askchapo

To me, a real communist isn’t just someone flying the label. It’s someone who actually sees capitalism as a specific, exploitative system and not just “""greedy people doing bad stuff""”. Who views the state as structurally built to protect the owning class, so the whole strategy is about building independent working-class power from below, not just electing nicer managers (i.e. communism won't come out of ballots). Who actually wants to abolish the entire boss/worker setup, wage labor, and private ownership of the big stuff, replacing it with a democratically planned economy oriented around human need. Who instinctively sides with workers in other countries and despises their own nation’s imperial adventures because solidarity doesn’t stop at borders. Who backs all that up with the unglamorous, face-to-face organizing work: shop-floor talks, tenant meetings, serious party-building. Instead of just treating communism as an online aesthetic.

Overcoming American individualism is a slow, non-linear process of unlearning. You have to let go of the shame attached to depending on others, the reflex to blame yourself or your neighbors for systemic misery, and the comfort of thinking you can opt out of class struggle if you just try hard enough. A person becomes a communist not when they just adopt a new set of opinions, but when they start experiencing themselves as part of a class and act accordingly. That's almost always born from the friction between the American dream and the brutal reality of life, combined with the lived experience of collective struggle. The individualism never fully vanishes (lifelong cultural programming). But organizing is the cure because it teaches you that "we" can do what "I" never could.

And because this is adressed to Americans, one has to talk about systemic racism. Racial issues aren't an add-on. A white worker who thinks class unity means ignoring racism is a liability. A POC who thinks racial liberation can happen without smashing capitalism is, from a communist view, a naïve liberal. The goal is multiracial working-class solidarity forged in a common struggle that takes on both exploitation and racial oppression head-on. Overcoming individualism means overcoming racial individualism too i.e. the idea that you can escape alone, or that your group can get a slightly bigger slice of a pie of shit. That's one of the hardest leaps for an American to make.