thoughts not yet fully formed but I have feelings about the Vaguely Socialist Resentful Doomerism that feels like the dominant politics in my microcorner of the Internet
the basic tenets of VSRD are:
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the ideal form of government is something like socialism (vague leanings toward anarcho-ish or ML-ish both fall under the VSRD umbrella, as long as they remain vague).
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due to the deeply entrenched, self-perpetuating power of capitalism and colonialism, plus a poor long-term outlook for humanity, we will never achieve this ideal form of government or anything close.
and, like, I'm not sure I fully disagree but it's a very depressing worldview that leaves few action items besides "comfort each other as we spiral down," and it's taken over a lot of online spaces I exist in to the point where people will outright correct someone who expresses any kind of hope about the future.
not ending this on a strong call to action, I'm definitely not trying to steer this towards "actually the Democratic Party has it all worked out and only needs you to Believe," but I think tying leftism so closely to cynicism is a mistake that needs to be untangled.
Building hope is one of the most challenging things to do but is absolutely necessary in order to motivate yourself to actually participate in any kind of successful organizing. Even if we are in the sunset of humanity we can still slow and ease that sunset so that there is less pain and suffering and a greater chance of rebounding in a healthy sustainable way with a way towards ecological healing.
Hope is not the same thing as uncritical faith in government institutions, non-profit establishments, or niche cults. A dash of skepticism is important. But doomerism paired with the correct critiques of society is not a recipe for a better world. The uninformed masses aren't taking any less political action but at least they aren't as depressed about the world they aren't trying to change.
I'm able to devote energy to union organizing because I truly hope we can win our contract demands and in doing so improve life for thousands of people immediately and even more people long term. I have hope because in Philly labor worked in solidarity with activist groups to out-organize fascists so hard we completely disarmed the threat. And if we had not had the hope to organize, we would have been overrun.
Sometimes at work our air conditioning will break and the jaded older staff will tell me not to even bother calling for a tech because the powers that be don't care about us and won't send a tech. But I insist on trying anyway and y'know what, we got the AC fixed. It's not about if the powers that be care about us. It's about if we have the chutzpah to force them to give us what we need anyway. Hope is confidence and strength. You have to be willing to try.
thinking also about how native people talk about being post-apocalypse already, and very literally, many indigenous nations have already gone through climate crises - and not even just recently through the cascade of global trends, but pre-contemporary climate change as a result of more direct attacks such as the US pick-sloan dams, which displaced several communities and utterly destroyed their lands. (and ofc not even getting started with the whole Everything Else that happened and is still happening)
and still we struggle for what's left, and for what will never be regained, we have to find new ways forward knowing that we can still heal.
from the perspective of someone who tries to be very critical of like, discourses of pathologization also, it's very revealing to me that as much as the US ruling class produces and relies on these concepts (like criminalization, pathologization, Unpersoning in general) so that there's always a bogeyman to fight, it is yet also actively beneficial to them to Cultivate a sense of hopelessness and terror in people about the future and the consequences that could come from resisting it. insert classic bloomberg opinion article about why more and more people staying as renters to a booming landlord class is Good Actually. the hopelessness this instills is largely not called out by the medical complex (except to just treat the presentation divorced from its cause, like depression or anxiety or psychosis); it is actively cultivated to make you a loyal subject. also insert the renewed fascist effort to preserve faith in the nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalist society by force, and specifically wielding ideas of people outside the nuclear family (such as queer communities) as "perverted" or "degenerate" to wipe us from the public eye. from this perspective, it is "healthy" to resign yourself to being a renter-worker and if you're queer, staying in the closet.
but from a materialist POV, it's clear that these feelings are both a response to our circumstances AND are being actively reproduced by the ruling class; this is because they are symptoms of a problem, a class conflict if you will, that can be rectified. our environment shapes our consciousness. emotions exist collectively, and motivate us to act on the world according to our thoughts.
something we talk about sometimes in my language group is how many words for routine things in our way of life and our culture just seem to be missing; it's devastating to think about. and yet in the end, what has to be done is we need to learn the language so we can understand how to coin that language again the best way we can. there's simply nothing else to do but rebuild.
having intergenerational trauma and severe OCD about the whole everything, it helps me to think of my despair as just a sign that work still needs to be done. it's a frayed string that needs to be tied, and me tying mine (as if my feelings are a problem exclusive to me) won't do anything when there's lots of fringes to fix that only all of us can do together. i diagnose us all with Needing To Do Decolonial Socialism, basically!
Something I've found among friends grappling with global doom - and in myself, too - is that while so many of us agree that we hate the direction these systems are taking us, the sheer enormity of it makes them seem unbreakable. Like, how do you break Amazon? How do you break a country of furious parents banning books by Black authors? How do you break transphobic hatred? Many of us grew up without these kinds of concerns. And so when we see these hundreds of overwhelming problems, we say, "I can't stop this. I am powerless in the face of this." And we still have bills to pay, so it's not like we can dedicate our lives to fighting, anyway. I've seen a lot of the we're doomed attitude come from this.
But it's not about any one person stopping anything, right? I love heroic stories too, but real life is never about a single hero. It's about groups of people helping others in need. Small groups locally, and maybe bigger groups at a bigger scale, but each person contributing a small amount, whatever they can, but without exhausting themselves. It's much more sustainable to participate where you can - in local politics, or mutual aid, or unions, or volunteer work, or raising money - helping those around you in small ways rather than trying and failing alone. So many have this idea of self-sacrifice in the face of the machine, but an individual sacrificing everything can't match a crowd of people all giving a little. I think building toward that is another way to move forward with hope.
