chapotraphouse

I totally get where you’re coming from OP, but bear in mind that as stupid as this may sound…touching grass is a privilege in the cool zone.

You’re right that cities are awesome, but no one knows this better than rich people: hence why they decided living in a city should be a luxury and all us poors have to fuck off to the suburbs in bumfuck nowhere. It’s a lighter, more subtle form of ghettoization and ghettos are a breeding ground for useful idiots for reactionaries. I say this as someone who’s never been able to leave the sticks. While it may not be nearly as violent as good ol’ fashioned ghettoization, but suburbs do have their negative impacts on the working class who call it home: absolute isolation, nonexistent community, promotes consumerism, car dependency, and not only is it a “jobs desert”. It also serves as a “culture desert”. The sticks are just that soullessly boring and you end up missing out on some really good experiences.

TL;DR: I agree with your main idea, but remember that porky REALLY doesn’t want you or me touching grass. I should write an effortpost about this tbh

Memory of a lot of people during BLM that were committed to revolutionary burning of cop stations on paper but very wary of leaving the house to meet people at protests.

Sadly capitalists have realized this and have done everything they can to make cities more and more unliveable

One of things I realized going back home is just how much of a bubble suburbanites are in. I mean I always knew this ever since I moved out of the suburbs, but it started to dawn on me how that warps your political conscious.

For example how am I supposed to convince a suburbanite that homeless is not just a natural outcome of laziness but a conscious choice by the capitalist system? These people see a homeless person maybe once in a year. They are just so far removed from how the capitalist system fails people. And it's so easy to get them to be hostile towards immigrants because they are in this bubble where the status quo must be preserved forever and anything that challenges that is bad.

I realized that you can't really reason with them because they are in this bubble and you are speaking a different language than them when you talk about reality.

I'd be interested if anyone has done any marxist analysis on suburban/urban/rural living conditions and what can be done about it, cause it just seems hopeless

Urban areas with a high density of population are always more left-wing than rural areas.

nah. unless you mean that places with more people have more total leftists than place without people... which is maybe not a revelation. though i suspect you mean that urban dwellers are more likely to be left-wing than rural dwellers. which, i reiterate: nah.

having lived in and serviced the glittering metropolises and their antipodes, what Phil Neel describes as the "Far Hinterland", where one can find the bones of extractive industries being actively scavenged, human trafficking rings feeding into furloughed prison labor gangs, indigenous communities sharing traditional ecological knowledge and protecting natural resources... it's pretty easy for people to become lonely losers in an anonymous, world class city and it's pretty easy to learn the names and relation to capital of most people in a tiny rural village within a few weeks and a few conversations.

the interface matters less than the person and their will to meet and connect with others.

in many cases, for all their activism and protests, the cities are not invariably the site of history's successful revolutions nor are they what capital formations seem to struggle to control. che's memoirs talk extensively about the failures of the urban socialists to achieve more than symbolic acts and the successes of the rural people in recognizing the opportunities and rapdily aligning, at great personal risk, to resist batista and his murderers. by the time the revolution came down from the mountains, the tide had long turned. i personally have seen multiple wildcat teachers' strikes start in tiny rural towns, spreading across a state only to dash upon the rocks of larger urban political machines, where the insurrectionary energy is rapidly defused into lip service for liberal reforms.

in the way that david harvey says it is easier to teach marxism to prisoners than university students, materialism and class confict is likely easier to resonate with those who are not buffered from being ground between the gears by the features of civic life. and civic life is nowhere more degraded in america than the mysterious interior that every movie for the past 50 years has been framing as a place of backwardness, incivility and evil. which, as we all know, is actually the official motto and organizing principle of staten island.

I honestly don't think this is so correct. Maybe there's a marginal increase of socialists in urban areas (which I'd be more inclined to attribute to access to university education) than rural areas. I do think urban areas where people interact with a variety of people are significantly more likely to have good takes on social issues, but mostly just end up being a lib instead of a lib

Actually, socialism is when you

Get to know your coworkers

Community outside work is important too ofc, but getting to know your coworkers is the first step if you want to organize. And you might discover that you work with some cool people!

Wtf I'm a fascist now.

Jk, I actually enjoy socializing, even if I'm drained by the end of it because I'm masking so hard. But that's more of a me problem.

@barryamelton@lemmy.ml This post is not equating the Nazis with an actual socialist party, though I agree it could be a bit more clear, what it seems to be saying is that more insular homogenous communities are more likely breeding grounds for fascism.

Unironically true. You cannot be socialist without community and you cannot have community if you do not know anyone

In Capitalist America, a protracted people's war starts from the radicalized cities and expands towards the reactionary countryside.