are Americans possibly the laziest people?

[R_P_A_S]

I was just wondering... bear with me here!

I grew up in Mexico and well I didn't know of little things like TV dinners, drive thru windows, or like food being delivered to your house. I found out about all this stuff once I moved to the U.S. in 1991
You are probably thinking, so what's your point? That might be just little things but at the same time if you really look at it most American's aren't really radical or revolutionary.

they have this massive propaganda telling them they are the best in the world, they are free, and that they go around the planet promoting democracy and all this stuff.. and people, I believe have been eating this shit up. for years and decades.. every one in a while they do their little marches for anti this and anti that..

Why hasn't there been radical times like there were in the 60's? did the FBI did such a good job at smashing those groups that it smash dreams of new revolutionaries?

why do you guys thinks that most Americans just sit around their houses and let their government bullshit them to death and they dont do shit about it?

maybe i didn't make my self clear. but is like more than half of the country agrees that their president is a complete piece of shit, and that his wars are a complete waste of time and are what is making the world hate the american people. yet they do shit about it to get rid of him.. they voted for him AGAIN and they sit there with their thumb up their ass

[ComradeR]

Well from what i've seen capitalist educational conditioning has had a great success in creating an apathetic american working class, plus as long as the bourgeois can maintain the labor aristocracy there will not be any real chance of a revolution in the US. But hopefully with dwindling oil supplies and the direction the third-world (especially latin america) is going, there may be a major economic upheaval in the near future, that may shake the US proletarians out of their apathy and make possible a road to revolution.

[Revalation]

I always hear the amercians claiming that mexicians are lazy amercians are by far the fattest people tho

[Don't Change Your Name]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 05:55 am
I grew up in Mexico and well I didn't know of little things like TV dinners, drive thru windows, or like food being delivered to your house. I found out about all this stuff once I moved to the U.S. in 1991
Whoa...I didn't know Mexico was still in the Middle Ages


You are probably thinking, so what's your point? That might be just little things but at the same time if you really look at it most American's aren't really radical or revolutionary.

they have this massive propaganda telling them they are the best in the world, they are free, and that they go around the planet promoting democracy and all this stuff.. and people, I believe have been eating this shit up. for years and decades.. every one in a while they do their little marches for anti this and anti that..

Why hasn't there been radical times like there were in the 60's? did the FBI did such a good job at smashing those groups that it smash dreams of new revolutionaries?

why do you guys thinks that most Americans just sit around their houses and let their government bullshit them to death and they dont do shit about it?

maybe i didn't make my self clear. but is like more than half of the country agrees that their president is a complete piece of shit, and that his wars are a complete waste of time and are what is making the world hate the american people. yet they do shit about it to get rid of him.. they voted for him AGAIN and they sit there with their thumb up their ass

This is not much different from what happens in most Western countries.

[Janus]

why do you guys thinks that most Americans just sit around their houses and let their government bullshit them to death and they dont do shit about it?
Why do most people do that?

It's certainly a worldwide stereotype that the average American is a fat, lazy, and wasteful being but this is simply a generalization. Not all Americans are lazy and apathetic, it's just that because of the US's standing among the other nations that cause these types of generalizations to occur.

[SPK]

It isn’t too useful to try and explain the current passivity we see in the usa by way of theories of the labor aristocracy, and so on. Global political and economic conditions were far more favorable for amerikan imperialists and more privileged layers of the proletariat here in the sixties: nonetheless, as R_P_A_S noted, that decade saw a renewal of radical politics much more intense than we see today.

