Sometimes when a socialist is lil’ booj/labor aristocracker, I see this canard used to console them that just because they’re a part of an exploiting class doesn’t mean that they can’t be a traitor to that class and aid the revolution. A similar sentiment is expressed when someone brings up that Engels, Lenin, and Mao all came from priveleged backgrounds, or when someone brings up the clapback that Zhou Enlai made against Kruschev. However, I really can’t shake the feeling that that’s just copium, especially in the context of the imperial core.
When not invested into making more money, the income of this strata goes into consuming treats. So, so many treats. Services like Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, and Steam are high powered treat beams aimed directly at their brains. On top of this, the places people own their own homes (or rent, but they make enough income that they don’t need to worry about not making rent) are invariably in white flight crackerburbs and gentrified parts of cities; I like to call such places the crackersphere.
Considering being an actual communist requires being among the masses, this presents a pretty big issue for would-be communists within the crackershpere. How is one supposed to relate and build comradery with proletarians when they share none of their struggles? Not many are willing to give away their things and become proletarians themselves. Hell, the most famous living socialist in the Great Satan is currently a millionaire parasocial treatboy.
If this post seems kind of half cooked and rambly, that’s because it is. This is a thought that’s been haunting my mind for awhile now.
Edit: I’ve read all of the responses to this post so far and you’re all right. I definitely have a lot of Christian idealism I’ve yet to purge from my mind, and it’s an individualist lens that ignores how to figure out how to collectively change material conditions in favor of individual moral pissing contests that are as connected to reality as debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. This logic, if taken to its extreme, results in the kind of left deviationism perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
While this is a point often used as a purity test, I think I posted this as more of a call for help. The atomization and alienation of this society is literally driving me insane.
Yes, it kinda is like that. However, I’ll just ignore what OP posted in the body because it’s not the way to view this problem and I don’t have much else to say about that. And it is a problem. Those who claim otherwise look up, shake their heads and put the blame on a fetishism of Christian martyrdom. And by up I mean the specific quote above Lemmygrad. They should read Losurdo but these nerds can’t hold a consistent thought for more than 5 seconds. It’s funny because the book non-violence by him speaks about this and it mainly related back to the importance of improving the productive forces as quickly as possible, which doesn’t concern us yet. Now, shaming them without a way to channel this into something positive will surely do nothing good for anyone. It’s a very frustrating contradiction, one where the West got their prosperity from imperialism, and to build a movement on class suicide is obviously difficult.
About elitism, an accusation from a comment here in this thread, I read the book on psychology they recently recommended and it reeks of Nietzschean philosophy all the way to the end (The book is Psychology of the Private Individual) Many sentences and opinions are virtually identical from Beyond Good and Evil and it’s vile elitism. All this to say western leftists’ consciousness is polluted by Nietzschean thought. As for this “purity testing” BS, it doesn’t mean anything. We can still work together in any organization, but you are not immune to criticisms and if you’re offended because you got criticised, who’s doing the purity testing here?
Barely started Losurdo’s Class war the other day, do you happen to know when/where he takes down Nietzchean will to power in particular? I’ve read western leftists far back as 100yrs ago abandon all of Nietzsche but they won’t abandon that concept proposed by him and try their best to spin it as useful to the movement.
He has a whole book about Nietzsche and it’s his most thorough study. It’s called Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel. I highly recommend the book but be warned, it’s extremely dense and complex lol