Class is based on a person's dialectical, pure (two-way) relation to the means of production. Just so everyone's on the same page on this site. There are temporary alliances labour professionals, economistic labour unions, etc. made with the capitalists, but they are temporary until their conditions change. Class consciousness, true or false, sits on top of this relation inside the minds of workers and further modifies their actions based on this relation to the MoP. Obviously, people with more control over the MoP or serve the direct interests of those who do, have more leverage to aquire wealth from the production process, but that is a symptom not a cause of the relationship.
They're idealist left-lib dipshits, like him, Tersee, r/StupidPol, (Matt Christman a little), etc. who constantly conflate social affect and income for "class."
And that is exactly the problem. The struggle at the heart of post-left populism is a struggle of idealist categories. Normal person versus PMC. To be normal, much like to be a centrist, is to define yourself purely in relation to contemporary discourses rather than personal principles. Nagle arrives at the Normie political subject by critiquing subculture theorists who bought into the idea that there is indeed something special, something radical about these in-groups. But rather than escaping the idealist framework of cultural analysis, Nagle simply inverted this position.
Why she did this is quite simple when we realize that the normal political subject at the end of the book who enjoys trashy mainstream music is supposed to be a self-insert. Nagle, as well as Terese and their cohort have confronted the hyper-subcultural ingroups of the left and come away scarred. The dizzying factions, callouts, posturing and absurdity can be traumatic to many in the same way that imageboard culture can be to outsiders. I can hardly blame them. The betrayal at the heart of this trauma cuts deep, as it is often the betrayal of our hopes for the future of our world, coming at the hand of those we thought would be our allies, or even friends.
This trauma prevents them from escaping the paradigm of cultural analysis, and adopting principled, scientific understanding of capitalism. It is this trauma, in fact, that prevents themselves from attaining the normal political subjectivity they so covet . . .
Great article. His analysis applies more widely too. I’m seeing a lot of libs being pushed right because of cultural issues. Someone on the “woke-left” is mean to them and they go running to Tucker Carlson. It sucks people so unprincipled that they collapse right or go “post-left” so easily - there’s a material analysis at play here too.
Fitting into this, I see people who are themselves pretty left conflate performative wokeness with the left. Taibbi is the biggest offender. He gets called out on it but has a blind spot to it, or it’s a grift, or both. At any rate, he’s leaning into that budding post-left populist market hard.
Class is based on a person's dialectical, pure (two-way) relation to the means of production. Just so everyone's on the same page on this site. There are temporary alliances labour professionals, economistic labour unions, etc. made with the capitalists, but they are temporary until their conditions change. Class consciousness, true or false, sits on top of this relation inside the minds of workers and further modifies their actions based on this relation to the MoP. Obviously, people with more control over the MoP or serve the direct interests of those who do, have more leverage to aquire wealth from the production process, but that is a symptom not a cause of the relationship.
They're idealist left-lib dipshits, like him, Tersee, r/StupidPol, (Matt Christman a little), etc. who constantly conflate social affect and income for "class."
https://newmultitude.org/kill-are-peemies-how-the-post-left-got-got/
Great article. His analysis applies more widely too. I’m seeing a lot of libs being pushed right because of cultural issues. Someone on the “woke-left” is mean to them and they go running to Tucker Carlson. It sucks people so unprincipled that they collapse right or go “post-left” so easily - there’s a material analysis at play here too.
Fitting into this, I see people who are themselves pretty left conflate performative wokeness with the left. Taibbi is the biggest offender. He gets called out on it but has a blind spot to it, or it’s a grift, or both. At any rate, he’s leaning into that budding post-left populist market hard.