I feel sick

[CCCPneubauten]

I feel sick...why you ask? This is because I feel the blood of the proletariat on my hands. I am 15 year old student, and I feel sick. This Dell commuter I’m typing on, the Windows OS it uses. The tea I drink. The money I carry, the CDs I own, the food I eat, hell I piss out more nutrients than most people eat in a day. I feel like I am just a capitalist...I have been into Leftist politics since 1st grade when I got a book on the USSR and have been at it ever since. Can some one tell me if I can still be here but be the American I have always been (Note I want to move to Chiapas and fight with Marcos after college and after a year in the Peace Corps) But I feel like I don’t live what I preach, hell I don't even have a job...can I be saved?

A comrade,
Will

PS thanks for help.

[Clarksist]

Its okay, see if you do not buy things in a capitalist society, then businesses shut down, and the proletariat lose jobs and go into poverty. Under capitalism lefties have to stick firm to our idealogy, but its different under capitalism as selling our labour is crucial to our survival.

[turkishXstyle]

if we want to avoid capitalism in every way, the only thing we can do is leaving the civilization. but that cant be the answer, i suggest you to act by joining a socialist party

[OleMarxco]

Or organize armed resistance. Whichever functions best :P

[Entrails Konfetti]

Thats American Capitalism for ya.

If you have to live in America, where else are you going to buy or work for ? The Capitalist giant !
And thats what we call enslavement .

It doesn't have to be this way.

[CCCPneubauten]

I am only a student...what am I to do? I live in what the call "Bush-country" my ideas ae poked fun of daily. 'That damn commie" being a favorite of my so called peers.

[Phalanx]

Same here, I think most of us took shit for being a commie one point in their lives. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it, unless being made fun of really makes you mad.

[CCCPneubauten]

Eh not really. I take a lot of it from the Young republican club. And in my mind I know I'm the one wh is fair, right, and just. So it just motivates me more....most of the time. But its all the capitalism taht I partake in that makes me mad.

[RedAnarchist]

Its not much better here in the UK, but you must remmeber that for things to change we must act and never give up. Change will come!

[workersunity]

yes thats happened to all of us, we realize that you need what capitalism produces to survive, i take measures to limit this like buying fair traded food, and union made etc.. i just find the positive things in my beliefs to help me get over it

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by CCCPneubauten
This is because I feel the blood of the proletariat on my hands.

Bad reaction.

Capitalism is a bloody system, no question about it. But most of the people who live in it are no more directly responsible for its horrors than they are responsible for the weather.

What makes "feeling guilty" an especially bad response is the existence of certain people who will use your "guilt" to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Watch out for any so-called "lefty" who starts by attacking you as "privileged" and then suggests that you can relieve your "guilt" by giving your money (or time or energy) to him!

Cults and cult leaders prey on young people who "feel guilty"...including some who pose as "leftists" or even "revolutionaries".

Don't fall for that shit! :angry:

Unless you become a cop or a soldier or in some other way a part of the repressive apparatus, you are not guilty.

Unless you become or aspire to become a rich bastard, you are not guilty.

Unless you buy tons of useless shit, you are not guilty.

And the fact that you are 15 makes the very idea of "guilt" in connection with your life virtually "out of the question".

If you don't like the system that you see around you -- and obviously you don't -- then forget "guilt" and start thinking about how to struggle to change it.

Learn as much as you can...and this site is a great place to start.

Begin to resist the crap in small ways...and later you can move on to bigger ways.

And if anyone tries to "guilt-trip" you into anything, seriously, tell them to fuck off!

No one who does that is up to anything any good.

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[RedAnarchist]

Would you say, in your opinion Redstar, that my coca-cola boycott would be trying to guilt-trip others?

[CCCPneubauten]

Yeah, that's true...I really aspire to help others when I get older. Peace Corps being that way, but the one thing I dont get it...I dont spport war, BUT as a Left member don't I support Class War? And if we shut down those thrid world sweatshops, wouldnt a ton of workers lose their jobs? Just some questions I've been having.

[gewehr_3]

I am only a student...what am I to do? I live in what the call "Bush-country" my ideas ae poked fun of daily. 'That damn commie" being a favorite of my so called peers.

Im 16 and my friends and I (only 3 of us) are the only communists in the whole school and everyyone else is a bushist

[CCCPneubauten]

That sounds exactly like me...except its ALL Bush and about 3 Che poser wannabe kids.

