I think there's something fundamentally wrong with an article that attempts to analyze fascism and the social strata that makes up it's base without once mentioning the word petit-bourgeois
Journalists are rarely petty boug tho. Usually highly precarious labor aristocrats.
I worked as a copyeditor at a local paper as a joke to see what it was like there and how long I would last. I made it three months. It's the only job I was fired from and I've been working for two decades. Here are the reporters I encountered there:
- white male boomer who called himself a democratic socialist, who once openly stated his desire to marry Mazie Hirono, whose articles consistently quoted only one establishment source, with no one ever complaining. He was the only guy who seemed to be happy there, and I believe it was because he already had Medicare/Social Security;
- white female Gen Xer who revealed that she was an anti-vaxxer pre-pandemic because of bad experiences with doctors (fuck anti-vaxxers but the unbelievably shitty healthcare situation in the USA is one of many reasons for their proliferation);
- white female Gen Xer who published a book about a local anarchist but seemed terrified of losing her job. She barely ever said anything and would just shut herself down if anything even remotely political came up in office discussion. She also had the hardest job out of everyone, having to attend town meetings with dozens of local petite bourgeois scum arguing about taxes for five hours, well into the night, at least once per week, and almost certainly not being paid for it. She and the last lady both had elementary-aged kids.
- white female Gen Xer, the editor, who left her shitty dog in her car all day because on the rare occasions when she brought it to the office, it would bite people, including me. Two other workers, the coolest people there (they were involved in advertising and secretarial work) yelled at her for this. She fired me because I refused to approve a transphobic article the white boomer had written. (I've mentioned this on hexbear only about eighty times.) A few months later, she herself was demoted and then fired. The newspaper now has a new white lady editor who is bending over backwards to make the paper as inoffensive as possible.
- me, a white-passing millennial communist dude finishing the day's work within an hour or two, with several hours to go until I was allowed to leave, being bored out of my mind in a stale depressing office, working on my own books whenever the boss's back was turned, kind of thinking it was funny that they were paying me to do that even though the pay fucking sucked ($13/hr). Toward the end I was kind of trying to get fired and slipped shit into articles about the USA being built on theft, rape, and murder. Nobody ever caught it or complained.
I suspect all corporate papers are more or less like this, even our beloved New York Times. Whatever the reporters' personal beliefs, if they don't toe the bourgeois line, they're out.
Could be, but idk journalism's been thoroughly proletarianized anyway so I don't think either subclass descriptor is useful here.
Editorial (management) is what serves the interest of capital (newspaper owners) anyway, which is probably the sentiment @DivineChaos100 was getting at.
What's the difference between petit bougies and labor aristocrats?
Petit bourgeois are small business owners, family-owned small farms, landlords with only one or two properties, etc. People who are technically members of the capitalist class but don't have much actual capital and don't exploit much labor to turn a profit.
Labor aristicrat is really just an antagonistic term, referring to members of the working class who are materially privileged enough that when the proletariat comes into conflict with the bourgeois, they often side with the bougies. I've heard it used to describe everything from programmers to the entirety of the working class in the US and Europe.
Labor aristocrat is how I would explain many working musicians, a disgusting number of them are just the most ignorant libs.
I think the PMC is real as a distinct subset of the working class that emerged post-WWII. But the problem is that a lot of people here think the PMC is static, when really it's collapsing back into the larger working class milleau. Hence the gnashing of teeth at knowledge economy workers when they're stable and the spiteful laughter when they're not.
lol that's how I feel about PMC
at least labor aristocracy highlights the material interest involved vs. immaterial nature of the work being done
last thing to note, describing journalists as labor aristocrats was a mistake. I think I used it as a gentler correction to calling them petty boug
The only thing to add to @TheFreshestHell's explanation is to be boug you have to own capital. Petit just means they don't own much (think small business owners and smalltime landlords here).
Journalists rarely own capital. Hell at this point they're barely labor aristocracy.
The rare individual cases where a journalist is bourgeoisie, it's almost certainly gentleman farmer-type situation (they don't need the wage) and there's nothing petit about them.
