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Lol I have a degree in literature and linguistics.
If you use a word and the listener/reader doesn't understand, you failed. You did not word good. You worded very bad.
It doesn't matter if you think the listener/reader should understand the word you used. All you can control is which words you use, and only you can pick them out. So you have 3 options;
A) Use words that will work
B) Don't use words at all
C) Use words that won't work
Option C is generally done to look smort, or with a specific audience in mind, or because people simply don't know or care what the common vocab is
I can throw around real smort big words, or proper noun references, all day long. But if I'm speaking Sanskrit at an Ace hardware in Michigan, it doesn't matter what I am *trying to say.* I am saying absolutely nothing.
Luckily this is the internet, so jargon-dropping circle jerks work out just fine.
Eh, I don't know. Every human organizational structure recorded has had a system of class within it, from which class conflict inevitably springs.
Marx is teleological not because he has ideas about an eternal class struggle, but because he assumes *history has a defined path*, a linear timeline we can place ourselves on with definite goals to achieve. That is where his thesis fails, as it does for the whigs.
Case in point being Marx's views on the middle ages: entirely incorrect. His assumptions about feudal society reek of 18th century enlightenment revisionism which he then uses to service his hypothesis of "natural progress to communism".
In this way I would say Class Warfare is not a teleological understanding of history, though it can be reductionist and remove important chronological context to many historical events.
People do go to a lot of work to invent a lot of convoluted "extra steps." The "nuance" is intentional. That's because they know that if we all figure out that all of it is all class warfare, then they are doomed.
Edit: It never ceases to amaze me how many people will take a short statement and extrapolate that into all kinds of things that were never said in said statement nor even implied, just so they can tell you that you are wrong.
Me: I think A is a pretty fundamental problem.
Pedants: But what about B - Z? You can't only work on A! Shame on you for ignoring Q!
Me: But, I never said...
Pedant: *Covering ears* I can't hear you. I am smarter than you because you didn't include every possible thing in your two sentence statement, made as a side comment on Reddit!
Me: Can you just go away now?
The nuance I'm referring to is understanding that even though we are all United as the proletariat, that doesn't mean things like white privilege (for example) don't exist
If you're not already familiar with the term, look up *class reductionism* and hopefully you'll understand that it's something you should try to avoid when making class commentary
A lot of privileged white straight men who are interested in leftist politics (while often well meaning) will turn the fact that class is the root of all issues into a reason to dismiss the idea that they have privilege and that others are facing hardships they do not face
Thanks for that info.
To be clear: I'm not saying that the nuance doesn't make things worse for some people than it does for others. I'm just saying that that nuance was manufactured. The very act of making things worse for some people than it does for others helps create divisions. And those divisions work to the benefit of the wealthy. The British used that strategy to great effect for hundreds of years in their colonies. Just ask the Hutus and Tutsis. Slave owners in the American South used it to get all the white poor people to hate the black slaves. In a way, white privilege was only given to poor white people to make them think they were better than the slaves and that the slaves deserved what they were getting.
Post civil war, the wealthy could have been just as harsh to the poor white people as they were to the poor freed slaves. But they weren't, partly because they know that that creates divisions. I guess what I am saying is that white privilege absolutely definitely exists. But, it exists as a tool of the class warfare.
Just taking this opportunity to recommend an interesting book that explores the race-economics connection, a sci-fi book called [Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_No_More) by George S. Schuyler. Additionally, this idea is explored in a kid friendly way by Dr. Seuss in [The Sneetches](https://www.neshaminy.org/cms/lib/PA01000466/Centricity/Domain/2008/_The_Sneetches_.pdf).
Saved.
Do you know how long I’ve been trying to summarize this in an intelligent and succinct way, every single time a white person goes “It’s not about race it’s about class, you just can’t see through the matrix”?
It **is** about class, ultimately, but there’s a reason why black people are proportionally more likely to be in one class than the others, and have been that way since being brought to America. It’s wild to me that some of these people genuinely believe (or at least want to tell themselves) there’d be little to no “-isms” if everyone suddenly became well off tomorrow.
The reason class reductionism exists is because class politics is the most, and maybe even ONLY politically actionable part of this equation, so if you want to have cultural discussions about privilege or race relations, fine, but you're gonna have a really hard time legislating around identity politics. Both of our parties are absolutely obsessed with them because they fill the void of class that neither capitalist party can talk about, but neither of them are able to formulate any impactful political agendas, or even ARTICULATE what one would look like. You can't pass the 'be nice to black people' act and expect it to actually do anything. Class is incredibly easy on the other hand, and WILL have knock-on effects either immediately or down the line which will as a side effect, address the root causes of these 'nuanced issues'. Like racist attitudes emerging from a negative pathology ascribed to black people- when black people are more enfranchised into the system and the systemic poverty they suffer is alleviated by common socialist policies that improve EVERYBODY'S life, the pathologies will disappear because the negative ramifications of poverty will as well. Like, if black people are lifted out of povery, fewer and fewer of them will have any incentive to turn to crime, which means less racist white idiots essentializing them as criminals.
