By class traitor I don't mean a fed or infiltrator. You don't have to go out of your way to denounce leftist ideas or stop the left. You just have to have class interests directly in conflict with workers and the poor. You can let your factory unionize, and take less money. But would you choose to be that factory owner if it meant your current situation improved significantly?

I don't know what I would choose because I have no hopes of owning capital. I would love to quit my job and be free to just own stuff and make money off it. But then I would have to reckon that with my beliefs. I guess you could just accept you can't be a leftist and volunteer for the wall should the day come.

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Third-worldism is kinda garbage. It paints with a huge brush all the irregularities of labor and compensation within a country, and serves mostly as a source of either guilt and despair for radicals.

          Yes, there is a lot of wealth that companies extract from poor countries, and yes, a lot of it does end up in rich countries where sometimes it bumps up wages or keeps down prices in specific sectors, leading to a better quality of life for some people.

          But a minimum-wage full-time worker making $18,000 a year is not "the global upper class", let alone "the global ally of the bourgeoisie".

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, man, becoming free labor for capital that serves to depress wages for what working class there is in the U.S. is definitely the solution. That being said, if people aren't at least feeling out their co-workers out for unionization and making spread sheets, what is even the point of having leftist ideals except to be Cassandra?

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If you get caught, you're either killed, or they work you for pennies in the prison system which competes with my labor in the industrial sector. Makes it way more difficult to organize when they can just scab in prisoners to a job site. The only way you can radicalize enough people to make a difference in labor is through solidarity, it's tough to make people think locally, let alone internationally. Show em they can change one thing, and hopefully, they will try to change other things. I'm not gonna die for hexbear.com, and my work is already difficult enough without getting paid nothing for it.

          Look, I get the sentiment, it's just incredibly unrealistic. I have communist ideals because I firmly believe it is in my, and the world's, best interest, but I don't see what my personal martyrdom does the movement, unless you think it will become some sort of Christian-like ritual lol. Maybe when I'm like 50, I can pull a Willem Van Spronson, but at this point I'm just hoping the bastards at the top keep shooting themselves in the foot internationally. Maybe that makes me a 'bad' leftist, but I'm working with what I got here.

    • snicker [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      "But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which "enlightened" people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment", demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep".

      -- George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling"