Yea circa 2016 my thought process was "America sucks, I hate living here" to "America sucks, it must be razed to the ground"

Giving up on workers in the most powerful parts of the world (no matter how pampered they are by capital) means just giving up and watching third world workers throw themselves at the empire's tanks and jets over and over again until something different magically happens. It also implies that your revolutionary potential comes only from how exploited you are. If that were the case then socialist revolutions (not nationalist ones) would have happened in every former colony instead of just a few (like China or Burkina Faso) and that political consciousness isn't real force.

Western workers have a responsibility to build a left in their countries that is capable of throwing its weight around instead of shirking that responsibility and turning leftism into a "its not happening, its too hard, someone else far away will do it". Finally, if and when left revolutions do happen in the third world, they are likely to have mutate into nationalist reactions when the west attacks them. There is no future in which the left succeeds for good in which workers of the most industrialized countries are asleep.

After the Bernie thing, someone posted in r/CTH a picture of Lenin with the text "where did all that being you, back to me...". And then I started reading Lenin.

The real horseshoe theory is when you go past Maoist/Third Worldist and end up back at anarchism because the best thing to do from within the imperial core is to prioritizing dismantling the whole thing and building mutual aid networks to support people that will otherwise either suffer and die or be caught up by reactionaries.

The best thing the United States can do for the world is balkanize and die. I agree that revolution will not come from the imperial core; the American civil religion is too strong to break while the state (which has been entirely captured by capitalists) exists. If all my friends and family weren't in this godforesaken country I would leave yesterday tbh.

When change is forced upon the global north, it will still be an internal change, just one triggered by external conditions. And that internal change, whenever it happens, will need local principled and organized communists. So, the thing to do is the same as always, educate yourself and others, agitate, organize.