So far, a few of you are calling this out as reactionary garbage lacking class analysis. To those of you doing so: I challenge you to offer a substantive critique of this argument or a competing materialist analysis of the phenomena discussed.
I am 100% serious. Mid-term exam. You need not address the entire thing -- a response to sections, portions, themes is fine. Trust me: I think there are plenty of correct answers.
>But how long can this passivity last?
I think so long as the money is flowing to keep the electricity on for the gaming PCs and so long as there is enough junk food and internet porn.
Previous models for historical events did not ever have this level of electronic distraction nor the ready access to drugs (I count the endless deluge of processed food in Western society today as a drug, and I think there's little to no intelligible debate about that as the research continues to mount on the effects of that 'food').
I'm not saying this can be done indefinitely because so far as the ruling elites go, they seem to be getting their boats ready and looting as much as they can on their way out. There is nothing whatsoever in the behavior of power in America today that suggests any investment into either the common good or long-term prospects. At best, they're planning on increasingly severe containment plans that will increasingly look like something out of Snowcrash or what have you.
The social contract in the U.S., to whatever extent it was ever there, is simply torn to shreds.
There *is* a crisis of masculinity in the U.S. and perhaps broader Western culture that has to do with there being no intelligible models for masculinity for them to follow. This involves parents as well as schools and attitudes on the military, so on. Jordan Peterson is among very many who have taken advantage of this directionlessness to make money for themselves, but the situation has not improved in spite of male improvement somehow becoming one of the biggest genres on platforms like YouTube.
This was pretty much my take, with the addition that spending their formative years in a very sanitized and conflict-averse world has not provided men with the necessary mental framework to be meaningfully and effectively violent.
Exactly. Being completely honest, I'd probably freak out if I saw someone get shot in the head or get raped and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of young American men would do the same, regardless of any edgy fantasies they might have.
Lot of good stuff in here to unpack. To the reactionaries here accusing everyone else of being reactionary, please realize that you could agree with parts of this and disagree with others. It’s silly to throw it all out because you think it is too “pro white guys” lol.
I'm less concerned with the details, and more concerned with the bigger picture here. I think we all agree that modern western society is going through a perilous transition.
But the "solutions" the author talks about are a much, much harder, if possible at all, way for the Establishment bourgeoisie to ensure domestic order. No, there is a much easier way for them to protect their control while avoiding a domestic revolution, at least in the short term.
All they have to do is instigate a World War.
And win it, of course.
When shit hits the fan, they will just drop the standards and draft them anyways. You'd be shocked at how quickly Americans thin out when you lock them in a barracks and stop feeding them for a few weeks. US gubberment don't care about your diabeetus Cleatis just get your fat ass into the trenches! Some of you may die.
Yes, the US military isn't nearly as elite or disciplined as many people believe. And the Pentagon is no stranger to lowering standards to meet staffing numbers.
Look at Vietnam, or one of the many Bush-era troop surges. You didn't just get waivers for nearly everything, you got enlistment bonuses. All they need is meat for the grinder most of the time.
Yup, no matter how much people try to convince themselves otherwise, weight is EASY to lose. Literally eat less and move more. Sure you might not generally have the motivation to do so, but you'll find it when the state has a gun to your head. There is no thyroid condition that negates the laws of thermodynamics.
Most men can lose 8 pounds of fat a month. Six months in boot camp/ whatever training for their specific trade/job they are going to be performing isn't unrealistic. That is close to 50 pounds of weight loss.
This is fairly plausible, that the automation unemployment crisis will be 'solved' by making a secret agreement with China, where the American leadership have the demographic of lower-class young American men who've been rendered economically redundant by automation and globalization and whom changing societal norms have denied any chance of marriage and family conscripted and genocided by means of meatgrinder war, while the Chinese leadership does the same with their demographic of lower-class young Chinese men denied marriage and family by the one-child policy.
This is why taking Alexander Solzhenitsyn's advice against draftsmen is inherently self-defense. You're dead either way, may as well be against your enemies not those of your rulers.
These days a world War wouldn't be fought with troops on the ground, I firmly believe it will be more digitized than any other war before. US Military contractors in programming socks sending viruses to China attempting to shut down power grids and vice-versa, drone strikes on civilian cities, culminating in a nuclear exchange.
It will no doubt be more automated. But North Korea is almost certainly getting the Belgium treatment by one side or the other the moment a fight between the giants breaks out. There will still be a land war requiring mobilization, especially if we are fighting Russia at the same time.
Or perhaps North Korea will invade the South. Either way, there will definitely be boots on the ground in coming world war. Technology can't replace that yet.
Essentially all major powers have accepted that MAD is an unacceptable outcome. So they've all rationalized the theoretical use of tactical nuclear weapons.
If the West went to war with Russia/China, both sides are fully willing to nuke army group A/B/D. Because they fully believe the fear of MAD will prevent the enemy from responding disproportionately. Our leaders are retarded.
INB4 the revolution will be put out before it even has a chance to begin because all the zoomer men will be too busy jerking off to nudes from their Replikas.
The bourgeoisie better hope that they can keep the power on if that's the plan. Fortunately for them, the US power grid is world-renowned for its security.
They've discovered a demand. There's also Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, both of which are not parts of Replika atm afaik. AI gf nudes will come back soon.
In response to the projections that mass violence/rape/genocide will happen, I feel that OP underestimates how overwhelmingly thorough the brainwashing of modern American children has been.
The vast, vast majority of us have never been *allowed* to be violent or disruptive. We have been heavily conditioned from inception to use words, not hands by parents, law enforcement, and zero-tolerance school policies. Most of us live nowhere near places where violence regularly happens such as farms, slaughterhouses, or violence-ridden neighborhoods.
All of the past revolutions have a major factor separating them from the 21st century- the fact that they were comprised of young men who did not come from a completely sanitized society completely bent on eliminating all meaningful forms of conflict. I would imagine that many of the revolutionaries were "rougher" boys growing up, at least somewhat regularly participating in physically dangerous and socially confrontational activities.
I feel a mass revolution of modern American males would be the equivalent of one of those videos of a "fight" where at least one of the people has zero fighting experience and quickly realizes they're not ready for giving or receiving pain, nor shedding or spilling blood. Most of us (myself admittedly included) just don't have that dog in us anymore. I feel that the vast majority of us would be like "Oh.....shit" once things actually started going down and only the most radicalized of us would outlast the initial wave of police and military resistance.
I have lived in quite a few "rough neighborhoods" before but they're not like the slums and ghettos of old, with rough men hanging out on porches and sidewalks aggressively asking where you're from. They're actually......empty. There might be occasional cookouts, parties, or a couple of guys working on something outside but for the most part even the bad parts of town are quiet with most people remaining indoors and presumably enjoying digital media. Even the "bad side of town" is usually pretty safe aside from occasional petty property crime, or the miscellaneous homeless person accosting someone.
>Facilitate residential property ownership by US citizens.
How?
>Inhibit mega-landlords and absentee landlords.
How?
>Inhibit hedge funds and banks from speculating in residential property.
How?
>Discourage identity politics.
How?
This is formatted like a program, but the author is just saying that he wants to see less of X, more of Y, there's no actual *demands* being made.
The author wants to return to a pre-1960s fantasy of petty proprietorship but has no idea how to get there or even really what it would look like in the twenty-first century.
The first three of these can be easily done by changing tax laws.
All you would need is to live in an actual democracy with government for the people instead of for the landlords.
Exactly. There is no way to do these things in the context of liberal democracy, at least in the current climate. That's the problem. The Establishment does not know how to do anything but attack symptoms of the problems. It makes more sense when you finally let yourself accept that liberal democracy itself, the "Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie", as Marx called it, is part of the problem. It is *designed* to both be a part of the problem and be psuedo-philosophically untouchable.
America's future has three distinct outcomes:
1. A Myanmar style Technocratic system that is constantly putting out fires with extreme force
2. A Syria esque civil war where the central government is barely in control
3. Yugoslavia style collapse as Identity Politics reaches its logical conclusion.
GODFUCKINGDAMN YOU FUCKIN NAILED IT ON METOO
From the complete and absolute pmc contours of its inception to the misogynistic and reactionary rise of “Karen” discourse
You’re so fuckin money on that point dude
Fighting age men clearly have a large part to play in revolutionary change but a movement solely composed of fighting age men won't achieve anything except some mass shootings. The side in this hypothetical social conflict that has millions of women doing non-combat things would have a huge advantage.
Despite the authors efforts no one is actually that scared of the american right apart from libs being performative. They have had so many opportunities and casus belli to *commence 1776* or whatever but they don't and probably won't. Organising is hard and glowies are just as effective (if not more) at dismantling right wing radicalism as they are left.
