Comradeship // Freechat

Fair warning, this post may be a bit long-winded and scatterbrained.

I am an 18 year old Cuban-American boy living in the United States, in Florida. The world feels so... decayed now.

Over the course of the last two years I was politically awoken, and in the I've gone from 'centrist' gusano, to libbed up, to socdem, to demsoc, to ML. In the last few months in particular I have become radicalized as I witness the vile sickness Capitalism has wrought unfold before me. I cannot stand it any longer.

I come from a family of reactionary gusanos—a mix of former Cuban bourgeois farm owners and petty bourgeois Cuban diaspora. Eventually, my family fell from their petty bourgeois status, my uneducated father who is just barely to the left of MAGA becoming a blue collar worker, and my mother becoming a labor aristocrat working at a college. I have witnessed them be shredded to bits by the capitalist machine. My father's body ground to a pulp and my mother's eyes buried in their sockets, sleepless nights and restless weekends. And yet I still see them pay lip service to atrocities of bombing cities and mowing down protesters that Capital so enjoys.

I have witnessed Capital organize wars and butcher millions for the interests of a few powerful men. I have witnessed capitalists be exposed for the organized rape and murder of thousands of women and children—meat to the capitalists all the same—and the supposedly just liberal democracy be impotent to stop them.

I have walked around stores here in Florida, by my very home, as ash rained from the sky and smoke blotted out the sun. The Everglades is burning again. Charred leaves fall in my hand as thick black smog causes me to cough—the poison in the air pervades my lungs. The failures of Capitalism literally rain down around me and fill my chest as I breathe, and no one around me but a select few seem to care.

I am a year out from finishing my college degree in Electrical Engineering, I am lucky enough to have gotten a full ride scholarship. Many of my peers weren't. Many of my peers do not care. Many of my peers gather around Lockheed Martin recruiters at career fairs. Many of my peers and of the generation to follow me shamble like mindless zombies, only interested in the next cheap and easy dopamine hit. How can one who doesn't understand the true nature of capitalism do anything but despair when looking at the state of the world from within the Imperial Core? We stand upon a mountain of skulls. Not one person seems to care enough to look down. We have become dependent on our first world addictions of cheap food, entertainment, and comfort, and I do not absolve myself of such a sin.

The mass surveillance crushes me with existential dread, and it is fruitless to attempt to escape it. I have replaced many things with more private alternatives, but the further down the line I move the more I realize everything I do is traceable back to me. Even if I was able to eliminate it the less of a footprint I leave, and the harder it becomes to communicate with others. I plan to have a family in the future. I feel as though I am being watched right now. What will Capital do to them when there comes time for a new Red Scare? Is there any hope for me to have a family here? How can I escape this place? With what money? Will they have sealed off these borders when I am well off enough to move away? Will the dollar be worth anything or will I be rotting in a jail cell? I do not care if I die in what is to come. If I died for the cause, it was worth it. I cannot say with the same certainty that I would be okay with my future children or wife being forced into this violence, though my rational mind understands they already are.

I would love to organize, to meet comrades in real life and speak of the cause with them. I already have in some respects. Me and a friend crept to the left and ended up radicalizing each other, together! My sister is theoryless and a bit of a screenager, but is sympathetic to MLs. I have radicalized my partner of four years and introduced her to some basic theory. I am working on opening other people's eyes as best I can, but I can only do so much when my parents have my constant GPS location from my car. How am I supposed to help organize unions late into the night when my sleep deprived mother will refuse to go to bed because I haven't come home yet? When my parents may very well kick me out if they found out I was a communist?

I look back on these choices I make and even more I feel some creeping inkling of guilt. Those in the Global South do not have a luxury of such a choice. Regardless, I want to leave. I somehow want to escape the West. God, I wish I could just pick up and flee to China.

I understand I have had quite the comfortable and ignorant life up to now, and I find it hard to shake the effects of that reality. Those effects seem to have softened me. To make me afraid. To make me self-pity. So I ask to you, my comrades: how do you cope with thoughts and struggles like these? Thank you for any input you may have.