I haven’t heard the podcast for context but if he thinks “people aren’t willing to deal with the discomforts inconveniences and pain” of revolution, he’s only talking about a small handful of the people in this world. The white people in the imperial core.
Now not too long ago that handful of people had a disproportionately huge bearing on humanity’s prospects, so you couldn’t really fault anyone for ignoring everyone else in their evaluation. But that disproportionality is eroding, and it’s being accelerated as the world rejects the US.
So his statement about that specific set of ‘people’ may be true, but it increasingly doesn’t matter.
Yeah, he’s completely ignoring places like Afghanistan, where things are violently out-of-control. I’m pretty sure the scary sectarian violence and risk of starvation probably has a lot of folks over there ready to just say “fuck it, let’s burn this fucker down” because their lives are already so uncomfortable. The idea that revolution against violent religious fanatics would be less comfortable is a joke.
It’s a very elitist and out-of-touch Western take on the whole idea, but perhaps he only is referring to revolution in the West. Which just makes him Euro/Amerocentric.
Even in the case of white settlers in the imperial core. Conditions will worsen for enough of them for the plurality to see it in their own interest to do revolution rather than keep on carrying on with the capitalist bullshit. First, however the third world will get what they are owed in wages, then the rest shall fall into place.
Maybe crackers aren’t willing to deal with the discomfort.
When their material conditions get worse, they will be.
I am inclined to agree, but I believe it is more that we have been conditioned to tolerate the discomforts, inconveniences, and pain of capitalism.
I saw a chart a while back that showed the average wage in the US is less today than in the great depression. I didn’t vet the sources, but it makes sense. It’s just been normalised.
My two cents are that as someone from the imperialist core he probably just sees people who aren’t willing to deal with all that around him, because they don’t have a reason to. A big problem with revolutions there is that most of production is happening outside of those countries, where labor is a lot cheaper. As a result, most work in the service sector and shit, which is where people are very replaceable, so strikes are just monetary suicide, and those who work in domestic industry don’t have it bad enough to contemplate revolution.
That’s kinda why we need national liberation in places where most of production and mining are. Especially mining these days, because China accounts for a shitload of production and we can only hope CPC doesn’t stray from the path.
I think it has less to do with not wanting to lose comforts as much as it has to do with hypernormalization, which you’d think Curtis would be familiar with since he made a fucking movie named… hypernormalization.
What Curtis I don’t think has discussed enough in regards to is is capitalism and psychology. The unfortunate truth is the best way to make a living as a psychologist in the West is to work for a private corporation making advertisements and/or propaganda, or working for a government making propaganda. In other words, creating media that normalizes all this on purpose.
By and large, beyond the limitations of our technology that Curtis has covered in detail, the biggest way you normalize these things is with psychology. We have the smartest and most capable psychologists working against the common good for most people.
Even on a personal level, when you’re seeing a psychologist for mental health help for yourself, if you tell them about how stressed you are because you’re not making enough money, yet you’ve done “all the right things,” but you’re still struggling and it is weighing on you… Well they can’t prescribe “money” so they just shove antidepressants in your face, telling you “these will help.”
(Aside: undoubtedly, this isn’t meant to be some kind of take-down of modern psychology, many, many people need things like anti-depressants and anti-psychotics to function. I’m speaking almost exclusively about people who are mostly okay mentally, but their mental state is damaged by their poverty.)
In many ways, instead of addressing major problems, we teach people in our society to take drugs to avoid thinking about the major problems. We have psychologists using their training to promote advertisements or propaganda to make us question our own knowledge and how we feel about our own lives.
In past revolutions, the ruling class simply didn’t have access to this kind of knowledge of how humans and groups of humans function psychologically. Through this knowledge, there is a finer grained control over modern society than there has ever been.
How do we begin to fight the work of the people who know the most about how to exploit the human mind? I’m not sure there’s an easy way. I think others in this thread are correct, we’re more likely to see “the revolution” begin in the global south, far away from the influence of the US and Europe.
I saw a talk with a therapist recently when she said the most difficult kind of patients she had were the poor ones, when they problem was capitalism and she don’t know what to do.
I don’t believe these professionals have much to do as well in a therapists patient relationship.
Yes, to be clear, I’m not trying to vilify average psychologists who want to help people. Generally, if you’re willing to choose to make a lot less money by helping people directly, you’ve already shown yourself to likely be a halfway decent person.
