this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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It's easy to call us cowards, in reality we live in a surveillance state that makes trillions of dollars by killing and torturing it's own citizens. In a place like this lacking morals becomes a question of survival. Definitely not excusing it, but it's the truth.
Well, they've also been brainwashed into extreme individualism, "if you fail at life it's your fault" kind of thinking. The fact that losing your job means homelessness, no healthcare, and with extremely powerful corporations handling pretty much everything you do or own makes it incredibly hard to organise.
Revolutionaries have succeeded in worse conditions, like Russia, China, Cuba, etc. The reality is that a good portion of the US Empire's working classes are bribed by the spoils of imperialism, and that there is a huge settler population that benefit from settler-colonialism. Organizing in the US needs to primarily be from a decolonial and anti-imperialist standpoint, which is largely why the Black Panther Party was so successful in garnering support, along with the mutual aid and community defense they performed.
A lot of the Black Panther Party was inspired by global south movements, including juche socialism from the DPRK, and Mao's policy in China. They focused on independence, sovereignty, and self-reliance, which is why their community defense and free lunch programs were so critical to their strategy. They believed that they needed to correctly show the working classes how to properly be a disciplined, working class party, bringing them up to their level theoretically and practically.
that, and none of the people who so flippantly dismiss us all as cowards have ever seriously considered the realities of spending considerable time in the American penal system, our favorite way of breaking people who color outside the lines. They're usually people from countries where prison is a place of rehabilitation and not punishment.
Everyone wants to see another Luigi, nobody wants to go through the kind of grief he is going or will go through.
No, just last week 250 comrades were arrested from a sister group of ours in Turkey.
Turkish prisons are not very pleasant. But when you have something to strive for, you do what is right and not what is easy.
Türkiye, exemplar of justice, egalitarianism, and good government. Great example.
That was the point, that activists still organized despite the harsh prison sentences. Fear of imprisonment in the US Empire isn't a valid excuse for the under-organization of the working classes.
Fair enough
It’s not a valid excuse, but it’s a reason. Like saying that you drove the car into a tree because you were drunk- it doesn’t excuse it (in fact, in both cases it makes it a little worse, imo), but it is the reason.
Plenty of other people get drunk without driving or even drive drunk without crashing, but you’d be giving a technically true and very misleading answer if you just described the physics of the accident (driving too fast into a curve or swerving to avoid an obstacle, for example).
I don't think it's a reason that gets to the heart of the issue, though, as comparing similar situations gets us different results. There is more going on that is holding the Statesian organizers back.
Oh, absolutely. I think it’s a combination of
tldr; one) slavery, Native American genocide, structural racism, the civil war, and McCarthyism; two) manifest destiny; and three) Reagan
the country literally being founded on and steeped in multiple deeply societally divisive, violent, and genocidal institutions, the cultural worship of rugged individualism, and the simultaneous erosion of public education and removal of the fairness doctrine, which, in combination with the heavy usage of and government investment into propaganda since the 1930s (along with other factors, like the fact that we’re a huge country with only three land borders with two countries, neither of which historically had a radically different culture immediately upon crossing the border [the four countries that border Mexico used to be part of it, and before cultural homogenization, the American border towns weren’t so far off from their Mexican equivalents], so, given the high cost of international compared to domestic travel, most people (that’s just a population index for comparison with the next link, if you want) don’t really go anywhere too much different from where they are from, even fewer before air travel became commonplace, so for boomers and older)]) lead to a very malleable society, but that’s just one of many perspectives on why Americans are so docile in the face of such circumstances.
There's also the bribery from the spoils of imperialism and settler-colonialism. The aspects you bring up are often more subtle and related to the superstructure, which reinforces that which already exists at the base level. Hell, there is a semi-colony of New Afrikans within the US (the Black Belt theory), and the US itself is a settler-colony.
Founded on and steeped in isn’t base level enough? 😂
When I mean base and superstructure, I am referring to the base as the mode of production and distribution (ie, imperialist and settler-colonialist capitalism in the US), and the superstructure as the aspects of society that reinforce and maintain that. Laws, culture, art, the state, etc are all part of the superstructure. The base and superstructure reinforce each other, but the base is primary, and the superstructure secondary. This is a Marxist understanding of the subject.
Yes, I was trying to get at that reinforcement in my comment. Perhaps I was unclear.
Ah, gotcha!
Nah, I mean, I didn’t say it. I was just trying to not write a novel for once, but alas.
Fair, lol.
Most people don’t protest exemplars of justice, egalitarianism, and good government. And if 250 people were arrested while doing so, they’ve got a different understanding of either the word “protest” or the word “exemplar” from mine.
Given that, I’m not sure what answer they could have given which wouldn’t have prompted the same reaction.
I guess it was easier in Nazi Germany to keep your head down and go with the flow, too.
Don't worry, people don't forget!
The problem is not that you are cowards, the problem is that you are stupid cowards.
You don't organize, you don't know how to either. And yeah going to prison sucks but that is true for the whole world.
There’s just very little solidarity. I’m from the US, and I didn’t realize it was missing until I moved to a country where it’s normal. Nobody trusts others to have their back, so why would they risk anything?
That said, it looks like it’s slowly developing. Ten years ago, I would not have expected Minnesotans to en masse refuse to help ice agents caught in the snow, for example. That may be because of my own ignorance, but in my home state of Connecticut there is a group of insurance professionals (not your local brokers, more like actuaries and people who work at the insurance company headquarters-not a group inherently predisposed to solidarity with immigrants) who coordinate shopping for local immigrants.
This was the purpose of the oligarchy sponsored NoKings bullshit, to give the illusion of organization and resistance in a nonthreatening format.
Revolution is neither easy nor impossible, it's difficult. The fact that obstacles stand in our way does not mean they are insurmountable, and as the empire decays it becomes more and more a "paper tiger," rotted from the inside out by finance capital. Imperial security is being enshittified, so to speak, along with the rest of society. That's why the war on Iran was lost.
You're right, it is easy. Seems to me there are exactly 3 people in America who aren't too cowardly to take a shot at the pedophile king.
In America it is somehow, inexplicably, easier to organize and coopt conservatives into betraying their cause than it is to get more than even 2 or 3 self proclaimed leftists to agree to do anything at all substantial.
edit: This has been my experience, at least. The American “left” mindset is so very performative and seems to think that doing anything other than voting the problem away is too scary or too much or too something. I cannot imagine we will see actual organization until something so bad happens that not being organized seems more dangerous than being organized, and i’m pretty sure it’ll be way too late to get started safely and cleanly by then.
It’s my experience, too. Even worse they freeze you out for speaking like this. They just want to march and getting killed or tossed in jail for it isn’t enough to convince them.