Is there a "we're utterly f*cked, and this just goes to show it" thread?

[LDC]

The one reason to be cheerful is the likely coming decline of US hegemony... That's a massive step forward if it happens, for the UK especially

I still think you're wishing for something rather foolishly when you have no idea of the actual consequences of that outcome.

If the decline was due to a upsurge in class struggle or other similar factor then fair enough, but thinking a decline due to far right isolationism/re-emergence of merchantile capitalism and a global shift towards other equally terrible strong country/empire blocks results in the same end result is wildly context blind.

 

[farmerbarleymow]

stop doom scrolling that will stop you going mind

looking up the bright side of the internet or fluffy animals eating is a good start
like the below

That's why I start nice threads about lovely creatures to cheer people up - even the curmudgeons like petee and cupid_stunt

 

[danny la rouge]

I think people are misunderstanding each other on this thread, including misunderstanding what chilango was trying to convey.

I think it is possible to be (and look, I don’t want to go all Gramscian here) realistically pessimistic about structures while having optimism for human decency and solidarity.

I think it is all too easy to wallow in the news cycle unhealthily, to the extend of feeling paralysed. Indeed, I do think that learned helplessness is something the powerful rely upon the rest of us having taken in.

And furthermore, I think it is possible to restrict one’s intake of all the doom without that meaning you’ve “buried your head in the sand”.

And, if I may, chilango , I took your intention in starting this thread to being a way to strike that balance. To say “let’s be realistic” rather than, as some seem to be taking it, “let’s wallow in doom”.

In other words, here’s the reality and here’s what we can do.

I personally think taking care of one’s mental health is important in being an effective activist. Climate grief, polycrisis grief and dismay at the rise of the right in all its forms are realistic reactions. But they will overwhelm us unless we look after ourselves. We need not to ignore that grief, but deal with it. Only then will we have the clarity to act.

 

[Rob Ray]

Might as well put this here as seems relevant to the thread topic... some thoughts from Rob Ray on the current situation. Some good points, although understandably very orientated to what's left of the anarchist scene and what it might do.

Part 1 Anarchism and the New Military Wave (pt.1) - Freedom News
Part 2 Anarchism and the New Military Wave (pt. 2) - Freedom News

Ta for the post, my main self-criticism of it is obv concrete proposals, which for the "utterly fucked" theme are currently contingent on anarchists cutting waaay back on the internecine bickering, snubbing, rumour milling etc which is not historically a strength of ours ...

 

[LDC]

Ta for the post, my main self-criticism of it is obv concrete proposals, which for the "utterly fucked" theme are currently contingent on anarchists cutting waaay back on the internecine bickering, snubbing, rumour milling etc which is not historically a strength of ours ...

The way round that for me is to largely (completely) give up on the anarchist scene/movement for anything more than being a political touchstone/source of comradeship and orientate any organisation and activity that we do around work & geographical area.

 

[Rob Ray]

Understandable, and I think you're almost certainly reflective of the vast majority of people who consider themselves anarchists in Britain. Trouble of course is that embedding local without connectivity elsewhere and a clear political project to go beyond atomised local issues restricts the ability to build wider/deeper in the long-term. I also don't think any of the current crop of federations have much in the way of legs for providing that structure mind. SolFed came closest for a while but is just too weighed down by byzantine internal systems designed for a completely different time and place.

 

[Aladdin]

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching,”
(attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.—William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277 (1953).

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Ta for the post, my main self-criticism of it is obv concrete proposals, which for the "utterly fucked" theme are currently contingent on anarchists cutting waaay back on the internecine bickering, snubbing, rumour milling etc which is not historically a strength of ours ...

Whilst this is true, my impression is that the bickering was dialled down a bit during periods of upticks in the class struggle - for example the miners strike and the poll tax?

 

[Rob Ray]

Yeah it often does abate when things really kick off, but more because everyone's busy than because the arguments have gone away. It returns with a vengeance as crisis subsides.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Tax The Rich campaign is going to have legs this next few years I think

And nationalisation of water and energy companies.

