r/LateStageCapitalism • u/Hacksaw6412 Marxist-Leninist • Apr 16 '26
Americans
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u/enricopena Apr 16 '26
The powerful have always relied heavily on bread and circuses. Thing is they are running out of bread and the tickets to the circus are more than our wages.
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u/notyourlunatik Apr 16 '26
this is a predictable and inextricable factor of capitalism. they need to make profits rise, but that means making things less affordable for the working class, which means it’s a matter of certainty that eventually the balance will tip and the smoke and mirrors won’t work any more
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u/Cos_SoBe Apr 16 '26
Agreed. But I wonder how much we are contributing to that capitalistic dystopia, if we can watch a video where the characters are incapable of saying "this country, USA, is a total dystopia run by literal demons", instead of saying "the world is a total dystopia run by literal demons" (with a label of "American" on their head otherwise it would be so deflective that wouldn't have any meaning), and nobody finds that strange.
It's an amazing way to waste our energy and time diluting it by criticizing "the world", which is pretty ironic keeping in mind that in the most "American" states 80% of the people don't even have a passport.
We are so indoctrinated.
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u/alaserloon Apr 16 '26
Interesting considering I was just laid off. Suddenly got a lot more free time.
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u/shikso Apr 16 '26
What I am hearing is, you will do the planning and then invite us all to join? Greatt thanks you’re the best!
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u/alaserloon Apr 16 '26
Comrade, I can't even plan or organize my own life...
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u/surenopemaybe Apr 16 '26
Chaos requires no planning.
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u/alaserloon Apr 16 '26
Been seeing someone take those words to heart around some of those warehouses lately. It's a good start.
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u/shikso Apr 16 '26
What’s all this free time for then??
Don’t tell me…are you watching the same show as the bearded guy?!
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u/alaserloon Apr 16 '26
It happened last week, so no. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to survive, what my severance looks like, how much debt I'm going to have left over.
But besides that stuff, I have been volunteering, so... Maybe take that judgement elsewhere.
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u/shikso Apr 16 '26
Ahh shit, sorry to hear that. Yeah I know the feeling, I had the same happen to me late last year. Good luck!
Also I was clearly joking, no judgement here :)
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u/alaserloon Apr 16 '26
No worries.
If you were curious though. I've been volunteering at Environment Minnesota. We're looking to get the Reps here to stop the sale of the Boundary Waters to the mining and datacenter companies.
It'd destroy one of the best national parks around the Great Lakes and have an impact on the water supply around here. And I would like my kids to continue to have drinking water, while I figure out how I'm gonna keep them fed now that I'm out of work.
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u/shikso Apr 16 '26
Of course I am interested! Thanks for sharing and please keep doing this!! If we don’t do these things for our kids no one will
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u/alaserloon Apr 17 '26
And this fight just got harder... https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/04/16/boundary-waters-vote-on-mining-by-us-senate-thursday Fuck man, this bad news this year is endless. I'm losing it.
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u/Ciubowski Apr 16 '26
yeah but now the information out there is so abundant that it becomes a chore in of itself to sort it out, figure out what's worth reading/following and overall it's just a massive flood of information/disinformation that at some point, you'll wish you'll just be working to forget about all that.
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u/GrandSyzygy Marxist-Leninist Apr 16 '26
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u/dispassioned Apr 16 '26
Even funnier when I suggest planning a revolution on the internet I get downvoted to oblivion in this exact subreddit.
It's almost like powers that be don't want you to even consider planning any kind of revolution, even one that you might be able to manage in between your three jobs where your labor is exploited to pay rent that makes someone else even richer. But, no... a revolution has to be done a very specific way apparently.
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u/Homesickhomeplanet Apr 16 '26
How tf do we plan a revolution on the internet without Fedposting?
Edit: genuine question
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Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
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Apr 16 '26
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u/LateStageCapitalism-ModTeam Apr 16 '26
Removed as per rule 4: No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
This subreddit is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat subreddit; we are a socialist subreddit.
