As capitalism gets more and more mask off brutal and it becomes harder and harder to ignore that the democracy people thought they had is at best very limited and easily revoked, the paradigm shifts more and more to a sort of internalised existential self reduction. A very natural response to life under capitalism, after all, life under capitalism has very little meaning for the average proletariat so why wouldn't people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless? I see a very tired, nihilist society.
It's like watching someone in an abusive relationship. People have been conditioned by their abuser into a state of submission via exsaution and erosion of their identity, their agency and their self-confidence. They want to escape, but are controlled by their abuser via financial, emotional and even the threat of physical abuse. This works well for the ruling class, as such victims are understandably very hard to organize. There is an attitude of "I don't matter and nothing I do matters, how would organizing change anything. It's unrealistic, egocentric even, to expect better." That we have to contend with and keep in mind when we try to mobilize people living in these conditions. I've struggled with such thoughts my entire life, and it's very strange to see such a thing slowly become so normalized.
Anyway, don't ever let the ghouls make you feel like you don't matter. The workers of the world deserve better than this
Having described the partner who abused me as an "emotional capitalist", this tracks. The idea that you could have something better outside of the system that you exist in right now is dangerous and has to be shut down.
I'd never experienced anything like it in my life until I was neck-deep in it. The way you wind up suffocating your own dreams, your own capacity to imagine something better - that's just capitalist realism. And the abuse I was getting at home happened to mimic the dynamic at my workplace pretty much one-to-one. Shrink yourself down. Your only value is what you can provide, what can be extracted from you. Expecting anything is dangerous. Any day, any time, I might be getting written up for something banal that happened months ago. Everything you do is surveilled, fuel for discipline. There really was no escape. I forgot how to engage with people without being prepared to get hurt in the process.
Since I got out I've been relearning how to interact with people in a healthy way. I keep noticing ways I've internalized that garbage that I didn't even consider so long as I was in it. That this same dynamic has been normalized at a societal level has some really unsettling ramifications for What Is To Be Done.
There's so much to say about this. Maybe an effortpost sometime.