These are fairly mild social-democractic reforms, but there are things being said now that would have been decried as absolute fringe lunacy ten years ago.

 

[LDC]

Understandable, and I think you're almost certainly reflective of the vast majority of people who consider themselves anarchists in Britain. Trouble of course is that embedding local without connectivity elsewhere and a clear political project to go beyond atomised local issues restricts the ability to build wider/deeper in the long-term. I also don't think any of the current crop of federations have much in the way of legs for providing that structure mind. SolFed came closest for a while but is just too weighed down by byzantine internal systems designed for a completely different time and place.

I think any local/work organising should be politically driven and with clear (ish) politics from the get-go, rather than just some lukewarm 'community' organising around whatever issue that people hope will morph into something more 'revolutionary/political' one day in the future.

I think there's possibly also some space for anarchist organisations to act as a wider point for some people who are doing that kind of work/local organising can go 'back to' to develop ideas and theory more broadly, but yeah none of the current organisations seem to do that very well.

I also think do the former type of organising well and it'll create the need and ability to form wider/bigger structures and organisations.

(Edited for garbled words...)

 

[krtek a houby]

I think people are misunderstanding each other on this thread, including misunderstanding what chilango was trying to convey.

I think it is possible to be (and look, I don’t want to go all Gramscian here) realistically pessimistic about structures while having optimism for human decency and solidarity.

I think it is all too easy to wallow in the news cycle unhealthily, to the extend of feeling paralysed. Indeed, I do think that learned helplessness is something the powerful rely upon the rest of us having taken in.

And furthermore, I think it is possible to restrict one’s intake of all the doom without that meaning you’ve “buried your head in the sand”.

And, if I may, chilango , I took your intention in starting this thread to being a way to strike that balance. To say “let’s be realistic” rather than, as some seem to be taking it, “let’s wallow in doom”.

In other words, here’s the reality and here’s what we can do.

I personally think taking care of one’s mental health is important in being an effective activist. Climate grief, polycrisis grief and dismay at the rise of the right in all its forms are realistic reactions. But they will overwhelm us unless we look after ourselves. We need not to ignore that grief, but deal with it. Only then will we have the clarity to act.

Dukkha, and accepting it. And accepting that what follows and containing it.

 

[Ax^]

All I'm trying to do is help you understand that The Name of The Rose is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory...

 

[BigMoaner]

there’s definitely something insidious about being bombarded with stories and problems constantly that one is almost totally powerless over. Same with images of people’s perfect bodies/faces/lives. It becomes an exercise in self abuse almost. I’ve got into the habit of buying a Sunday paper each week and not paying much attention to the online news cycles. I don’t feel less “empowered” I feel instead like i have more mental and emotional space to do things like, eh, raise my kids, focus on hobbies, etc. There’s no real moral imperative to stay plugged into the news all the time, especially when 99% I can’t/don’t do anything about the horror anyway. What’s the point? I suppose the old Greek moral question should then be raised: what if everyone done that? Well yeah good question, what if everyone stopped watching the news?

 

[RichDelBoy]

Yup, we're fucked.

Social Media is the primary cause and the vast global over-reaction to a pandemic was the straw that broke the proverbial camel.
Arguably we wouldn't have had the latter without the former.

 

[krtek a houby]

Yup, we're fucked.

Social Media is the primary cause and the vast global over-reaction to a pandemic was the straw that broke the proverbial camel.
Arguably we wouldn't have had the latter without the former.

How should pandemics be reacted to?

 

[hitmouse]

It's just a question of strategy for me; what is our ability to collectively impact something? If we have none then there's nothing to be gained (and plenty lost) by getting too bothered by it. The slightly drunk comment I deleted on the Quaker thread was in part motivated by that, in that I think much of the left is caught up in this emotional rollercoaster of outrage and horror at various (often quite minor) things, and exhausts itself on complaining about things that it can't do anything about and often were also an entirely a predictable consequence of what the people involved did.

