I haven’t thought much about this yet personally, but my hot momentary take is that it has to do with class consciousness. I’m going to ignore the volume of anti-labour/anti-communist propaganda in capitalist nations for a moment as I’m not sure that’s as important to this. I also just read the essay "Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” which was pretty hot on lemmygrad a month ago which has definitely changed my perspective.

People in the west do not have class consciousness, or even the sense that class struggle exists and is happening. I think if you’d ask random people on the street they’d tell you that class is basically just income brackets.

Capitalism forces all of us to be selfish to an extent, so without a base level of class awareness and active class consciousness we often choose the path of highest rewar and lowest risk for ourselves. When the going gets tough in a union building situation for example, we can cash out as it were, and rat on management, thus turning the situation positive for ourselves.

Whereas in socialist countries, there is a common sense of class consciousness. Even if the thing your union or workplace or municipality is doing in this moment may not benefit you directly in this moment, you have been given the tools to see how it will be beneficial for your community, your class, and thus for you in the future. Or maybe it’s not beneficial to you personally at all, but again with that class consciousness in mind you still work towards that goal or at least step aside to allow others to do what they need to do to for the advancement of the cause.

I also question this idea of leftist infighting. I see a lot of it simply coming from the fact that a lot of self-proclaimed leftists aren’t leftists at all, and they get in to fights with radical anti-capitalists such as MLs. There’s not going to be any unity there without breaking the ideology to the point where it’s useless.

In my opinion, the biggest problem in the west is not in fighting. That was a problem for us too. The biggest problem in the west is that the state is so powerful and efficient, it has mastered the art of population subjugation and propaganda. Obviously, this is many times truer in the US first, other settler countries second, and the rest of the West third.

In the US, this is so true that it has become part of its culture. Anti-labor unions, focusing on yourself and viewing your collegaues as competitors, not sharing your salary, etc. All this is culture that sept through from propaganda.

It has mostly to do with cult like mentality that has been on the culture since the first time a religion got side to side with an state. If you lool closely, the bourgeoisie is defending teeth and nails the supposed freedom of religion because it do really does a good job of concealing any bit of critical thinking. And the bougies learnt to do the same with a cultist mentality regarding idealism, patriotism, nationalism, identity, individualism, and more, the same way the nobility did in their own context.

It has to do a lot with propaganda, aka: indoctrination.

I think this partly has to do with the fact that, historically, material conditions and the availability of consumer goods in the west have been generally better than those of countries where socialist revolutions have taken place (for obvious reasons and through no fault of socialism, “thanks” to imperialist and colonialist exploitation). People lacking class consciousness thus do not immediately see why socialist ideals or even revolution are worth immediate struggle. The rise of China and decline of the West might soon change this dynamic.

While I was brooding at home after work (ruining the rest of my day) I realize that this whole thing is a really optimal scenario for the boss. In fact if I was a boss, I’d specifically try to hire aggressive-ish employees.

Any boss who’s actually smart should see this as a less optimal scenario. Sure, in the short term you might be able to take a divide-and-conqueror approach to your employees. But in the long term, it poisons the workplace and makes you use loose good employees. My workplace is unionized and the leadership has proven themselves to me to be committed to creating a genuinely pleasant work environment. People stay there for a long, long time. I’ve been there for seven years and I’m on the lower end of the scale, whereas at many other IT departments that would be high. That is beneficial to the organization because loosing an employee means loosing institutional knowledge and training up a new hire.