Moreover, the silence that is prevalent today is a recent phenomenon, having arisen over the past three years or so – from 2004. The roughly five years prior to that was, relatively speaking, a period of great creativity and activism:

- In 1999, the Seattle rebellion against capitalist globalization occurred. These events constituted a very significant rupture in the usa, in that they reintroduced a radical, anti-capitalist politics – something which had basically been missing for the preceding quarter-century or so, when so-called identity politics, lacking any analysis of the prevailing economic system, were dominant. Those events also reintroduced into the movements serious direct action against the state. That “moment”, led paradigmatically by resurgent anarchist and anti-authoritarian tendencies, seems to have lasted until, generously speaking, late 2003 (in Miami).
- The anti-war movement against the impending invasion of Iraq emerged in early 2003, and it was the largest that history had ever seen: millions of people in the usa were mobilized. Efforts were led mostly by reenergized Marxist-Leninist currents, which controlled or coordinated the key national coalitions. These anti-war struggles were not able to maintain their initial momentum, once Hussein’s military had been defeated, and are clearly in a downturn right now.

And the last three years haven’t been completely quiet, obviously. In 2006, the immigrant rights movement successfully defeated proposed laws that would have made being an immigrant without papers (“illegal”) a felony punishable by potentially years in prison. Millions of mostly Mexicano, Chicano, and central American people took to the streets. This movement, while again one of the most significant in us history, also currently seems on-hold.

Today, the objective conditions certainly exist for a new upsurge: intensifying cutbacks by the bosses; attacks on civil liberties; wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; ruling class offensives against immigrants; and so on. The subjective conditions, to a certain degree, also exist as well: many workers and oppressed peoples have an awareness and consciousness that the current situation is very bad, even if their ideological understanding of the alternatives and different strategies for resistance is quite limited.

Given these conditions and the very dynamic struggles of the past decade -- including the fact that all of them appear dead in the water today -- I would say that the key contradiction is a failure of political leadership by the movements in question. If we want to explain the quiescence around us right now, that is way to do it. Each of the movements, it seems, had the potential or possibility to much further radicalize this country, particularly in upping militant opposition to the continuing imperialist occupation of Iraq, and that simply did not happen. Understanding why requires an assessment or summation of each of those specific struggles or historical phases: an analysis of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian trends (which made an egregious strategic mistake in not effectively transitioning from a focus on international capitalist institutions, like the World Bank or IMF, to a focus on resisting the war machine here); an analysis of contemporary Marxism-Leninism (which changes only slowly and incrementally over time anyway and from which I don’t really expect anything new – like a direct action orientation); or an analysis of the immigrant rights movement (from where I’m at in Houston, it seems that a turn to traditional electoralism and the Democratic Party machines helped to at least temporarily suppress it). Grasping the specific, particular political or leadership errors in each of these movements would, of course, require an entire debate unto itself.

[Cyanide Suicide]

America is so diverse, it has some of the laziest people, and yet some of the most detirmined hard-working as well. Are drive-through windows really a sign of laziness? I don't think so, they just simplify things, and that's not always a bad thing.

As for why 60's-era anger isn't happening; The main reason I believe, despite what people may say here, is fear. Fear of what the government will do. I mean, look at something like Kent State. College kids simply protesting, and some get killed by police. Also the fear of being labeled a terrorist and serving prison sentences for action against the state. In this age of electronic surveillance, getting caught is easy. Plus, organizing stuff like say, riots, is difficult because if you tell the wrong person, you're arrested for conspiracy.

That's just how I view it, I may be wrong.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

As for why 60's-era anger isn't happening; The main reason I believe, despite what people may say here, is fear. Fear of what the government will do. I mean, look at something like Kent State. College kids simply protesting, and some get killed by police. Also the fear of being labeled a terrorist and serving prison sentences for action against the state. In this age of electronic surveillance, getting caught is easy. Plus, organizing stuff like say, riots, is difficult because if you tell the wrong person, you're arrested for conspiracy.

Maybe that's part of it, but I think that the number one reason why the good old 60's Yippie rebeelions aren't happening anymore is because the young people (myself included) are kind of spoon-fed mindless entertainment until all they care about is what Britney did last night.

I've tried to talk to people about socio-political issues and the level of ignorance is astounding. In today's pop-culture knowing about radical politics is no longer cool.

[RedCommieBear]

America is just like any population; there are some lazy people, some smart, some stupid, etc. I don't think you can really pin down 300,000,000 unique individuals and try to use an adjective that will describe them all.