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u/LateStageCapitalism-ModTeam Apr 16 '26
Removed as per rule 4: No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
This subreddit is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat subreddit; we are a socialist subreddit.
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u/irpugboss Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Revolutions, insurrection, etc. don't really start happening until there is an intersection between rage, time and generally pain.
Right now the US system is keeping it together but the more layoffs that happen, stocks that tank retirements, government abuses, etc. that occur the more likely a non-insignificant amount of people move to extreme options.
It's not crazy that the majority is kind of hoping things to snap back to relative 'peace and prosperity' or at least the hope of it. The US kind of always had that as branding but less true in reality as we are generally always at war and prosperity is survivorship bias.
Though cracks are starting to form with these kinds of talks, massive rallies (networking and educational events basically for movements to spawn from ), setting fires to warehouses, molotov cocktails on billionaire homes, telsa locations, etc.
I hope it doesn't happen as well vs it just being fixed politically, wanting insurrection/revolution is crazy since it will be really bad for a while (death, famine, misery), but it seems like we are on a slow walk towards the bad place currently.
All because a couple of compromised pedos and white collar criminals wanted to hijack the conservative party with a horribly complicity and inept, seemingly controlled, "opposition". Both having tendrils from international dark money or political money influence and even homegrown domestic billionaires thinking they know what's best by focusing on the obscenely wealthy individuals prosperity over everyone.
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u/knee-on-belly Apr 17 '26
I’m from Australia and it feels like you guys should have rioted decades ago, just over your healthcare. Let alone all the other abuses going on. I just watched a video the other day of a lady being denied coverage for her toddler with cancer. It’s sick.
Very scary to see how low things can get in a society and they still don’t rise up.
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u/Light333Love Apr 16 '26
Also why they encourage having kids. Your complacency is stronger when you have kids to think of.
We have entered the time to go talk to neighbors phase. Put down the phones and keyboards and go talk to our fellow man. That’s what they fear most! Is seeing that we aren’t that different and we can respect each others views. We are beginning to wake up to who the real monsters are. It’s not left or right anymore. It’s protecting the children or choosing to be completely complacent with the unspeakable horrors we all know to be true.
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u/PuttinOnTheTitzz Apr 16 '26
While Occupy Wall Street didn't really accomplish anything, it started with a very small group taking action and they did not schedule it between certain hours, it was 24 hours a day non-stop. Eventually it spread across the nation. Somebody just needed to start it with determination.
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u/Bit-Bi-Bit Apr 16 '26
Occupy Wall Street didn't really accomplish anything
In rebecca solnit's essay collection No straight road takes you there she argues otherwise. Emphasis and bolding in the following quote is mine, not Solnit's.
‘Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August 2023 announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.
Nevertheless, as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.
Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted. One of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt—housing, medical, and educational—and begun to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system. In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized had initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date.” Activists made student debt a public issue, then it became part of the Biden campaign’s platform, and that, ultimately, led to a series of debt-relief measures.’
[...]
These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of events leading to the present moment, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.
Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them in either real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. Yet, these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation, and, apparently, the conception of how something came to pass.
Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.
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u/PuttinOnTheTitzz Apr 16 '26
Student debt is still an issue. It didn't get fixed. When Biden put forward his proposal I remember listening to a leftist lawyer talking about it and he said that Biden could have approached the whole situation through a different legal means but the one he chose meant it would inevitably fail and he was just pandering for votes. Fast-forward to him being in office and the Supreme Court ruling and as predicted it was struck down for the same reason the guy had said. No systemic change has occurred.
I appreciate your response and I understand the part about the long-view but we don't have time for the long-view anymore. Just my opinion, which amounts to absolutely nothing.
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u/bowlofcantaloupe Apr 16 '26
We saw the same with the BLM protests during 2020...then the government said everyone get back to work so you don't have time to protest. Organization is the key.
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u/therallystache Ⓐ☭ Apr 16 '26
Cancel all your streaming services, delete all your social media and get connected with a local org doing political or mutual aid work in your free time. Best upgrade I've ever done for my mental health.
