It's a case of discovering class politics without abandoning liberal morality. "Real worker" is a value judgement, not a class analysis.
How much a person gets paid does heavily influence their material conditions and thus their revolutionary/reactionary potential, though. Especially with imperialism at its current heights, some workers in the imperial core countries will be so comfortable that their material interests will align more with the imperialists than the global proletariat. And capitalists' control of culture is so strong that even many workers whose material interests are more on the borderline may tend towards reaction.
A comrade is a comrade regardless of how much they make, but there's a reason most people making 200k+ a year are ghouls.
edited after your comment because it's late and I realized the way I worded it could have sounded accusatory.
That said, some people like to scribble zigzagging lines that weren’t there because they don’t like teachers or think artists aren’t doing real work or some shit like that.
Yeah that nonsense is hilarious at best and possibly a psyop lol
I appreciate this post a lot. To give people a little more concrete of a real example that isn't just a theoretical tech laborer somewhere we should be concerned about:
I dropped out of college for mech/aero eng with absurdly good grades because I didn't want to build weapons for America. I still have all that debt. I still only have (real & relevant) work experience in the service industry. I've been basically starving since and one of the few industries I've found SOME work in (freelance, because permanent work was already hard to find) is about to be further destroyed and turned into a hellscape of capitalist exploitation (than it already is) likely making any progress I've made since dropping out reset or worse. My entire background before college was IT, but in another country. Nobody in America is spending the extra 5 minutes figuring out how/when to dial a different timezone to verify that shit, and that's half the reason I went to college after moving here in the first place. Instead my resume just goes in the bin because all I've got is a half decade of retail and shit nobody cares about.
It's hard to see people cheer for how hard it will be to find a job in the industry you're actively trying to find work in because they're annoyed at redditors or whatever. I'm already trying to survive on eating my principles instead of food. I'm not talking like "Oh I'm sad I don't make 60k" I'm talking "I've been living below the poverty line for almost 3 years at this point and I don't know how much longer I can pull it off". When does it start to feel like I made the right choice?
Don't get me wrong. I fucking hate the techbros and the cultists and the industry in general, but what should I do instead? One of you give me a job and then feel free to post at my expense all fucking day for all I care, but until then I think I win the moral grandstanding competition.
I'm not trying to be hostile or anything, I just saw some of the posts and just scrolled on at first but I've felt shitty about it for a little bit and seeing this post made me feel like it was worth it to maybe add in why it's not so cut and dry.
i've been there
the average amount of failure you have to go through just to find a shitty 9-5 is brain-breaking without a network, so for the sake of your sanity, please just bum a latex template and start fabricating your entire fucking resume, even if it's just to get some return calls from recruiters.
just wanted to say that despite being of the same class, proletarians are still capable of exploiting each other intentionally or not, and so there needs to be a serious campaign for internationalist consciousness among the core's (hwite) labor aristocracy so they don't fall into opportunism (again)
No. There is exactly ONE true worker on earth and it is I, the one true leftist
No, everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.
to be fair, the deserter is destroyed and delusional, not because of his communist past, but because
spoiler
he's a senile misanthrope and misogynist who snipes at people from his island while he rages to himself about how he should have died with his comrades. also he's been exposed to the neurotoxins of a giant insect called the insulindian phasmid.
i understand where you're coming from. apologies if i seemed dismissive.
Some workers have a class interests so opposed to other workers that it doesn't make sense to put them in the same class. Cops and writers for The Atlantic are two examples.
One of the many distinctions between "worker" and "not a worker" is when your sole purpose is to oppress workers and protect the ruling class. Cops under capitalism are not workers.
??? Both cops and said writers, though fighting for the stupid side, have very definite interests shared with all workers, they have nothing to lose but their chains and everything to gain from common ownership over the means of production. Fighting for the wrong side does not invalidate you for the label of prole.
have very definite interests shared with all workers
Not sure about this. Both of their occupations require them to be opposed to the interests of the greater working public.
not respecting someone is different than not considering them workers.
also if there is no ethical consumption under capitalism there cant be ethical production under capitalism either. why does it matter what volume or type of suffering your particular lever in the pain machine causes and to whom? the point is that we literally can't do anything inside of the system that's free of its sins.
as did the guy who would drive the bulldozer next if the first driver was shot and killed.
Embracing the capitalist rationalization that it’s fine to do shitty evil things because if you don’t someone else will takes us down a pretty dark road.
I'd love to agree, but how? To be honest, I don't think there's a single job I could do that isn't meaningfully supporting exploitative systems.
Being dogshit and fighting for the bourgeoise does not make you not a worker. They have similar material interests.
That becomes a question of propaganda then, tbh. Media/culture convinces the middle class they're more like the upper than the working class. But the middle class is an illusion. If you need to work or you die, then you're a worker. So, the job becomes convincing the so-called middle class that their interests align with the rest of the workers, which is no different from convincing the rest of the working class that their interests align with other workers, that is, class consciousness.
Stock Market itself is a form of propaganda. The average techbro owns nowhere near enough to live off of it (i.e. like the bourgeois) but it serves as a permanent source of anxiety, keeping them chained to the forces of the market and the stability of the capitalist system. The only people who actually become rich off of it are those who own enough to influence it, i.e. the people who're already bourgeois. This is why crypto shit became so big - knowingly or not, people realized that kind of explosive, exponential return was the only way to actually become rich. And, of course, it is now used by the already rich to exploit everyone else.
