The United States of America were founded by wealthy slave owners and arch-Stuart reactionaries who rejected their monarch because he couldn’t prevent Parliament from taxing their colony, whose violent settler peasantry just wanted to continue murderously expanding their frontier.
They were one of the last countries to abolish slavery and didn’t become a formal democracy until the 1960s. Their advantage of being a freer and more open society was short-lived and their attempt to build anything resembling a social state crumbled. Instead of a society of mass affluence, they ended up with a barbaric carceral system of historically unprecedented proportions, a top-heavy rapaciously extractive economy, a state thoroughly captured by oligarchic interests.
The last decades have been marked by America’s centrality to nearly every damaging social, cultural and ideological trend. It continues to export its accelerating domestic psychoses to the world. It has become the ultimate destabilising hegemon, blundering around like dying ogre, ever swelling a mountain of rotting corpses.
American isn’t the cause of all ill in the world, but the increasingly nihilistic, zero-sum social culture of contemporary capitalism, that has ramified into every corner of society, is fundamentally American, and the umbilical chord is very much still attached. There is no Post-American world—but with a little luck there will be one day.
Happy 4th of July
Americans will try really hard to convince you the American revolution is impressive and interesting. They'll also try to sell you AI apps that gamble on sports for you while you sleep. In both cases the yank must be ignored
“go to therapy” yeah i have! 15 minutes in my therapist started crying told me I’m what happens when you fix all your problems . He ended up paying me for the appointment. He shook my hand and on the way out i rang the bell reserved for cancer patients. everyone cheered
i despise expressions like "class war from above" or "class war... by the rich!". the point of "class war" as a way to understand reality is that it's empowering, dignifying, not whiny. it reminds you there's people already in the trenches waiting for you to pitch in.
Everyone who uses the phrase “elite overproduction” should have a somewhat elaborate idea of what ‘non-pathological’ elite reproduction looks like and be able to answer questions related to hierarchy, inheritance, scapegoating, etc.
Saw a pair of boots marketed as “union made” and had to ask the clerk if it was a class-struggle union composed of the class-for-itself or if it was a labor aristocratic guild formation desperately holding onto racialized concessions from over a century ago
What I love about reading Lenin is that he used every crisis as a way to intervene and figure out where the masses were at. He never laments that they aren’t sufficiently radical, he has curiosity about what events are telling him about where consciousness is trending. Just dismissing every event out of hand instead of analyzing it and seeing what interventions can be made is a completely dead end politics whose only purpose is to puff yourself up online. It has no real world utility.
Defending the prairieland political prisoners, calling for their release, turning it into a cause célèbre, should be a priority for our congressional faction
The sentences handed down today are a huge threat to the possibility of a democratic society. The prosecution is rife with constitutional violations, but 30 years in prison (more than anyone for January 6) for moving some magazines? 50 years in prison even for those not involved in planning the protest? The evidence of an illegal conspiracy is non-existent, but this is how the authoritarian dragnet targets those fighting against repression. Everyone should be learning about this case. https://t.co/XLki7OBuID