Raise the bucket from the ground

Another great post from Kasama:

There is an old communist saying “We have to raise the bucket from the ground” — meaning that we can’t control where things start from. People enter into radical activity and struggle (as Lenin once said) “with all their prejudices” and then we (together) “raise the bucket” from there. And this is not just a matter of the middle classes and their prejudices. Anyone who doesn’t think the most oppressed enter struggle with very mixed ideas and baggage…. well they don’t know very much about the oppressed in real life.

This means (obviously) that many people in the U.S. come into political life with patriotic misconceptions (about history but also about the current U.S. role in the world). Even the very oppressed often arrive with non-rational, mystical or semi-religious notions about how society works (which helps underscore non-rational conspiracy theories).

They are sometimes only thinking about how to better THEIR personal position (or the position of people like them) — and so we get notions of “buy American” or “energy independence as a security issue” or “maintain U.S. dominance in the world.” Or “speaking as [fill in the section of people]” — as if our struggle is not global and universal, or as if our view of reality can’t be held in common.

People sometimes arrive thinking that things are now terrible and worsening — but still believing that somewhere (in the recent past, or some distant past) “things” were somehow better — and so we get slogans like “take America back” (as if “we” every had it!), and as if there is some previous ideal that we want to return to, or as if the “founding fathers” had the right idea that has since been perverted (and so on).

Read more here.