Beyond the obvious examples like Buttigieg.
Imagine being one of the most influential American Marxists of the twentieth century, then having your son get a job at the Soros foundation, then he later writes a hagiography for fucking Alexander Hamilton
Material conditions are basal, but people still make their own choices. For every Buttigieg there's a Kropotkin or Engles.
True, leading to one of the greatest dunks in History (which might be too good to have actually happened)
Nikita Khrushchev: The difference between the Soviet Union and China is that I rose to power from the peasant class, whereas you came from the privileged Mandarin class
Zhou Enlai: True. But there is this similarity. Each of us is a traitor to his class.
:dril: "im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob :corn-man-khrush:
It's one of those things where you can predict with incredible accuracy what 90% of a group of people will do, but if you're looking at an individual from that group there's no way to tell if they'll be in the 10% that do something unexpected.
In order the for the United States to transform its economy rapidly enough to stave off cataclysmic climate change, we need not look to socialist experiments in foreign countries or the writings of Karl Marx, but simply to Hamilton, Parenti argues.
Brainworms
There's absolutely no value in what a slave trader, militarist (he LOVED invading Indigenous land), and complete tool for the early American Bourgeois, has to say. The only Founding Father whose ideas have worth is Paine, and he was removed from any influence basically as soon as the revolution was over, and he stopped being useful.
It sucks when your parents' politics are actually incredibly good and then you rebel against it and now you're the insufferable crotchety reactionary picking fights with your dad at Thanksgiving over the definition of sweatshops
jesus christ christian parenti
he had the best parenti to get politics from
mama mia
Why can't it be both material conditions and theory? Some people hate their jobs but literally don't have the vocabulary to think outside the box of capitalism.
It's both and I should've said primarily in the title.
I do think that one's class interests generally create the window of what politics someone finds acceptable, but you're right in that Theory is still instrumental in allowing people to realize their class interests, and shaping someones politics within that window.
So is working for McKinsey, enlisting, or becoming a cop.
I don't think someone with a PhD from the London School of Economics is having to choose between becoming a fellow at Open Society Foundation, and stocking shelves.
The class war is real at the end of the day. Always was, always will be in this rotten country.
sorta of related question, how would you raise your child to be more a parenti than a buttigieg?
My dad started out as a communist (he's not from the states, and our family was once pretty involved in local politics) but has been drifting center-wards his entire life. He donated to Warren this cycle, but he accepts that the Democrats are shitty imperialists and didn't judge me for voting green. The 90s and 2000s were very demoralizing for Leftists, and he's too misanthropic to have ever been tied to political projects outside academia, which have been drifting toward capitalist realism for decades. Partially because he was a shite father when I was younger, I had some anti-communist takes when I was younger. Logic being, he's a hypocrite, so all communists must be hypocrites. Now I've come around.
If I had to guess for Joseph Buttigieg and Donald Harris, because they're academics, they are of that PMC milieu that demands success of their children at all costs. Pete and Kamala, being narcissistic little schemers, recognized that serving Capital is the way ahead. So if you want to avoid raising capitalist kids, start with being kind to them.
Oh, I live in an area where the older communists are from Eastern Europe. Your parents from Asia?
Yeah, academics
I think that's the point here, hard to join the academy after seeing your parents attacked by cops during a protest
I dunno how I ended up left.
My mom is a Clinton liberal and my dad is hard right (but also came around to hating Trump because of how childish Trump has been)
All my friends growing up were the apolitical Southpark types. My former best friend is now a woman that complains about feminists on Facebook like a boomer.
I guess it might have been growing up poor that did it, but a lot of my friends were poor too and they all became chuds. I could have easily become a chud too.
Eh, Radical Hamilton isn’t that bad. It advances some interesting ideas around the role of government in development. It mostly depicts Hamilton as a ruthless pragmatist.
I personally am picking a career where I will constantly be surround by diverse, working class people.
