If it makes you feel better, the late 19th century Intelligentsia of the Russian Empire felt the same.

It took a civil war to jumpstart Chinese and Russian socialism. To put it another way, the central state and military needed to be severely weakened so it’s monopoly on violence is broken. Western governments, particularly their militaries, never reached this level of collapse historically, so they were able to quash their revolutionary movements.

people have to believe they can and should or need to divest themselves from what is and that they’re empowered to build what can be and it takes a certain critical mass of desperation/alienation and at least a bit of awareness of where the problems one faces truly comes from.

things must get worse still, but we’re reaching a point where possibilities start emerging that felt impossible before.

as governing bodies retract and certain services disappear for example, people can start building power by stepping into the void to help people make ends meet with food, necessities, transit, work. The kinds of vacuums being created can create real bases of power and potential.

one also just has to keep in mind that… you know… they’re watching and probably won’t fail to react to any such collective labors

I feel that, a lot of dread over what’s to come. But I do believe that the actual majority of people are closer to our leftists beliefs than we realize. It may come from crisis and atrocities, but I think if people start organizing a serious resistance we will see more comrades than it seems now. Most media is so captured it’s hard to say what people’s views are or what the current situation really is.

Yes. Also climate collapse in the next like couple decades.

I think there is an existential unease among all who are paying attention. What we’re wondering is - how bad will it get, and how fast? There’s all the normal stresses of life with the catastrophic reality of climate change looming over our shoulders to make every small accomplishment ring hollow.

The short sighted optimists are hoping we return to a semblance of stability in 2029, once the national shame of trumpism runs its course.

A friend of mine is in school to become an addiction counselor/therapist, and they were saying there are white guys in class doing the “what about white history month, what about racism against white people?” slop, and I’m just so tired. We’re going to be having these sisyphean conversations the rest of our lives because the dipshits asking those questions don’t actually want answers. It’s so sad to watch gen z fall into line of culture war bullshit instead of seeing through it.

On a personal level, after the hundredth instance of happening, I think I somehow broke through the other side. All we really have the power to do is build community, and that comes naturally to us, because we actually believe in community.

I think about the Portland frog. A month ago, it was one person being brutalized by police. Now, hundreds are there nightly, and they are supported by street medics, legal observers, bail organizers, ride shares (because when DHS arrests people in Portland, they drive them across state lines to release them in Vancouver WA), cooks who provide meals to protestors, etc. This is the vanguard, and they are practicing. Will they be crushed and snuffed out like BLM and Occupy? Probably. Maybe they’ll go underground.

There is good in this world, Mr frodo, and it is worth fighting for.

Generations from now, they will look back on us, at this hinge point in history. How do we want to be remembered?

Yeah I feel this, but the healthy way to deal with this is by recognizing what is causing our despair and acting against that, in order to arrive in a new world, we cannot even imagine right now.

I’m gonna be self critical here and say that large parts of my despair is caused by the lack of seeing my actions make a positive impact on the world around me, something that would make me feel hopeful. But of course it’s not that easy as I’m barely getting by myself. Try to do something yourself, if you’re able.

Like I have been learning a bit about Maoist Third-Worldism. Most westerners see the current situation as a fair deal, even if porky has screwed them over materially, white men cannot get enough of the emotional salary porky pays them seeing a fellow white man be king of the world.

I don’t think this can hurt, but if I had the funds and porky was actually hiring, I’d fuck off to one of the most progressive cities in the burger-reich, organize locally and get to making demands there: a complete inverse of the chuds post civil rights act strategy. I still think it’s important for the left to set down roots in climate havens, and make the place as inhospitable to chuds as possible.

Sauce: Look at the success of Zohran Mamdani. Set those roots and create some places where life is actually tolerable in the burger reich.

I do sometimes feel like the highest aspiration realistically left for Americans isn’t revolution, but to play the role that the French Resistance did under Nazi occupation. We can at least kneecap the fascists to hasten their defeat from other forces.

I really do be thinking it’s going to take military intervention to solve homelessness and poverty.

I feel the despair. Not only do things keep getting worse, the state of dissent and opposition in America makes me think that we’re still collectively not even at step 0.

At the same time, Fidel and Castro landed with 80ish men and had what, fewer than 20 left after the initial attack from Batista’s forces? How many times did the Chinese Communists evade death and certain defeat?

It’s never going to be easy. It never was. Sometimes Things Happen. The George Floyd Uprising was not something we could have predicted, and it was flash of hope. There are important lessons to be learned from the successful counterinsurgency against it and that ultimately it achieved very little. But it does illustrate that sometimes things do happen, unexpected opportunities arise.

I guess I see it this way: the forces of reaction had won in the imperial core before I was born. I had some false hope in 2016 and 2020 that we could get some reforms with Bernard, but I realized since then that that was always utterly false hope, because Bernard is sadly still an imperialist at heart, and no solution which doesn’t address the rapacity of the US Empire is no solution. The solution, as it were, has always required imperial collapse. Our prospects are no worse now for knowing that bitter truth than they were when we thought there was some shortcut to victory.

As for China invading, for all that I find the memes about “Xi Xinping please, the American people cry out for liberation”, Absolutely nobody is coming to save us. Nobody wants to invade the US. Nothing would be better for the invader if they invaded the US and then fought major war over a large amount of territory against a heavily armed populace of people ideologically primed to do insurgency. Nor would it even be better for us to have war.

(There’s something absurd about the fact that I can only ever feel a shred of optimism when I am arguing against someone else’s despair, but I myself am drowning in despair that I cannot drag myself out of. There is absolutely no shame to being despondent)

The thinga bout despair is this: What is the point? It serves an emotional purpose, which is to protect people from disappointment. If you despair, you cannot hope. If you do not hope, you cannot be disappointed. But how useful is that really?