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Is there any point?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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It's me, I'm the third worldists. I feel like the American left still has some vestigial ideas of sin and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that you absorbed through your lifetime. You see the concept of labor aristocracy and equate it to some sort of personal moral failure instead of a way to understand class relations under imperialism. You get told that revolutionary potential in the imperial core is low and you can't simply take control of history to conjure up revolutionary conditions out of thin air and deliver a McRevolution to your doorstep in 30 minutes or money back and think it's nihilism and defeatism and communism is impossible.
While I personally believe that a revolution in the imperial core is a long way off and that the US proletariat are labor aristocrats whose interests align with maintaining imperialism, I have never blamed you for your conditions because that would be unserious. Nor have I put up unrealistic expectations on you to scrounge up revolutionary conditions out of nowhere and destroy the Great Satan before the next warcrime festival occurs and blame you when that inevitably fails. I get really pissed at obvious displays of chauvinism but that's a normal reaction of a person with self-respect who is dehumanized by that chauvinism. And sometimes the shit American leftists, MLs even, say makes me give some credence to the Yakubian Devil memes and I fully understand why Global South leftists give up on this place to preserve their mental health.
Recognizing that it is hard or that you are objectively limited by complex factors outside of your control is not doomerism or a call to surrender. The point is to keep fighting. To bet your life on it even if you might not live to see the revolution. To understand your capabilities and not feel uncomfortable with your limits because that is how you become tempted to make mistakes. To keep learning and become a better communist so you can make more out of future opportunities. To see yourself as a citizen of the world and cheer for every victory no matter how far away because it brings us all closer to our goal. Revolution is hard. The road to communism is long and bloody and many times lonely and frustrating. If it was easier the world would be much different.
I mean, you're not wrong about the obsession with sin and moral failure (I am reminded once again of Jones Manoel's excellent essay on Christian culture's influence on marxism in the west: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture), but let's not act like everyone who brings up third worldism online is solely doing a detached, detailed class analysis. When people use it as a vague means of disregarding those who live in the imperial core under the guise of scientific socialism, or reduce the entire class dynamic there to a single blob of labor aristocracy, they aren't helping anybody learn or build solidarity. You might not do this, I don't know, but it does happen. You don't represent everyone who espouses this stuff.
I can't say how much of a problem it is. Maybe it's a very minor online problem. But it is a thing that comes up.
That said, to put it bluntly, I would not blame non-white-designated peoples for being very wary about trusting white-designated peoples on having revolutionary solidarity and I would say that's the more stark aspect of this that's real and dangerous, than the overly vague application of labor aristocracy (which looks silly fast when considering, for example, a diaspora scraping by working class non-white person in the US vs. a tech bro white european person who was born there). White supremacy is a very real system of power and has a lot of racism embedded in it, and the stuff going on with ICE in the US illustrates how very alive and well it still is. So that's a very real and concrete concern. And I think it's much easier for a white person to turn against white supremacy and organize with non-white peoples than it is for them to grapple with some convoluted analysis about the spoils of empire, which mainly leads to "don't be a soc dem or a western chauvinist", which we have other arguments for already anyway.
Or to put it another way, if the tendency is that westerners are going to internalize third worldism as a hair shirt and go no further with it than that, then maybe it's not a very useful framework when engaging with them.
❤️
if i'm going to suffer through the rest of my natural life and die unliberated it's no different than being impossible. imperial decline makes me smile but i have no positive reasons to wake up in the morning
The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, almost two entire centuries ago. Countless have dedicated their lives to the struggle since then, some in conditions that a first worlder cannot even begin to comprehend, without any guarantee that they would live to see victory. Many died without ever seeing revolution and the road ahead is still long and hard. Communism isn't just a fancy political fashion accessory, it's a world historical struggle against the overwhelming power of capital. Nobody is forcing you to take part, but if you're going to call yourself a communist at least honor the struggle of those countless comrades by not allowing yourself to indulge in self-pity.
there's no orgs here and i've lived an isolated life due to neurodivergence, so i don't claim a specific tendency.
i'd love to take part but nobody will meet me even 10% of the way. nobody masks. unions barely exist. no group is travelling into my backwater to do outreach or recruitment.
those people that struggled had each other. they had community and solidarity. Castro had 82 men and said he could have started the revolution with 10 or 15. I have none. I'm thousands of kilometers from the nearest person i would call a friend, let alone a comrade.