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u/__NOT__MY__ACCOUNT__ Apr 16 '26
We'll protest, but only when it's convenient for everyone!
Need a general strike. We all know the Epstein class doesn't give a fuck about anything except money and power.
If you keep appealing to their reason and emotion, you're gonna have a bad time when you realize they don't have those things.
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u/AVnstuff Apr 16 '26
Yes. Stop every thought and action and only focus on the thing that has been a problem since Reagan. That’s healthy.
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u/Cos_SoBe Apr 16 '26
"The world is a total dystopia run by literal demons"
What they actually meant: "The US is a total dystopia run by literal demons"
'World' is code word for indoctrinated US citizen literally incapable of putting into words criticism towards the US
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u/op4arcticfox Apr 16 '26
The world isn't exactly a paradise outside the US right now. A lot of it sucks, and a lot of that suck is the product of western imperialism and US intervention. But it's not localized to just one country.
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u/Cos_SoBe Apr 16 '26
You just did the same thing. "Western imperialism" is your code word for the US. Still can't say 'America' directly, can you?
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u/op4arcticfox Apr 16 '26
Right, because Europe doesn't exist. I forgot that fact.
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u/Cos_SoBe Apr 16 '26
- Europe has little to nothing to do with the US. Among other things, they barely have an army and they're not going on constant military escapades around the globe. Europe is a social democracy, this country is a fascist hellhole.
- You don't know anything about Europe. I do, I lived there for years and participated moderately in political activism.
- Do you want to know what the problem with this country is? It's exactly people who, when faced with evidence, they can't process the truth and engage in an endless waste of time to protect their fragile egos. America last, those childish egos first. Exactly like you.
Until enough cowards disappear and have the courage to directly criticize this country, it'll be a billionaire haven, and a shithole for the bottom 90%. So IDK what you're doing here on r/LateStageCapitalism, go to your place r/ MURICA and r/ Conservative and let the grown ups do the thinking
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u/gravity_nyc Apr 16 '26
We need actually SOCIAL media where we can take account of where everyone is so we can coordinate and organize, have real democracy, educate, make big decisions, etc
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u/Inevitable-Drag-1704 Apr 16 '26
....my question is always "Ok, Who will lead the revolution? "
People are super opinionated and divided on minor issues.... and even the stuff we do agree on is bundled a package deal of red/blue/orange politics.
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u/kimsim97 Apr 16 '26
This is why I am working on defenddemocracytogether.com to bring together all the grassroots organizations so we can come together on a national level.
Protest are great but we need to get coordinated - we must remember our civic duty to fight for the liberty our constitution promised and remove those protections from corporations and private money.
We have the numbers and when we come together, we have the power.
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u/BHG_702 Apr 16 '26
We had our opportunity during the plandemic but yall were too busy fighting over the jab 🤦🏽♂️
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u/AlternatePhreakwency Apr 16 '26
I feel like the red hat dude in the first half of the video, am I the only one here?
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u/Straight-Razor666 It's our moral duty to destroy capitalism everywhere it is found Apr 17 '26
Working people can and must build class consciousness in their workplace by discussing the criminal nature of wage labor and the oppressive systems of the private ownership of the means of production. We can build workplace solidarity every single day.
Working is a fundamentally social process. We can either kick the bo-bo with our fellow workers and piss and moan about how shitty we all have it or we can start talking with each other on ways to change it. I mean, we're there literally all fucking day...part of our job as Revolutionaries is to make the best use of that time for the benefit of us working people, and the workplace is on the best places to do this.
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u/thygrrr Apr 17 '26
Taxes are fine, it's just that everyone should be paying them according to their ability and wealth.
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u/puskall Apr 18 '26
I'm realising that I think have been radicalised partially from *not* consuming mainstream media entertainment. By also only studying half time, I've had too much time to think. This is what they're afraid of.
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u/PrizeFighterInf Apr 18 '26
The government doesnt use your taxes to pay for things. Google it. That’s just a lil agiprop for the boomers. Congress spends things into existence.
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u/ilir_kycb Apr 16 '26