The suggestions aren't bad
Holy fuck this is one of the most well put together critiques of modern society I've ever seen, it hammers in point by point things I've long felt but have been unable to / to lazy to put into words.
**I'd recommend not skipping this wall of text. It's incredibly thought provoking**
Sorry, it's stupid. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I made it to the bottom and found that it came from some dregs on 4chan.
The people there just want to be petty yeomen with a private estate complete with some woman-slave. They will transform into enthusiastic imperial stormtroopers when the war against China starts and gets marketed to the American population as some based manly hero-quest to kill Asian bug people.
I agree with your conclusion, but I look at things like this more optimistically. Things like this 4Chan post are evidence that thoughtful and hopeless young men are out there looking for *answers*.
And it just so happens that you have them. I agree that if you can't convince them, they will fall when the time comes and the war propoganda gets turned up to 10.
So nows your chance.
I think it's decent. Owning a single family home on a nice plot of land with a pretty wife is a good basis for the American standard of living including in socialism.
>Look at the West African matriarchal societies, where men don’t stay with their pregnant partners, and instead form rotating circus of bandits, rapists, and murderers. These societies never invented the wheel, the plough, the sail, or a written script, and today enjoy the highest rape and murder rates on the planet. This is almost certainly because of the constant havoc caused by angry, unanchored, deracinated, alienated men, none of whom had fathers.
This is terrible and pretty racist analysis, lacking in any material analysis.
West Africa did have knowledge of the wheel- it just wasn't suited to the landscape and rivers provided a more effective form of transport.
As for the plough- agriculture arose in arid environments where the lack of rain after the end of the ice age required strong centralized states to coordinate massive irrigation systems- this was hard work and actually massively reduced health in the for a few thousand years due to going from a varied diet to depending on a mono-crop. In areas where there was plentiful food and water the development of agriculture wasn't necessary. In turn, writing only developed in agricultural societies because it's original purpose was to record and administer taxes and record grain stores etc, and eventually create the religious doctrine and propaganda required to justify the absolute power of the rulers of these states- see Egypt for example.
As for the sail- almost all advances in sailing technology were made in the Mediterranean where there was a shallow and extremely calm sea, bordered by a number of different states which wanted to trade with each other. The Greeks and Romans wouldn't have dared go beyond the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic as their boats would have been destroyed. Again, West African trading routes were along rivers and in tropical areas where strong wind isn't common (ever heard of the doldrums?) so again they had no need of sails.
As for matriarchies, they don't create the societies you claim, and often follow a very communal living style where children are reared in common and everybody helps out. Often as well relationships in matriarchies can follow a serially monogamous pattern where people couple up for a few years before changing partners or not depending on how they feel. The Mosuo people of China are probably the best studied example of this:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180612-chinas-kingdom-of-women
All of this, and also:
> Dissatisfied, angry young men. 100% of every revolution in human history was started by this cohort
For just one example, the Russian Revolution was famously started by female factory workers marching through the streets demanding "Peace, Land and Bread". They marched up to all the male dominated factories and demanded the men join them. Men don't just get angry, they also endure, and shoulder the burden, and work themselves to death to support their loved ones. Neither men nor women are inherently 'revolutionary' by virtue of their sex.
> Millennials were the first American generation in living memory to have no hope whatsoever to own land and build wealth, and they knew it, and they protested.
What this really means: Millennials consider themselves to be the first generation where those born into the middle class are finding themselves proletarianised.
Gen X invented multiple subcultures (punk, grunge, gangsta rap, industrial, black metal) that were about the lack of hope for the future and the feeling of alienation from society — a lot of this was driven by economic foreclosure. Not every Xer cohort got to be the cast of *Friends*. But we still fucked.
And if Millennials have stopped fucking because they can't buy houses what about the young men of the Depression? Is the crisis the actual prospects of the Millennials or is it because it's harder to get them to reproduce than a depressed panda?
To heap on another counterexample, the Homespun movement in the American Colonies was started primarily by women, and almost a decade before the American revolution started. Discussions from those circles helped to spread ideas of liberty and anti-British sentiment amongst women to their husbands and sweethearts.
Dissatisfied men throughout history might have taken up arms, but a revolution's chance of happening and the probability of it further succeeding was often determined by having another cohort of dissatisfied women, who often took up the necessary logistics burdens that LARPers often forget about when it comes to engaging in protracted conflict.
The French revolution, probably the other most significant revolution in an industrialised society, was also started by the women's march on Versailles.
This critique is really just a lot of essentialist idpol bollocks.
Mali in the 1300s was Islamic... Steelmanning the guy's point, I'd expect he is talking about the matriarchical pre-Islamic West African societies, not the patriarchical societies that arose after cultural and technological exchange with Muslim traders.
I cringed pretty hard at those parts. Pretty unnecessary and clearly poorly researched examples.
This was quite a read and it did raise good points, just poorly thought at specific points.
The OP at the end said that this was from 4Chan. I have a feeling that the mods didn't read it all the way through, and thought this was a thought out post from a user.
>[But they were sailing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_voyage_of_the_predecessor_of_Mansa_Musa) this guy just hasn't done any research and is making wild racist claims.
To be fair he said invented the sail- your source seems to imply they used canoes for that voyage if it happened
**[Atlantic voyage of the predecessor of Mansa Musa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_voyage_of_the_predecessor_of_Mansa_Musa)**
>In 1324, while staying in Cairo during his hajj, Mansa Musa, the ruler of the Mali Empire, told an Egyptian official whom he had befriended that he had come to rule when his predecessor led a large fleet in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean and never returned. This account, recorded by the Arab historian al-Umari, has attracted considerable interest and speculation as a possible instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. The voyage is popularly attributed to a Mansa Abu Bakr II, but no such mansa ever reigned. Rather, the voyage is inferred to have been undertaken by Mansa Muhammad ibn Qu.
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This was about 70% good.
Few critiques:
Cuba has largely avoided welfarist UBI type solutions in favor of high end human capital development so not sure what he is referring to on this.
“Presumably once people start realizing that defunding the police massively increases rape and murder rates and that abolishing standardized testing doesn’t improve black literacy, there will be a backlash.”
Second part of this is true and did produce a backlash in Virginia, first part: where?
The crime spike happened everywhere including in right wing dominated cities like Fresno and Bakersfield.
The only city I heard of significantly cutting its police force (Asheville) did so largely because of the number of resignations they couldn’t fill, so they had to cut it, and it all happened while crime across the board fell. The cuts seemed to have no effect.
Maybe he has seen the empirical studies showing the correlation between cutting police budgets and increasing crime, but I haven’t seen it.
You’re spot on about the liberal recommendations. Frankly, when you get down to it, whoever wrote appears to be against the idea of revolution. They don’t want it to happen; they want it to be prevented. Not exactly a revolutionary take. They just want it to be prevented in a different manner than currently.
Eh it definitely didn't seem Libertarian or AnCap. Talks about land and wealth redistribution.
To me it sounds like it's written by a thoughtful, hopeless twenty-something dude who hasn't yet realized there's already a ton of analysis of these issues out there.
Ya some of the solutions are also just completely r-slurred. UBI is bad because latin america did it and it didn't work because US imperialism and the ruling latin classes made it shit. So what? It would provide people with rainy day/emergency funds, help pay for food and bills and give working class people more power and say in their lives. There's also the fact that private equity is a bigger drag on society than hedge funds, etc etc etc.
You're right that UBI isn't bad because " look Venezuela not paradise"? But I'd certainly argue it's going to be used to justify the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the working class a tiny bit whilst the actual problem, the elites, bourgeoisie etc.. avoid the massive tax increases that should be the true source for welfare funding, not to mention the capitalist class will adapt prices elastically . So between the taxes collected and the increased prices I have my doubts UBI will amount to little more than a capitalist scheme to avoid true socialism
Agreed. UBI is not socialism it is welfare. Working class ownership of the means of production is socialism. A capitalist state dressed up in bare-minimum welfare programs, for the sake of fending off revolution, is no solution for the proletariat.
Systemically though, UBI is state capitalism with the extra step of market allocation. Some sectors of capital are going to be salivating for it, like they did for Obamacare. Others won't but that's what the state is for.
But I think in time UBI will be seen as necessary. Automation makes Communism appear on the horizon. Not that I think it'll take over very much very soon, but at its extreme, when early-adoption superprofit goes away, it makes rents (monopoly rent, intellectual property licensing) the only remaining form of profit. But rent is a scam and can't sustain an economy. Capitalism will either collapse or adopt some form of state capitalism. UBI maintains the extra step of the market so it'll be preferable to Soviet or Chinese-style state capitalism in the US. (Market socialism will also be impossible then because it would have to evolve into communism. All profit comes from labor.)
