Sidagma
26th March 2013, 23:35
So, I live in this town that's really really progressive and great. I made some points in my introductory thread that the situation here isn't so much that people need to be radicalized -- people are already well aware of the structural limitations of capitalism. It's a small college town of less than 50k people, and being on the west coast it's also somewhere where young queer people come in order to find acceptance. The problem here is one of organization.
Social groups here (POC, queers, etc) don't have very much visibility or at all. This is I think partly because the discrimination isn't too overt -- generally it's not a huge deal if you're gay, for example, because if you like someone and they don't like you back it's not too much of a big deal why not. It's a boundary-based culture up here. I'd be surprised to hear of physical violence happening to anyone for any reason, even if the person it's happening to isn't white.
It's also a town in which talking to strangers isn't encouraged very much. It's considered rude or invasive to start a conversation with someone you don't know on the bus or while going grocery shopping, for example. That's part of the reason I live here; I have intense social anxiety, and since there are so many queers and others who came here in order to escape recent bullying and child abuse, I imagine the situation is much the same for other people.
But we're also isolated from the world in a lot of ways. Most of the people in my demographic are here for like, because the (also very progressive) college is here. There's a strong element of surface radicalism -- I mean the kind of like, anarcho-kiddie stuff where we throw around a lot of words like "accountability" and "sustainability" and shop at food co-ops. I'm not knocking it, and I don't want to imply that the radicalism isn't genuine. There are genuine attempts at inclusion and anti-oppression work that I can't believe sometimes!
There just isn't very much class-based organizing, I feel like, at least in my demographic? Like, when it comes to the means of production, I actually don't know if we have any (and don't care, too much, being on social security myself) and I imagine that most of my demographic is pretty much the same.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, which I think is pretty much the point -- I'm not sure to go about building a serious revolutionary platform in these conditions. People are already being educated and pretty much everyone has anti-capitalist sympathies. But we don't have a viable alternative to capitalism which like, is a tall fuckin' order I know so how do we get started on building one?
Social groups here (POC, queers, etc) don't have very much visibility or at all. This is I think partly because the discrimination isn't too overt -- generally it's not a huge deal if you're gay, for example, because if you like someone and they don't like you back it's not too much of a big deal why not. It's a boundary-based culture up here. I'd be surprised to hear of physical violence happening to anyone for any reason, even if the person it's happening to isn't white.
It's also a town in which talking to strangers isn't encouraged very much. It's considered rude or invasive to start a conversation with someone you don't know on the bus or while going grocery shopping, for example. That's part of the reason I live here; I have intense social anxiety, and since there are so many queers and others who came here in order to escape recent bullying and child abuse, I imagine the situation is much the same for other people.
But we're also isolated from the world in a lot of ways. Most of the people in my demographic are here for like, because the (also very progressive) college is here. There's a strong element of surface radicalism -- I mean the kind of like, anarcho-kiddie stuff where we throw around a lot of words like "accountability" and "sustainability" and shop at food co-ops. I'm not knocking it, and I don't want to imply that the radicalism isn't genuine. There are genuine attempts at inclusion and anti-oppression work that I can't believe sometimes!
There just isn't very much class-based organizing, I feel like, at least in my demographic? Like, when it comes to the means of production, I actually don't know if we have any (and don't care, too much, being on social security myself) and I imagine that most of my demographic is pretty much the same.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, which I think is pretty much the point -- I'm not sure to go about building a serious revolutionary platform in these conditions. People are already being educated and pretty much everyone has anti-capitalist sympathies. But we don't have a viable alternative to capitalism which like, is a tall fuckin' order I know so how do we get started on building one?