But seeing as I benefit from the blood of children being spilled, why should I want to do anything other than set myself on fire?
This kind of thinking is still privileged. You do not recognize your responsibility to the people of the world and selfishly want to anihillate yourself to save yourself from the trouble of doing the hard work. This is ingrained american exceptionalism and you should reflect on that. I do not write this to "dunk" on you, but I live in an equally if not MORE anti-communist country, and what? Do I complain? Do I resign? No. Our organization is small, but it's the little Davids that stand up against Goliath every day, get beaten down and rise back again. Because if not us, then who? You will not be saved from the outside, and resignation is admitting defeat, and giving away the win to the ruling class without a fight. Do better.
Nah, this is a shitty thing to say to someone whose mental health is obviously in a dark place. Telling someone who is struggling a lot in part because they are internalizing guilt that they are essentially being selfish because of having dark thoughts, is an asinine approach to mental health, that will just reinforce the guilt they already feel.
Depression and self-harm are not problems confined to westerners and doubling down on insinuating somebody is particularly bad for being a westerner who is already internalizing that as a horrible thing, is the opposite of helping.
Not everything is about hard work, ffs. Take a step back and reframe this as if you are talking to someone who is bedridden and then maybe it will make more sense what's wrong with it. You're completely erasing the potentially disabling mental health conditions they are operating under and talking as if a "tough love" speech will fix them.
Well damn, you do cut to the core of it, huh? Well, if what you say is true and that it truly is easier to annihilate myself, then I will do just that and stop being a drain. Thank you for the motivation to end my cowardice and embrace oblivion. Goodbye.
Stop romanticizing your despair. You are not a martyr, and you are not 'evil', that framing is a convenient escape hatch. Calling yourself scum lets you off the hook because it declares you irredeemable before you've even tried. That isn't humility, it's narcissistic fatalism. The global oppressed don't care about your American guilt complex, they care about whether you're useful.
'No organizing potential?' That's lazy defeatism dressed up as realism. The US has millions of exploited workers, tenants facing eviction, and queer kids losing rights. The potential is there, buried under the same rubble you're too tired to lift. Did you expect the masses to deliver themselves to your doorstep? The vanguard isn't handed out, it's forged in the exact exhaustion you're feeling right now. If you can't do grand strategy, do logistics. If you can't do logistics, do mutual aid. If you can't do that, then your only job today is to survive and show up tomorrow. That is a tactical order, not a request.
I am not going to coddle you. But I will tell you a hard truth: checking out is the ruling class's favorite outcome for radical Americans. They want you dead or paralyzed. Staying alive and doing one tedious, miserable task today is an act of war against them. So stop spiraling about your inherent evil, that is a bourgeois luxury problem, and start thinking about your next tactical move. Eat a meal. Make a help-line call. Send an email to them. Just don't confuse self-pity with political analysis. Get up. Not for the party not the cause, but because lying down is exactly what the Empire wants you to do.
This is not the message of my comment.
If what you care about in this case is the lives of children, setting yourself on fire saves exactly 0. In rest, you should discuss how to process and cope with things outside your control with a mental health professional because you seem to have things going on that strangers on an obscure communist website aren't equipped to help with.
Imagine a tug-of-war played over a deep pit. On one side stand the imperialists and their lackeys. On the other, the third-world communists. If they should win, and the Empire is dismantled, then you lose some privilege.
(Of course, you're also being stolen from. A full victory would be in your actual benefit. For the sake of argument, let's ignore that, thought).
You're standing on the side of the Capitalist. You recognize that them doing well makes "your side" win. What should you do? Should you pull the rope to your side? Surely not, you don't want your side to win.
It seems your answer is that you should jump into the pit yourself.
My answer is this. Sitting the contest out is the same, why not do that? That's what everyone around you does already. You can also pull the rope the other way. You don't have to pull your arms of to make a difference.
You are not at fault for what side of the pit you find yourself standing on. Don't pretend you are. Find others who also want 'your side' to lose, and talk to them. They are going through the same guilt you are. They can help you directly, and you can help them too.