Look, I actually have to spend my time around Americans. I dislike them probably more than a lot of people who say stuff like in [https://www.reddit.com/r/TankieTheDeprogram/s/eHww4UALHm](this thread). But it’s not out of lack of trying.
But that’s besides the point. No other country’s people gets treated this way. And no, I’m not going to say I’m more oppressed than people in the global south or whatever. In fact a lot of psychological problems result from the fact that I’m privileged to be in the global north.
But Americans are so often…dismissed. That’s the only term i can come up with. But everyone talks about it in such idealist matter. They always talk individuals or idealism or whatever. The closest to material analysis is “the proletariat’s material conditions are closer aligned to the imperialist Bourgeoisie.” But that doesn’t just apply to Americans.
But, look. Why doesn’t any other people get treated this way? Genuinely. I don’t think Stalin sat down and said “well Germany lost a major world war and went through multiple economic crises and still hasn’t had a socialist revolution. So obviously it’s a lost cause, kill all of them.” Japan and South Korea are never treated this way, despite being very arguably in similar boats. And if we want to talk about material conditions, what about Indonesia or Iran or Cambodia or so many other nations? They haven’t had socialist revolutions yet despite their material conditions, so does that mean these people are useless treatlerites too?
I’m sorry. I know, again, we’re in the imperial core, we’re privileged. I don’t know what part of my mentally ill brain it is, but it’s just that the logic completely fails for me and that gives me anxiety, because reasons. Not just that, but the actual oppression of the communist and self determination movements here are also just ignored.
Based on what I’ve seen, it appears like more of a self-hatred problem than it is people outside of the imperial core focusing overly much on the individuals who inhabit it.
I think there are some misconceptions though, which contribute to a sense of near-hopelessness in reference to the imperial core. Such as:
“The empire living off the exploitation of others necessarily means the people living in it are well off and so the rest of the world has to do a revolution before they would ever be motivated to.” On inspection, many of them are increasingly not well off and some are part of a marginalized group on top of that (such as black people in the US).
“People in the US have never really tried.” The US is for sure the most virulent anti-communist there is in the world and it derives from a genocidal colonial project that transformed into a global imperial one. After saying that, it’s easy to stop and go “look at how it (seemingly) is now, a handful of weak reformists doing nothing.” But the one feeds into the other. The US had the red scare (well had, more like has ongoing) which vilified anything even slightly “leftist.” The Black Panther Party tried to build a vanguard party with dual power and faced assassination, imprisonment, vilification, infiltration, and so on. Earlier in its history, there’s the Civil War, which I won’t romanticize and pretend was some grand liberation struggle the white power brokers were partaking in, but it is important to note because post-Civil-War did not repress or dismantle the confederacy side properly and they went on to do things like romanticize slavery via The United Daughters of the Confederacy material pushed in schools. So it’s not just that USians (some way more than others) benefit materially from imperialism, it’s also that it has faced enormous internal political repression and a kind of ongoing aggravated internal state between the slave owner faction and the reform faction (and what those factions developed into later on). And it’s not only “non-white” who have ever tried anything. Eugene Debs is a notable socialist name, one who ran for president while being imprisoned over an anti-war speech. The Battle of Blair Mountain is a notable event of how the US state was willing to join in on waging class war against its own people (white included).
“It has been this way so far, so it will keep being this way.” Change requires transformation, but it is possible. However, it also requires assessment of where things are going wrong and how to do different in a way that will work. When CriticalResist made the point some time back that so many imperial core parties are “ossified and failures” (I believe was the wording), I had an initial desire to push back. I think because I was concerned it was being too demoralizing a picture of ongoing struggle. But we do have to be sober about real failures and the goal of a vanguard party is not to figure out how to cozy up and co-exist with imperialism while doing some token opposition in the margins. So it’s more about movement than it is about judgment. People are going to judge and we will too, but at the end of the day, things are moving. Question is where do they get moved to.