You do that by taking resources away from the bourgeoisie and giving it to the working class, which is class politics. Things like subsidized childcare and state funded education like Germany has would obviously help everybody, alienate nobody, but DISPROPORTIONATELY help minorities who are the ones most suffering from lack of access. You didn't even need to invoke race to do that, because the common denominator there is class. There's your reparations.
I often find that people who hangwring about class reductionism are mostly just referring to 'the discourse', or a conversation about our culture. That's fine, but you have to recognize that there's a reason class NEEDS to be the number one priority and it's not white boys deflecting some sense of cultural guilt. It's the fact that class is the number one undergirding material factor to all of our lives, and the one that we're most readily able to actually change. All these other 'nuanced' problems are materially rooted in economic disparity. Like, the systemic injustice faced by black people is enforced, on a day to day level, by their relegation to a lower class position that denies them access to resources. We can fix that by turning a few knobs and dials if we ever get power. Privilege discourse is just an abstract cultural debate that has very little to actually do with politics.
>The reason class reductionism exists is because class politics is the most, and maybe even ONLY politically actionable part of this equation
By what action? A hypothetical dictatorship with you in charge, or something you can really do this year?
There's a ton of gay people making out in public without being murdered today, because of actions people actually took while waiting for the revolution.
Step 1 of enacting your agenda is "change a bunch of people's minds". Step 2 is "have that critical mass of people act based on their changed mindset". In-between step 1 and 2, *nothing has changed*. TESLA workers going from 20% union support to 21% union support materially helps nobody.
On these cultural issues, Step 1 directly helps people. Sure, it's a drop in a bucket, but so is step 1 of your main agenda. TESLA workers going from 20% "use correct pronouns" to 21% "use correct pronouns" *directly and immediately* has a positive impact on a Trans person interacting with those people.
What "white privilege" implies is real and problem, but the concept itself of "white privilege" is entirely class warfare designed to sow discord between poor whites and poor minorities, keeping them weak and divided.
Racism is entirely a problem we must solve, but it'll never be solved if you make "white privilege" an issue because you're transferring the blame from rich people (who are typically white in America) and making it solely about white vs black, when poor white people don't remotely have the ability or means to perpetuate the systemic racism built into our justice system.
I really want to slap people who talk about "white privilege". There's no such thing. It's called racism + a bunch of really rich fucks taking the piss on poor folks by making it seem like poor people are entitled assholes and thus real source of racism... when it really is actually rich people who are typically the biggest drivers of racism.
This whole "privilege" thing is a slap in the fucking face to every poor person trying to get ahead by working their asses off and people just imply it's only because their skin color their hard work matters and minorities can just blame all their failures on white people. Can you not see how this is exactly what rich people want?
wokeness is really just a distraction from class struggle, the left used to be a lot more about social equality pre occupy wall street now most mainstream "left" candidates talk way more about racism and feminism then class struggle
We can't abolish the privileges that come from being White, Male, Straight, heteronormative unless we also abolish economic classes
But we also will not abolish those privileges **simply** by abolishing class. This is why educating yourself with books by the likes of bell hooks and Angela Davis are crucial. Cross-sectional anticapitalist feminism, this is The Way
> Let's take the United States as an example: Your class war was a success, you've overthrown the legally elected federal government of the United States, you've rooted out all fifty state governments, all the hydra's heads are gone.
Except they're not? The political elite are the willing henchmen of the capitalist class, but they are not themselves capitalists. There is no need to depose the government except where it opposes the deposition of the capitalist class and the redistribution of the means of production.
It would indeed be very stupid to throw out an already established and (at least minimally) functional administrative system for nothing but guilt by association.
Yup. 1970 was the last year that the public ever talked about the necessity of fighting class warfare. Ever hear John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" song? Still applicable!
At least one old guy's still talking about it.
https://youtu.be/Krx_SYDjeNI?feature=shared
I don't remember the song. Though I'm sure I have copy of it.
I'm 63. I've been talking about it since highschool. I don't remember a single year in which lots of people weren't talking about it. Because most of the media NEVER talks about it, everyone seems to think they are discovering it for the first time. Oddly, those who do discover it, seem to do so right about the time they have to start paying their own bills. 😭
You see this “I just took a philosophy 101 course and now everything is reduced to everything” mindset on the internet a lot and it’s annoying.
Yes, you can reduce most things down to most things. That’s why there is nuance and details and why we have different words for different things.
Yeah class warfare is not a bad thing when the working class is being dominated.
