Post #4168793

2026-07-28 16:19 UTC

I don’t know how to take this, where i live bringing topic of anti government or protesting or complaining about living standards does not take building material conditions for What are these material conditions, suffering? Do you guys riot and protest out of choice instead of out of need? I’m not trying to be dishonest here, where i live if you signal someone to pick you up and you just say the word police to them i don’t know who they are they’ll pick you up and take you right to your home free of charge, i genuinely do not comprehend the need for some conditions or setup to resist, living is the conditions for it

Replies (1)

@antifa_ceo@lemmy.ml 2026-07-28 21:27

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.

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