I always feel like I'm hanging out in a punk/hardcore music scene (various anarchist groups, psl to some extent) or with lame improv nerds (dsa). I don't see either of these groups connecting with very many working class people. This is obviously a huge problem but (at least where I am) there is very little attempt to organize or recruit people making minimum wage, fast food workers, service industry, manual laborers etc. I mean shouldn't this be the main priority right now? I don't know I'm just venting but I'm baffled by how bad at organizing these groups are. Do they really just like being this cliquey group that is hard to get into and that's what really matters?
I completely agree. While counter-culture and "leftism" will always go hand in hand to an extent, in the US and most of the west it seems like you have to subscribe to the counter-culture in order to be a leftist at all. You see it on this website too, with debates/memes over what is the true proletarian art/transport/hobby/lifestyle and what is not (which ironically alienates workers of course). I think that a major hurdle in making the radical left popular in the west will be "normalizing" the left without losing its radical nature.
There are reasons why:
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social class antagonisms. The left very much has a "college kids who didn't get the careers promised to them" feel to it right now. We don't recognize enough that a big part of college is upping your social class, and that doing so can alienate us. In general, since economic class is getting flattened into two strata, social class is our last refuge. And people on the left have a real problem discussing social elitism.
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we ourselves struggle in the same capitalist reality as everyone else. The most effective organizer is going to be someone who works with you who radicalizes. But that same person is under threat of the same consequences if they talk about unionizing, and that shit sucks. Capitalism keeps our jobs under threat at all time to keep us docile. So even leftists who do work in those jobs have to reckon with that.
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it is impossible to overstate how non existent the left was 20+ years ago in the US. We are rebuilding, and right now we can't be terribly particular about who with. So we take the dilettantes, the cranks, the weirdos, the outsiders, the people who want to use power but definitely shouldn't be given it, the people with disordered personalities. You know, the people who would be interested in a movement that rejects traditional elements of success. We have weak material and we don't really know what to do with power yet. This will get better, but at the small group levels like you're discussing, the catalyst can be literally just one person with good charisma who convinces the group to swap a reading night for a canvassing night or a tabling night.
The reason the left is mostly young and consists of college or recent graduates today has its historical contexts and reasons traced back to the new left in the 60s after having been previously purged from union leadership positions in the 50s and earlier by the HCUA and McCarthy and undergoing a major split and a shifting demographic by moving to cities. When that happened the left started orienting itself around the student movement and organizing marches and demonstrations through the 60s and 70s and saying things like "the students are the revolution", something that has virtually no historical context, nor any particular strategic implication that can often translate beyond mere spectacle. This largely shifted the socialist movement from its previous strong presence in organized labor, which hasnt been able to recover till now.
yeah when the left gets full of normal people, hopefully we'll still have this site to be queer and mentally ill together
If we enable people with abusive personalities, people will leave our movement or will drastically underperform compared to how well they'd do in recovery/away from an abuser.
People with trauma and personality disorders are a valuable part of the movement but we cannot afford to enable harmful behaviors.
it is impossible to overstate how non existent the left was 20+ years ago in the US.
This is just plainly not true. The "Left" is about as strong in 2020 as it was in 2004 or 2008, and that's arguably weaker than it was in 1996. Social attitudes have become more liberal, and the public faces of "the Left" are a lot more young and diverse than they were 20+ years ago (the Squad vs Kucinich and Sanders for example), but I mean come on. The Sunrise Movement ain't shit compared to what Greenpeace or the Earth Liberation Front were doing 20 years ago.
Rage Against the Machine was one of the most popular bands in the world 20 years ago, and they did things like shut down the NYSE for half a day because they filmed a music video there, caused a riot at the 2000 DNC, and openly supported left-wing guerillas in Chiapas.
If you go back slightly further, even in the mid-90s, there was more strike activity than in today's "record-breaking" time of unrest.
I know this is largely due to how young the 2020 Left is, but it's a serious case of erasing history to try to claim that the Left has made progress in the past 20+ years. We hit a nadir under Obama that we've barely started to crawl out of.