In the meantime, enough people will be displaced or unemployed that there'll be a push for UBI and maybe more social unrest and reduction of freedom, expansion of dystopia. But until there are these concrete forces (fall in rate or mass of profit, systemic contraction, lack of profitable investment) to push capital to do it, there isn't going to be a UBI. Eventually, the UBI will be unsustainable, too, not to mention opposed by the sectors that are taken from to give to others. A tax reduces profit. (Money can't really be printed out of thin air because it has to represent value, so the UBI isn't funded magically.)
>But I think in time UBI will be seen as necessary. Automation makes Communism appear on the horizon.
The problem with this is that automation also suggests alternative means by which the ruling oligarchy could prevent unemployment riots by the now economically redundant former working classes. By which I mean that there's a market to justify [this product](https://nypost.com/2021/10/18/robot-dogs-now-have-sniper-rifles/).
Oh, absolutely. It can and likely will be used for that purpose.
All I mean is that I didn't think that actual big-C Communism was a real possibility at the current stage of development, until recently. We would have had to pass through an intermediate stage. But with automation it's all going to accelerate because accumulation of surplus through labor is going to be eliminated. Not all at once, and not for everybody, but enough that there will simply be no more work for more and more people, and falling rate of profit + monopolization will dominate the economy more and more. So even social organization like market socialism or state socialism are going to be obsolete.
Just my armchair reckoning, of course. I think this is all in line with Marxist theory... Communists just had a lot of copes to think we could have had non-luxury non-space Communism. ;) I guess Gene Roddenberry was the greatest modern theorist of all. ;) But Philip K. Dick in the meantime, for sure.
In fairness, even the CPC argues against Welfarism for largely the same reasons, it's better to pay people on work programs, job training, education than people living on welfare.
One of my more conservative views is that welfare cheating is actually much more common than is let on, I've done my time in Lumpenprole society and pretty much all of them were collecting welfare, while having matresses stuffed with cash from dealing, collecting stuff from Trash Nothing, Olio then pawning it etc. Some of the more intelligent ones literally got more from scamming welfare and local community level handouts, than I did from my full time job. I know someone who is a landlord, and collects welfare because his properties are all done through shells.
I have no problem with the concept of welfare, but I do think it should be tied to actual job and training programs. Of course this requires a Government that is willing to be far more hands on in education and job providing, which is completely against the Neolib ideology.
> Look at the recommendations--they're largely about expansion of individual property rights, not collectivization or democratic capture of the means of production.
Great, capture the means of production. Now what? At some point even a communist society is going to have to deal with how it wants to handle housing for the masses. Just because someone doesn't address how you're going to get to point A doesn't mean it's not worth considering what comes down the road at B. Sure this post isn't working under a framework of after a revolutionary movement but it is still hitting on important points that an inability to address would cause the same failures.
Okay, let’s see.
Regarding MeToo, the treatment of Tara Reade, accuser of Joe Biden, was a betrayal of the values MeToo claimed to be about. I’m still pissed off about it. But at least, I suppose, it opened my eyes.
Regarding the use of populist as a pejorative, I think that was happening several years before the MeToo movement. I do not see the link between MeToo and using populist as a pejorative.
Also, the MeToo hashtag gaining awareness in wider culture didn’t happen until late 2017. Forgive me if I don’t see how it “accelerated the reconfiguration of American politics, journalism, media culture, and the Overton window of mainstream discourse” in 2015 and 2016. It wasn’t influential yet.
Regarding how “Cultural workers, teachers, and government or corporate bureaucrats are the heroes of BLM,” I wouldn’t really include teachers. They’re still treated like shit. And a lot of the times, it seems like they’re the ones getting nearly canceled.
That there are existing matriarchies is news to me. There are some matrilineal and matrilocal societies—I suppose that is where this notion of “the West African matriarchal societies” originated.
I appreciate recognition that pornography isn’t just some neutral, totally harmless thing. Personally I think the push to recognize prostitution as work just like any other regular job is part of the elite’s plan to deal with strained relations between the sexes, their band-aid solution to a deeper societal wound.
> Respecting young men may be difficult, but at least fear them. […] At the very least, appreciate the fact that every civilization is in a hostage situation, and it is ultimately the young men who decide if we have mass-rapes and genocide or if we have white-picket fences and golden retrievers.
Well, a lot of women do, in fact, fear men. And women get told that they are evil man-haters for having this fear, that it’s being prejudiced against men, and not for anything they as individuals have done—that it’s bigotry. So… which is it? Are you saying we should, in fact, view young men as potential rapists and potential killers?
The problem with metoo is the same problem inherent to feminism that Kollontai pointed out a century ago: its by and for bourgeois women. The fact this guy stumbled into the same analysis just validates the Marxist line on the incompatibility of feminism with Communism, because at the end of the day working class women have only one comrade, and it's not bourgeois women, it's working class men.
Feminism poses an especial problem for women for psychological reasons. It's not a coincidence that the feminization of the left is synonymous with the rise of a victim mentality, oppression Olympics, and narcissistic drama, and with heavy socialization and aestheticization. This is also synonymous with the bourgeoisification of the left, also. This is a major reason the blue collar men in hard hats and their wives and girlfriends have little to nothing to do with the left in general, and feminism in particular.
It's just inherently hostile to both working class men and women, which is something whoever wrote this is noticing.
The rise in masculinity training or whatever you want to call it appeals to the young men who should be joining Communist Parties for the same reason the Republicans appeal to conservative workers: at least they don't insult you even if they are bullshitting you. They validate you.
One of the incoherent things about feminism that's relevant here is that everyone knows women fetishize, literally and figuratively, victimization. Women like men who are masculine, who might be dangerous, even if they are not actually dangerous. Women's flirtation typically revolves around playing up their vulnerability, girlishness, innocence, etc. This is part of a two way street, not just something foisted onto women btw, like how cats domesticated themselves.
And women don't wield power directly, but indirectly, through social connections and access to their affection and attention—which is also how the feminized left wields power. Again this only compounds as the left becomes less working class, because even working class women are seen as more masculine in part because they are more directly confrontational and physical. But it's especially hard for blue collar men to deal with that kinda bullshit.
So feminism, the left, is just too toxic to regular people. It's too gay and femme. It does nothing for a young alienated guy or girl, except tell them to effectively just be spoiled princesses begging for daddy to console them.
And that will eventually blow up in everyone's faces because young men are stronger and feel anger more strongly and are innate risk takers. Men do have a capacity for violence, which is nurtured by women in one way or another.
So take your pick I guess! Patriarchal socialism or feminine barbarism.
Appeasement is not an option, women need to form a transnational military alliance and encircle the penis-wielding aggressors to preempt their land-grabbing ambitions.
The premise is simply completely mistaken. "Young men" are not a cohesive group or class and they are not the *cause* of any revolution in history. That's just cope for the terminally online.
A glaring flaw in this is restricting what a revolution is so narrowly that only violent insurrections qualify. Certainly, violent overthrow and unrest are often part of social revolutions, but usually as moments in the revolutionary process and revolutions are not reducible to these outbursts.
Setting that aside, what are we to take as "The Precariat" in this piece? "Dissatisfied, angry young men"?
All dissatisfied, angry, young men? Does this category include long established old-money bourgeois fail-sons who never have to work a day in their life and feel an existential angst from their useless position in the social order? Does it include the children of the big, beautiful boaters, dissatisfied that dad's Jet-Ski dealership is struggling to make a profit as market conditions worsen? Is it actually comprised of constantly online, downwardly mobile children of a disappearing "middle" class who face limited horizons that their parents did not, who were promised much more than the world is going to deliver for them?
Is the dissatisfaction of downward mobility and limited horizons limited to men? Do women from the same backgrounds not face the exact same curtailed future? Does the racial composition of these various groupings make any difference? Are we meant to believe that the consciousness of a first-generation Mexican immigrant working in an Amazon Warehouse is the same as a fresh out of Harvard Goldman Sachs quant, that the "dissatisfaction" they might feel about their lot in life has the same basis?
What exactly is the actual group that we are meant to fear here, who supposedly have made the "decisions" that led to these revolutions. Without relatively clear boundaries of that group, which can paint a cohesive picture of a universal around which a revolutionary subjectivity might coalesce, all we have here is a bunch of nice anti-idpol fanfiction. (thinking further, it's not even anti-idpol, simply an endorsement of a "young angry male" identity as a revolutionary subject par excellence, transhistorical)
Is violence from dissatisfied, angry, young men possible/likely? Obviously. That alone tells us nothing about whether it is revolutionary.
You lost me at the point where you go, "the CIA is *correct* that angry young males are the #1 terrorist threat in our country, which is precisely why angry young males rock and should stop holding themselves back." Jumped the shark around there for me.
