I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.
Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.
Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.
I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.
So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…
But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.
I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while now, and all the evidence I see is that yes it does. People are a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But unfortunately all I’m seeing is a growth of the far right. Being on the left is hard, people want easy answers.
That and we’re actively fighting against the status quo, fascists actually support it
Yeah capitalism destroying itself, capitalizing on every basic necessity, not being able to afford a home to live, living month to month, the youth will be radicalized seeing how we are all modern slaves, even in the imperial core.
You can only keep a body hidden in the closet for so long before it begins to rot and decay. Eventually, others will take notice. Now could you have kept the body in a freezer instead in order to delay it being discovered? Of course! You could and you would. But not the capitalist. All they can think about is the added expense of the freezer. The cost of electricity to keep it running. Their greed will ensure a haste full decline for their system.
I can’t tell if this is cringe or not, but fuck it! Post!