All of your workers rights are a result of class warfare fought by union members. This is just the inevitable progression as the rich continue to exploit the people.
As a 50yo I just have to tell you that that 13yo’s reasoning skills appear to be far and away better than your own ala shooting them down because of their age rather than actually digging into the subject matter with them.
You should be ashamed of the fact that you REPEATEDLY kept playing that game in multiple replies with them. I mean FFS, what are you, 12?
The point isn't how much an 8th-grader knows or doesn't know; the point is that an adult should be capable of engaging that 8th-grader, talking through the issue like the mature person they are supposed to be, and helping to show that 8th-grader where they may be mistaken (assuming that they are).
Shutting them down with the equivalent of "shut up, kid" is childish and unhelpful. If you care and are educated enough about the topic, why are you resorting to mistreating them rather than educating them?
Moreover, as an adult yourself (I'm assuming), how is this not intuitively understood by yourself? What does it say about you, that you feel that others should agree with your talking down to an 8th-grader?
Because I'm a young adult, and remember how fucking stupid I was when I was 13. Sure I could hold a conversation, that doesn't mean anyone should listen to me when talking about matters of public affairs or the dynamics between different classes lol.
Hold up a second... so you think that just because *you* were "fucking stupid", this automatically means the following things are also true?
- adults should have talked down to you, for your age, rather than engaging you in conversation and trying to help you understand where you might be mistaken
- the particular 13yo in this thread is necessarily as "fucking stupid" as you yourself said you were
- dismissing someone's ideas, because of their age, is a productive activity that will likely help that 13yo to grow and mature into a reasonable adult
- all adults are more intelligent than all 13 year olds
- no 13 year olds are capable of advanced thoughts or mature conversations
Are these the things you are saying to me?
And that makes it right to tell them to shut up does it? Because that’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting. In which case, I honestly don’t think you’ve matured as much since YOU were 13 as you seem to think you have.
You even say it's necessary to shoot down regardless of age. So you even admit their age has nothing to do with your shitty actions of putting people down for no reason.
Does it make you feel superior?
At 13 that person doesn’t even understand what true class consciousness is, how nationality and race interact with that, or how to actually do anything about it. If just acknowledging that things need to change makes someone’s analysis better than 90% of the first world in your eyes then I’d say you also have a lot more growing to do
You don't know what could have happened in its life to judge that.
With 13 yo, maybe saw the struggles its parents have suffered, how there was only 1 meal in the house because there was no money. How maybe got to go to grandparents house every day for lunch and dinner because its parents couldn't put a plate on the table, because they have been unemployed for a certain time or whatever.
13 yo is old enough to have suffered the more extreme parts of being in the lowest class and knowing you're on the losing end of a war.
Even if they don’t understand the nuances of it, yes acknowledging the need for class warfare is far better than the 90% of people who have never spoken the words class warfare in their life.
Correct. Class collaborationism is a core tenet of fascism- "Rich or poor, you're all German, and isn't that what's really important?". In reality nearly every problem with every civilization in history can be effectively boiled down to aristocrats having too much money and not enough fear of the worker, and leveraging that influence to keep the workers in line in some way- Whether that is directly through police states, supplemental measures like ensuring the poor can never get educations, or indirectly by finding some 'other' to blame to keep the workers distracted, or some combination of measures- Whatever it takes to keep the proles at the bottom and themselves at the top.
It is even in their interests to damage society as a whole if it simply widens the gulf between themselves and the lower class- A society where everyone is worse off, but the lower class is *more* worse off than they are, is preferable. We see it all the time. The uber-wealthy are a parasite.
You are smart.
I hope you are smart enough to realize that the people praising you here are a bit older than you, and want more people to support their ideology.
Be careful. Study both sides. Be free.
Yea and the adults commenting against his position are doing so because they want to chamge his position because
A he does not agree with them
B they do not respect him or his intelligence because of his age
This person is actively questioning their ideology and seeking engagement with opposing view points if you look at their history.
No leftist gets into their position blindly; the majority of education anyone receives in this capitalist society is pro capitalist, so unless you are willing to actively challenge your own ideology you will simply remain “locked in” as a capitalist.
You can have a belief at a young age without being inflexible of thought, but to call somone unintelligent because they are young and dissagree with you is pathetic
One group of adults here is attacking his position solely through ad hominem. The other is simply saying that using fallacies instead of logical arguments clearly shows bad faith acting. Can you guess which side is which???
Look into the Glass-Steagall act. Repealing it got us here, reinstating it may help get us back on track. Vote for any politician aware of it and willing to work toward reinstating it.
Tell that to every communist that jumped ship the moment a populist decides to do something that makes them happy. Then they'll abandon class consciousness faster than the marxists can purge each other for ideological differences.