I would say most psychologists aren’t bad people as much as they’re decent people working within the bad framework of the system in which they exist. The therapist you’re referencing is correct: it’s not really their fault that they don’t have the tools to help people broken by capitalism. I don’t think these people are purposefully pushing ignoring reality, but they can’t 1. promote things that could cause their client harm (revolution) 2. magic up new ways to fix people’s live under capitalism. So they’re stuck, and that sucks for their clients, and for them.
Absolutely not. This is boomer talk. Idealistic rant without basis in reality.
Who is he talking about? Extremely privileged white upper middle class in core capitalist countries?
Because everyone else is living fucked up lives everyday and dealing with it. The working class deal with “discomforts and inconveniences” daily. What the fuck is this guy talking about?
Those people need to get out of their bubble and talk to working class people every now and then.
The working class deal with “discomforts and inconveniences” daily. What the fuck is this guy talking about?
I don’t know if it’s really his argument, but I think that no matter how hard the working class is getting it, without class consciousness they will be unable to deal with all the specific hardships of revolution.
Sure they have to work in terrible conditions but are they ready for extreme leftist infighting, with all the betrayal and conspiracies? Are they ready to engineer laws and a prison system that is ready to deal with counter-revolutionary activity? Like, reeducation programs, surveillance and jailing of reactionaries, enforcing ban on reactionary publications?
Hardships aren’t an abstract degree of suffering, they are specific. People learn how to deal with paying extremely high rent, it doesn’t mean they can deal with any other type of hardship. Not because someone lived 5 years without a house it means they’d be able to actually kill anyone.
That’s a fair point, but… Well, that’s what the Leninist party organization is for. To forge this revolutionary spirit on the advanced members of the working classes and then spreading this through the class.
It will not come naturally. Class consciousness doesn’t come from nowhere. We can’t complain that there isn’t class consciousness without actually building organizations to foment it. We need more Lenin in this conversation.
Edit:
Sorry for editing but this is an important point. As Marxists we shouldn’t rely on idealism but on the material conditions for something to happen, right?
This discourse “people aren’t ready for the hardships of revolution” is idealist. It pressuposes that metaphysical conditions and ideas (“being ready for the revolution”) are the movers of history. As Marxists that’s not what we believe. We believe that material conditions are the movers of history.
So we ask ourselves: what material conditions make people apt for revolutionary action? And we work to bring about those conditions.
That’s the Leninism in “Marxism-Leninism”!!! That’s one of the great contribution of Lenin (not the only one, of course): the first steps on the theory of revolutionary organization.
That’s what frustrates me about the phrase in the title. We have a lot of past theory and practice to apply for that problem. Granted: I didn’t listen to the podcast. Maybe that’s what he talks about later. But I think the phrase as it’s written is a disservice.
Thank you for clarifying your analysis. I recognise that I haven’t automatically seen the vanguardist aspect of the matter, it is right that the vanguard party will be the one teaching the ways of the revolution.
However we still need to address why is there no credible vanguard parties in the imperial core. My bet is that imperialism allow for the fragmentation of the working class by virtue of not having any more industry, as well as a lifestyle that is depressing and precarious rather than physically violent, and a political system that can orchestrate a spectacle of democracy.
All of these are material factors, it’s not about the metaphysical state of the proletariat, it’s their material relality created by imperialist extraction.
But of course you’re also right to mention that there is a Eurocentric tendency in saying “people aren’t ready” without mentioning that only imperial core workers are in that state
100% agreed, comrade.
That’s where we can converge. Thank you.
I mean I think the region being talked about matters a lot too. USA? Absolutely I agree, when it comes to the 3rd world? Historically speaking, usually the nation that is extremely exploited revolts. Russia and China were backwards and behind the times before their Revolutions. Cuba Laos and Vietnam were struggling under Imperialism before winning their revolutions, the 3rd world still has Revolutionary Potential
I agree with him at this present time, however revolutionary sentiments have always been low during periods of capital expansion. The revolutions of russia, china, and germany required decades of hardship, famines, wars, and humiliation in order to achieve liberation.
Revolution isn’t possible now, but to predict the capital crisis is rather simple really. Capitalism will reach a stage once again on the verge of imploding. The current boiling temperatures that the US economy is experiencing is reminiscing the 1920s, and I argue it’ll be even worse, since absolutism of capitalism flow into one country only, the US.
“Revolution is impossible, until it is possible”
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Keep this in mind.
