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Working class has been recuperated to mean a cultural/aesthetic signifier now, not an actual class. At least in the popular consciousness.
hmm wonder why the PMC media would create that impression? :soviet-hmm:
You mean the 40 year old asshole who owns a landscaping company, drives a lifted f-150, listens to all the latest country hits, wears a pristine condition Carhartt jacket, has Salt Life, Trump 2020, and thin blue line punisher skull bumper stickers, and owns a lakefront property and a boat isn't working class????
But he's a genuine, masculine southern guy! He drives a big truck - and those can haul things! He swears he uses it to haul things! He wears jeans to work! That's what working class is, right????
Must be a suburbs thing. I've never met anyone like this, but I do see them in large southern cities in the burbs, typical middle class haunts, etc.
"blue collar" vs "white collar" its literally described as an aesthetic difference
Accept that capitalists have more control over that word than we do and start using other language like "wage earners" "rent payers" "servants" "producers" "employees" etc. Nobody knows what a "proletariat" is and if they do the only time they have heard of it is in the context of the DOTP so it's very scary.
These types are what would be called labor aristocrats, no? High skill trade workers who usually have a union and make a lot. It's a reactionary right-wing culture in the usa, the cult of tradition is still probably hanging onto tradesmen still being the "working class" while everyone else are lazy burger flippers.
Nope this sucks
Of course tradesmen in unions are working class, in fact isn't having a union the ideal? Its just that all other working people are in the working class too. Dividing people with the same class interests into groups like "labor aristocracy" is just stupid.
labor aristocracy is a seasoned term used by Marxists for a long time
It just feels needlessly divisive in this context. I'd understand applying it more to managers and such whose class interests are closer to the bourgeoisie, but tradesmen are working class in every sense
Just leave the term out of the conversation. It's not useful for labor organizing until you already have a powerful labor org. It's an imperialism thing, it never ever needs to be a term used at a union meeting unless your union actually has leverage or could gain leverage over part of the global supply chain. If you're in that position you already have a super radical union. Until workers in the imperial core can actually have a say in their participation in the global supply chain via worker emancipation can we actually do anything about it.
It is, but I just want to point out that using it in the company of anyone who is not already radicalized is dogshit tactics.
To the average western worker, being told by a leftist that "you are part of the labor aristocrasy and your wage is paid off of the backs of poor people in the global south" doesn't really sound any different than a chud saying "poor people today have smartphones, flatscreen tv's and AC, so they're actually better off than royalty 500 years ago".
Even though the former statement is objectively correct and the latter statement is utter nonsense, they are both going to be interpreted as "fuck you, you have no right to complain".
So it's definitely not something we should just randomly bring up while having lunch at work. Save it for the reading circle.
You’re right but if I’m being contentious here I’ll say wages are not even being paid off by the global south but by the lowest class and income people in the country. There’s people far below the wrung of skilled union laborers.
Agreed 100%, but I wasn't specifically thinking about skilled union laborers, just western workers in general.
using it in the company of anyone who is not already radicalized is dogshit tactics.
We're on a tiny explicitly communist forum that is the legacy of a moderate sized socialist subreddit which started as a fanclub for a radlib white boy podcast.
Who the hell here is "not already radicalized"
That's exactly my point though. Did you not read the last line?
So it’s definitely not something we should just randomly bring up while having lunch at work. Save it for the reading circle.
The labor aristocracy is the residents of the Imperial core that although being exploited as workers also exploit a shit load of third world labor. It's the first world. Like, probably you, definitely me.
Office workers have more of a case for being "labor aristocracy" than the guys in OP.
Ultimately this is just trite culture war bullshit that gets used to let people believe that THEY are the True, Good, Blessed "working class" - the Christlike bringers of salvation - and actually those other people are wicked labor aristocracy/reactionary/PMC shitlibs/unskilled lumpen etc.
These labor aristocrats should be put in a guillotine and their jobs given away to those who never had the opportunity to work a skilled job before.
:wut: is this a bit account or conservative troll account :diaz-canel-troll:
Why? Because the ruling class wants people to think this way. If people identify with all other professionals as what they are - workers, you get, well, class solidarity.
What's really fucking funny and sad about this shit is when bernie was running, the worst fucking ghouls ever like Sally Albright, Khive goons, and pete platitude fans tried framing "the working class" as some type of white only dog whistle. I genuinely don't believe that is what bernie meant at all lol—but i suppose there was some sad truth to what can be considered "the working class" in some people's minds. "The working class" has definitely been used to imply white or white passing, and they are the workers of the country, who keep it running or the idea of that. This type of idea is just ingrained in this blood soaked country, it's everywhere.
It is very akin to the reactions whenever Corbyn would talk about the rich and seemingly every brit automatically assuming that it was a antisemitic dog whistle. Recognizing dog whistles is a good thing, but it is also wielded in a very cynical way against the left.
that type of idpol shit is definitely a cudgel, which has been shaped and formed though the years. It's incredibly blunt and can be effective, a lot of people recognize how race, religion, or culture can be wielded but still fall to it due to the mass of the swings. It's everywhere, it's really hard for a lot of people to figure out what actually matters, but they also know something seriously fucked up
big city bad gay people black people in bad city not real american bad ew gross bad urban crime poor black bad city
first history since Marxism came out of Europe there the "proletariat" was mostly white, mostly male factory workers. Then propaganda/recuperation sees governments like Nazi Germany and the United States appropriate leftist imagery to appeal to the proles and build a "national working class" to exclude immigrants/minorities.
The search engine is an invention of white men from the imperial core that uses search data generated by a society dominated by white men which means it's machine learning is biased towards the perceptions of white men and thus all portrayals of "working class" are filtered through whatever a white dude would find most relevant.
Edit: as a white dude, I'm really one of the last people that should be asked about a fix for this, and I don't have one.
When politicians talks about doing something for the working class, that always think of this 40 year old white guy in overalls and hard-hat and assume that he's a reactionary flag-waving asshole who hates gays and brown people.
The elite thinks of the working class as their own parody of what a worker is, not as the actual diverse and dynamic working class.
We can stop deifying the working class altogether.
Graeber categorized most of the jobs on your list as being part of a "caring class" that is excluded from the definition of worker exactly because they are traditionally jobs performed by women, non-white people or the young. The reason we associate the "working class" with older white men is because it was largely older white men who defined what we societaly think of as work and especially valuable work.
I mean service workers arent much better than industrial workers lol, Id say they are even less class conscious because of the nature of their work. Workers in the imperial core are a labor aristocracy, save a few exceptions. You can't just turn them into a revolutionary force overnight, as of right now they have close to zero potential.
to fix that we must own the means of media production and distribution, comrade.
Because Soviet union only had two Industries, factory man and farmer man, therefore working class