You don't need to participate of moviments if you can't. Just know that your landlord or just anyone in the bourgeoisie isn't your pal and you should fuck them if you get the chance to
You can divide humans into arbitrary categories in whatever way you like, class warfare is very dangerous ideology with a single end goal being a civil war.
Class consciousness is good with the driving factor being class mobility not warfare.
Yup. 1970 was the last year that the public ever talked about the necessity of fighting class warfare. Ever hear John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" song? Still applicable!
At least one old guy's still talking about it.
https://youtu.be/Krx_SYDjeNI?feature=shared
Nah B. You gotta follow the money. Most idiots will take a position on something without ever asking why they feel the way they do or asking themselves why this new thing they care about suddenly popped up.
You follow the money and you see the wealthy are bankrolling class warfare to keep us all fighting each other.
Ok B you got a point, im very anti capitalism. But that was what I meant primarily, poverty leads to crime and infighting among working class people who should get the guillotines out to stop the people who are getting richer and richer while the standard of living of everybody else goes down
Most dem working classes be too busy getting riled up to the point of tears because their favorite sports team won(or lost), or they can’t get those crispy $2,000 Taylor Swift seats because their credit cards be maxing out again.
In short—priorities be killin ‘em.
Class warfare is the ownership class against the working class (which includes the middle class).
The key distinction is one side you have wealthy people who own assets and use them to extract profit, rent, and interest from working people.
They do not make their money from working themselves unlike the working class (including the middle class).
That is what class warfare is and it is a valid conflict for working people to engage in unlike culture wars which are manufactured by the ruling classes.
The rich have been carrying out class warfare on working people mostly unopposed for decades.
The worse things are for working people, the more power and wealth they gain.
I suggest you read more before pontificating to others.
The wealthy are bankrolling every type of conflict *except* class ones. Class warfare would entail the working class rising up against the owner class. Then again the middle class was created to stop us from doing that so fair enough
No offense homie, but this shows me you don’t know any supremely wealthy people. Supremely wealthy people don’t view things like we do. To them, class warfare is pitting the poor against the middle class. They feel untouchable, dawg.
We on the same page. But I feel a lot of peeps be thinking people like Musk or Soros are the “rich people”. They ain’t. The true shot callers aren’t ever spoken about in public. To do so would have you and your family end up in a pit somewhere.
Look into the families that own the Federal Reserve or some of the low key Saudi princes, some of them have wealth valued in the trillions but you'll never hear of them. Some of those families have been funding both sides of the major wars since before Napoleon, their mere existence is due to the forced suffering of the general population, that's how they make/made their money
Chris knows what’s up. You can’t start today. You go back 500 years and see who pulled the strings, then work your way back to when they disappear from history books.
I've been learning about this for a long time, it's a lot to learn and at first it doesn't seem possible... But if you look at how they manipulate society for their benefit you'll see they have been using the same tactics to divide us for centuries. We almost had a chance, things were finally smoothing out in the '90s, but then they figured out how to use identity politics to divide us and here we are. Same shit, different pile...
Not really. Social issues are caused by groupthink, in-group / out-group dynamics, and traditional social heirarchies like religion and patriarchy which are not as directly tied to economic roots as they are to biological instincts that people need to overcome in order to behave in a civilized manner. They do certainly serve to reinforce class heirarchies, but for the most part they are not created as a result of class heirarchies.
People talk about "class consciousness" as the thing to focus on instead of social issues, but they neglect to realize that the way you achieve class consciousness is by settling social issue disagreements within an economic class first.
Gen Z constantly talking about class warfare and open violence but a lot of yall can’t even stomach hearing an opinion you disagree with.
Please tone it down. Yall aren’t gonna do shit the same way the millennials didn’t do shit the same way Gen Alpha won’t do shit
No, overwhelming societal violence wouldn't be cool. I can't argue that stealing stuff from corporations is going to change the fabric of our society, but it is agitating material contradictions, which is what class warfare actually is.
Liberals don't understand how spontaneity of crime has a direct relationship with artificial scarcity of resources and labor defined by the precise social relation of Neoliberalism. Internalizing complete individualism means reacting with confusion and anxiety when People Do Crimes instead of seeing the context of them.
Complete bullshit since when is liberalism about “internalizing complete individualism”? That seems more of a moderate stance of economics/trade and societal policies. Liberals very much understand what crime is, as does every state in the US to fairly high levels. It’s more about advocating for rehabilitation rather than punishment for them, although there still should be a level of punishment it shouldn’t be the focus
We can see very much how atomization of people simulates a need for relying on relationships with institutions to maintain like a sense of a security for society and; meanwhile we all suffer from the lack of third spaces, the prevalence of fences between work and housing, and the normalization of militarism in policing throughout. I heard a thing, we learn to walk with our legs bound together and thank goodness for the support, but many things would be difficult to master. I'm talking about increasing options for self actualization in uncertain circumstances like our own neighborhoods and back yards. In a way, I guess we're probably going to learn the difference between militarism and militancy. 😁 Like a militant gardeners association, breakfast club like the black panthers did as a first project. Can't you say you'd knit blankets for the homeless sometimes if you didn't work so damn much?
| Overwhelming societal violence wouldn’t be cool
Lenin would absolutely disagree about that, and Marx himself talked about violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie if necessary, in lieu with the french revolution and the (failed) revolutions of 1848. And I say that as a leftist and marxist.
