There’s no organizing potential in the USA at all. Everyone only thinks social democrats are the most radical option. Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here. I’m scum for being born in this country. I know it at this point, I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism, we’re all labor aristocrats, so why bother? I don’t even feel the strength to get out of bed anymore. I just want to lay here until I die or until I get evicted and die on the streets. I’m to scared to kill myself, so may as well. I’m just so tired of everything, of seeing the rights of my closest friends being peeled away and there being no viable way to stop it because, again, everyone here only thinks voting is the way out.
Listen to better music & make plans to move 👍 you’ve got years
Gotta kill the
copgod in your head, comradeEvil is a social construct and there’s no such thing as absolution in death.
Guilt and shame are immaterial.
There’s obviously more to it than just turning off or invalidating emotions, but understand that how you internalize and process information doesn’t impact the world, doesn’t lessen anyone’s suffering. As such feeling shame and self-pity is materially worse for the victims of imperialism and capitalism (including yourself, to whatever degree) than doing any action to build revolution.
So like, feel what you’re going to feel as a human, but exercise what influence you can over how those natural reactions translate into second-order thoughts and analysis.
First, divorce Marxist analysis from moralism. Marx didn’t write Capital to describe the ways in which the bourgeoisie are evil and proletariat are good. The working class isn’t good. Class is an abstract category we construct to understand and interact with material interests, not to assign individuals to heaven or hell.
Then internalize dialectical thinking. Ban yourself from static thoughts.
There’s no organizing potential in the US at all
I won’t address how this is patently false and likely influenced by capitalist-mediated algorithmic representations of reality from social media. It’s a static thought, implies the existence of some essence of US that was, is, and always will be. But everything exists in relation to other things and everything is always growing and changing based on its internal and external contradictions.
You don’t look at a sapling and tell one of its molecules: gah! This is barely a tree! There’s no wood for building or fruit for eating or leaves for shade! Why even try? You’ve opened a biology textbook to the sapling page and fixated on a single paragraph. Or to stretch this metaphor past its limits, the textbook is written by the tree-hating bourgeoisie, who have conveniently omitted the ludicrous idea that any plant could grow larger than a sapling.
Static thinking sees binaries, dialectical thinking sees waxing and waning influences and tensions. Static thinking sees mixed material interests and reduces them to no revolutionary potential. Dialectical thinking examines the conflicting interests of imperial spoils versus proletarian exploitation, the former a reactionary tension on imperial-core workers and the latter a revolutionary tension. It analyzes the degrees and trajectories of each tension, sees waning imperial influences and waxing proletarianization, and predicts a reemergence of revolutionary potential in the imperial core.
Extremely cogent and on point.
I have Avoidant Personality Disorder (AvPD), which causes self-hatred, depression, all that fun stuff, with no friends, no political social network, and have gotten scammed out of thousands because I thought for a second someone was actually liked me, and am stuck in a rural area. People can talk about revolutionary optimism all they want, but that doesn’t help.
I know what your feeling. I know what it’s like to know that the negative self talk you give to yourself is idealist and undialectical, only for that recognition to become more ammunition for the voice.
I fear that some of the advice given by comrades here, for as good as it is, will be twisted by that voice and empower it even more. “Defeatism and nihilism are reactionary notions that the ruling class uses to paralyze you and prevent you from resisting” becomes “I’m an ontologically evil defeatist nihilist reactionary and should just kill myself so I don’t drag down the movement”. You may read the comrades’ advice, realize that they are emphatically telling you there is nothing inherently wrong with you and that their coarseness is to get through to you, and turn that into even more ammunition against yourself for why you’re a bad communist and should end it all.
Recognizing that this way of thinking is ingrained in us from a young age to demobilize us is an important step. There are feds in our brains – ones who can even hijack your sense of self – and they are trying to kill us. One of the luxuries we first worlders get is the latest and greatest tricknology to use for our own personal MK Ultras.
I don’t know what comes after the recognition step. I haven’t gone past that myself. Joining an org and seeking community are of course important, but how to take those steps when even the mildest attempts send me onto the brink of a mental breakdown? I don’t know.
