Is capitalist imperialism really more beneficial for westerners than socialism?

One petit-bourgeoisie libertarian actually said that he reported me to the FBI because I told him that I hope ISIS attacks his city next instead of Orlando (he's in Florida) and kills usurious rent-seeking bourgeoisie scum like himself. This is proof that libertarians are not in favor of freedom. They are fascists. He told me that he is someone very important and he will get the FBI after me (meanwhile he's a lolbert that sells bitcoin, how powerful can this fucker be? People with real power don't sell bitcoin). Hahahaha.

Bourgeois "individualism"

Exactly. There's nothing individualist about agreeing to get fucked up the ass by your employer, by the bankers, by your government "representatives" and by the bourgeoisie's hired thugs (cops).

The society we live in seems hopeless. Class consciousness just doesn't seem possible in our part of the world.

I don't even think social democracy is possible at this point. I saw social democracy as an achievable compromise to socialism. But the working class is so incredibly classcucked. I am losing faith in humanity. I just want to see the world burn now.

I even talked to a supposed Bernie supporter recently who said that the chronically unemployed are lazy and don't want to work. Even though Bernie Sanders has spoken very sympathetically about NEETs and says that he wants to get us all $15+/hr jobs (tbh $15/hr isn't even enough but it's progress of some kind. The minimum wage in the 1960s is like $21/hr today).

I don't know what part of the world you're in but in the American South I'm seeing it spread by the day. People don't have the words to express it but they know they're being fucked and who's fucking them and they're getting angrier and angrier about it, especially the young folk.

I live in Canada (Toronto area).
If you believe the lies that StatsCan and the media tells you, unemployment among men in my age group is like 4-5%. But in reality, 15+% are not employed. And those who have a job are like "well who gives a fuck about them, they are just lazy." And the ones who are in our situation basically just do drugs and waste away. I feel like I'm the only one who is expressing that anger. Outside of criminals who steal to get by.

Politically we have liberals (neo-liberal), NDP (third-way classcucks) and Greens (they want a $20,000 UBI to pacify the lowest of the proles but they are a very marginal party). And there's no revolutionary hope outside of the political system either here.

Also didn't the American South just vote for a trustfund billionaire? I'm shocked that class consciousness would even be possible in the American South

The portion of the american south that bothers to vote AND didn't have their vote suppressed. Truth is non-voters are significantly more left wing than voters in the first place and also voter suppression was all focused on the more left segment of the population.

In the Democratic primaries, Hillary defeated Bernie by a large margin in the South as well. This is what is most demoralizing. The people can't even accept social democracy. Let alone socialism.

That was largely on the backs of black people who had other reasons for that (black political leadership telling them to do though.) So if we look at white non-voters they're not gonna have that and gonna be more leftwing than voters.

This

I know people that walk into work every day thinking about burning the store or warehouse or whatever down. Their bosses fuck them hard and they aren't getting anywhere with the shitty pay the receive. Now some places are giving hourly employees managerial responsibility without managerial compensation. You don't have to read Capital to know who wins in that equation. They're always hiring and part time workers roll in and out and while permanent employees get their benefits cut they get bulletins from corporate telling them how great things are going and how many billions the company made last quarter, but somehow despite the company stock going up and up and up they still only get a 2% raise a year.

To quote Zizek, they don't even have the words to articulate their own unfreedom. They know something's fucking wrong but they don't quite know what or how to express it, especially since it's not talked about anywhere but online.

Young people are the most angry. Older folk are just worried.They've got kids in school or university preparing for jobs that won't be there or back home looking for work that'll never come. They hate their jobs and are just trying to hold on until retirement. For some working people I know it'll be their second time putting in 20-25 years some place.

It's a fucking powder keg. The cherry on top of this insane sundae is that everyone is putting their hopes in Trump. Maybe that's not the right way to put it. It's not like they (or most people anyway) have faith in him as a leader or person, but they're just sort of holding their breath and hoping for the best. "Well, we'll see what happens, huh." They're hoping he at least doesn't make anything worse, but they don't seem very hopeful that he'll actually make things better. He's the president they're stuck with and they don't feel like they have any other alternative or option.

This baby is going to blow, and it's going to be a monster when all this tension finally breaks free. When the economy goes or another Katrina (or worse) leaves the east coast in tatters or whatever, people are going to lose it.

