I lean leftwards because I want more people to get the help, dignity and peace they need and deserve. Now I feel a wave of being told to "harden my heart" and I feel scared and isolated. I don't have it in me to become a martyr and estrange myself from most people any further, I get nervous with the leftism I see so often expressed as wanting the bad people suffer, and that anything short of revolution is not just not good enough, but worse than doing nothing. And then I have constant guilt that I'm judging people more discriminated than me for how they express things; that my fears aren't valid and expressions of privilege.
By now I'm feeling emotional burnout, I get annoyed by any respone that isn't in-depth analysis because it just feels like watching the same responses happening over and over and never going anywhere.
Do you view socialism/communist society as a reward for people like heaven is to Christians? 'cause it's not. It's a social necessity. You don't need to martyr yourself and no one in the actual-marxist movement is asking you to. Advancing the social dialectic is something that happens whether you want it to or not, so you might as well be pushing it in the better direction since there's no other option.
There Is No Alternative To Marxism.
+1
violent revolution is assured not by a desire for violence inherent in the base but by the unyielding logic of capitalism--and the bourgeois-controlled superstructure dominated by that logic--ensuring that violent revolution will come to pass
the word 'necessity' proves itself lacking. its social connotations are inextricably tied up with desire (a red herring) while its scientific connotations address the configuration of outcome (the dialectic produces a resultant scenario, synthesis of the imminent and its contradiction, and this synthesis is a necessary completion of the triad)
a more direct word is probably "inevitability," although that's still hitting too wide; the inevitability of violence in the consequent period directly following collapse is not the inevitability of revolutionary violence, per se. barbarism is still the base case we must avoid.
so if we need something narrower, that describes only the problem of understanding revolutionary violence apart from the personal, it would be something like, "by destructively suppressing all avenues for peaceful revolution within capitalist societies, the capitalist system preconfigures violence as a guaranteed aspect of any revolution that may occur."
this isn't advice for hardening your heart, OP. you have zero personal obligation to engage the perceived social compulsion to pick up the knife and steel yourself, not least because that compulsion is not there.
the goal is not to become the violent revolution. the goal is not to desire it. at the level of the individual, the goal is to understand what is happening and why, to not be 100% blindsided when 'it happens'. the goal is to stay alive. if staying alive for you means keeping your soft heart and aversion to the lurid expressions of frustration that evoke violence while they forget or gloss over or downright misunderstand the central concept, then that is a good thing and the thing you should do.
Those are good points. I tend to be pretty good at knowing what to expect, but bad at actually preparing for them, doing what is to be done. That's something I could focus on when I begin getting organised