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.
Socdemism is structurally an impediment to the benefit of people even in the imperial core. It's easy to use "making perfect the enemy of the good" language when speaking in generalities, but fundamentally there is no addressing capitalism by contenting ourselves with the election of socdem politicians.
I find it extremely convenient that the only productive action that the majority here recognize is “community building”. But not in any established orgs, because theyre either socdems like the DSA or proletariat-bourgeois like the teamsters or filled with sex pests or otherwise problematic leadership like insert western org with “communist” in their name here. Which at best leaves community volunteer work or forming unions from scratch, and at worst just means informally hanging out with like-minded people. I’m not shitting on volunteering, but I don’t think wearing a hammer and sickle pin to the food bank or turning the local coffee shop into a coop is going to move the needle when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of the western proletariat. So much here is wallowing disguised as realpolitik.
You are assigning things to me that I never said. Go ahead and join the DSA or whatever, go ahead and join one of the trot orgs, probably don't join a sex cult but like hopefully you don't call that me being "unpragmatic". I dislike the central PSL leadership for obvious reasons, but if someone wanted to join a local branch while being aware of that, it is what it is, and FRSO is to my knowledge better in this respect.
I am against socdemism, but even nominally demsoc orgs can be used productively. I agree that there are some real wallowers here, but they are mainly the "there's nothing I can do because [my country] is too reactionary" types.