This makes me angry. I encounter it online and in the wild all the time. People have a problem with billionaires and corporations owning everything. They don't have a problem with mom-and-pop landlords living in the neighborhood (whatever's left of it) and renting out a few AirBnBs. People feel this way because they can't see a way out of capitalism except saving up some money and getting their own AirBnbs to exploit the land and proletariat, even though small landlords are neither happy nor interesting people, and they are still trapped inside capitalism.
People with an anti-corporate and anti-billionaire mindset are moving in the right direction, but they're still beholden to capitalist individualism. It's the same with local small businesses, even though these businesses are buying all their products from big businesses, selling them for a massive markup, and (in my experience) cheating their employees far more often than big business. Government jobs are the only ones I've had where I didn't feel like I was going to be fired or screwed every single day I was there.
I saw a Sysco truck a few days ago outside the only restaurant in my very small town. This place was my first job (as a bus boy) a loooooong time ago. They stiffed me on my first paycheck (I had been working an unpaid training period without knowing it, I was also supposed to be a psychic at this place) and I walked out. In the second or third year of the pandemic I saw a girl who couldn't have been more than eight years old working in an apron there (she was related to the family that owns the place). I've lived here off-and-on for decades and almost no one ever went to that restaurant; everyone knew you'd get sick if you ate their food. We suspected that it was a mafia money-laundering operation, since the owners drive red corvettes and seem to be rolling in dough. Tourists do eat there more regularly now even though the place has noticeably bad yelp reviews.
In a colonial context, big or small bourgeoisie can be revolutionary. In an imperialist context like in the USA, they are almost never revolutionary.
Also, the phrase "during the pandemic" makes me angry! A friend living overseas just told me yesterday that they had gotten sick and lost their sense of taste. Look up recent online reviews for scented candles.
Using "childish" as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
"Israel" is to blame for everything but somehow the USA is still good. This is thanks to Hollywood and the fact that the USA is a far bigger and more successful "Israel." Very few people know that Columbus was a Zionist. People around the world still dream of living here and making it big because of Hollywood movies and friends or relatives who immigrated here and somehow made it work.
In my experience, Arabic speakers are ready for a revolution, as long as it excludes women's liberation / queer liberation. Spanish speakers have profound levels of liberal brainworms. Portuguese speakers are typically pretty aligned with hexbear without knowing it. White leftists seem uninterested in returning the USA to indigenous sovereignty and paying full reparations to slaves / the descendants of slaves, and this is one major reason why their movements always go nowhere. (I hate the term "leftist" but I don't know what else to call these people since they aren't communists and yet they're still a bit more radical than the average democrat.)
What are some of your left-ish peeves you regularly encounter online?
Weaponizing Thrift
The first stage of my approach involves learning what the bare minimum you can live on is. That means splitting rent multiple ways, cooking all your meals in big batches, finding ways of entertaining yourself that don't involve routinely spending money, so that you mostly just spend money on the absolute essentials of rent, groceries, medications, toilet paper, and dish detergent. It could be called a "third-world lifestyle". Virtually nothing gets bought from gas stations or liquor stores or smoke shops (except maybe the equipment and raw materials to make things yourself), or even certain aisles of the grocery store. Nothing builds solidarity with the proletariat of overexploited countries the way feeding yourself on $3 a day does.
Location is a big part of this. There's a presumption that the only places that are worth living in are metro areas of 1M+ people, but capital is invariably quite well-developed in these places, housing costs are inflated far above the baseline, and most working-class people are barely getting by to the point where the citythey're in doesn't matter all that much, unless there's family there.
There are lots of places in the country where you can get your expenses down below $800 a month while still having conventional housing, and there is still economic diversification and cultural development and interesting people to be around (including socialists). In fact, political objectives are a lot more feasible in smaller cities, you can bike across them, and if there's really something you need a larger metropolis for, you can take the train or bus there. There are lots of states where the minimum wage is high, while smaller cities away from the big metro areas have a much lower cost of living.
Every dollar that doesn't go to a landlord or creditor, or to gasoline/alcohol/nicotine/meat/sugar, is a dollar that fuels your own liberation. The less you spend, the less you are propping up the bourgeois state. Teaming up with like-minded roommates, you can slow down the gears of the economy to less than $10k per person per year to start out with.
