https://twitter.com/jacobin/status/1649729770635051008?s=20

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    How is this wrong lol. The US working class has no power to resist the imperialism committed by its national bourgeoisie. It needs to first get some class consciousness and second get some class power to do that.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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      1 year ago

      It's wrong because it ignores the dynamic race and the home ownership rate plays in the American conception of class consciousness

      Compared to those two social phenomenon wages comes in a distant third

      Wages have been stagnant half a century, but low income workers still make up 28 percent of the home ownership rate, that's alot of people with something to lose and it ties a huge amount of workers to the financial sector which is directly kept aflot by US imperialism

      Folks hear labor aristocrat and imagine some union boss wearing pantaloons sipping tea making 100,000 plus

      Reality whether leftists want to accept it or not is usually a disgruntled office or retail worker who for twenty years has been using his stagnant wages to pay a mortgage and goddammit one day he's gonna flip that broken down shitty house for a quarter million and retire and then buy a boat and maybe pay off those credit card bills

      That's not a class of people you can radicalize without first destroying the economic imperialism that sustains that kind of captured consciousness

      • Nagarjuna [he/him]
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        1 year ago

        This is why the US sponsors land reform. Get people in debt and protecting what little they have and they won't have a revolution.

      • glimmer_twin [he/him]
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        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I will always be skeptical of third worldism because it’s an extremely convenient excuse for Western leftists to sit on their ass and do nothing.

        Reality whether leftists want to accept it or not is usually a disgruntled office or retail worker who for twenty years has been using his stagnant wages to pay a mortgage and goddammit one day he’s gonna flip that broken down shitty house for a quarter million and retire and then buy a boat and maybe pay off those credit card bills

        Literally the only people of my generation I know with a mortgage were helped out by their rich parents lol

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don't see it as convenient or much of an excuse at all, I see it as a call to arms for international solidarity, historically the most succrssful western labor movements were those who embedded themselves in international networks of support and advocacy, the civil rights movement being the most famous example

          We see how successful the international networks of right-wing thought and power gave become, yet embracing myopic localism is supposed to be the best course for the left? Ok well western leftists are gonna get crushed doing that, at least in international movements organizational mobility becomes an option

          Literally the only people of my generation I know with a mortgage were helped out by their rich parents lol

          Doesn't change the fact a third of homeowners are low income workers, not every suburb is made up exclusively of mcmansions

          • glimmer_twin [he/him]
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            edit-2
            1 year ago

            I see it as a call to arms for international solidarity

            embracing myopic localism

            How is it mutually exclusive to establish international connections whilst also acting in local class struggle. That’s literally what being a communist is. Also I hate to break it to you but it’s rather to hard to build international networks if you’re an irrelevant soup kitchen with ten members. The Cubans aren’t gonna start sending weapons caches and briefcases full of cash to every Maoist book club that sends them an email. People have to start somewhere. Without a base of power the “international network” is just a mailing list

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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              1 year ago

              How is it mutually exclusive to establish international connections whilst also acting in local class struggle.

              That's my question when lefties start trashing third worldism

              Third worldists have always advanced the cause of community organizing while also putting the international struggle first and foremost

              The same can not be said for the vast majority of western tendencies since at least 1917 and nothing like that has existed in the US since 1968