I’m not individualizing anything. I’m describing a structural condition, seen clearly from outside the imperial core. The U.S. left is shaped by its material position inside empire, not by a lack of sincerity.
Unions are a good example. In the core they’ve been neutralized and folded into labor management. Legalism, no-strike clauses, bureaucratic leadership, and state integration have turned them into tools for disciplining workers and stabilizing capital, not confronting it. They were broken precisely because they were once militant; what remains is the form that empire can tolerate.
“Local groups” follow the same pattern. They’re allowed to exist as long as they stay small, visible, fragmented, and symbolic. NGO logic, surveillance, and subcultural politics keep them inward-facing. Anything disciplined, durable, or capable of escalation is isolated or dissolved. That’s not accidental.
From the periphery, it’s also obvious that the imperial core rarely needs open violence against its own population. Control is mostly psychological and material. Propaganda, career risk, housing insecurity, debt, and social punishment train people to self-censor and self-repress. Fear of losing stability does the job long before police ever have to.
That’s why I feel calls for “optimism” or generic organizing miss the point. The problem isn’t effort; it’s that the dominant forms of organizing in the core are designed to be safe for the system. Until that’s confronted, activity will continue to look radical while remaining harmless.