Long post coming up.

I started my first full-time blue collar job a few months ago. I live in a purple state. I expected all the guys I worked with to be Trump guys. Only one I've encountered has been truly a fascist, though he said nothing about Trump. The rest are just kind of ideologically adrift. A different coworker I've mentioned here a few times I've been riding with for months. Seven hours a day, five days a week, talking. Personally I like him. I guess I would describe him as an ideologically malleable Berner. Sometimes I despair about changing him. This last week, though, he was really impressing me with some of the things he was saying. We talked about landback, ending America's imperialist wars, China, Russia, and I've even started using the word "communism." "Communism is about workers running society, what's wrong with that?" I said. No pushback from him. I have not told him that I'm a communist. But how can he not suspect?

Then a few days ago I talked about the PNN guy on tiktok harassing dickheads on at the Capitol, and my coworker basically said that we should confine our efforts to peaceful protests. (I live in a very rural area and some of these guys are just living in a permanent fight-or-flight mode it seems, they really tense up when I talk about protestors, they all want to live in the middle of the woods, they say they hate people, and they and always empathize with whoever is being protested.) That was where our conversation ended since we had arrived at our job site.

He has little American flags at his house, which his girlfriend (fifteen years older than him) is apparently close to losing; he just bought a truck he cannot afford; he ran out of money and was unable to buy lunch once; he has several kids from two relationships (difficult to keep track) but two of them are trans; he grew up working on farms because he was unable to afford school supplies (he is white). He thinks the government is oppressing him (and has no awareness of which class constrols the government), but has spoken positively of the police. He was shocked when I mentioned that Ansarallah has claimed to have struck the USS Eisenhower multiple times, and said that the military would not lie about getting hit. (Admittedly it would help if we had some photographic evidence to prove this here.)

I've just been thinking that usually people do one hour a week of therapy. I'm doing about twenty hours a week of therapy with this guy. I'm not a qualified therapist (most therapists worship Mayo Pete), but I've been in therapy, I've read Freud and Lacan and Reich, I'm a Marxist (and have studied all kinds of texts for years), I have some organizing experience, and, most importantly, I post a lot on hexbear. Even with all this, I'm still up against this guy's roughly thirty-five years of existence in a reactionary hellhole. I'm up against Facebook, which he is constantly browsing for treats he cannot afford. I'm up against everyone he talks with, everyone he knows, because there are at best only a handful of communists for a hundred miles in every direction. The hardest thing I'm up against, which my own therapist (a good guy) has told me, is the fact that my coworker doesn't think he has a problem. The client, the patient, cannot change unless he wants to. Insert lightbulb joke. It's okay, my coworker thinks, to be ideologically adrift in a raging ocean of fascism. I like him but don't trust him and don't consider him a friend. He would ditch me for his job in a heartbeat. There is no solidarity at this place. And while my coworkers might be ideologically adrift, they might not be interested in voting for Biden or Trump, they always come down on the side of white supremacy and helping the company's owners get richer.

Think about hexbear's demographics. I SUSPECT, but am not sure, that most of us here are radicalized labor aristocrats. Most of us are white with college degrees, which means, in this apartheid society, that most of the people we know are going to be the same. And let me tell you, the life of the labor aristocrat, even in this shithole, is a good one. I've seen so much fucked up shit in this job, heard so much fucked up shit you wouldn't believe. It basically amounts to people working full-time but either being homeless or on the edge of homelessness, having no access (forgive the term) to necessities. The vast majority of labor aristocrats have no awareness of this. They, we live such pampered lives, it blows my mind. To get up, drive to work, spend all day sitting in an office doing unproductive labor, chatting about TV and restaurants and weekend nonsense at the air-conditioned water cooler, and then to come home and watch Netflix, the biggest worry being your impostor syndrome, ah, how easy that is. I used to do it until I moved back to the USA from overseas, and found that even as a qualified white liberal, I couldn't get a good job. So I radicalized.

If you live this kind of life, why question it? Why change it? Come out as a communist, risk your career for Palestine, and you're in for a world of pain, at least in the short term. Friends, family, and career will all abandon you. It's always been easy for labor aristocrats, so why risk that ease? Things have always been the same, so how could they change?