What I do know is that I’m in this with you. Please don’t kill yourself. I need you. We need you.
if we all kill ourselves then what will be the point of the movement? nowadays, the CIA and other anti communist organizations know they dont need to go full mass surveillance or go after every single one of us because they know that people self censor due to fear of humiliation and death.
second off, youre not evil for anything. theres this stupid thing americans do to each other where they insist they are worse than hitler over drinking a pepsi. this is useless. i think that you have to create your own sense of reality here and affirm it. if a frustrated third worlder says that all americans have to die you dont take that as an invitation to kill yourself. you realize that 1. they dont mean it literally 2. they are verbalizing their own frustrations 3. socialists exist in every part of the imperial core, youre not evil for being born there.
i think that you have to create your own sense of reality here and affirm it.
100% this. With thoughts, words, and deeds, often moment by moment, until you get the hang of it. And those old patterns are ingrained, and will try to drag you back into it. So daily check-ins, reframing thoughts, correcting self-talk is a must, if not more often.
Don’t kill yourself, agitate. As a wise man once said, “Laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor. And help the damn revolution come quicker.”
You’re already on the right track, and the world needs more people pushing for progress, not fewer.
There’s no organizing potential in the USA at all
three years ago nobody thought that hating zionism would be as mainstream as now, or someone like luigi being considered some kind of hero even if there’s some adventurism around him
Everyone only thinks social democrats are the most radical option
who are everyone? people in the internet?
Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here
you should ignore the hivemind filled with FBI bots for you own good
I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism
you should stop being so hard on yourself, nobody is inmune to propaganda
I’m just so tired of everything
that’s what they reactionaries want
Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here. I’m scum for being born in this country. I know it at this point, I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism, we’re all labor aristocrats, so why bother?
It’s me, I’m the third worldists. I feel like the American left still has some vestigial ideas of sin and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that you absorbed through your lifetime. You see the concept of labor aristocracy and equate it to some sort of personal moral failure instead of a way to understand class relations under imperialism. You get told that revolutionary potential in the imperial core is low and you can’t simply take control of history to conjure up revolutionary conditions out of thin air and deliver a McRevolution to your doorstep in 30 minutes or money back and think it’s nihilism and defeatism and communism is impossible.
While I personally believe that a revolution in the imperial core is a long way off and that the US proletariat are labor aristocrats whose interests align with maintaining imperialism, I have never blamed you for your conditions because that would be unserious. Nor have I put up unrealistic expectations on you to scrounge up revolutionary conditions out of nowhere and destroy the Great Satan before the next warcrime festival occurs and blame you when that inevitably fails. I get really pissed at obvious displays of chauvinism but that’s a normal reaction of a person with self-respect who is dehumanized by that chauvinism. And sometimes the shit American leftists, MLs even, say makes me give some credence to the Yakubian Devil memes and I fully understand why Global South leftists give up on this place to preserve their mental health.
Recognizing that it is hard or that you are objectively limited by complex factors outside of your control is not doomerism or a call to surrender. The point is to keep fighting. To bet your life on it even if you might not live to see the revolution. To understand your capabilities and not feel uncomfortable with your limits because that is how you become tempted to make mistakes. To keep learning and become a better communist so you can make more out of future opportunities. To see yourself as a citizen of the world and cheer for every victory no matter how far away because it brings us all closer to our goal. Revolution is hard. The road to communism is long and bloody and many times lonely and frustrating. If it was easier the world would be much different.
It’s me, I’m the third worldists. I feel like the American left still has some vestigial ideas of sin and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that you absorbed through your lifetime. You see the concept of labor aristocracy and equate it to some sort of personal moral failure instead of a way to understand class relations under imperialism. You get told that revolutionary potential in the imperial core is low and you can’t simply take control of history to conjure up revolutionary conditions out of thin air and deliver a McRevolution to your doorstep in 30 minutes or money back and think it’s nihilism and defeatism and communism is impossible.
I mean, you’re not wrong about the obsession with sin and moral failure (I am reminded once again of Jones Manoel’s excellent essay on Christian culture’s influence on marxism in the west: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture), but let’s not act like everyone who brings up third worldism online is solely doing a detached, detailed class analysis. When people use it as a vague means of disregarding those who live in the imperial core under the guise of scientific socialism, or reduce the entire class dynamic there to a single blob of labor aristocracy, they aren’t helping anybody learn or build solidarity. You might not do this, I don’t know, but it does happen. You don’t represent everyone who espouses this stuff.