Well, I have at least been practicing what I preach by not getting around to reading the relevant bit of the Quaker thread. Generally speaking, I think it's very easy to become overwhelmed and just fall into this thing of passively doomscrolling and consuming information. For whatever reason or reasons, Trump is very good at inducing this affect/effect. Potentially strategically useful information (eg where are the immigration detention facilities near me, what are likely targets for immigration enforcement raids, where are my pension funds invested and who are the decision-makers for that pension fund) doesn't have that same numbingly addictive quality but it's much more useful to concentrate on imo.

Tax The Rich campaign is going to have legs this next few years I think

I mean, I'm (I hope) far from the most buzzkill person on this thread, but do you really think so? Cos unless anyone has a secret plan for getting John McDonnell into No 11, that means asking Starmer and Reeves to tax the rich, and they're just going to tell anyone suggesting that to fuck off. And then you get on to questions like leverage - does anyone have an actual plan for making Reeves and co tax the rich against all their inclinations, or would it just be a People's Assembly-style march through London with all the impact those marches always have, and maybe a trending hashtag on whatever the currently popular social media site is?

I think people are misunderstanding each other on this thread, including misunderstanding what chilango was trying to convey.

I think it is possible to be (and look, I don’t want to go all Gramscian here) realistically pessimistic about structures while having optimism for human decency and solidarity.

I think it is all too easy to wallow in the news cycle unhealthily, to the extend of feeling paralysed. Indeed, I do think that learned helplessness is something the powerful rely upon the rest of us having taken in.

And furthermore, I think it is possible to restrict one’s intake of all the doom without that meaning you’ve “buried your head in the sand”.

And, if I may, chilango , I took your intention in starting this thread to being a way to strike that balance. To say “let’s be realistic” rather than, as some seem to be taking it, “let’s wallow in doom”.

In other words, here’s the reality and here’s what we can do.

I personally think taking care of one’s mental health is important in being an effective activist. Climate grief, polycrisis grief and dismay at the rise of the right in all its forms are realistic reactions. But they will overwhelm us unless we look after ourselves. We need not to ignore that grief, but deal with it. Only then will we have the clarity to act.

Mentioned this over on the hopelessness thread, but I'm currently in the middle of reading Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat by Hannah Proctor, and I would really recommend it to anyone thinking through these questions:

Burnout

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists...

www.versobooks.com

I've not got to the end yet so I dunno if she tells us what we need to do to fix everything, though.

Yeah it often does abate when things really kick off, but more because everyone's busy than because the arguments have gone away. It returns with a vengeance as crisis subsides.

I remember this being an interesting look at those dynamics from 2013, as the early-2010s anti-austerity wave was breaking and rolling back:

After the Crest

CrimethInc. After the Crest The Life Cycle of Movements 2013

theanarchistlibrary.org

 

[nogojones]

I had an A level economics teacher in the early 80s who predicted that the biggest problem facing mankind within the following 20 years or so, was what would everyone do with all the leisure time they would have as technology progressed.

Like capitalists were going to pay people a week's money for 2 days work.

Our headmaster was on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum. At our leaving assembly he said "good luck out there. A lot of you probably won't be able to get a job"

80's Coventry wasn't the most buoyant labour market

 

[nogojones]

I actually find the news quite entertaining, as it unendingly confirms what I used to go about smugly saying to everybody the world would end up looking like once the cold war ended. From November 1989 onwards I couldn't abide the smugness of the liberals of both left and right, with their baseless complacency about their own correctness, nor the lunatic optimism of those Trots and others on the radical left who assumed that the death of what more or less the whole world assumed was communism in practice would somehow eventually lead to some form of communism or socialism.

It was always coming to this.

