are you doing it for? For the love of who? Isn’t it hard to have great love for, say, the global south if you refuse to include yourself in that love?
i mean like it’s a form of discipline for myself only, i know love works for others but if i get too accepting of myself then i lose sight of what i must fix on myself if that makes sense
it’s a form of discipline only i use, it’s not good for others
as for great love i identify more with the whole “communism is the hammer which crushes the enemy” thing mao said than castro’s idea of great love, i feel the latter can be used once global revolution has occurred but focusing on the danger of the omnipresent enemy is priority imo
I sort of get where you are coming from better now and I am wondering if it’s something of a misunderstanding of what love is and can be.
i mean like it’s a form of discipline for myself only, i know love works for others but if i get too accepting of myself then i lose sight of what i must fix on myself if that makes sense
I don’t see love as validating everything in oneself. If I had desires to be a bourgeoisie exploiter, I wouldn’t be like “that’s okay, you can have that as a goal, I still love you.” I’d be like, where the heck is this coming from, what is causing these desires in me. But I also wouldn’t put myself down over it either.
But even then, it is a thing in literature/advice about intrusive thoughts that fearing them and aggressively pushing them away can do more harm than good. The mind is kinda complicated.
Anyway, coming back to love, consider that Castro headed up a vanguard that had to use violence to win a revolution and then hold on to that power. I’m sure he wasn’t going, “I just love the bourgeoisie and their exploitative behavior so much.” Or Mao has that quotation, but he also did very meticulous work investigating the conditions of the peasantry and building ties with them. These individuals, and the revolutions behind them, are multifaceted, is what I’m trying to get at. They contained within them the capacity for great love and great hate, sometimes the one fueling the other; the hatred drawn forth from their love of the people and their hatred of the ones oppressing them.
So the way I see it, the aim of self love is not the repression of hatred or fault, not the smoothing over of it in a liberal fashion where all desires are equal and all ways of being can be accommodated no matter what they are. The aim is to nurture appreciation, cherishing, and a sense of emotional stability. To be able to feel like a whole being who can work in interdependence with others toward a better world, and yes, that sometimes includes self-crit and self improvement. Ideally, one does not need encouragement on this and has an upbringing where they felt safe and loved, and formed secure attachments with others into adulthood. But not all of us do. Ideally, we have help on this via loving, secure attachments with others if we didn’t get it in childhood. But sometimes that’s not easy to build.
You deserve to love yourself and to be loved. The economy has nothing to do with that. Please be kind to yourself. I can promise you that if you start there then you will find a good path to walk.
from each something something
