I am going to assume you don’t live in the US based on your comment. I can only speak from a US centric perspective. I will try to explain what I am saying.
Living in the US is interesting because of how thoroughly propagandized the population is. Large swaths of the working class have been convinced their best bet is on the rich, not on building power for themselves. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Living in the heart of the evil empire ruining the world does something to you that you have to work hard over time to deprogram.
As conditions in the country deteriorate many people become disabused of these ideas but it takes time and a direct confrontation with their beliefs for it to happen often times. On top of this the capitalist class has many pressure valves that allow people to wash their hands of feeling like they need to do anything - they went to stomp around at a protest sanctioned by the police and went home, they donated to an LGBTQ advocacy NGO, etc etc etc.
Moreso effective protests and strikes especially take massive amounts of coordination and planning to pull off in a safe way. To organize those you need people who have apparatuses to make them happen and we are largely still building those structures. Big strikes don’t just happen out of nowhere they take years to make happen. It takes time to build the organizations that can even organize these efforts too.
And lastly people who are struggling to feed their kids and afford to go to the doctor simply do not have the ability to go to protests when it risks their only livelihood allowing them and their family to survive. We need to work as socialists to identify the material needs these people are lacking so they CAN join us.
I wrote this up hastily but would love to keep talking on this more. Broadly I think these ideas touch on my concerns about the material conditions even if it could probably be fleshed out and revised some more.
I see, yeah i don’t live in US i live in north africa and the first difference i spotted is the propaganda aspect, here there’s of course nationalist propaganda and corruption and indoctrination but there’s a hard line drawn on government, it’s like we’re us, we suck, we’re horrible and we’re mind controlled, but it’s all ours, even the mind control, meanwhile the government all of it is “them”, no one ever mixes the government with the identity of the people not even the flag is theirs, they’re just our bosses
So struggle and resistance is natural, riots or protests is something you’d bring your friends over to or tell your family about not something to avoid or hide
I actually got told once that a riot was taking place over death of someone(it wasn’t even caused by the government they just used it as an excuse to bring old wage cuts as an issue) and they told me if i wanted to come and i did! I picked them up and some snacks and we went over to just record from a distance and cheer, you don’t get to see this very often, the police also are brutal and they sometimes attack people with vehicles but when the the riots become public they generally stop escalating, maybe they also don’t get paid enough for this or are just told to stop, normally they’re pretty awful and don’t even follow laws as is, they also avoid killing people directly while controlling the riots because someone from us dying is bad enough to start riots, someone dying while rioting is when many public workers just leave on coincidentally timed vacations, i genuinely don’t think they organize it either they just know they’ll get away with free days because chaos is guaranteed to take place, the government also knows that it’s best to have riots last days than to crack down and have a complete shut down of the country because they know we absolutely hate them
Also when people generally tell others about how bad the riots are or protestors get treated it’s always in a sympathetic way and are always told to remember the original cause rather than focusing on the damage unless there was theft from small businesses everyone looks down on that because they’re us
I didn’t understand the idea that you could love governments at all until you brought up propaganda for it, it’s so normalized here to have a clear separation of pro country and pro government even when every radio station, TVs and media outlet is blasting pro government agenda and most buildings having pro government pictures or banners, people just look at you weird if you take any of it seriously or remind you how to think properly when it’s a 1 one 1, you only take it seriously infront of “them”, and they’re not us
We also struggle to eat here, sometimes water or electricity just go out due to strain, most meals are more like snacks, but because we’re so poor it’s actually unprofitable for the large fast food manufacturers to set up shop here so the small businesses like street stalls or stands still give you meals for cheap, i’m not sure how this works in the US since you said people struggle to feed kids, also not to be rude but i think feed is exaggerated sometimes, i only really need loaf of bread and tuna can twice a day and some water/juice and i usually call it being fed for the day
But yeah! We don’t actually coordinate anything here people are just extremely angry and that shared anger and the us vs them is what coordinates us, everyone makes sure to turn the country into an ungoverned zone if anything more is taken
I am going to assume you don’t live in the US based on your comment. I can only speak from a US centric perspective. I will try to explain what I am saying.