I saw the thread title and thought of you. This thread is your playground

 

[RD2003]

Our headmaster was on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum. At our leaving assembly he said "good luck out there. A lot of you probably won't be able to get a job"

80's Coventry wasn't the most buoyant labour market

At my school some teachers used to revel in telling us that we're basically losers who at least once had a chance of being factory fodder or office menials. Not so anymore they said, just wait and see. This was the spring of 1979 and the anticipated Thatcher victory. We were all due to leave in the summer at 16-there was no 6th form at the school. You could go elsewhere to do A levels if they'd have you, but staying on until 18 was actually quite a rare thing, at least in my neck of the woods.

 

[nogojones]

At my school some teachers used to revel in telling us that we're basically losers who at least once had a chance of being factory fodder or office menials. Not so anymore they said, just wait and see. This was the spring of 1979 and the anticipated Thatcher victory. We were all due to leave in the summer at 16-there was no 6th form at the school. You could go elsewhere to do A levels if they'd have you, but staying on until 18 was actually quite a rare thing, at least in my neck of the woods.

They can't have been all that bad surely. They must have helped nurture your effervescent and chirpy soul.

 

[RD2003]

They can't have been all that bad surely. They must have helped nurture your effervescent and chirpy soul.

These were the left wing teachers. I think they might have been trying to wake us up and, in a roundabout way, instil a bit of political consciousness.

They were pretty cynical about it all though. Cynicism wasn't in short supply where I come from.

 

[RichDelBoy]

How should pandemics be reacted to?

I'd say not pissing away an extraordinary amount of money on ineffective measures, incompetence and corruption would have left the country in a much less periolous and damaged state.

My point about social media stands though.......

 

[krtek a houby]

I'd say not pissing away an extraordinary amount of money on ineffective measures, incompetence and corruption would have left the country in a much less periolous and damaged state.

My point about social media stands though.......

Your government of the day certainly fucked around while the people suffered, their utter contempt for them (alive or dead) was pretty evident.

As to the measures - just to clarify - do you believe they were essential in preventing deaths and the spread of the virus, or it was a lot of fuss about nothing?

 

[RichDelBoy]

Your government of the day certainly fucked around while the people suffered, their utter contempt for them (alive or dead) was pretty evident.

As to the measures - just to clarify - do you believe they were essential in preventing deaths and the spread of the virus, or it was a lot of fuss about nothing?

In the UK.

• Long Blanket lockdowns were daft - the risk profile was established fairly early on. As a healthy bloke in my late 40's I was happy enough with the risk.
• Paying furlough at such a high rate for so long was daft (see above).

 

[krtek a houby]

In the UK.

• Long Blanket lockdowns were daft - the risk profile was established fairly early on. As a healthy bloke in my late 40's I was happy enough with the risk.
• Paying furlough at such a high rate for so long was daft (see above).

And all those who weren't healthy blokes in their late 40s, how about them?

What rate would have been acceptable pay for you?

 

[Dystopiary]

Oh God.

 

[RevolutionSound]

In the UK.

• Long Blanket lockdowns were daft - the risk profile was established fairly early on. As a healthy bloke in my late 40's I was happy enough with the risk.
• Paying furlough at such a high rate for so long was daft (see above).

Lockdown wasn't to necessarily protect you personally.

 

[danny la rouge]

- the risk profile was established fairly early on. As a healthy bloke in my late 40's I was happy enough with the risk.

I’m glad to hear you were happy enough with the risk to older people and babies and those with diabetes or asthma or COPD, the immuno-compromised, and so on. Because fuck those wankers, right?

 

[DotCommunist]

If anything quite a few bells who have never experienced the very effective bits of state power allowed to flourish- MH sectioning, prison, care, benefits, visa and borders and so on- were driven raving by finding out that yes, the power does still exist to make you stay home and eat your shreddies unless really needed to keep goods and vital services flowing. Because theres a proper sickness abroad ffs, an airborne one. Then the extremely thinly veiled, corruption and pisstaking of the political/media clique compounding the sense that Someone Is On It here. all eagerly whipped along by a media that had just finished debasing itself entirely to pretend a wider anti austerity movement channelled into a social democrat wave within the labour party was in fact the fourth reich. So here we all are.