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.
Reminds me of the story of the meeting of Nikita Khrushchev and Zhou Enlai. To paraphrase,
K: We are nothing alike. I am the son of workers, a proletarian, and you are the privileged son of a Mandarin elite
Z: Oh really? We are alike in one way.
K: What is that?
Z: We are both class traitors.
I never like questions like these, because we all very much know you can be a principled communist without being the downtrodden salt of the Earth. Engel's dad was a big time industrialist, Kropotkin was a prince, many Marxists were highly educated which was a very privileged position and showed their class background. like obviously don't be an evil piece of shit, but you do not HAVE to be proletarian to be a leftist.
now, I will grant you, almost all of these are people born into comfort who later came to denounce that, rather than being workers with class consciousness contradicting themselves to gain private property. but it's also true that none of these guys donated all their wealth and lived as Diogenes, naked in a barrel.
the idea of 'pure' leftism with this innate untaintedness to it just gives me real Christian morality vibes, I do not like
well, it's all about class
if you're not actually becoming a member of the bourgeoisie or a cop you're probably fine
Brusilov supported Bolsheviks more out of patriotism. Better examples of aristocrats supporting Bolsheviks due to ideological reasons would be Bonch-Bruyevich brothers - radio engineer and general; general Alexander von Taube, who basically built the Red Army in Siberia, was captured by Whites, refused to join them and died in prison; Georgy Chicherin who became the first People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs; Alexandra Kollontai and many others.
Anglowiki article about von Taube was 100% written by some White apologist.
The class positionality locks you out of meaningful/radical praxis but it doesn’t lock you out of sound analysis. Had this realization as a petty bourgeois failson set to inherit wealth and a business. I can’t exactly overthrow myself and refusing ownership/trying to dissolve the company would just result in another capitalist taking over rather than meaningful gain for the workers. Best I figure my pathway is to negotiate down the position of power succdem style and try to restructure as a worker coop while volunteering resources to working class movements and orgs. Oh god I’m a BMF post about PMC DSA Karens
The part about how the the system works in small glimpses sounds interesting. What would be an example of that?
Engels' dad was a factory owner and he quite literally wrote the book on communism so you can definitely do both of these things
I lost a job once after my boss told me I need to come in some days for free and I told them haha no I'm quitting.
They told me they needed two weeks notice and I said haha no actually you hired me as casual staff to avoid paying for sick days so that's your own fault for being a greedy fuck.
Does that count?
Me at 18 looking at marketing or business career options: fuck off, I don't believe in any of thar nonsense
Me getting a stem phd and getting a job in ~~fancy~~ marketing: so true
Ah, our best and brightest scientific minds going to checks notes figure out how to send push notifications at the right time so users engage with their food delivery app more.
Until Soros starts getting those checks out for people doing praxis people don't need to apologise for making a living if it's not something directly ghoulish.
I'm also a victim of the "follow your passion" to "just find a job in marketing" pipeline.
you don't get a choice, that's the point. to act against your class interest as a petty capitalist, you would have to become personally invested in a project that is larger than yourself, on a deeper level than internet fandom, slumming, or abstract fantasizing. what that looks like in practice is completely losing your mind and rejecting practically every other feature of your existence that makes it coherent.
you see plenty of people in liberal strongholds try and fail, and the point they ultimately arrive at is making moves up until their guilt is assuaged (usually charity work or public self flagellation), because the guilt is the only facet of the reality of capitalist exploitation they have any real sense of firsthand.
TBH, I always feels uncomfortable when people say they're just going to straight up liquidate everyone with money. That's like some Pol Pot shit
We're not Nazis :thinking-about-it:
It's actually a long process.
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Try peacefully.
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Fail.
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Try again.
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Fail again.
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Try with some coercion.
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Some landlords give up their properties.
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Try more.
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More give them up.
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Force them all to give them up.
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Angry landlords form gangs of reactionaries and murder their former tenants.
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Liquidate them because they literally gave you no choice.
We're now at one of the Try Again parts and they responded by letting more than 6 million of us die of covid. Keep that in mind, those who find violence distasteful.
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Does the small degrading plastic sleeve I keep my cards in count or am I good?
The 1% like a thousand people. If we turned them into a soup like homogenate you cousld stand in the puddle without getting your socks wet. It is simply an acknowledgement of the deep ammount of violence it takes for them to maintian their positions.
I recently worked with a young man who's bones tuned into sharp dust from chemical exposure and the savings to the company that did that was probably only a hundred or so dollars. He will likely down in his own blood some day so some rich guy can get one(1) extra apatizer at a rich guy restaurant. When the time comes we will need no excuses for the terror.
they've been liquifying us without a care in the world, if anything they've enjoyed it.
you don't have to enjoy returning the favour, but don't dare let utopian moralism slow you down because they'll liquify you in a heartbeat
Yea anyone trying to argue for peace negotiations or leniency in the face of proletariat victory should be immediately shot. That person is not on the side of global communism and has no interest in seeing the project carried out to fruition
yes, in a heartbeat. for one thing, I can just snap my fingers and say "this is a worker coop now!" and get to work with everyone else. Assuming I for some reason can't, I'm still in the best position possible to help the workers in the factory. And since you're just placing my in the role, I don't have to work my way up, there's no time for me to get corrupted. I'll fire the rest of management because this is my fifedom now. I could also start giving away whatever we produce until I run out of money to pay people, or just give away my money directly. Assuming I couldn't do any of those things, there is no solid reason I shouldn't take it because the workers will be abused whether I run it or someone else does, I might as well improve my quality of life. Purity is a calvanist idea and has no place in leftism.
This. You might not be able to stop the exploitation all the way down the supply chain, but you can at least collectivize what you have power over.
This is the fundamental contradiction. Modern capitalism forces you to work against your fellow proles if you want any chance of even living a normal fucking life. I don't blame anyone for trying to survive within a system where they have no choice.
The solution is collectivism. Do what you can to organise, ally with others, and actually change that system so it no longer pushes people into these situations.
Up to the point of being work-free, I can kinda forgive. If you're landlord or a fuckin' factory owner, just sell your goddamn capital to some class-conscious workers and live your life off that money or there will be stabs
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".
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?
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.
I get it man, I'm just in abit of a curmudgeony mood. Sorry, if I came off debate bro.
"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"
I did a joke answer based on the specifics of the hypothetical, but to answer the spirit of the question I can easily easily say 'pure' leftist. I have lost jobs, homes, money, belongings because I refuse to compromise my principals. I can usually see that moment coming and plan for it, and well, I'm living with my parents rn cause that seemed cooler than letting my previous landlord sell the house out from under me without losing the sale and also losing a lot of money. However my folks have decent union gigs, are about to retire with decent pensions and well, there parents have pretty much all died so silent generation money is coming in. I have a hell of a safety net so I stick my neck out for others
