just keep hammering them with questions and don't let them slip about with vagueries or cliches until they agree that the working classes can only be defined in contrast to the owning class.
For example: wtf is a "scientist"? A sociologist is a scientist who might do dozens of interviews to solve a problem. A biologist might trek into a swamp many times to collect water samples. A chemist might be dealing with extremely hazardous chemicals, far more dangerous than anything most workers deal with. This is all work by any means, and at most these people are petite bourgeois, but the vagueness of some "scientist" allows it to mean some dude in a lab coat with a clipboard that jerks off all day for a six figure salary. Don't let them be intellectually lazy. Make them say that if a scientist works for someone else, they are by definition a worker.
I think it's also worth noting that there are plenty of contradictions within the "working class" and that the "Proletariat" (which is the class of most interest to Marxists) is not synonymous with "working class".
Maybe talk with them again? If they're still shitty about it then tell them you'll call animal control about a loose dog but you should probably talk to them more than once in months if it's really an issue.
Or maybe be really passive aggressive and anytime the dog shows up walk it back to their house, ring the doorbell, and kindly return their escaped dog.
You're not alone. After my dad left my mom, he and his new wife became fairly wealthy, they're probably millionaires now. While this happened his kids and ex squatted in their old home for a few years until they were kicked out and then moved into a leaky house that barely had heat in New England. I never got shit from him in adulthood besides being able to stay on my step-mother's health insurance which he would get pissed at me every time I used. Though I've been lucky to never be in a bad financial spot, I still worry constantly, sometimes to the point of panic, about money because of how I grew up and he's done irreparable harm to me and the people I love by hoarding wealth.
Some parents hate their kids. Some just have no empathy for them. Either way I think it's quite reasonable to be upset about it and define your relationship around it. It gets easier to deal with over time.
She comes out of a trend that primarily exists in the DSA that functionally believes all the same things American Democrats do, just with Medicare for All (which itself is a half-assed liberal pollicy that they latched onto because it wasn't as "scary" as state run healthcare) and Green New Deal haphazardly tacked onto the platform.
They only believe in one thing, their own individual power. They don't care about advancing materially definable working class politics, proletarian revolution, or even some sort of morally righteous politics. Just get more racist so the racists will put them in power and they'll take care of the rest. Many of these people are minorities but they feel vindicated by the pundits saying the Democrats lost because of identity politics because they've taken to the politics of the reactionary proletariat.
They sow the seeds of their own destruction with their opportunism though. Their lazy organizing and blatant opportunism is what has cause the DSA to collapse from its height a few years ago. I'm sure they've seen new growth since then but they'll chase those new people away too.
Well my cat is dead. Part of me is relieved she is gone but I'm also totally destroyed that we lost her. The vet said it was likely heart disease causing her more severe problems but she had gone mostly blind and had severe arthritis so even if it they were technically able to treat it she wouldn't have had much of a life.
Convinced my mom we need to put my childhood cat down tomorrow. She's been avoiding it for months and I broke down and basically demanded it of her because it's gone on too long and tomorrow is the only day that works for everyone. I feel like shit though. I never wanted to argue in favor of killing my cat but here I am.
If they didn't vote in 2020 then yes they are not included in these numbers because they're unlikely to be Democrats that got pushed away from the party because of events in Palestine. Those voters that voted for Biden in 2020 and abstained voting this time around are included in these numbers however.
In two of these states Harris actually got more votes than Biden did four years ago. The gain in North Carolina is small enough that maybe it could be explained by changes in population or demographics and if adjusted for that she would have received fewer votes than Biden in 2020. Otherwise it seems fairly safe to say for all of these states except maybe Michigan that recent events in Palestine did not drive voters away from the Democrats between 2020 and 2024 because the Democrat's losses from 2020 and third party voters don't amount to more than Trump's margin of victory.
I wasn't arguing a position, just pointing out that Michigan is really the only one of those states from the graphic that the numbers might suggest the possibility of Gaza playing a role in changing the outcome of the state election. I personally don't think it changed the outcome anywhere.
In Michigan Harris lost by 80K votes (netting 70K fewer votes than Biden in 2020), anti-genocide candidates got 50K (37K more than 2020)
In Wisconsin Harris lost by 29K votes (netting 30K more votes than Biden in 2020), anti-genocide candidates got 17K (16K more than in 2020)
In Pennsylvania Harris lost by 130K votes (netting 66K fewer than Biden in 2020), anti-genocide candidates got 34K (Greens were not on the ballot in 2020)
In North Carolina Harris lost by 190K votes (netting 4K more than Biden in 2020), anti-genocide candidates got 35K votes (23K more than 2020)
I'm not a statician by any means but my reading of the numbers is that Michigan seems to be the only of these states that you could argue that abstentions from 2020 plus the growth of anti-genocide parties could have actually cost Harris the state.