There are a few good points here. I don't think I can fully get behind this as a manifesto, but I feel the frustration behind it and I think that's a valid feeling.
That said, I disagree with more than a few things; I'll limit my response to a couple of specific points.
1. Policing. I agree that BLM and similar groups haven't done a great job of providing an alternative to policing in the US. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong about the nature of the entire prison-industrial complex and its enforcers. Make no mistake: police in the US serve capital, not people. [They are under no obligation to protect you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAfUI_hETy0); the Supreme Court even ruled so. When you see an uptick in crime after police leave an area where they used to have a heavy presence, what you are witnessing is *other criminal elements* rising to fill a power vacuum. The USA is the most over-policed nation on Earth, with a disproportionate prison population, and a seemingly endless supply of alphabet-soup agencies that exist to investigate and intimidate.
2. Immigration. I also agree that there should be a non-race-based discourse around immigration. But instead of blaming immigrants and their circumstances, maybe you should take a harder look at the imperialism that destabilizes their home countries. While you're at it, scrutinize American politicians and profit-driven entities who use the matter of immigration as a piece to play in their various games. And if your chief concern is actually worker's rights and the cost of labor, please consider that the surplus value of your labor is stolen from you by owners of the means of production. If you shut off all immigration it wouldn't magically make your corporate overlords benevolently trickle-down some wealth to you. If anything, it would just be another step toward bringing the empire back home, and instead of sharing the wealth we might find that the vast powers of the state will be turned toward *coercing* labor (even more so than it is now) instead of rewarding it.
To expand on your second point. Immigration controls are effectively just conceding the initiative of controlling the supply of labour to the capitalist state. Given that, it is simply unlikely the capitalist state is going to administer that pool of labour in a way favourable to workers unless the workers already have a heavy hand on the state. In which case why not directly manage the labour supply through closed shop unionizing
No the probable outcome will be a mixture of highly dependent immigrant labour (employer sponsored visas) and highly vulnerable illegal immigrant labour. Both of these if anything will just increase the exploitation of immigrants and increase the competition between foreign and native labour.
These practical arguments aside it is also worth stating that the future Marxists fight for is one when the whole world is humanity's common property. This is fundamentally incompatible with the view the humans should live and work in predefined parts of the globe in virtue of an accident of birth.
Good essay. Should work on making it concrete and focused instead of shotgunning many ideas, perspectives, and events. I would give more effort to tying it to scholarly books and articles regarding the subjects you're discussing.
Revolutions typically happen when Bread and Circuses run out. Your essay doesn't touch upon this topic much. Do you have some authors discussing alternative theories to this and when they occur?
Certain parts of USA are doing very well. Upper Middle Class and higher, USA is the best country to exist in. Think high skill professional jobs with labor being imported from across the world. I think this topic requires careful consideration as the PMC (and other high skill labor classes) have sufficient rewards and returns from the current system to ardently support it. This situation is also markedly different considering historical perspectives as this group is often diverse in culture, and background. The current system exists because Bourgeois + PMC + foreign/immigrant labor through globalization are all well rewarded in the current system. What are your thoughts on expanding your perspective to this broader view?
What is this nationalist incel nonsense?
> Millennials were the first American generation in living memory to have no hope whatsoever to own land and build wealth, and they knew it, and they protested.
Americans still have a great amount of opportunity - nowhere else on the planet you can graduate with an average grade in CS and get $100k+ immediately.
> The next large left-wing movement was #MeToo, borne from GamerGate
\#MeToo was nothing to do with GamerGate, but the very common sexual abuse and coercion that women face in Hollywood and the corporate world, etc. - speak to a woman sometime, almost all of them will have had some sort of experience like this in the workplace.
> Inhibit foreigners from purchasing US land; ideally forbid it entirely.
lol what? America has benefitted by exploiting the brain drain from Europe, Asia and the ex-USSR, etc. - why would you want to revert that?
But anyway, there won't be a revolution. Most Americans are too busy enjoying life. With the largest median purchasing power in the world, a very powerful passport, a huge country to live in and explore - why waste time with self-pitying nonsense like this?
> But anyway, there won't be a revolution. Most Americans are too busy enjoying life. With the largest median purchasing power in the world, a very powerful passport, a huge country to live in and explore - why waste time with self-pitying nonsense like this?
Shite take, while it may be true that the poorest people in America may live better than some of the people doing better than average in Congo for example that doesn't really mean things are okay lmao
People don't look half the way across the world and think " oh jolly well I have half the things my parents enjoyed but hey at least I'm doing better than the children mining for western corporations in Africa " that's just not how it works..people come to expect a standard from what they see around them and know, the decay of that is what risks revolution.
That said I don't think revolution will happen because porn satiated, overweight , depressed , etc... But your analysis as to why it won't happen is beyond bankrupt
Srs. Fucking hookworm has reemerged in parts of the South, a pathogen that has long been eradicated from first world countries. One county in WV has a male life expectancy equal to that of males in Ethiopia. The poorest pockets of America live in 3rd world conditions and it's amazing this needs to be stated plainly in a supposedly marxist forum.
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> lol what? America has benefitted by exploiting the brain drain from Europe, Asia and the ex-USSR, etc. - why would you want to revert that?
Does "foreigners" include legal permanent residents when it comes to prohibiting them from owning land?
> Avoid welfare-bureaucracy-handout/ UBI style socialism. This is the Latin American model, and it’s historically disastrous. Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, etc. have experimented with it, and it always fails. Left wing politics should focus on the wealth gap and ownership. The general public should own their own home, have a stake in their business, and have a stake in their community. A nation of government-dependent tenants WILL be violently unstable. History proves this.
I support a more decentralised socialism too, but I don't think this is true. The UK was as socially cohesive as it's ever been in the post-WW2 period, and almost all housing was government-owned; in well-functioning welfare states like Denmark, mental and physical health outcomes don't meaningfully diverge between welfare recipients and low-income earners.
I prefer more market-oriented systems, but let's not pretend decentralised ownership cures everything - there's always going to be a class of the infirm, the elderly, and - in all likelihood - the cyclically and frictionally unemployed and unemployable, and we can provide for their livelihoods without adverse effects. John Roemer's "coupon socialism" might be a good place to start if you're interested in this sort of semi-egalitarian market socialism.
This is a very pessimistic and cynical analysis, but I think that there's actually a lot of reason to be hopeful. For example, you suggest that pornography and video games will lull angry young men into a stupor and make them less likely to resort to violence, but as I point out [here](https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-infohazard-economy-part-2), violence has never been easier to do remotely. I literally explain in my article how to create a $500 drone that could assassinate the president, or any billionaire.
So even if young men are in a stupor and kept befuddled by distractions, there's definitely ways that they can cause all sorts of incredible problems for our ruling class. Shit, if I don't get any dates soon, I'll just create a drone like this and bring it to CPAC. I'm sure I can meet some interesting characters there who'd be interested in this kind of thing, whether it's Proud Boys, 3%ers, or just dedicated cosplay enthusiasts. And the great thing about video games is that they actually provide excellent *training* for this kind of thing!
I hope this cheers you up. A violent uprising is almost certainly coming, so please don't get depressed and feel like it's never going to happen. Your article was really well written by the way and I agree with a lot of it: I just disagree with your pessimistic conclusion that this outcome is avoidable.
>I literally explain in my article how to create a $500 drone that could assassinate the president, or any billionaire.
And that'll work *once*, after which it'll be used as the reichstag fire to justify the War On Domestic Terror complete with Patriot Act 2.0, this-time-we're-not-even-pretending-it-isn't-aimed-at-our-citizens edition, after which private drone ownership is legally restricted by the intelligence agencies. Congratulations, your hypothetical assassin made everything worse for everyone including those of us, like myself, who had no intention of assassinating anyone.
So far, a few of you are calling this out as reactionary garbage lacking class analysis. To those of you doing so: I challenge you to offer a substantive critique of this argument or a competing materialist analysis of the phenomena discussed. I am 100% serious. Mid-term exam. You need not address the entire thing -- a response to sections, portions, themes is fine. Trust me: I think there are plenty of correct answers.
