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

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    2 years 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]
      ·
      2 years 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]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years 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]
        ·
        2 years 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]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years 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]
            ·
            2 years 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