As leftists, we tend to assign a lot of blame to systems, and that's good because that's where a lot of problems come from. But the coronavirus nonsense in the US has made me reconsider and wonder how much of our problems are really because our systems are fucked up, and how much is because people suck. Obviously, the government bungled the coronavirus response and made things considerably worse. But even if they hadn't, it's kind of hard to imagine that Americans would actually work together for the common good and not be entitled shitheads about it. As another example, while climate change certainly is a big systemic problem, it's also true that Americans tend to have larger carbon footprints than people in other developed countries.
I was watching Luna Oi on Youtube and she talked about Vietnam's coronavirus response. Some of what she said had to do with the government's swift and effective response, but she also talked about ordinary people taking it seriously and chiding people to wear masks. I've also thought about culture and Vietnam whenever chud libertarians use the Vietnam War as an example for how they could fight the state, and it's like, if you put an American chud next to a Vietnamese guerilla, they're about as different as two people can be, and if you consider those differences for two minutes it becomes clear that it's completely unrealistic for the former to fill the latter's shoes. To a certain extent (though certainly less so), I think the same critique can be applied to American leftists who make the comparison.
So with electoralism being such a dead-end, and with revolution looking pretty dicey, I wonder if it's worthwhile to work on things that may not solve problems directly, but might shift the way people think and act to be less, uh, you know, American. I don't know what that looks like exactly - maybe like community gardens or something. I know that climate change has us on a clock and that there are many other urgent problems right now, but it's hard to picture how anything gets solved with the way things are, so I figure it's worth looking at things from another angle. I don't really know what can be done about straight-up chuds though.
Idk, kinda just rambling/brainstorming here, thoughts?
I don't know enough to make a strong argument, but I think the Aztecs are a good example of how culture and economics are important. The Aztec empire's brutality definitely had strong economic underpinnings, but the form of that domination was strongly dictated by culture, to the extent that I don't know that there's anything else like it. Fighting entirely artificial wars served the economic interests of maintaining hegemony, but also a core cultural goal of attaining victims for sacrifice to keep the machinery of the universe running.
Inca are another culture that doesn't seem to fit the mold. Again, I'm not an expert at all, but they had this weird, like... agrarian state theological redistributive model, where agricultural surplus was owned by the theocratic state, but redistributed to the people. I wish I knew more about it, but it really doesn't seem to have fit the mold of any economic system in Europe.
And Islam has some unique elements, too. Zakat is a sort of quasi-official redistributive model that was intended to look after the needs of even the poorest muslims. It's been more or less formalized over the centuries, but at least in some times and places it was a very formalized and organized mode of economic welfare that, again, doesn't really have a clear parallels in European economics.