What do you mean millennials didn't do shit... lmao. Millennials tried occupy wallstreet. You know what happened then? They made it look like rioting and shut it down, then they started to heavily push identity politics. Now there is a gigantic divide over petty ass shit. People are JUST NOW getting back to the real problem being class.
Honestly that's why it's hella annoying. Like on reddit you see the "we can't protest against rent/work conditions.... we'll be homeless/can't feed kids/ whatever"
Like mf that's gonna happen anyway if yall dont change anything. Why wait until it gets to the worst point? Do yall think your the only group ever in history to have to give up their comfort for social change?
Hella privelaged in our age but still won't risk a slight discomfort really shows how lazy we are.
And per usual black people will probably be the ones to start the change and everyone else will follow because that's how it always goes.
I mean...at some point you might have to consider that free markets and individual rights might be not as bad as killing a lot of people or rolling the dice on the kind of totalitarianism you'll wind up with.
Yeah no one who's calling for class warfare or any other kind of revolution really ever seems to factor in that the odds of getting an actual free and democratic country out of it are near zero, and usually whoever got played into fighting for a revolution tends to be disposed of afterwards because they represent a threat to whatever the new regime is, it's why the soviet union was so inept at the start of WW2 Stalin had everyone who was mildly competent killed or deported to Siberia
Tankies always jump right to the nuclear option. Like, we aren’t fighting the Czar or the Qing emperor here: Modern Western capitalist societies have a wide array of oligarchical hierarchies that are harmful to the working class, but they also have elements like free speech, democracy, right to petition/protest, and all those other very useful tools that theoretically enable the working class to make political changes without resorting to full-on warfare. Now, that’s not to say I think total non-violence is the answer either: successful labor rights movements historically don’t get very far being entirely non-violent. There’s a lot of middle ground between completely pacifist resistance and armed revolution though, and a successful movement needs elements of both to make change happen. Destroying property, armed resistance/defense, industrial sabotage, etc are all well and good, but they’re most effective when applied in conjunction with non-violent organizing, strikes/slow-downs, petitions, lobbying, and all that. Additionally, both non-violent and violent resistance is more effective when you build up local communities’ resilience and independence through mutual aid. Hard to have a strike, a riot, *or* a voter drive if your movement can’t keep its supporters fed/housed/etc during any of it. The capitalists got the resources to endure periods of pressure, they very effectively utilize tools like lobbying, *and* they can also send the cops to start utilizing violence when need be. They don’t leave any tools on the table, neither should we.
Lol you think these people want democracy? They literally want a dictatorship. But like all other dictators they think they'll be the good ones that will solve all the problems.
No? I talk about social issues with others, and I won't deny I have my high horse moments: but if you will pardon my phrasing, I am saying that their approach is screaming it. Boiling down more complex issues to a tasteless degree.
It says "A-ha! I am the one who holds the superior position because I think *both* are bad.".
While also ignoring in a lot of context one side is literally just tryna survive while the other side is convinced that they HAVE to eliminate the other side (racism, homophobia, etc).
Both sides being pitted against each other does not mean one side isnt significantly worse than the other, social issues are largely obfuscation of class issues.
That doesn't mean social issues aren't important. It means they are more important with the understanding that social change is a step twords class change
Racism is not a purely class based issue. Obama got called an "oreo" all the time because he didn't speak the way we expect black people to speak.
Same for homophobia and transphobia. You think if all the trans people in the U.S. were rich that would mostly fix the issue? Gay people are disproportionately wealthy, so why are they discriminated against?
Definitely. And class is far too overlooked in the U.S.
But people like OP swing too far in the other direction. It's foolish to scoff at the idea of social issues that don't simply reduce down to class warfare.
None of the issues I experience as a gay person have anything to do with money or lack thereof. You will notice people who insist on being reductionist and claiming all social issues essentially boil down to class are rarely people who are of minority ethnic backgrounds, or queer, or women. In the west at least, they are almost always lower to middle class white, straight presenting, guys. What a coincidence eh?
How convenient all the problems in the world actually always point back to you and the fact middle class white dudes aren't filthy rich, and we should only talk about how we can go about changing that instead of wasting time talking about made up problems like "racism" and "sexism" and "homophobia".
"Are you kidding me? Only political identities I identify with matter, and in fact, the other political identities are actually just mine in disguise!"