The openly socialist left of the 90s was a hollow joke, not taken at all seriously. Labor was stronger then, but still operated under neoliberal constraints, and its decline was very much in progress.
But I will give you that I should have said socialist instead of Left in my original post. Don't post multiparagraph statements 10 minutes before bedtime, folks!
The openly socialist left of the 90s was a hollow joke, not taken at all seriously. Labor was stronger then, but still operated under neoliberal constraints, and its decline was very much in progress.
All of this applies even more so today than it did back then. Modern one-day wildcat strikes that barely even match what the piss-weak, neoliberal unions were doing out of memory 25 years ago. Yes, they were in decline and lead to the situation were in today, but you're talking about Radlibs, not "the Left", if you try to claim that socialism is stronger now than it was back then. The big difference is that liberals have started to co-opt the term "socialist" more than they used to, though even back in like 2007/2008 it was pretty common for Lefty-ish people to say that they want to be "socialist like Denmark or Sweden".
The only part of the Left that is stronger than in the 90s is the PC-crowd, who now absolutely dominate the entire conversation.
I don't think a lot of people "on the Left" understand how much of a joke the rest of the world views, for example, Bernie or Corbyn supporters. "Silly kids".
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ideally the makeup would be closer to a church
As much as it spooks me that is correct. You organization should be family friendly to an almost dorky extent but serious in its objective. Leave the punk attitudes and irony poisoning at the door.
You need to be able to share your pain, feel someone else's pain, and set that pain ablaze is just rage. You will feel a distinct sensation when this happens. Christians say it is "being filled with the holy spirit" and are fairly adept at invoking it. You need that spirit for revolution. That's why collectivos are primarily poor mothers. That's why Che says "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love".
You're stance on how the spaces should be more inclusive is literally how my local punk scene is. Many of the shows are all ages, but they never get enough of a draw for vendors outside of the band merch table to bother setting up. A lot of the people are sincere, most of the time the insincerity comes from newer members to the scene. But really, the weakness is there just isn't enough people to care enough to participate. I feel like it's always the same 20 people, and half of them are from out of town :(
God i fucking miss punk shows.
I don't even have a problem with the people really, I just wish there was way more emphasis on organizing outside of these cliques. Just some strategy to grow these groups within the mass working class. But from what I've seen this isn't a priority.
I think part of Matt "Material Conditions" Christman's take on college vs. non college is spot on. There is a very real bougie-adjacent air of nobility to lots of the left smarts that keeps them from actualizing a real class-based analysis. Whether they went to college is honestly irrelevant, but they all give off cultural semaphore, the way these folks speak, the hand gestures they use, the fucking board games they play on game night, it's just a big fucking nerd soup and so few have a """real""" revolutionary analysis because they are all ultimately comfortable or feel just cool enough gaining prestige points in their culture bank accounts.
I think one of the relatively large trot groups (US SWP?) went through a phase in the 70s where they were aggressively anti-counterculture, they all wore nice clothes and got normie haircuts and we're strongly anti-weed, among other signifiers. The only thing it really accomplished was making them look even weirder, and ended up isolating them (further) from both the "new left" and from mainstream society.
I think it is a problem to an extent, especially on the internet where politics is an identity and the tendency is towards gatekeeping and cliquishness, but also think what you are encountering is partially due to how young these groups tend to be. Among the people I've worked with, none especially political, the younger tend to be stoners and they look 'subcultural'. Among them are a lot of outright punks, very few are whatever you are thinking of as normal. This is in perfectly, stereotypically blue collar jobs. There were also nerds though, which I am guessing is what you mean by improvish.
The two more real differences between them and the people at those meetings, when you adjust for age, are college talk - which is due to their liberalism rather than their leftism - and being overtly LGBT, which is non-negotiable.
Dirtbag leftism has its place in the real world. I worked in kitchens and restaurants for a while and sometimes just screaming about how Pelosi drinks children's blood and the Capitalists stealing directly from our pockets and there are more of us than them, and guillotines are cheap gets through to people that are really down.