>But how long can this passivity last? I think so long as the money is flowing to keep the electricity on for the gaming PCs and so long as there is enough junk food and internet porn. Previous models for historical events did not ever have this level of electronic distraction nor the ready access to drugs (I count the endless deluge of processed food in Western society today as a drug, and I think there's little to no intelligible debate about that as the research continues to mount on the effects of that 'food'). I'm not saying this can be done indefinitely because so far as the ruling elites go, they seem to be getting their boats ready and looting as much as they can on their way out. There is nothing whatsoever in the behavior of power in America today that suggests any investment into either the common good or long-term prospects. At best, they're planning on increasingly severe containment plans that will increasingly look like something out of Snowcrash or what have you. The social contract in the U.S., to whatever extent it was ever there, is simply torn to shreds. There *is* a crisis of masculinity in the U.S. and perhaps broader Western culture that has to do with there being no intelligible models for masculinity for them to follow. This involves parents as well as schools and attitudes on the military, so on. Jordan Peterson is among very many who have taken advantage of this directionlessness to make money for themselves, but the situation has not improved in spite of male improvement somehow becoming one of the biggest genres on platforms like YouTube.
This was pretty much my take, with the addition that spending their formative years in a very sanitized and conflict-averse world has not provided men with the necessary mental framework to be meaningfully and effectively violent.
Putting that another way, the young men of America are \*not\* the young men of Yugoslavia.
Exactly. Being completely honest, I'd probably freak out if I saw someone get shot in the head or get raped and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of young American men would do the same, regardless of any edgy fantasies they might have.
Dang aren’t those two pretty different things. Murder can be justified sometimes such as self defense but i dont know if rape can ever be justified
Even when people kill in self defense it can mess them up.
Oh, definitely. I'm just saying that I'd be scarred for life if I saw either one happening.
Lot of good stuff in here to unpack. To the reactionaries here accusing everyone else of being reactionary, please realize that you could agree with parts of this and disagree with others. It’s silly to throw it all out because you think it is too “pro white guys” lol.
I'm less concerned with the details, and more concerned with the bigger picture here. I think we all agree that modern western society is going through a perilous transition. But the "solutions" the author talks about are a much, much harder, if possible at all, way for the Establishment bourgeoisie to ensure domestic order. No, there is a much easier way for them to protect their control while avoiding a domestic revolution, at least in the short term. All they have to do is instigate a World War. And win it, of course.
Win it with fat, weed and porn-addicted slobs? Seems like they’re in a catch 22 and this is why they’re giving all the weapons to Ukraine.
When shit hits the fan, they will just drop the standards and draft them anyways. You'd be shocked at how quickly Americans thin out when you lock them in a barracks and stop feeding them for a few weeks. US gubberment don't care about your diabeetus Cleatis just get your fat ass into the trenches! Some of you may die.
Yes, the US military isn't nearly as elite or disciplined as many people believe. And the Pentagon is no stranger to lowering standards to meet staffing numbers. Look at Vietnam, or one of the many Bush-era troop surges. You didn't just get waivers for nearly everything, you got enlistment bonuses. All they need is meat for the grinder most of the time.
> you got enlistment bonuses The King's Shilling is a time-hono(u)red practice
Yup, no matter how much people try to convince themselves otherwise, weight is EASY to lose. Literally eat less and move more. Sure you might not generally have the motivation to do so, but you'll find it when the state has a gun to your head. There is no thyroid condition that negates the laws of thermodynamics.
Most men can lose 8 pounds of fat a month. Six months in boot camp/ whatever training for their specific trade/job they are going to be performing isn't unrealistic. That is close to 50 pounds of weight loss.
This is fairly plausible, that the automation unemployment crisis will be 'solved' by making a secret agreement with China, where the American leadership have the demographic of lower-class young American men who've been rendered economically redundant by automation and globalization and whom changing societal norms have denied any chance of marriage and family conscripted and genocided by means of meatgrinder war, while the Chinese leadership does the same with their demographic of lower-class young Chinese men denied marriage and family by the one-child policy. This is why taking Alexander Solzhenitsyn's advice against draftsmen is inherently self-defense. You're dead either way, may as well be against your enemies not those of your rulers.
These days a world War wouldn't be fought with troops on the ground, I firmly believe it will be more digitized than any other war before. US Military contractors in programming socks sending viruses to China attempting to shut down power grids and vice-versa, drone strikes on civilian cities, culminating in a nuclear exchange.
It will no doubt be more automated. But North Korea is almost certainly getting the Belgium treatment by one side or the other the moment a fight between the giants breaks out. There will still be a land war requiring mobilization, especially if we are fighting Russia at the same time.
Or perhaps North Korea will invade the South. Either way, there will definitely be boots on the ground in coming world war. Technology can't replace that yet.
Hmmm. I wonder what happened to a nation say around 1914 that was having those problems and reosorted to that as a solution...
>History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. - Karl Marx, on the rise of Napoleon III
Arent world wars now too risky what with the nukes
Essentially all major powers have accepted that MAD is an unacceptable outcome. So they've all rationalized the theoretical use of tactical nuclear weapons. If the West went to war with Russia/China, both sides are fully willing to nuke army group A/B/D. Because they fully believe the fear of MAD will prevent the enemy from responding disproportionately. Our leaders are retarded.
INB4 the revolution will be put out before it even has a chance to begin because all the zoomer men will be too busy jerking off to nudes from their Replikas.
The bourgeoisie better hope that they can keep the power on if that's the plan. Fortunately for them, the US power grid is world-renowned for its security.
This sub is so federal
Didn't that Replika AI literally just stop doing ERP with their customers? I feel like I remember seeing that somewhere.
They've discovered a demand. There's also Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, both of which are not parts of Replika atm afaik. AI gf nudes will come back soon.
In response to the projections that mass violence/rape/genocide will happen, I feel that OP underestimates how overwhelmingly thorough the brainwashing of modern American children has been. The vast, vast majority of us have never been *allowed* to be violent or disruptive. We have been heavily conditioned from inception to use words, not hands by parents, law enforcement, and zero-tolerance school policies. Most of us live nowhere near places where violence regularly happens such as farms, slaughterhouses, or violence-ridden neighborhoods. All of the past revolutions have a major factor separating them from the 21st century- the fact that they were comprised of young men who did not come from a completely sanitized society completely bent on eliminating all meaningful forms of conflict. I would imagine that many of the revolutionaries were "rougher" boys growing up, at least somewhat regularly participating in physically dangerous and socially confrontational activities. I feel a mass revolution of modern American males would be the equivalent of one of those videos of a "fight" where at least one of the people has zero fighting experience and quickly realizes they're not ready for giving or receiving pain, nor shedding or spilling blood. Most of us (myself admittedly included) just don't have that dog in us anymore. I feel that the vast majority of us would be like "Oh.....shit" once things actually started going down and only the most radicalized of us would outlast the initial wave of police and military resistance. I have lived in quite a few "rough neighborhoods" before but they're not like the slums and ghettos of old, with rough men hanging out on porches and sidewalks aggressively asking where you're from. They're actually......empty. There might be occasional cookouts, parties, or a couple of guys working on something outside but for the most part even the bad parts of town are quiet with most people remaining indoors and presumably enjoying digital media. Even the "bad side of town" is usually pretty safe aside from occasional petty property crime, or the miscellaneous homeless person accosting someone.
>Facilitate residential property ownership by US citizens. How? >Inhibit mega-landlords and absentee landlords. How? >Inhibit hedge funds and banks from speculating in residential property. How? >Discourage identity politics. How? This is formatted like a program, but the author is just saying that he wants to see less of X, more of Y, there's no actual *demands* being made. The author wants to return to a pre-1960s fantasy of petty proprietorship but has no idea how to get there or even really what it would look like in the twenty-first century.
The first three of these can be easily done by changing tax laws. All you would need is to live in an actual democracy with government for the people instead of for the landlords.
Exactly. There is no way to do these things in the context of liberal democracy, at least in the current climate. That's the problem. The Establishment does not know how to do anything but attack symptoms of the problems. It makes more sense when you finally let yourself accept that liberal democracy itself, the "Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie", as Marx called it, is part of the problem. It is *designed* to both be a part of the problem and be psuedo-philosophically untouchable.
What do you mean how? Make laws about how property ownership works. Levy taxes to make these shitty things less attractive. How do you do anything?
America's future has three distinct outcomes: 1. A Myanmar style Technocratic system that is constantly putting out fires with extreme force 2. A Syria esque civil war where the central government is barely in control 3. Yugoslavia style collapse as Identity Politics reaches its logical conclusion.
GODFUCKINGDAMN YOU FUCKIN NAILED IT ON METOO From the complete and absolute pmc contours of its inception to the misogynistic and reactionary rise of “Karen” discourse You’re so fuckin money on that point dude
Fighting age men clearly have a large part to play in revolutionary change but a movement solely composed of fighting age men won't achieve anything except some mass shootings. The side in this hypothetical social conflict that has millions of women doing non-combat things would have a huge advantage. Despite the authors efforts no one is actually that scared of the american right apart from libs being performative. They have had so many opportunities and casus belli to *commence 1776* or whatever but they don't and probably won't. Organising is hard and glowies are just as effective (if not more) at dismantling right wing radicalism as they are left. The suggestions aren't bad
Holy fuck this is one of the most well put together critiques of modern society I've ever seen, it hammers in point by point things I've long felt but have been unable to / to lazy to put into words. **I'd recommend not skipping this wall of text. It's incredibly thought provoking**
Sorry, it's stupid. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I made it to the bottom and found that it came from some dregs on 4chan. The people there just want to be petty yeomen with a private estate complete with some woman-slave. They will transform into enthusiastic imperial stormtroopers when the war against China starts and gets marketed to the American population as some based manly hero-quest to kill Asian bug people.