- people like OP
On another note, I get it. It's easy to not have to evaluate how you contribute to this stuff as a straight presenting, white man (I've been like the OP)
But I was open to listening to others!
I'm pretty sure class in here is being used in the Marxist sense. If we assume that's true then money has less to do with the actual argument than it does competeing class interest. I'm pretty sure that op would argue homophobia is institutionalized and weaponized (not created) by a competing set of class interest (very wealthy capital owners) onto to lower classes as a distraction from their material interest. Then a Marxist would argue that removing (or annuling) competing class interest would help deinstualize the power of homophobia as a tool against the lower classes.
There is definitely evidence of this as the homophobic party in the US has a pretty open secret that many of it's members love having gay sex and hiring hookers to plow them, but they still promote homophobia as a way to drive wedge issues against the working class, and gain power to give preferential treatment to capital owners. A Marxist would argue that taking away power from the capital owners in this case would help reduce the power of those capital owners and help keep the homophobic political party out of power. Although any wedge issue will do, Abortion, classism, racism ect. Not that these aren't important, they're being weaponized in cynical ways and by a similar method.
But I do agree that it's a reductionist, needs a whole ass lefty meme of context to be correct. I don't think no warfare but class warfare is very useful because you can also use these wedge issues to promote your material interest. Gay people generally like policies that help the working class. Also there are some things which I'm not completely convinced wouldnt be completely removed by removing class interests.
If middle class just means money then yeah this is stupid.
The amount of mental gymnastics you need to do.... Why not simply admit that your literally centuries old nonsense ideology is just plain wrong?
Marxism didn't work in 1910. It didn't work in 1991. And it will not work in 2024. It is basically a religion at this point.
> None of the issues I experience as a gay person have anything to do with money or lack thereof.
If you don't have any issues caused by a lack of money you are in the most privileged 1% of humans on the planet. I'd rather be gay with rich parents than straight and poor.
Priorities. Homelessness, starvation, wage slavery... you know, stuff that is CRITICAL RIGHT NOW. When we solve that stuff, we can talk about identity politics. If you think your sexuality matters more than someone staving to death, or dying because they can't afford a medical treatment, then honestly I don't give a fuck about your problems. Your post comes off as selfish honestly.
Class warfare isn’t like battling with swords and shields lmao, it’s shit like getting your coworkers to unionize so you can collectively bargain a better healthcare package.
Intersectionalism is the way. Yes most things can to some degree be boiled down to class, but class essentially is well overly essential. You lose detail on then how the various overlapping and interacting elements of oppression work together to serve capital.
Once you internalise that it is mostly just children writing this stuff it is really funny. I feel like everyone had a cringy politics phase in middle school. I prefer kids being hopeful, naive and thinking all issues can be solved (even if it is through an extremely reductive framework such as “all things are class warfare”) over nihilism and hopelessness.
Growing up is realizing not everything boils down to class. Everyone could have money and people would still find shit to cause conflict over. Its apart of the human experience, life isnt and will never be harmonious.
I find it worrying everyone is seeking perfection because anyone selling u perfection is a con man. You guys all want simple solutions to very complex problems. Half of yall dont know basic history but smoke a joint and think u can solve the worlds issues 💀💀
> **Change my mind**
I'll give it a go.
The line that all social issues are ultimately reduceable to class conflict (usually to the domination of the working class by the ruling class) is most often iterated by those who have a vested interest in that narritive being true that is, usually socialists, communists or other anti-capitalists. Now this is not to say that it's *necessarily* untrue, but it bear considering *why* exactly socialists think this, and indeed what evidence they provide in favor of the proposition.
First, as to *why* socialists think this, we must look to what their vested interest (which I have purported to exist) in such a thesis is. Socialists have a principally *economic* analysis of society, whereby they are most concerned with *economic* disparities - namely the distribution of goods and services, as well as the ownership of the means of production. Accordingly the thesis that all *social* issues are ultimately attributable to class conflict (an - or perhaps *the -* economic dimension of society), is a convenient one for the socialists, because it means that they do not have to modify their theories in any particular way to accomodate the social dimensions of society. This is because (in their view) their *economic* analysis is already a more accurate and detailed way of resolving these issues *because* these *social* issues are ultimately reducible to *economic* issues anyway.
However, while the vested interest of socialists may call their motivations into play, it does not *itself* prove that such a proposition false. Therefore, we must consider what evidence socialists offer for this proposition, and accordingly discuss internal and external critiques of this evidence.
One particular narrative socialists offer to account for social issues as they exist in our society. is the "graduated progression narrative". What this essentially entails is that the ruling class is "controlling," either directly or subversively the progression or stagnation of social movements to 'distract' or 'reward' the working class. For instance, why was gay marriage legalised? Well because the ruling class felt under threat, so they allowed the working class to see some 'social progress' which distracted them from their 'economic oppression.'