Edit: if every single voter in these states that the Dems lost between 2020 and 2024 voted for Harris, and every vote for anti-genocide candidates was a whole seperate vote for Harris (which is an absurd assumption), then the only one of these states that would flip to her would be Michigan. If Palestine was what drove all of these votes away from Harris (also an absurd assumption) then we can fairly conclusively say that the Democrats' position on Palestine did not cost them WI, PA, and NC.
Unions will continue to be regulated by the US government but would hopefully figure out that without the NLRB pressuring companies to negotiate the workers would have to do it themselves.
Most likely though the courts will say it's up to the states and then each blue state will have a labor relations board like many already do for workers not covered under the NLRA and zero new organizing will happen or be supported in red and purple states as industries are slowly shipped out of areas with union presence and the unions reach their eventual demise.
At most Kamala only "lost" 2.1 million voters to other candidates this election (realistically it's probably around a million). If that's the case then 5.9 million voters voted for Biden in 2020 and nobody in 2024 but still casted a ballot. Now maybe that's because of Gaza but from my experiences with the American electorate I highly doubt that the majority of those people are refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza, refusing to vote third party, and yet still voting. I think if Americans had coherent anti-genocide politics then the anti-genocide candidates would have seen more growth than 5% of Harris' losses. I don't believe Americans have coherent politics though so I doubt most of those voters were taking a principled anti-genocide stance when they didn't vote for anybody.
This isn't to say that abstentions or votes for other candidates because of the genocide could not have played a significant role in the fucked up math of the American electoral system, merely that it didn't drive her huge loss in the popular vote from Biden's victory in 2020.
I honestly don't think any more than 10% of the voters Kamala "lost" were because of Gaza. Otherwise there would be millions more votes for the third parties that ran almost exclusively on ending the genocide. The vast majority of these voters abstained from the presidential election and voted down ballot either because they did not like Harris or Trump, or more likely they didn't know anything about either of them and did not feel confident casting a ballot for them.
As much of a farce as 2020 was, the political divide was quite clear. Trump represented COVID and racist cops murdering people. Biden seemed to represent something else. The mass mobilisations and the initial response to the pandemic taught people that and many more of them voted accordingly. The Democrats didn't even try to reach the masses this time around though and so the masses were left confused and aimless and did not vote.
A 2020 Gallup poll found that 46% of American adults read below a 6th grade (11 or 12 year old) level. Many surveys have found slightly better but still worrisome reading levels in the adult population. This is not a matter of Americans being able to read what is on a page, but rather that they do not know how to take in and process information.
Any political analysis that does not start with this fact is fundamentally flawed.
Essentially capitalism had progressed to a point sometime in the late 19th century where industrial monopolies had formed in the major European powers. The industrial monopolies had been purchased by finance capital, and the finance capital became monopolized as well. In search of cheaper profits, these monopolies began exporting capital overseas to other countries and colonies. The secret treaties were a product of this. France for instance was heavily invested in Russia (I think Lenin said France owned half of all foreign capital in Russia at the start of the war) so France signed a defense pact with Russia to protect their investments there.
The treaties also carved up the world outside of the major European powers so the Balkans, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were all legally divided between the imperialist powers so that they could be more securely be exploited.
The German, French, British, and American finance capitalists ability to carve up the world (as they did with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire, Africa, Asia, and they intended to do to Russia had the Bolsheviks not won) and exploit the people in these imperial holdings was why the war was fought and they were happy to liquidate the proletariat of all nations to do so. It had nothing to do with fighting autocracy or the right to self determination which only served as ideological cover for the postwar settlement and were quickly done away with especially in the British and French colonies. Therefore the British and French were not the "good guys". Tens of millions of people were slaughtered just so the British and French could pillage and enslave most of the world.
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to you and Mr. Softie
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just keep hammering them with questions and don't let them slip about with vagueries or cliches until they agree that the working classes can only be defined in contrast to the owning class.
For example: wtf is a "scientist"? A sociologist is a scientist who might do dozens of interviews to solve a problem. A biologist might trek into a swamp many times to collect water samples. A chemist might be dealing with extremely hazardous chemicals, far more dangerous than anything most workers deal with. This is all work by any means, and at most these people are petite bourgeois, but the vagueness of some "scientist" allows it to mean some dude in a lab coat with a clipboard that jerks off all day for a six figure salary. Don't let them be intellectually lazy. Make them say that if a scientist works for someone else, they are by definition a worker.
I think it's also worth noting that there are plenty of contradictions within the "working class" and that the "Proletariat" (which is the class of most interest to Marxists) is not synonymous with "working class".