Living in the US is interesting because of how thoroughly propagandized the population is. Large swaths of the working class have been convinced their best bet is on the rich, not on building power for themselves. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Living in the heart of the evil empire ruining the world does something to you that you have to work hard over time to deprogram.
As conditions in the country deteriorate many people become disabused of these ideas but it takes time and a direct confrontation with their beliefs for it to happen often times. On top of this the capitalist class has many pressure valves that allow people to wash their hands of feeling like they need to do anything - they went to stomp around at a protest sanctioned by the police and went home, they donated to an LGBTQ advocacy NGO, etc etc etc.
Moreso effective protests and strikes especially take massive amounts of coordination and planning to pull off in a safe way. To organize those you need people who have apparatuses to make them happen and we are largely still building those structures. Big strikes don’t just happen out of nowhere they take years to make happen. It takes time to build the organizations that can even organize these efforts too.
And lastly people who are struggling to feed their kids and afford to go to the doctor simply do not have the ability to go to protests when it risks their only livelihood allowing them and their family to survive. We need to work as socialists to identify the material needs these people are lacking so they CAN join us.
I wrote this up hastily but would love to keep talking on this more. Broadly I think these ideas touch on my concerns about the material conditions even if it could probably be fleshed out and revised some more.
I see, yeah i don’t live in US i live in north africa and the first difference i spotted is the propaganda aspect, here there’s of course nationalist propaganda and corruption and indoctrination but there’s a hard line drawn on government, it’s like we’re us, we suck, we’re horrible and we’re mind controlled, but it’s all ours, even the mind control, meanwhile the government all of it is “them”, no one ever mixes the government with the identity of the people not even the flag is theirs, they’re just our bosses
So struggle and resistance is natural, riots or protests is something you’d bring your friends over to or tell your family about not something to avoid or hide
I actually got told once that a riot was taking place over death of someone(it wasn’t even caused by the government they just used it as an excuse to bring old wage cuts as an issue) and they told me if i wanted to come and i did! I picked them up and some snacks and we went over to just record from a distance and cheer, you don’t get to see this very often, the police also are brutal and they sometimes attack people with vehicles but when the the riots become public they generally stop escalating, maybe they also don’t get paid enough for this or are just told to stop, normally they’re pretty awful and don’t even follow laws as is, they also avoid killing people directly while controlling the riots because someone from us dying is bad enough to start riots, someone dying while rioting is when many public workers just leave on coincidentally timed vacations, i genuinely don’t think they organize it either they just know they’ll get away with free days because chaos is guaranteed to take place, the government also knows that it’s best to have riots last days than to crack down and have a complete shut down of the country because they know we absolutely hate them
Also when people generally tell others about how bad the riots are or protestors get treated it’s always in a sympathetic way and are always told to remember the original cause rather than focusing on the damage unless there was theft from small businesses everyone looks down on that because they’re us
I didn’t understand the idea that you could love governments at all until you brought up propaganda for it, it’s so normalized here to have a clear separation of pro country and pro government even when every radio station, TVs and media outlet is blasting pro government agenda and most buildings having pro government pictures or banners, people just look at you weird if you take any of it seriously or remind you how to think properly when it’s a 1 one 1, you only take it seriously infront of “them”, and they’re not us
We also struggle to eat here, sometimes water or electricity just go out due to strain, most meals are more like snacks, but because we’re so poor it’s actually unprofitable for the large fast food manufacturers to set up shop here so the small businesses like street stalls or stands still give you meals for cheap, i’m not sure how this works in the US since you said people struggle to feed kids, also not to be rude but i think feed is exaggerated sometimes, i only really need loaf of bread and tuna can twice a day and some water/juice and i usually call it being fed for the day
But yeah! We don’t actually coordinate anything here people are just extremely angry and that shared anger and the us vs them is what coordinates us, everyone makes sure to turn the country into an ungoverned zone if anything more is taken