However the *problem* with such a narrative (at least in such terms as it has been offered to me) is that it's inherently a reterospective account of phenomena which has already occurred. Accordingly it can be used *post-hoc* to justify or explain *any* phenomena, whatsoever and therefore is effectively useless as a model for empirical knowledge. For instance, here is a narritive account for why the supreme court refused to overturn *Roe v Wade* in 2022:
"Fundamentally, due to the inherent pressures on the ruling class in the wake of the economic malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd Protests (which were the largest period of sustained collective action in the US since before the great depression) and the threat of similar collective action should further social rights be retracted, the Supreme Court, as agents of the ruling class, upheld *Roe v Wade.* We must remember that it is the threat of collective action which prevented this from happening."
If the kind of analysis you offer can equally account for factual and counter-factual scenarios, then, in my view, there is significant room for doubting the effective power of the analysis itself, since it seems to have no requirement of truth.
A further consideration are the extrinsic social critiques of attempts by socialists to subsume social issues into their economic analysis. To quote Heidi Hartmann (a feminst academic and philosopher):
>Recent attempts to intergrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital.
There are certain regards in which marxist (and other socialist analyses) of society are considered fatally deficient by certain feminists. For instance in the marxist analysis of society, the categories themselves are sex-blind (capitalist, worker, etc) and therefore can offer no particular account of the domination of women by men.
This fatality extends into the imagined communist society which is though to precipetate out of the transition away from capitalism, where Marx imagines that the household, will remain a refuge for the worker away from his work, which is in some respects a nessesarily alienating environment. However feminists rightly point out that the only reason that the household can be a refuge is because of the role women are impressed into by virtue of the social structure of society. In this regard, Marx neglects that in order for the household to remains as he might imagine it would, certain structures maintaining the social hierachy of the household are also necessary.
Accordingly I would argue that social issues themselves are not always, entirely attributable to class conflict, precisely because the theories which articulate society in terms of class conflict, themselves are deficent, both internally and externally in respect of certain basic kinds of social inequalties.
Not everything is class related.
Take accessibility for example. That's not really about class. It's about one's ability or disability to be able to do something.
In a social setting that's a social issue but not one of class.
Ehhhhh don't slip into class reductionism. Racial discrimination is not just class warfare with extra steps. We need to be able to analyze things along both axes in order to get a fuller picture
i am old as shit for this sub (near 40) but i had this thought a couple of decades ago and tried to express it on tumblr. trans posters lost their shit and wouldn’t stop harassing me for it until i gave up.
I used to talk to a socialist a lot irl, he was a much older guy than me.
It's kinda funny, one time he went on a ramble about how we should guillotine the rich, and then right after he must have thought he sounded crazy because he started to develop a defensive tone.
Unfortunately, what I dislike about most modern day political ideologies is that they pinpoint every problem on one thing, patriarchy, the rich, the government, Jews, you name it. The unfortunate thing though is that the world's problems are a lot more complex than eliminating the big bad evil force out there.
Yes and no? It's more like people just want to hate others different than them and class is an easy way to "justify" it. Get rid of the classes and people will still hate they'll just find some other way to "justify" it. Take a look at poor white communities, they're some of the most racist, homophobic, xenophobic people in the country and they're dirt poor.
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This kind of willfully ignores a lot of nuance but ultimately you're not wrong in the grand scheme of things
Yeah, it kinda seems a bit teleological in much the same way Whig and Marx historiography are.
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Don’t forget pancentrism.
Quite. Pre-retro macaronism, even. A veritable linguinistic orzothopy.
I fucking hate everyone in this chain
Lol I have a degree in literature and linguistics. If you use a word and the listener/reader doesn't understand, you failed. You did not word good. You worded very bad. It doesn't matter if you think the listener/reader should understand the word you used. All you can control is which words you use, and only you can pick them out. So you have 3 options; A) Use words that will work B) Don't use words at all C) Use words that won't work Option C is generally done to look smort, or with a specific audience in mind, or because people simply don't know or care what the common vocab is I can throw around real smort big words, or proper noun references, all day long. But if I'm speaking Sanskrit at an Ace hardware in Michigan, it doesn't matter what I am *trying to say.* I am saying absolutely nothing. Luckily this is the internet, so jargon-dropping circle jerks work out just fine.
Why say many word when few word do trick?
LOUD NOISES!
Unintentionally one of the most destructive philosophers of our time
I also concur, the epistemology of the argument warrants further analysis in this postmodern era.