Your reasoning also applies to the what you consider "real" workers in the West, who themselves benefit from the exploitation of the global south. I've heard it before, the argument is that somehow the latter will rise up against the capitalist-imperialist system and bring about socialism. So that is who we all should be focusing on and that workers in the West are just the "labor aristocracy" i.e. useless in the struggle and might even be opposed to it.
That way, I'm sorry to say, will never lead to socialism. We, who live in the heart of the empire, are equally needed to bring about socialism. We, the workers in the west, must oppose our capitalists who oppress both us and the people in the global south. It is only by this combined effort of all workers all over the world, the imperial core and the global south, that socialism will emerge.
I'll go a step further. I think this entire argument is just lazy, defeatist ideology meant to create an excuse by Westerners to not do shit to bring socialism, and sit on their ass and hope that brown and black folk do the job for them.
I've had this discussion here in the past. People here, when you press them, admit they don't even believe socialism is possible in Amerika or the west. It will just be fascism and the only thing they can do is support themselves and their loved ones. It's just so fucking lazy and defeatist.
i don't think anyone is supportive of defeatism here, it's more of a post hoc justification of the metropolitan proletariat's historical betrayals of their long term class interests in favor of their more immediate material interests
adding to this, aesthetics will only defeat material conditions if the contradictions of capital are sufficiently blunted
the entire point of imperialist, 'divide and conquer' constructs such as racism is to create an illusionary gradient of proximity to capital in order to funnel mainstream demographics towards its defense in the form of reaction
barring an utter breakdown of the capitalist state apparatus, only the most marginalized groups of the core will be able to develop class consciousness of their own accord
the lifeboat is shrinking, and the middle class is simply at the middle of the lifeboat
it convinces itself that it is on the same yacht as that rich guy over there
They are far closer to being homeless than they are to being a billionaire or even millionaire and this is more true in areas where CoL eats up the extra income. Some might realize this, some might not, but it definitely is in their interest to side with workers against the capitalist class.
As someone who knows a fair few people making 100k+, I guarantee you they are just as afraid of losing all their money and being fucked over and left in the gutter. The shared interests are a fairer way of living that makes better value judgements and doesn't threaten to throw you in the swamp the second you stop being useful to the bourgeoise.
I'm not saying the 15k person isn't closer to the gutter, just that the fear is still there.
There are some blurry lines when we get into more PMC jobs but ultimately yes. At the end of the day the well-paid engineer has the same class interest as the precarious service worker. PMC's are way closer to becoming destitute than to become billionaires. All it takes is an illness or "the economy" having a hiccup.
However, despite having a class interest in controlling their own labour, many PMC's are reactionary dipshits who sides with the oligarchs. This form of false consciousness is useful to the bourgeoisie as it makes workers in key positions of the economy loyal to them. However, what they feel like our what they vote for doesn't change their material relationship to the means of production.
wouldn't that apply to the industrial workers of the past who were able to buy houses and live middle classes lives and retire as well? Before 401ks pensions were a lot more prevalent
I have honestly only met 2 people like that at most in my 10+ years of experience in software engineering
Most tech workers I've known have been fairly normal 9-5 workers, not rise-and-grind cultists, not musk huffers, not whatever. Even the ones that leaned bazinga-brained were pretty non-loyal to their jobs/companies and were ready to jump ship for a boost in compensation or worked on their side hustles on the clock
Aren't the cultists mostly the econ/business types who like tech and work in tech but don't understand it? I think the entire start-up culture in germany is based around that.
Probably, fortunately for me I'm pretty insulated from that.
But people have the misconception that technical workers are like that because software engineers tend to be highly paid. They can have brainworms on account of their material conditions (and often do, I haven't had much luck trying to find people willing to unionize) but they're rarely full bazinga brains in my experience
I've met a few people who are minimally-brainwormed about having teslas too, believe it or not . mostly well meaning climate libs with too much money, but at least it's just a car to them
But yeah after hitting their mid-late 20s most everyone I've known in tech gets pretty normal and even sometimes lean based.
I worked with this one guy for a few years who was a total stereotypical g*mer and overall had extremely Kyle energy, wound up being surprisingly based the more we talked, to the point where we'd yes-and each other's communist shit in meetings in front of our boss before she could catch up enough to change the topic lol. A couple other former coworkers have been anarchists, a couple more MLs, and an old FOSS greybeard I worked with was a trot. It's not the norm, but it's not unheard of either
In my experience there are fewer bazinga than you'd think, and more comrades than you'd think too. The people with the worst opinions are just the terminally online ones, and we make fun of them on the clock
The amount of anti-tech worker vitriol on this site lately has been making me stop by a lot less.
As a tech worker. . . fuck tech workers. Easiest job in the fucking world gatekept behind leetcode hard challenges. Anyone who plays along with that hiring process is a class traitor.
Yea sure I agree. But I will still hate stemlords and techbros on a deeply intimate level while I fight for their rights
I will fight for everyone regardless of education to have the same level of material access as STEMlords and techbros currently do, so that they have one less thing to be smug losers about.