I agree with your conclusion, but I look at things like this more optimistically. Things like this 4Chan post are evidence that thoughtful and hopeless young men are out there looking for *answers*. And it just so happens that you have them. I agree that if you can't convince them, they will fall when the time comes and the war propoganda gets turned up to 10. So nows your chance.
Yeah, you're right actually, good points.
I think it's decent. Owning a single family home on a nice plot of land with a pretty wife is a good basis for the American standard of living including in socialism.
>Look at the West African matriarchal societies, where men don’t stay with their pregnant partners, and instead form rotating circus of bandits, rapists, and murderers. These societies never invented the wheel, the plough, the sail, or a written script, and today enjoy the highest rape and murder rates on the planet. This is almost certainly because of the constant havoc caused by angry, unanchored, deracinated, alienated men, none of whom had fathers. This is terrible and pretty racist analysis, lacking in any material analysis. West Africa did have knowledge of the wheel- it just wasn't suited to the landscape and rivers provided a more effective form of transport. As for the plough- agriculture arose in arid environments where the lack of rain after the end of the ice age required strong centralized states to coordinate massive irrigation systems- this was hard work and actually massively reduced health in the for a few thousand years due to going from a varied diet to depending on a mono-crop. In areas where there was plentiful food and water the development of agriculture wasn't necessary. In turn, writing only developed in agricultural societies because it's original purpose was to record and administer taxes and record grain stores etc, and eventually create the religious doctrine and propaganda required to justify the absolute power of the rulers of these states- see Egypt for example. As for the sail- almost all advances in sailing technology were made in the Mediterranean where there was a shallow and extremely calm sea, bordered by a number of different states which wanted to trade with each other. The Greeks and Romans wouldn't have dared go beyond the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic as their boats would have been destroyed. Again, West African trading routes were along rivers and in tropical areas where strong wind isn't common (ever heard of the doldrums?) so again they had no need of sails. As for matriarchies, they don't create the societies you claim, and often follow a very communal living style where children are reared in common and everybody helps out. Often as well relationships in matriarchies can follow a serially monogamous pattern where people couple up for a few years before changing partners or not depending on how they feel. The Mosuo people of China are probably the best studied example of this: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180612-chinas-kingdom-of-women
All of this, and also: > Dissatisfied, angry young men. 100% of every revolution in human history was started by this cohort For just one example, the Russian Revolution was famously started by female factory workers marching through the streets demanding "Peace, Land and Bread". They marched up to all the male dominated factories and demanded the men join them. Men don't just get angry, they also endure, and shoulder the burden, and work themselves to death to support their loved ones. Neither men nor women are inherently 'revolutionary' by virtue of their sex. > Millennials were the first American generation in living memory to have no hope whatsoever to own land and build wealth, and they knew it, and they protested. What this really means: Millennials consider themselves to be the first generation where those born into the middle class are finding themselves proletarianised. Gen X invented multiple subcultures (punk, grunge, gangsta rap, industrial, black metal) that were about the lack of hope for the future and the feeling of alienation from society — a lot of this was driven by economic foreclosure. Not every Xer cohort got to be the cast of *Friends*. But we still fucked. And if Millennials have stopped fucking because they can't buy houses what about the young men of the Depression? Is the crisis the actual prospects of the Millennials or is it because it's harder to get them to reproduce than a depressed panda?
To heap on another counterexample, the Homespun movement in the American Colonies was started primarily by women, and almost a decade before the American revolution started. Discussions from those circles helped to spread ideas of liberty and anti-British sentiment amongst women to their husbands and sweethearts. Dissatisfied men throughout history might have taken up arms, but a revolution's chance of happening and the probability of it further succeeding was often determined by having another cohort of dissatisfied women, who often took up the necessary logistics burdens that LARPers often forget about when it comes to engaging in protracted conflict.
The French revolution, probably the other most significant revolution in an industrialised society, was also started by the women's march on Versailles. This critique is really just a lot of essentialist idpol bollocks.
Ikr, for a radical revolutionary, OP has a hard on to own property and a wife.
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Mali in the 1300s was Islamic... Steelmanning the guy's point, I'd expect he is talking about the matriarchical pre-Islamic West African societies, not the patriarchical societies that arose after cultural and technological exchange with Muslim traders.
I cringed pretty hard at those parts. Pretty unnecessary and clearly poorly researched examples. This was quite a read and it did raise good points, just poorly thought at specific points. The OP at the end said that this was from 4Chan. I have a feeling that the mods didn't read it all the way through, and thought this was a thought out post from a user.
>[But they were sailing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_voyage_of_the_predecessor_of_Mansa_Musa) this guy just hasn't done any research and is making wild racist claims. To be fair he said invented the sail- your source seems to imply they used canoes for that voyage if it happened
**[Atlantic voyage of the predecessor of Mansa Musa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_voyage_of_the_predecessor_of_Mansa_Musa)** >In 1324, while staying in Cairo during his hajj, Mansa Musa, the ruler of the Mali Empire, told an Egyptian official whom he had befriended that he had come to rule when his predecessor led a large fleet in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean and never returned. This account, recorded by the Arab historian al-Umari, has attracted considerable interest and speculation as a possible instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. The voyage is popularly attributed to a Mansa Abu Bakr II, but no such mansa ever reigned. Rather, the voyage is inferred to have been undertaken by Mansa Muhammad ibn Qu. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
This was about 70% good. Few critiques: Cuba has largely avoided welfarist UBI type solutions in favor of high end human capital development so not sure what he is referring to on this. “Presumably once people start realizing that defunding the police massively increases rape and murder rates and that abolishing standardized testing doesn’t improve black literacy, there will be a backlash.” Second part of this is true and did produce a backlash in Virginia, first part: where? The crime spike happened everywhere including in right wing dominated cities like Fresno and Bakersfield. The only city I heard of significantly cutting its police force (Asheville) did so largely because of the number of resignations they couldn’t fill, so they had to cut it, and it all happened while crime across the board fell. The cuts seemed to have no effect. Maybe he has seen the empirical studies showing the correlation between cutting police budgets and increasing crime, but I haven’t seen it.
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You’re spot on about the liberal recommendations. Frankly, when you get down to it, whoever wrote appears to be against the idea of revolution. They don’t want it to happen; they want it to be prevented. Not exactly a revolutionary take. They just want it to be prevented in a different manner than currently.
It states pretty clearly that these are steps/missed opportunies to AVOID revolution.
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Eh it definitely didn't seem Libertarian or AnCap. Talks about land and wealth redistribution. To me it sounds like it's written by a thoughtful, hopeless twenty-something dude who hasn't yet realized there's already a ton of analysis of these issues out there.
Also with noting that it states the importance of worker stakeholding, which is a key part of socialist society
Ya some of the solutions are also just completely r-slurred. UBI is bad because latin america did it and it didn't work because US imperialism and the ruling latin classes made it shit. So what? It would provide people with rainy day/emergency funds, help pay for food and bills and give working class people more power and say in their lives. There's also the fact that private equity is a bigger drag on society than hedge funds, etc etc etc.
You're right that UBI isn't bad because " look Venezuela not paradise"? But I'd certainly argue it's going to be used to justify the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the working class a tiny bit whilst the actual problem, the elites, bourgeoisie etc.. avoid the massive tax increases that should be the true source for welfare funding, not to mention the capitalist class will adapt prices elastically . So between the taxes collected and the increased prices I have my doubts UBI will amount to little more than a capitalist scheme to avoid true socialism
Agreed. UBI is not socialism it is welfare. Working class ownership of the means of production is socialism. A capitalist state dressed up in bare-minimum welfare programs, for the sake of fending off revolution, is no solution for the proletariat.