I mean, every podcaster this site stans, even Adam Johnson, is petite boug. The irony of a thoroughly-privatized media industry owned by neoliberals is that you need to have your own operation to create content that advocates socialism.
articles titles like this, even if this wasn't written by a trot, are so trot-coded.
and are extremely hokey, ironically inaccessible to the Social Strata 'We Must Win Over'
this article title is petty boug repellant. i know im doing aesthetics or whatever but it does matter when you talk to normal people to not sound like an ai trained on revolutionary lingo
The petite bourgeois make up something like 10% of the population in the US if we're going off small business owner numbers. You could absolutely win without a single one of them on your side, provided you got a big enough chunk of the remaining 90~%, and it'll be a lot easier to convince the latter when their material interests align with socialists.
It is not enough to counter fascism militarily, as Antifa does, though that is important. To truly defeat fascism, we must win over a substantial segment of the social strata that make up its mass base.
This article keeps mentioning that the "left" relies too much on establishment liberal society to push agendas, and that alienates those who are drawn to fascism. What isn't mentioned is the social base for fascism comprise of members of that liberal order, like small business owners or people embedded in imperialist domination, like cops or feds.
I've mentioned this around, but American fascism doesn't comprise the same people as when Germany went fascist. Our average fascists come in two varieties: A white 55 year old pool supply shop owner who is terribly overweight and likes to trigger the libs, the other type being a completely nuts teenager who has melted their brain on 4chan.
Germany's social base were WW1 vets and street gangs. They were already militant before getting organized for fascism specifically, so who exactly are we supposed to win over?
We're supposed to win over the boomer warehouse owner who refused to hire immigrants? We're supposed to win over Twitch streamers with names like "Based Polish Nationalist"? Who exactly are we trying to win over here? Because the ones drawn to fascism at this point are already deep within it. They're the tip of the spear who are attempting to manifest fascism into practice, they're not some confused wayward members of the masses. They know what fascism is and why they'd want it
Maybe I'm cynical. I know some comrades here who used to identify as fascists before they got their head on straight, but that seems so rare and exceptional.
I think it's people like :hasan-ok-dude: , who can culture a viewership that is sympathetic to our causes, that are the key
I guess that's something at least, but I don't know how effective that is long term. As much as twitch streamers are a vehicle for spreading our propaganda, at the end of the day they're professionals doing a job and people gaining their political outlook from twitch streams just strike me as politically fickle
Our average fascists come in two varieties: A white 55 year old pool supply shop owner who is terribly overweight and likes to trigger the libs, the other type being a completely nuts teenager who has melted their brain on 4chan.
There aren't enough of these folks (even measuring these categories generously) to account for all the support Trump had. I'd say there are at least two additional sizeable groups:
- ~55-year-old white wage earners who see no prospects for the retirement they expected, and think attacking vulnerable groups is a way out. Probably some mix of believing Those People took their jobs and "even if I'm poor, I'll be poor and white."
- Millenial-aged petite bourgeois (mostly PMC types) who are upwardly mobile, but are terrified that they'll end up like the above group. These are folks who have a retirement portfolio and think Democrats want to give it to the poor.
As for the prospects of winning any of these people over, the pool supply store guy is probably a lost cause, the teenager at least has a chance of growing and changing, the ~55-year-old white wage earner might be at least neutralized with material benefits like universal healthcare, and the millenials might come around if they fall out of the petite bourgeois or at least realize how precarious their situation is.
You're right in everything you said. I think I wasn't including all Trump voters and supporters as ideological fascists, but you'd probably correct in saying they're prone to becoming fascists. Most people vote for congress and president in ways that don't necessarily match what they want. Like my parents voted for Trump under the impression Trump wanted to implement universal healthcare and he wasn't serious about all the hatred of immigrants. Complete goofballs basically.
I haven't tried to sway people politically much in my life, but I have tried to organize unions. The conservatives there are quickly won over by material interests, and if they aren't, they're easily told to shut up and shamed into going along with the group. That's been how I've won them over, massive social pressure backed up by numbers
have a retirement portfolio
That's just a different way to say "they passively skim off the surplus value of other people's labor".
You can't have everyone building up savings in a monetary system, nor can everyone have capital gains. One person's capital gains are another person's lost value, and if you try to stretch how many people fit into the creditor category, you get inflation and just end up diluting the whole thing.
For both ideological and material reasons, this group is heavily invested in capitalism, and you'd need to break down both of these reasons to win them over.
You can’t have everyone building up savings in a monetary system, nor can everyone have capital gains. One person’s capital gains are another person’s lost value
:big-bill: Every dollar someone earns without working, is a dollar someone worked for and didn't get
Bill Bill fucking slaps for these quick and easily digestible quotes
More than just that, all currencies (and most money-commodities) derive their utility directly from their scarcity. If they become less scarce, all of a sudden you can't trade in them quite as well.