I can’t say how much of a problem it is. Maybe it’s a very minor online problem. But it is a thing that comes up.
That said, to put it bluntly, I would not blame non-white-designated peoples for being very wary about trusting white-designated peoples on having revolutionary solidarity and I would say that’s the more stark aspect of this that’s real and dangerous, than the overly vague application of labor aristocracy (which looks silly fast when considering, for example, a diaspora scraping by working class non-white person in the US vs. a tech bro white european person who was born there). White supremacy is a very real system of power and has a lot of racism embedded in it, and the stuff going on with ICE in the US illustrates how very alive and well it still is. So that’s a very real and concrete concern. And I think it’s much easier for a white person to turn against white supremacy and organize with non-white peoples than it is for them to grapple with some convoluted analysis about the spoils of empire, which mainly leads to “don’t be a soc dem or a western chauvinist”, which we have other arguments for already anyway.
Or to put it another way, if the tendency is that westerners are going to internalize third worldism as a hair shirt and go no further with it than that, then maybe it’s not a very useful framework when engaging with them.
❤️
But seeing as I benefit from the blood of children being spilled, why should I want to do anything other than set myself on fire?
If what you care about in this case is the lives of children, setting yourself on fire saves exactly 0. In rest, you should discuss how to process and cope with things outside your control with a mental health professional because you seem to have things going on that strangers on an obscure communist website aren’t equipped to help with.
Imagine a tug-of-war played over a deep pit. On one side stand the imperialists and their lackeys. On the other, the third-world communists. If they should win, and the Empire is dismantled, then you lose some privilege.
(Of course, you’re also being stolen from. A full victory would be in your actual benefit. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore that, thought).
You’re standing on the side of the Capitalist. You recognize that them doing well makes “your side” win. What should you do? Should you pull the rope to your side? Surely not, you don’t want your side to win.
It seems your answer is that you should jump into the pit yourself.
My answer is this. Sitting the contest out is the same, why not do that? That’s what everyone around you does already. You can also pull the rope the other way. You don’t have to pull your arms of to make a difference.
You are not at fault for what side of the pit you find yourself standing on. Don’t pretend you are. Find others who also want ‘your side’ to lose, and talk to them. They are going through the same guilt you are. They can help you directly, and you can help them too.
This kind of thinking is still privileged. You do not recognize your responsibility to the people of the world and selfishly want to anihillate yourself to save yourself from the trouble of doing the hard work. This is ingrained american exceptionalism and you should reflect on that. I do not write this to “dunk” on you, but I live in an equally if not MORE anti-communist country, and what? Do I complain? Do I resign? No. Our organization is small, but it’s the little Davids that stand up against Goliath every day, get beaten down and rise back again. Because if not us, then who? You will not be saved from the outside, and resignation is admitting defeat, and giving away the win to the ruling class without a fight. Do better.
Nah, this is a shitty thing to say to someone whose mental health is obviously in a dark place. Telling someone who is struggling a lot in part because they are internalizing guilt that they are essentially being selfish because of having dark thoughts, is an asinine approach to mental health, that will just reinforce the guilt they already feel.
Depression and self-harm are not problems confined to westerners and doubling down on insinuating somebody is particularly bad for being a westerner who is already internalizing that as a horrible thing, is the opposite of helping.
Not everything is about hard work, ffs. Take a step back and reframe this as if you are talking to someone who is bedridden and then maybe it will make more sense what’s wrong with it. You’re completely erasing the potentially disabling mental health conditions they are operating under and talking as if a “tough love” speech will fix them.
Well damn, you do cut to the core of it, huh? Well, if what you say is true and that it truly is easier to annihilate myself, then I will do just that and stop being a drain. Thank you for the motivation to end my cowardice and embrace oblivion. Goodbye.
Stop romanticizing your despair. You are not a martyr, and you are not ‘evil’, that framing is a convenient escape hatch. Calling yourself scum lets you off the hook because it declares you irredeemable before you’ve even tried. That isn’t humility, it’s narcissistic fatalism. The global oppressed don’t care about your American guilt complex, they care about whether you’re useful.