If you ask me the best thing Holla Forums is doing right now is making memes, and we ought to be cranking them out as fast as we fucking can. I don't mean Pepe meme magic bullshit, but informative stuff. If it's informative and funny then all the better, but what we really need to be doing atm is letting people know that they're not alone and that they're not crazy for thinking something is wrong and that actually gives them the clues they need to figure it out. They need to know that there are not only alternatives, but that they aren't stupid for considering that things can or should be done differently and that capitalism doesn't just stretch on forever into the future. There was a thread just recently where someone was marking up bathrooms or something with leftist slogans. We need to be doing that too. Posters, graffiti, videos, image macros, memes, all of it, in meatspace and cyberspace, scattered like breadcrumbs that lead people to the answers they're desperate for.

Yea I was about to mention something about the black vote. On Twitter you saw black people saying that Bernie Sanders is a racist old white guy (LMAO) and talks too much about class, not enough about race. You saw some white liberal cucks who supported Shillary say the same shit essentially as well.

Are working class blacks that stupid that they will vote for Hillary because black leaders and black people on social media tell them that Bernie is a racist old white guy?

Fascist doesn't mean "system I dislike".

capitalism is fascist. China and India are capitalist

Yeah, let's just discard the meaning of words. Fuck being in any way accurate in your communication, right? Who needs multiple words with specialized meanings when you can just lump everything together.
Also, for a SocDem to state that capitalism and fascism are synonyms is effectively to admit to being a fascist.

can we agree on capitalism being authoritarian then if you insist that fascism = Hitler/Mussolini/Franco?

The problem here is that whilst the 1st world worker enjoys a better life than the equivalent 3rd worlder, he certainly does not get his money's worth.

I don't even make $15, but 1/3 of my pay goes towards rent, 1/3 towards bills and council tax with the remainder for food and everything else. I have no savings. Sure I get free healthcare too but you can't compare with nominal figures as they distort and appear to minimise the exploitation that the first world prole experiences.

My impression of the minimalist fad among wealthier people is an expression of particular personal possessions being less important to them because there was little to no sacrifice required on their part to acquire them and they are always able to replace or acquire more. At that point, grand aesthetic fads become more interesting because there is no barrier to following fashion. See wealthy people replacing entire expensive appliances like refrigerators for the sake of matching colours, or creating "themes" for their homes and offices that are changed every few years. There's a lot of status seeking involved in it also, as there always is once your basic material needs are more than satisfied but there is wealth to spare.

You'd be surprised how much it costs to create an authentic minimalist theme in the bourgeois style.

Most of this is beyond the reach of poor people. We tend to value our possessions more because there was relatively more sacrificed to get them, more meaning imbued in them, less ability to replace them on a whim. That being the case, there is more of a tendency toward hoarding, and having disparate styles, being less able to follow fashion.

fascism killed Rosa

Under rated b8

Yes while we make far more than the third-world in nominal terms, our cost of living is much higher. My dad expressed concern about my situation. He says that even if I made $30,000-40,000CAD/year, he says that this is still poverty because rent among other things is very expensive here. If you're making minimum wage, let alone $15US/hr, you're not living a good life. I have personally thought about buying a house in a secluded area like Newfoundland after my dad dies. Where the housing prices are way cheaper. Because there's no way I'm going to be able to afford to live in the burbs here, let alone the city. Everything is so expensive. Our monetary policy has created asset bubbles (like real estate). And these asset bubbles act as a parasite on labour. Labourers are trapped in debt servitude.

Black people on social media, i don't think really matter that much. And in fairness there have been a lot of old white guys who talked about class and only meant poor white people.
Black leaders i think were all in on hillary because of the existing working relationship. A known quality who talks to them better than an outsider.

Even as a basement dweller that doesn't pay rent, I still have a fair amount of expenses. I had to buy a new laptop recently ($418CAD after tax) because my old one was busted and not useful anymore. I have to go see the dentist regularly (not covered by OHIP) because I don't want my teeth to be fucked up. When I went for a cleaning, I had calculus on some of my teeth because I wasn't taking care of my oral hygiene enough. I have take my car in for maintenance regularly. I have to pay insurance on my car (very expensive here). I have to gas my car. You need a car to get around in suburbia (and I live in my dad's basement so it's either that or pay some bourgeois landlord downtown enormous rent). Cars are money pits. I have a cell phone bill to pay for. I pay for some of the groceries because my dad doesn't have much food around the house.

Admittedly I eat out at fast food more than I should. But groceries are so expensive these days that cutting out fast food doesn't make as much of a difference as you would think. You can buy a medium cheese or pepperoni pizza for $5.65CAD after tax. Meanwhile a Swanson Hungryman frozen dinner is like $3.50CAD. And frozen pizzas are often $4-5CAD anyways. $3.00-3.50 for a small maybe. I ate the cheap pizza a lot in order to save money that I got sick of cheese and pepperoni pizza. A couple days ago I bought a chicken tenders sandwich with mozzarella cheese + poutine + small fries because I am so sick of pizza. I ate the chicken sandwich and poutine that night and had the fries the next day. Maybe it would be a lot cheaper if I bought those frozen breaded chicken tenders that come in a box in store, Ciabatta buns and McCain french fries. I could even make my own gravy and figure out how to make my own cheese curds. But the breaded tendies they make at the pizza place taste better. If I was on my own and didn't live with my dad, I would feel far more motivated to learn how to cook more in order to save money. Because rent and housing is expensive. I need to make my dollars go as far as they can.