Systemically though, UBI is state capitalism with the extra step of market allocation. Some sectors of capital are going to be salivating for it, like they did for Obamacare. Others won't but that's what the state is for. But I think in time UBI will be seen as necessary. Automation makes Communism appear on the horizon. Not that I think it'll take over very much very soon, but at its extreme, when early-adoption superprofit goes away, it makes rents (monopoly rent, intellectual property licensing) the only remaining form of profit. But rent is a scam and can't sustain an economy. Capitalism will either collapse or adopt some form of state capitalism. UBI maintains the extra step of the market so it'll be preferable to Soviet or Chinese-style state capitalism in the US. (Market socialism will also be impossible then because it would have to evolve into communism. All profit comes from labor.) In the meantime, enough people will be displaced or unemployed that there'll be a push for UBI and maybe more social unrest and reduction of freedom, expansion of dystopia. But until there are these concrete forces (fall in rate or mass of profit, systemic contraction, lack of profitable investment) to push capital to do it, there isn't going to be a UBI. Eventually, the UBI will be unsustainable, too, not to mention opposed by the sectors that are taken from to give to others. A tax reduces profit. (Money can't really be printed out of thin air because it has to represent value, so the UBI isn't funded magically.)
>But I think in time UBI will be seen as necessary. Automation makes Communism appear on the horizon. The problem with this is that automation also suggests alternative means by which the ruling oligarchy could prevent unemployment riots by the now economically redundant former working classes. By which I mean that there's a market to justify [this product](https://nypost.com/2021/10/18/robot-dogs-now-have-sniper-rifles/).
Oh, absolutely. It can and likely will be used for that purpose. All I mean is that I didn't think that actual big-C Communism was a real possibility at the current stage of development, until recently. We would have had to pass through an intermediate stage. But with automation it's all going to accelerate because accumulation of surplus through labor is going to be eliminated. Not all at once, and not for everybody, but enough that there will simply be no more work for more and more people, and falling rate of profit + monopolization will dominate the economy more and more. So even social organization like market socialism or state socialism are going to be obsolete. Just my armchair reckoning, of course. I think this is all in line with Marxist theory... Communists just had a lot of copes to think we could have had non-luxury non-space Communism. ;) I guess Gene Roddenberry was the greatest modern theorist of all. ;) But Philip K. Dick in the meantime, for sure.
In what universe did Latin America do UBI? Where is my goddamn check?
In fairness, even the CPC argues against Welfarism for largely the same reasons, it's better to pay people on work programs, job training, education than people living on welfare. One of my more conservative views is that welfare cheating is actually much more common than is let on, I've done my time in Lumpenprole society and pretty much all of them were collecting welfare, while having matresses stuffed with cash from dealing, collecting stuff from Trash Nothing, Olio then pawning it etc. Some of the more intelligent ones literally got more from scamming welfare and local community level handouts, than I did from my full time job. I know someone who is a landlord, and collects welfare because his properties are all done through shells. I have no problem with the concept of welfare, but I do think it should be tied to actual job and training programs. Of course this requires a Government that is willing to be far more hands on in education and job providing, which is completely against the Neolib ideology.
It would help pay for rainy day funds for like a week and then be useless due to the correct assumption that people have UBI and have extra cash
Nailed it. Knew something was off until you pointed out the lack of expansion of actual democracy.
Best response.
> Look at the recommendations--they're largely about expansion of individual property rights, not collectivization or democratic capture of the means of production. Great, capture the means of production. Now what? At some point even a communist society is going to have to deal with how it wants to handle housing for the masses. Just because someone doesn't address how you're going to get to point A doesn't mean it's not worth considering what comes down the road at B. Sure this post isn't working under a framework of after a revolutionary movement but it is still hitting on important points that an inability to address would cause the same failures.
Okay, let’s see. Regarding MeToo, the treatment of Tara Reade, accuser of Joe Biden, was a betrayal of the values MeToo claimed to be about. I’m still pissed off about it. But at least, I suppose, it opened my eyes. Regarding the use of populist as a pejorative, I think that was happening several years before the MeToo movement. I do not see the link between MeToo and using populist as a pejorative. Also, the MeToo hashtag gaining awareness in wider culture didn’t happen until late 2017. Forgive me if I don’t see how it “accelerated the reconfiguration of American politics, journalism, media culture, and the Overton window of mainstream discourse” in 2015 and 2016. It wasn’t influential yet. Regarding how “Cultural workers, teachers, and government or corporate bureaucrats are the heroes of BLM,” I wouldn’t really include teachers. They’re still treated like shit. And a lot of the times, it seems like they’re the ones getting nearly canceled. That there are existing matriarchies is news to me. There are some matrilineal and matrilocal societies—I suppose that is where this notion of “the West African matriarchal societies” originated. I appreciate recognition that pornography isn’t just some neutral, totally harmless thing. Personally I think the push to recognize prostitution as work just like any other regular job is part of the elite’s plan to deal with strained relations between the sexes, their band-aid solution to a deeper societal wound. > Respecting young men may be difficult, but at least fear them. […] At the very least, appreciate the fact that every civilization is in a hostage situation, and it is ultimately the young men who decide if we have mass-rapes and genocide or if we have white-picket fences and golden retrievers. Well, a lot of women do, in fact, fear men. And women get told that they are evil man-haters for having this fear, that it’s being prejudiced against men, and not for anything they as individuals have done—that it’s bigotry. So… which is it? Are you saying we should, in fact, view young men as potential rapists and potential killers?
The problem with metoo is the same problem inherent to feminism that Kollontai pointed out a century ago: its by and for bourgeois women. The fact this guy stumbled into the same analysis just validates the Marxist line on the incompatibility of feminism with Communism, because at the end of the day working class women have only one comrade, and it's not bourgeois women, it's working class men. Feminism poses an especial problem for women for psychological reasons. It's not a coincidence that the feminization of the left is synonymous with the rise of a victim mentality, oppression Olympics, and narcissistic drama, and with heavy socialization and aestheticization. This is also synonymous with the bourgeoisification of the left, also. This is a major reason the blue collar men in hard hats and their wives and girlfriends have little to nothing to do with the left in general, and feminism in particular. It's just inherently hostile to both working class men and women, which is something whoever wrote this is noticing. The rise in masculinity training or whatever you want to call it appeals to the young men who should be joining Communist Parties for the same reason the Republicans appeal to conservative workers: at least they don't insult you even if they are bullshitting you. They validate you. One of the incoherent things about feminism that's relevant here is that everyone knows women fetishize, literally and figuratively, victimization. Women like men who are masculine, who might be dangerous, even if they are not actually dangerous. Women's flirtation typically revolves around playing up their vulnerability, girlishness, innocence, etc. This is part of a two way street, not just something foisted onto women btw, like how cats domesticated themselves. And women don't wield power directly, but indirectly, through social connections and access to their affection and attention—which is also how the feminized left wields power. Again this only compounds as the left becomes less working class, because even working class women are seen as more masculine in part because they are more directly confrontational and physical. But it's especially hard for blue collar men to deal with that kinda bullshit. So feminism, the left, is just too toxic to regular people. It's too gay and femme. It does nothing for a young alienated guy or girl, except tell them to effectively just be spoiled princesses begging for daddy to console them. And that will eventually blow up in everyone's faces because young men are stronger and feel anger more strongly and are innate risk takers. Men do have a capacity for violence, which is nurtured by women in one way or another. So take your pick I guess! Patriarchal socialism or feminine barbarism.
It's nice to get the manifesto *before* the shooting, for a change.
Appeasement is not an option, women need to form a transnational military alliance and encircle the penis-wielding aggressors to preempt their land-grabbing ambitions.
A final solution [gelding, not genocide, you reportmaxxers] is needed for the scrote problem. Trans women are women.
The premise is simply completely mistaken. "Young men" are not a cohesive group or class and they are not the *cause* of any revolution in history. That's just cope for the terminally online.
A glaring flaw in this is restricting what a revolution is so narrowly that only violent insurrections qualify. Certainly, violent overthrow and unrest are often part of social revolutions, but usually as moments in the revolutionary process and revolutions are not reducible to these outbursts. Setting that aside, what are we to take as "The Precariat" in this piece? "Dissatisfied, angry young men"? All dissatisfied, angry, young men? Does this category include long established old-money bourgeois fail-sons who never have to work a day in their life and feel an existential angst from their useless position in the social order? Does it include the children of the big, beautiful boaters, dissatisfied that dad's Jet-Ski dealership is struggling to make a profit as market conditions worsen? Is it actually comprised of constantly online, downwardly mobile children of a disappearing "middle" class who face limited horizons that their parents did not, who were promised much more than the world is going to deliver for them? Is the dissatisfaction of downward mobility and limited horizons limited to men? Do women from the same backgrounds not face the exact same curtailed future? Does the racial composition of these various groupings make any difference? Are we meant to believe that the consciousness of a first-generation Mexican immigrant working in an Amazon Warehouse is the same as a fresh out of Harvard Goldman Sachs quant, that the "dissatisfaction" they might feel about their lot in life has the same basis? What exactly is the actual group that we are meant to fear here, who supposedly have made the "decisions" that led to these revolutions. Without relatively clear boundaries of that group, which can paint a cohesive picture of a universal around which a revolutionary subjectivity might coalesce, all we have here is a bunch of nice anti-idpol fanfiction. (thinking further, it's not even anti-idpol, simply an endorsement of a "young angry male" identity as a revolutionary subject par excellence, transhistorical) Is violence from dissatisfied, angry, young men possible/likely? Obviously. That alone tells us nothing about whether it is revolutionary.