‘No organizing potential?’ That’s lazy defeatism dressed up as realism. The US has millions of exploited workers, tenants facing eviction, and queer kids losing rights. The potential is there, buried under the same rubble you’re too tired to lift. Did you expect the masses to deliver themselves to your doorstep? The vanguard isn’t handed out, it’s forged in the exact exhaustion you’re feeling right now. If you can’t do grand strategy, do logistics. If you can’t do logistics, do mutual aid. If you can’t do that, then your only job today is to survive and show up tomorrow. That is a tactical order, not a request.
I am not going to coddle you. But I will tell you a hard truth: checking out is the ruling class’s favorite outcome for radical Americans. They want you dead or paralyzed. Staying alive and doing one tedious, miserable task today is an act of war against them. So stop spiraling about your inherent evil, that is a bourgeois luxury problem, and start thinking about your next tactical move. Eat a meal. Make a help-line call. Send an email to them. Just don’t confuse self-pity with political analysis. Get up. Not for the party not the cause, but because lying down is exactly what the Empire wants you to do.
This is not the message of my comment.
and think it’s nihilism and defeatism and communism is impossible.
While I personally believe that a revolution in the imperial core is a long way off
if i’m going to suffer through the rest of my natural life and die unliberated it’s no different than being impossible. imperial decline makes me smile but i have no positive reasons to wake up in the morning
The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, almost two entire centuries ago. Countless have dedicated their lives to the struggle since then, some in conditions that a first worlder cannot even begin to comprehend, without any guarantee that they would live to see victory. Many died without ever seeing revolution and the road ahead is still long and hard. Communism isn’t just a fancy political fashion accessory, it’s a world historical struggle against the overwhelming power of capital. Nobody is forcing you to take part, but if you’re going to call yourself a communist at least honor the struggle of those countless comrades by not allowing yourself to indulge in self-pity.
There’s no organizing potential in the USA at all.
So you agitate. When there are enough Class Conscious individuals in usa the party will begin to crystalize, no point in trying to force it when the conditions aren’t correct.
Reddit
Reddit is a cesspit just don’t go there. It is built to break you. Get off reddit. Anybody who espouses actual Marxist Leninism on reddit gets banned. The only way to be a real communist on reddit is to keep it on the DL and be very measured and careful in your wording. These accounts who proudly proclaim to be marxists on reddit are allowed to exist because they spread false consciousness.
third-worldists call me evil for being born here. I’m scum for being born in this country. I know it at this point, I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism, we’re all labor aristocrats
That is a CIA psy-op just ignore people who say that shit. The 3rd worldists on reddit are mostly petty bougies or white collar, the labor aristocrats of their own nation. They are blaming the american left for the capitalists exploiting their countries while doing nothing themselves to throw off their own bourgeoise who exploit them with neo-colonialism for their own benefit. They are every bit as useless as the americans waiting for China or Iran to save them.
How can I effectively agitate if getting out of bed is a struggle and simply getting through one day without crying or cutting myself is an achievement? I’m useless.
Then you take care of the particular (the problem stopping you from action) before the universal (the action). Get medicated, find support networks, call helplines as much as you can, journal, and remember that material conditions predecede any form of conciousness - so you will not get better if you don’t get up. Set up the smallest goals. Do not think about achieveing them. Instead of “getting better” think of what personal material conditions you can change, so you are better. Remember Marx from the 18th Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Your position is still materially different than that of an Indonesian sweatshop slave. You can and should make the best of it.
I got banned from a subreddit for telling someone to investigate their beliefs even if they are sure they are true. Not to disprove them, but to strengthen their beliefs. To be fair, DPRK was mentioned. I was really pushing it telling someone to investigate history.
Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here. I’m scum for being born in this country. I know it at this point, I’m evil for benefitting from imperialism, we’re all labor aristocrats, so why bother?
I don’t think you are called evil by third worldists but your class interests don’t align with the working class from the third world. You do benefit somewhat from US imperialism.
Now that your rights and standards of living are being eroded, it should be motivation to organise against some of that erosion.
It isn’t motivating. I just want to die.
your class interests don’t align with the working class from the third world. You do benefit somewhat from US imperialism.
This can be the case somewhat depending on where you fall in the caste of the US, but it is not a simple, identical thing across the board.
Don’t give up yet. I’ve searched for the past 17 years to find people who’re pissed off about certain issues and I’m still struggling to find people in 2026. Things have changed though, I’m sure of it. Most of Gen Z understand that the current system is broken. Just keep chipping away at the political system until it dies.