Everyone's heard the fucking garbage that liberals spew, and they've all heard some compelling stuff from the right about how shit liberals are, but they're not used to hearing a combination of "black lives matter! Fuck the traitorous democrats!" It's a good way to get through quick and open up a new way of looking at things and isn't really one of the 2 accepted flavors
no working class person in America likes the rich. Some conservatives may SAY they support the idea of "getting rich" but you bring up Jeff Bezoz they will dunk on him with you. The class consciousness is there it just pretty weak and too individualized. Liberal bullshit is immediately detected as well which is why half this country rightfully cannot stand the pretentious democrats.
I had a couple chuds, but mostly apolitical libs that sometimes listened to Rogan in my shop. Every one of them agreed with basically everything I had to say. The chud was just a braindead ex Miami nightclub head so there wasn't any changing his mind. Everyone else agreed until I mentioned that what I've been describing is communism then just got confused because communism is bad lol.
Most of them have come around lately though, the pandemic made them snap pretty quickly to "my boss is the enemy, we need central planning and guaranteed welfare". Even when it feels fruitless, keep laying the seeds. Eventually material conditions will drive people to seek answers and they'll come back to what you've said.
Look I work in a kitchen and look like a freak. I get it. I know the pitfalls of punk scenes because I've spent time in them. I'm not telling anyone to dress different or not listen to flux of neon indians or whatever. I'm not talking about marketing, I'm talking about organizing. If your organization is only full of people who look just like you and have the exact same niche interests, then you have a problem.
The fact they they didn't come back to answer your question is funny. "Oops I outed myself as a booj lets split."
The term they used is 'I earn minimum wage', what does that term mean motherfucker
Not that it isn't relevant what their field is, since the implication is probably that they have plenty opportunity to increase their earnings, but regardless of what the people around them are making, if they are making minimum wage they are making minimum wage (probably not federal minimum wage I am guessing). I see the mistake that you and the others are making: assuming they were talking about the 'minimum wage in their field' but that is so strange a phrase, and so contrary to all the other context clues in their post, that I am confident that it is not I, but in fact you who is the dipshit. I am willing to admit the possibility that OP is actually the dipshit for strange and misleading use of language
Nah that would only have been the case if you had actually been saying what they all thought you were, which would've been so strange: who has ever talked about 'minimum wage' to mean like the money on the lower end of their career? Nobody ever says that and especially with the context it is to me such a bizarre interpretation. But everyone was seeing it like that, I thought I was going crazy
Turns out I was right lmao get rekt you read it wrong I literally did not care about the OP at all besides that I got to be right when like three people were wrong. This is the best day of my life
uhhh you sound so cringe and are proving the out of touch point. you sound like an improv kid out of touch
and I say that as someone definitely out of touch
I tried to be very careful with my language there because everyone else in this thread was demonstrating very poor reading comprension. If being better at understanding things is cringe then cringe away. This is like Christmas for me
but you’re wrong minimum wage to literally everyone especially average joes means not at all what you are saying. if you dont make 7.25 or 13 or whatever minimum wage is in your state dont say it lmao you’re basically coming across as stealing class valor or some shit and its hilarious.
They do make the legally mandated minimum wage for their area.
then why did they phrase it that way wtf lmao i take everything back thanks for being straight forward ffs
They admitted it wasn't perfect wording but I am being so rude about this because your interpretation of their post is imo so much stranger. It isn't even so much a matter of linguistic clarity as it is treating each other with even a tiny bit of good faith. If both interpretations are equally valid (they literally aren't) then everyone chose the bad faith one and then decided to be shitty about it. Not me. I chose to think the very best of my fellow poster and be shitty to everyone else
i respect that fam, I think i saw their post saw everyone else’s response of so you don’t make minimum wage and back pedaling it to make it obscured. i own up i definitely fucked up lol how else you gunna learn 🤷
I think I talked about this before when the forum was having a struggle session about the south. A lot of people equate working class with working poor and try to shoehorn themselves in the working poor's struggles just because they have a boss or they aren't PMC. Also when did people start thinking that lumpenprole = neet? Living off of your parents in a suburb does not make someone a lump.