It was also bread bakers looking at nearby jewish owned shop/high interest rates from banks killing them over. Vets and streetgangs were muscles, but not whole.
Think small shop owners/workers (rooftop koreans/guy who called on the george floyd) (og petit bourgeoisie, not usual bourgeoisie with tiny businesses, like restaurant owners)
The Nazis specifically were founded (as the DAP) as a mechanism for the German right to pull working class support from the organized left. Countering that project, and any other fascist attempt to sway people who aren't materially aligned with them, is fine. Neutralizing that teenager's fascination with fascism, or directing that disaffection somewhere else, probably does some small party to counter the stochastic terror strategy.
Playing for their actual reactionary base though? The major parties of the western 'left' have been trying to create a big tent that acquiesces to the material interests of those fuckers for the last 30 years. That third way strategy has had its time, and all it's done is ensure that neoliberalism isn't even slowed down by elections any more.
When the standards of bourgeois society are utterly discredited. Often fascist movements have recognized this aspect more readily than much of the left. Attempting to build an anti-fascist movement by reinvigorating the social order that has been utterly discredited cedes anti-establishment ground to the ultra-right.
This is especially poignant in this era of No Future, where an entire generation (gen z and the one after) do not have any pretense that the bourgeois capitalist future - like, their own middle age and on - will have any chance of being better than today. And what's the biggesr live "left" push in decades? Electing Bernie and the Squad, or their equivalent in other countries like Corbyn, in order to preserve what little we have.
And then we have our own internal punishment/reinforcement in left online spaces where recognizing that this is likely where the average person is at is "the black pill." It's the black pill in the sense that, yes, the future will not be better than today and things are only going to get worse - but there is an escape hatch, I mean yeah Capital is doing Thelma and Louise and we're all in the car, but we just have to open the door to survive. Which could be painful maybe even deadly but... the fuck is the alternative???
I have hope the kids (gen z and alpha), by nature of their upbringing in this reality, will come up with something
I don't think that they will tbh. The trajectory of the human experience since the end of the Second World War (honestly probably even since the end of the First, really) has been an inexorable march towards social & ethical hyper-individualism & I don't see that really changing at all until it becomes impossible to survive physically in the absence of an actual robust community network. This means that most of us will just fuckin die, without achieving anything meaningful politically or socially. I suppose that's the nature of living at the bottom end of the social latter during "normal" times.
Interesting read, still digesting. Seeing present conditions, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism would probably be good for me to read.
Good article but I wish they had gotten into the historic practice a bit more. The economic basis for fascism has always been smallholders demanding regulation but actually reaching them and getting them to support a revolutionary program seems to have been the historic problem (unless we take a more class-deterministic approach and we simply can't lead them).
We must realize that fascism is a movement of the disappointed and of those whose existence is ruined. Therefore, we must endeavor either to win over or to neutralize those wide masses who are still in the fascist camp. I wish to emphasize the importance of our realizing that we must struggle ideologically for the possession of the soul of these masses. We must realize that they are not only trying to escape from their present tribulations, but that they are longing for a new philosophy. We must come out of the narrow limits of our present activity. – Clara Zetkin, 1923
Just totally untrue, at least when applied to the US, lmao. The "disappointed" and "those whose existence is ruined" aren't a bunch of "middle-class" white people who benefit from the subjugation of black people lmao. Any article like this telling you that you should waste energy trying to fix awful white people feels like total misdirection to me. There are literally millions of non-white/poor people who wold absolutely join a movement to fight white supremacy. No need to go out of your way to find the least helpful most-likely-to-be-wrecker most-likely-to-turn-off-the-people-you-actually-need-to-gain-support-from types to bolster your movement.
Not to mention, there are literally already hundreds of millions of people who AREN'T THE MAIN SUPPORT BASE FOR FASCISM, WHO ARE ALREADY ON OUR SIDE. There are already a gazillion "progressive" Americans who would become a communist waaaay before becoming a fascist. There's enough of those people that you don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel lol.
Good article but they don't make a case for the central premise.
A better argument would be "when trying to understand the political environment you find yourself in, you must account for the class interests of the petite bourgeoisie" or "suppressing the petite bourgeoisie is necessary"
counterpoint: I immensely dislike that strata and want nothing to do with them
more likely that the sun will burn out in our lifetime than this happening
Death to America