The US has internal colonization too, it doesn’t just imperialize the rest of the world and then redistribute the superprofits equally to its labor aristocracy. A worker that owns no land, has no investments, and can’t save for retirement is certainly no aristocrat.
But you’ll notice once someone gets a house, starts investing, and starts bringing in high enough wages to save for retirement their revolutionary potential withers. They become invested in property values, market performance, and in their firm’s success.
Revolution is possible, and it’s the duty of those of us in the imperial core to kill imperialism from the inside. It’s as simple as that. There are decent orgs in the empire, none are perfect but we can still contribute to a better world. Revolutionary optimism is a necessary mode of thought.
I’m scum for being born in this country
No, you aren’t, that’s imperialist thinking pointed inward. Now if you were to go sign up for the US military and work on technology for bombing people in other countries, that would be scummy. But where you are born is something you have no control over and thus cannot possibly be your responsibility.
Reddit third-worldists call me evil for being born here.
Try not to take it personally when people do this kind of thing. Anyone actually literally saying that is misguided to begin with, but it is probably coming from a place of hatred for the empire and what it does, rather than a preoccupied hatred of every single individual living in the regions it controls.
we’re all labor aristocrats
I think that is an oversimplified analysis. Is a homeless person a labor aristocrat just because they’re homeless in the US? I don’t think so. The labor aristocracy analysis can be useful for tracking the connection between imperial spoils and imperial worker seeing some benefits from it, and how that changes the way they think about class struggle and international solidarity. But it loses precision of meaning if it is applied as a blanket categorization to everyone living in the imperial core, which defeats the point of it being a tool for being more precise in doing class/caste analysis.
everyone here only thinks voting is the way out.
Not everyone, but certainly there is a lot of it. This is likely to keep shifting as people do what they can to educate and as conditions worsen, with the electoral system providing no real relief.
Is a homeless person a labor aristocrat just because they’re homeless in the US
People unironically think that though! It really tempts me into digging the razor in deeper than I normally do.
Only ACP chuds unironically think that.
People think (or at least, act like they think) all kinds of shit, especially online. You’ll end up in a bad way if you wrap your mental health up in seeking the approval of online “leftists” who say whatever shit enters their mind like it’s gospel truth. Look for people who are doing detailed analysis and doing revolutionary political work, not just people who are opinionated and especially not just people who are hateful. Hating the baddies isn’t an ideology in itself. And applying collective punishment style blame logic onto imperial core regions is, like I said, turning imperial logic inward, not being a communist. Now does this mean that any time somebody vent posts about wanting missiles to rain down on israel for its obscene actions, that they are failing to be a communist, no. But it does mean that if somebody were to do a serious argument that every person living in israel deserves to die and should be glassed by nukes because of what israel has done and is doing, that would not be a communist analysis. The same applies to the US. So it’s important not to confuse impassioned desires said in the heat of a moment with serious strategic military analysis backed by a dialectical materialist understanding of change and contradictions, as well as backed by a humane, communal worldview.
In the heat of the moment, it can be unpopular to acknowledge this side of things and risk sounding like sympathy for monsters, but it does matter. It is imperialism and colonialism that persistently has a policy of collective blame and mass murder as the answer to those who get in its crosshairs (usually just by existing and not being a slave to it). It is not the purpose or goal of communism to continue this policy and apply it to the imperial core instead. It is our job to ensure that it stops and that the instruments of it are so smashed and its supporters so reeducated or removed, that it can never happen again; or in more scientific language, it is our job to resolve the contradictions that produce and reproduce this kind of barbaric behavior and system, so that it will cease to be and we can begin to live in a world where civilian life is actually protected and human life more generally is valued, instead of so routinely dehumanized for the sake of domination and exploitation.
More simply said, I always go back to how places like China talk about these things. Do they say, “Our enemy is everyone living in these regions and we aim to annihilate them all”? No. If they acknowledge it, they tend to do it insofar as recognizing at least one level of class distinction, as the ruling classes and the people below that. Strategically, no matter how they feel about average people in the imperial core, it is far more effective to speak in a way that emphasizes their beef is not with every single person living there, rather than hardening regular people against them, or sending the more conscientious ones spiraling into self-flagellating despair.