Edit: needed to add more words.
Which is another reason the American left aren't connecting with the broader public.
The way you wrote it made it seem like you were way higher than that lol
Yeah you're good. I asked way back before all the hostile stuff was coming around in this thread, I didn't mean it particularly insultingly.
I was born with a tragic inability to be wrong on the internet
There’s a lot of minimum-wage earning improv nerds out there, buddy.
And they're incredibly small minority living unsustainable lives. If that's the face of your movement, the rest of the working class is going to say "wow, have fun guys" at best.
A lot of those nerds and punks are working class. However they are a niche of the working class. This is a very relatable post. Being a communist isn't a personality trait
I know how lib this sounds, but in my South African opinion, US leftists need to cut a lot of the edgelord shit. Maybe the internet left isn't reflective of your broader leftist culture, and it's just a few loud idiots skewing my perspective, but it feels like you can't throw a rock in a leftist forum without hitting somebody who will uncritically stan literally anybody just for being "anti-" the right things.
Tankies are their own debate, but I'm thinking of the people I've seen being all " Mugabe good because ypipo mad" who've never actually met anybody from Zimbabwe. The Zimbabweans I meet in South Africa are usually either (A) trying to survive here as day labourers/ gardeners/ informal traders despite having tertiary qualifications because their prospects got so fucked back home or (B) STEM students working super hard to give their families a way out. None of those people are going to applaud the anti-imperialist ideological victory of seizing white wealth when that wealth was primarily "redistributed" to another small, elite group, who subsequently made material conditions so much worse for so many poor and middle class people.
Seizing white wealth is fine and dandy. The problem is the "redistribution" part i.e. the complete lack thereof. You can criticise our ANC government along the same lines: yes, they ended apartheid and that is good. Obviously. But the idealism and ideology of the Mandela era rapidly decayed into sickening corruption that made a few political families extremely fucking rich while selling huge chunks of the state off to corporate interests and destroying every attempt to uplift the poor (see: state capture, Estina dairy farm, etc.)
The "liberation" both these movements have achieved is ultimately pretty fucking shallow since neither has done anything much to liberate people from the economic/material subjection they face (and actually made it worse in many cases). They didn't end an oppressive ruling class, they became it.
But that's the thing: the Zimbabweans I was talking about aren't the white ones. All the white Zimbabweans I know are fine - they all went to good private schools in South Africa. It's primarily black Zimbabweans that got utterly fucked and are having to eke out a living doing menial work here while frequently being victims of xenophobic violence, due to the narrative that they're "stealing work from locals" (sound familiar?)
And here, during our very strict lockdown, the worst a white, middle class person could typically expect to deal with from the police was being asked firmly to go back inside if they got caught walking a dog, while black people were getting dragged out of their homes and beaten to death in the townships for supposedly having illegal alcohol. Sure the cops are black now, and the political and corporate interests they protect are largely black-owned, but they're still enforcing oppression of the black poor. Obviously that doesn't make the ANC equivalent to the apartheid government, or Mugabe's Zimbabwe equivalent to colonial Rhodesia, but I still don't think they deserve anything beyond the most critical support from the left. I also don't think it's class-essentialist to demand that decolonial movements work to free people from the material oppression of colonialism, rather than just changing who the small elite is that benefits from it.
this isn't a problem because those workers don't care what some "edgelord tankies" said on American internet. Also Mugabe is good solely because he destroyed those fascist Rhodesian nerds get fucked empire.
Imagine
being on the internetexisting past 2016 and still thinks that civility matters.
Part of building a new world is rejecting the old one. Not everything is The Party, some things are just Our Thing. The two are not exclusive. If your groups aren't organizing enough for you, be the organizer.
