Yes I did something good for a bad person and now I feel like shit
Discuss. Obviously being nice to homophobic Palestinians, or douchebag homeless people is cool but where do you draw the line based on how shitty a person is and how shitty their conditions are?
There's a certain point where behaving with the correct compassion burns you out more than it helps the recipient. Finding that point is an inexact art, and like @JackidyClack said you can't go around asking everyone to do a moral exegesis before taking any action.
I work at a shelter and struggle with this a lot. One guest is very out of touch with consensus reality and will go off on homophobic tirades. For a long time, I would just ignore it and not take him seriously as a person. Eventually, I realized that that wasn't appropraite either and it wasn't good for either of us for me to continue working with him so I tapped out.
In general, my thought is that its revolutionaries who fail the people and not the people who fail revolutionaries. If you are working with someone who does not have an explicit commitment to fascism and is in the popular classes, you should probably help them if you are able. (with the caveat to ability mentioned above!) The amount people's attitudes can change being helped and forced to humanize/relate to someone they would otherwise ignore or hold reactionary attitudes towards is enormous! At the same time it can suck being the person causing that change!
Well, working with the homeless is not 'praxis'. It is a good moral thing to do, but not 'praxis'. It does not build a revolutionary movement as the homeless do not have any means, theoretical or otherwise, by which to leverage power within the system. We know this because the wobblies already tried it better than you and it failed. As such, radicalizing the homeless is probably not high on the list of agenda items you should have. You can do it if you want, but if it fails, so what?
Ugh this whole thread sucks.
this thread is about the 'moral level' you nudnik.
Yeah, but without specifics it's morally totally meaningless. And the only reason to find morality in 'radicalizing' someone is if you think it's praxis, which was the seperate specific issue I was addressing, to which I said, helping the homeless is a morally good thing, but radicalizing them is neither here nor there.
The people are stupid babies who cannot feed themselves, it’s absolutely the peoples fault and not the revolutionary’s when leftists fail to make inroads in marginalized communities. The only solution is to take away all agency from everybody and have society run by a small group of communists
That is a horrible, misanthropic attitude.
Hitler had popular support, how the fuck are you supposed to fix something like that without subjecting the wider population to random rehabilitatory violence?
:countdown:
how do you imagine people will respond to 'random rehabilitatory violence'? how do you beat someone into liberation? in what way is venting against misguided workers revolutionary violence?
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