[KptnKrill]

Isn't a chunk of time in the peace corp 2 years?

[xnj]

Originally posted by [email protected] 9 2005, 02:49 PM
Yeah, that's true...I really aspire to help others when I get older. Peace Corps being that way
Isn't the Peace Corps sponsored by the US government? I don't know about the particulars of the program, but given the history of US intervention abroad through US AID and other NGO type operations, claiming to promote "development" but in reality undermining revolutionary movements and carrying out the dictates of capitalist imperialism, I'd be very wary.


I dont spport war, BUT as a Left member don't I support Class War?
In any society divided into classes, class war will exist, regardless of whether or not leftists "support" it. Socialists take the side of the proletariat in the already-existing class war, and by advocating the abolition of classes, support the conditions through which class war will also be abolished.


And if we shut down those thrid world sweatshops, wouldnt a ton of workers lose their jobs?
The anti-sweatshop movement supports the struggles of the sweatshop workers themselves for better wages and conditions. It's about labor solidarity across national borders.

[CCCPneubauten]

Eh I feel that helping people is best. Building homes and feeding the poor is bad and anti-Left so be it. I'm not going to watch 'em die just 'cause a government I dislike is sending me there. And as soon as those workers lose their jobs...another group just enslaves them. Those anti-sweatshop groups are great, but had to come by. Andabout that class war...it needs to be in America or Europe does it not? According to Marx it does but I dont see it.

[xnj]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2005, 12:23 AM
Eh I feel that helping people is best. Building homes and feeding the poor is bad and anti-Left so be it. I'm not going to watch 'em die just 'cause a government I dislike is sending me there.
Why do Third World people need paternalistic volunteers from North America to parachute in to "help" them? That's just a liberal version of the racist "White Man's Burden."

The problems of poverty, disease, and illiteracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East aren't the result of a lack of houses or food or knowledge. The people know how to grow food and build homes. They just lack land and capital, because they're being brutally exploited by the rich countries and local elites. The way to help them is to support their ongoing struggles for liberation.


Andabout that class war...it needs to be in America or Europe does it not? According to Marx it does but I dont see it.
Where does Marx say that? Anyway, class war IS happening in North America and Europe. The problem is that it's been an entirely one-sided affair for the past thirty years, at least in the US. The ruling class has been dealing blow after blow to the living standards of working people, decimating industrial jobs, replacing them with crap jobs at Wal-Mart, cutting social programs, and locking up unprecedented numbers of poor Black, Latino, and American Indian youth. It's been the same under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Bush's drive to dismantle Social Security, one of the most significant economic reforms ever won by workers in the US, is only the latest offensive in the class war from above. It isn't a question of whether there's class war or not--there is--it's about whether the working class will start defending itself and fighting back.

[CCCPneubauten]

Yeah I like the idea...but...when do we act?

[xnj]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2005, 01:57 AM
Yeah I like the idea...but...when do we act?
We can act right now in our communities. Traveling to the Chiapas isn't the only way to take action. Start from where you're at right now, in the community immediately around you. Get together with one or two of your friends and organize a study/action club, read a few books together on the Zapatistas or whatever else interests you, subscribe to some good leftist periodicals like the socialist journal Monthly Review (http://www.monthlyreview.org), discuss politics, go to a big antiwar protest together, publish an underground paper, maybe check if there are any sympathetic faculty members at your school, participate in local struggles against racism, for workers rights, and other issues. There are lots of possibilities! :)

The Right has been doing this type of patient base-building for years. The power of the Christian evangelical movement today is the result of that work.

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by [email protected] 9 2005, 09:08 AM
Would you say, in your opinion Redstar, that my coca-cola boycott would be trying to guilt-trip others?
Maybe.

If you tell people "boycott Coke because they treat third-world workers like shit"...that's an appeal based on solidarity.

If you tell people "boycott Coke because soft-drinks are bad for you", that's an appeal based on neo-puritanical concepts of sin and virture -- you are sinful if you consume anything that's "not good for you" and you demonstrate your virtue by refusing to indulge in such sinful pleasures.

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[CCCPneubauten]

Thanks guys. Sorry if I came of as Anti0Left...but I just wanted to know. But out some other thoughts I had. Xnj, thank you a ton.