Gray Economy
With the time that you're not working, build up your abilities to provide the means of your own existence, or at least the final stages of refining them. Basic skills in gardening, dumpster diving, sewing, bicycle maintenance, and carpentry are essential. Woodworking, auto repair, fiber arts, ceramics, refurbishing electronics, and lots of other skills are highly useful.If you can turn some of these skills into something that can be exchanged, that gets you much further along.
Collectivized Housing
Even if you cut out everything but rent, that's still a lot being sucked from you. A 3-bedroom house might rent for a year for 30k, while property taxes and DIY maintenance/repairs on that same house would cost about 7-12k. If you can fit 4 people into that house, that's $2-3k per person per year in housing expenses (plus another 1.5k/p/y in utilities). It could even go lower.
3 committed people working full-time and saving as much as they can will secure a down payment on a house like that in as little as 2 years. Then they'll be able to pay it all off in another 3-4 years. After that, they'll be able to either be employed a lot less, or be a lot more comfortable, or start saving up for the down payment for the next few comrades, aiming for a domino effect that lifts all the closely aligned people around out of the rent/debt trap, and even allows you to invite people to come live near you to augment your organizing potential (watch this space).
Zeroing Out
The time may come where there is an imminent danger from the government, or from reactionary non-state entities. Being able to hide without a trace is the surest way to survive this condition. This involves having access to land (minimum 5 acres at $8-12k per acre), building structures without electric or water or sewer connections and ideally inconspicuously, sourcing as much as possible in the immediate vicinity, making extensive use of appropriate technology, and having designated vehicles and drivers to go on errands as needed.
~~You will eat the (bean) pods and live in the (civilizational) bug~~ You will cook on a rocket stove with wood, you will poop in a composting toilet, you will get all your water from a slow sand filter, you will get all your electricity from a few solar panels, and you will have an enjoyable existence as long as you have people and books and plants and a purpose. With 20+ people living in an arrangement like this, you can have a kind of communal luxury, where you are living better than the average American, for a sliver of the cost.
Even without needing to flee and disappear, you can benefit from this in the near term. Renting costs 10k of economic activity per person per year, owning and inhabiting collectively can cost 4k, living on the land can be done with 2k or less.
Make a 501(c)3, or even a church out of it, and anyone can make tax-free donations to the collective homestead. These get used for ecological preservation, charity, education, et cetera; the important thing is that you can benefit from them. Conceivably, a comrade living and working in town could have gross earnings of 100k, but donate 60k to the nonprofit, have only 40k of taxable income, spend the weekend at the collective homestead, you see where this is going.
I have a further section on distributed proletarian economic espionage, but this is large and may have identifying information. Without going into too many details, it is possible to gain experience in a sector (especially a niche sector and/or small business), learn how that business is run, and with any luck, go into that business for yourself as a worker's co-op. This does strengthen the official economy but can also be the way that you build a kind of prosperity, have the wherewithal to support a party and communes and unions and self-defence initiatives, and maybe even make the arithmetic unfavorable to raiding and deposing you. If you control a part of the local economy, especially something that makes tangible goods and services, anyone who is reliant on the economy (practically everyone) ends up hurting themselves if they try to destroy you.
In general, "just barely getting by" is a result of medical/material disaster, or social isolation, or broad strategic missteps- these may include simply not being aware of the options that exist.
The good outcome in this lifetime does not come from holding out for the unions or a political party or the emergent class consciousness of the Western masses (lol) or some unforeseen good fortune to rescue us from our material conditions. It comes from recognizing that capitalism is not optimized and never can be, it needs incentives to operate, it needs a carrot to entice the proles, and that means it necessarily must have slack that can be pulled on, and that it never reaches the asymptote of maximal exploitation and economic coercion of everyone. It then follows from identifying and leveraging that slack for our own ends, building an economic counterpower bit by bit.
This is all pretty interesting. My only question is: where do you think it might work, specifically?
I also despair of finding anyone who could join a project like this (I have a lib spouse and multiple kids).
I am fortunate enough to have made a bunch of radical contacts in the place where I landed over a decade ago, and these have led me to all kinds of further connections. I don't have a high-paying job but I still put about half my income in savings.
One of my current most active projects is identifying places most like this, and I expect for there to be several dozen throughout the country.