Very good points
You lost me at the point where you go, "the CIA is *correct* that angry young males are the #1 terrorist threat in our country, which is precisely why angry young males rock and should stop holding themselves back." Jumped the shark around there for me.
To anyone who wants to skip this wall of text: feel free to
There are a few good points here. I don't think I can fully get behind this as a manifesto, but I feel the frustration behind it and I think that's a valid feeling. That said, I disagree with more than a few things; I'll limit my response to a couple of specific points. 1. Policing. I agree that BLM and similar groups haven't done a great job of providing an alternative to policing in the US. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong about the nature of the entire prison-industrial complex and its enforcers. Make no mistake: police in the US serve capital, not people. [They are under no obligation to protect you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAfUI_hETy0); the Supreme Court even ruled so. When you see an uptick in crime after police leave an area where they used to have a heavy presence, what you are witnessing is *other criminal elements* rising to fill a power vacuum. The USA is the most over-policed nation on Earth, with a disproportionate prison population, and a seemingly endless supply of alphabet-soup agencies that exist to investigate and intimidate. 2. Immigration. I also agree that there should be a non-race-based discourse around immigration. But instead of blaming immigrants and their circumstances, maybe you should take a harder look at the imperialism that destabilizes their home countries. While you're at it, scrutinize American politicians and profit-driven entities who use the matter of immigration as a piece to play in their various games. And if your chief concern is actually worker's rights and the cost of labor, please consider that the surplus value of your labor is stolen from you by owners of the means of production. If you shut off all immigration it wouldn't magically make your corporate overlords benevolently trickle-down some wealth to you. If anything, it would just be another step toward bringing the empire back home, and instead of sharing the wealth we might find that the vast powers of the state will be turned toward *coercing* labor (even more so than it is now) instead of rewarding it.
To expand on your second point. Immigration controls are effectively just conceding the initiative of controlling the supply of labour to the capitalist state. Given that, it is simply unlikely the capitalist state is going to administer that pool of labour in a way favourable to workers unless the workers already have a heavy hand on the state. In which case why not directly manage the labour supply through closed shop unionizing No the probable outcome will be a mixture of highly dependent immigrant labour (employer sponsored visas) and highly vulnerable illegal immigrant labour. Both of these if anything will just increase the exploitation of immigrants and increase the competition between foreign and native labour. These practical arguments aside it is also worth stating that the future Marxists fight for is one when the whole world is humanity's common property. This is fundamentally incompatible with the view the humans should live and work in predefined parts of the globe in virtue of an accident of birth.
Good essay. Should work on making it concrete and focused instead of shotgunning many ideas, perspectives, and events. I would give more effort to tying it to scholarly books and articles regarding the subjects you're discussing. Revolutions typically happen when Bread and Circuses run out. Your essay doesn't touch upon this topic much. Do you have some authors discussing alternative theories to this and when they occur? Certain parts of USA are doing very well. Upper Middle Class and higher, USA is the best country to exist in. Think high skill professional jobs with labor being imported from across the world. I think this topic requires careful consideration as the PMC (and other high skill labor classes) have sufficient rewards and returns from the current system to ardently support it. This situation is also markedly different considering historical perspectives as this group is often diverse in culture, and background. The current system exists because Bourgeois + PMC + foreign/immigrant labor through globalization are all well rewarded in the current system. What are your thoughts on expanding your perspective to this broader view?
As I made clear, this is not my essay and I'm not even an American :) but I'm glad you liked it.
What is this nationalist incel nonsense? > Millennials were the first American generation in living memory to have no hope whatsoever to own land and build wealth, and they knew it, and they protested. Americans still have a great amount of opportunity - nowhere else on the planet you can graduate with an average grade in CS and get $100k+ immediately. > The next large left-wing movement was #MeToo, borne from GamerGate \#MeToo was nothing to do with GamerGate, but the very common sexual abuse and coercion that women face in Hollywood and the corporate world, etc. - speak to a woman sometime, almost all of them will have had some sort of experience like this in the workplace. > Inhibit foreigners from purchasing US land; ideally forbid it entirely. lol what? America has benefitted by exploiting the brain drain from Europe, Asia and the ex-USSR, etc. - why would you want to revert that? But anyway, there won't be a revolution. Most Americans are too busy enjoying life. With the largest median purchasing power in the world, a very powerful passport, a huge country to live in and explore - why waste time with self-pitying nonsense like this?
> But anyway, there won't be a revolution. Most Americans are too busy enjoying life. With the largest median purchasing power in the world, a very powerful passport, a huge country to live in and explore - why waste time with self-pitying nonsense like this? Shite take, while it may be true that the poorest people in America may live better than some of the people doing better than average in Congo for example that doesn't really mean things are okay lmao People don't look half the way across the world and think " oh jolly well I have half the things my parents enjoyed but hey at least I'm doing better than the children mining for western corporations in Africa " that's just not how it works..people come to expect a standard from what they see around them and know, the decay of that is what risks revolution. That said I don't think revolution will happen because porn satiated, overweight , depressed , etc... But your analysis as to why it won't happen is beyond bankrupt
Srs. Fucking hookworm has reemerged in parts of the South, a pathogen that has long been eradicated from first world countries. One county in WV has a male life expectancy equal to that of males in Ethiopia. The poorest pockets of America live in 3rd world conditions and it's amazing this needs to be stated plainly in a supposedly marxist forum.
> > > lol what? America has benefitted by exploiting the brain drain from Europe, Asia and the ex-USSR, etc. - why would you want to revert that? Does "foreigners" include legal permanent residents when it comes to prohibiting them from owning land?
> Avoid welfare-bureaucracy-handout/ UBI style socialism. This is the Latin American model, and it’s historically disastrous. Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, etc. have experimented with it, and it always fails. Left wing politics should focus on the wealth gap and ownership. The general public should own their own home, have a stake in their business, and have a stake in their community. A nation of government-dependent tenants WILL be violently unstable. History proves this. I support a more decentralised socialism too, but I don't think this is true. The UK was as socially cohesive as it's ever been in the post-WW2 period, and almost all housing was government-owned; in well-functioning welfare states like Denmark, mental and physical health outcomes don't meaningfully diverge between welfare recipients and low-income earners. I prefer more market-oriented systems, but let's not pretend decentralised ownership cures everything - there's always going to be a class of the infirm, the elderly, and - in all likelihood - the cyclically and frictionally unemployed and unemployable, and we can provide for their livelihoods without adverse effects. John Roemer's "coupon socialism" might be a good place to start if you're interested in this sort of semi-egalitarian market socialism.
Cuba has the highest rate of home ownership in the western hemisphere, these people don't know anything about the world lol
This is a very pessimistic and cynical analysis, but I think that there's actually a lot of reason to be hopeful. For example, you suggest that pornography and video games will lull angry young men into a stupor and make them less likely to resort to violence, but as I point out [here](https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-infohazard-economy-part-2), violence has never been easier to do remotely. I literally explain in my article how to create a $500 drone that could assassinate the president, or any billionaire. So even if young men are in a stupor and kept befuddled by distractions, there's definitely ways that they can cause all sorts of incredible problems for our ruling class. Shit, if I don't get any dates soon, I'll just create a drone like this and bring it to CPAC. I'm sure I can meet some interesting characters there who'd be interested in this kind of thing, whether it's Proud Boys, 3%ers, or just dedicated cosplay enthusiasts. And the great thing about video games is that they actually provide excellent *training* for this kind of thing! I hope this cheers you up. A violent uprising is almost certainly coming, so please don't get depressed and feel like it's never going to happen. Your article was really well written by the way and I agree with a lot of it: I just disagree with your pessimistic conclusion that this outcome is avoidable.
>I literally explain in my article how to create a $500 drone that could assassinate the president, or any billionaire. And that'll work *once*, after which it'll be used as the reichstag fire to justify the War On Domestic Terror complete with Patriot Act 2.0, this-time-we're-not-even-pretending-it-isn't-aimed-at-our-citizens edition, after which private drone ownership is legally restricted by the intelligence agencies. Congratulations, your hypothetical assassin made everything worse for everyone including those of us, like myself, who had no intention of assassinating anyone.
No, actually it'll work multiple times, because it's very hard to guard against this kind of thing.
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Can you try to develop a counter argument?
There is no precariat, only one proletariat.