This is what decades of classless identity politics does and, IMO, is what it's designed to do.

So you end up with a guy talking about class, maybe even mentioning poor whites specifically in between poor blacks and poor latinos and women and gays and everything else and this is taken as "racist, sexist old white dude" because he's talking about other stuff TOO.

You saw this among racialised whites as well when Sanders made that poorly worded comment about whites "not knowing that it's like to be poor". One ill worded remark and suddenly he's racist against whites and pandering to blacks. A mention here and there that poor whites are suffering too, and he's racist against black people and only cares about whites.

People get used to demographic targeted propaganda that panders to them (regardless of which demo they belong to) and emphasises how special their group is and how separate from others that they actually get upset and resentful when someone comes along and talks about commonalities and shared interests.

IMO, this is why it's not only important to underscore class and class power as the foundations of emancipatory politics, but also to try to undo some of identity consumerism that contributes to these attitudes.

Get a crockpot/slowcooker its literally just put the shit in cover in water turn on and come back in 8 hours to great food

MTW is defeatism in revolutionary clothing.

social democracy relies on capitalist imperialism, idiot

It does. Social democracy is not the destination, it's a stop-gap solution. It's technically still capitalism.

The real question though is: Would first world workers be better off under socialism in the absence of imperialism than they are now under imperialist capitalism? Wouldn't our standard of living plummet like crazy if we stopped raping the third world of their natural resources and their human resources?

Sounds like everyone here needs to readsettlers.org

I heard about the labour artistocracy bit. Haven't heard anything about J. Sakai.

I will check that out

Interesting you mention that. I have been feeling quite defeatist lately. And this is why I started checking out some Maoist Third Worldist material. Wondering if Jason Unruhe really is right. lol.

When I tell people who are pro-capitalism that they wouldn't have to work so much under socialism to make the same money or even more, they just brush it off and even make ad hominem statements. Those that bother to entertain me further say that the lazy unintelligent workers would bring down the productivity of everyone else and cut into their earnings. That it's necessary for people who own the capital to call the shots because the people who own the capital are smarter than the people who don't. And that anyone with capital who goes out of business deserves it anyway.

And in their mind, if you are unemployed they say that it's because you are lazy. When you point out that there just aren't enough jobs to go around, then they say

"so you don't like competition?"

"so basically you lose in the competition of a job, you starve, go fuck yourself?"

"the reason why there aren't enough jobs is because of the minimum wage"

"so you want people to work for slave wages"

"it's not slave wages. You can easily feed yourself on $3/hr. I used to do it. I grew up in a single mother household. And she did it. And look at me" blah blah blah (this is coming from a petit-bourgeois business owner)

*that should say "you can feed yourself on $3/day"

One time I even baited these libertarians by saying "first world living standards are not sustainable with a 7+ billion world population" and then they said that we need a new black plague to kill like 60% of the world's population or something like that. Libertarians are fascist as fuck. They believe in social darwinism. Until a poor person robs them at gunpoint and then they yell "NAP!" and go crying to the state to protect them. So much for Darwinism. If you have to run like a bitch to the state to protect you, the state you hate so much, that's not darwinism at all. That's not the law of the jungle.

No. This is Götz Aly all over again.

Just because you are paid enough to not feel like an animal, doesn't mean you are getting paid fair share - or even enough. Note that indigenous Western population is going extinct. I.e. it is being paid below socially necessary amount.

Moreover, "McDonald's burger flipper who makes $15/hr" is not going to exist much longer. There is no reason for him to. USSR is over. Welcome back to 1913 (once China goes Capitalist we'll finally get our WWIII).

Every state is authoritarian. Every state is a dictatorship of one class over others. It's just in some cases dictatorship is not open dictatorship.

When Capitalist state (i.e. dictatorship of the Capitalists) can no longer pretend to be representative of everyone, when dictatorship of Capital becomes open - then and only then do we get Fascism.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat is also authoritarian - it is dictatorship - but it is not Fascism, because it is not Capitalists who are in charge.

Fascism is open dictatorship of Capitalists.
Dictatorship of Proletariat is called Socialism (delusional anarchists are allowed to call it Soviet Socialism or State Socialism - but only they).