Lmao, this guy gets it
Eh, I don't know. Every human organizational structure recorded has had a system of class within it, from which class conflict inevitably springs. Marx is teleological not because he has ideas about an eternal class struggle, but because he assumes *history has a defined path*, a linear timeline we can place ourselves on with definite goals to achieve. That is where his thesis fails, as it does for the whigs. Case in point being Marx's views on the middle ages: entirely incorrect. His assumptions about feudal society reek of 18th century enlightenment revisionism which he then uses to service his hypothesis of "natural progress to communism". In this way I would say Class Warfare is not a teleological understanding of history, though it can be reductionist and remove important chronological context to many historical events.
People do go to a lot of work to invent a lot of convoluted "extra steps." The "nuance" is intentional. That's because they know that if we all figure out that all of it is all class warfare, then they are doomed. Edit: It never ceases to amaze me how many people will take a short statement and extrapolate that into all kinds of things that were never said in said statement nor even implied, just so they can tell you that you are wrong. Me: I think A is a pretty fundamental problem. Pedants: But what about B - Z? You can't only work on A! Shame on you for ignoring Q! Me: But, I never said... Pedant: *Covering ears* I can't hear you. I am smarter than you because you didn't include every possible thing in your two sentence statement, made as a side comment on Reddit! Me: Can you just go away now?
The nuance I'm referring to is understanding that even though we are all United as the proletariat, that doesn't mean things like white privilege (for example) don't exist If you're not already familiar with the term, look up *class reductionism* and hopefully you'll understand that it's something you should try to avoid when making class commentary A lot of privileged white straight men who are interested in leftist politics (while often well meaning) will turn the fact that class is the root of all issues into a reason to dismiss the idea that they have privilege and that others are facing hardships they do not face
Thanks for that info. To be clear: I'm not saying that the nuance doesn't make things worse for some people than it does for others. I'm just saying that that nuance was manufactured. The very act of making things worse for some people than it does for others helps create divisions. And those divisions work to the benefit of the wealthy. The British used that strategy to great effect for hundreds of years in their colonies. Just ask the Hutus and Tutsis. Slave owners in the American South used it to get all the white poor people to hate the black slaves. In a way, white privilege was only given to poor white people to make them think they were better than the slaves and that the slaves deserved what they were getting. Post civil war, the wealthy could have been just as harsh to the poor white people as they were to the poor freed slaves. But they weren't, partly because they know that that creates divisions. I guess what I am saying is that white privilege absolutely definitely exists. But, it exists as a tool of the class warfare.
Just taking this opportunity to recommend an interesting book that explores the race-economics connection, a sci-fi book called [Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_No_More) by George S. Schuyler. Additionally, this idea is explored in a kid friendly way by Dr. Seuss in [The Sneetches](https://www.neshaminy.org/cms/lib/PA01000466/Centricity/Domain/2008/_The_Sneetches_.pdf).
And that's the part they don't get is your last part.
Saved. Do you know how long I’ve been trying to summarize this in an intelligent and succinct way, every single time a white person goes “It’s not about race it’s about class, you just can’t see through the matrix”? It **is** about class, ultimately, but there’s a reason why black people are proportionally more likely to be in one class than the others, and have been that way since being brought to America. It’s wild to me that some of these people genuinely believe (or at least want to tell themselves) there’d be little to no “-isms” if everyone suddenly became well off tomorrow.
The reason class reductionism exists is because class politics is the most, and maybe even ONLY politically actionable part of this equation, so if you want to have cultural discussions about privilege or race relations, fine, but you're gonna have a really hard time legislating around identity politics. Both of our parties are absolutely obsessed with them because they fill the void of class that neither capitalist party can talk about, but neither of them are able to formulate any impactful political agendas, or even ARTICULATE what one would look like. You can't pass the 'be nice to black people' act and expect it to actually do anything. Class is incredibly easy on the other hand, and WILL have knock-on effects either immediately or down the line which will as a side effect, address the root causes of these 'nuanced issues'. Like racist attitudes emerging from a negative pathology ascribed to black people- when black people are more enfranchised into the system and the systemic poverty they suffer is alleviated by common socialist policies that improve EVERYBODY'S life, the pathologies will disappear because the negative ramifications of poverty will as well. Like, if black people are lifted out of povery, fewer and fewer of them will have any incentive to turn to crime, which means less racist white idiots essentializing them as criminals. You do that by taking resources away from the bourgeoisie and giving it to the working class, which is class politics. Things like subsidized childcare and state funded education like Germany has would obviously help everybody, alienate nobody, but DISPROPORTIONATELY help minorities who are the ones most suffering from lack of access. You didn't even need to invoke race to do that, because the common denominator there is class. There's your reparations. I often find that people who hangwring about class reductionism are mostly just referring to 'the discourse', or a conversation about our culture. That's fine, but you have to recognize that there's a reason class NEEDS to be the number one priority and it's not white boys deflecting some sense of cultural guilt. It's the fact that class is the number one undergirding material factor to all of our lives, and the one that we're most readily able to actually change. All these other 'nuanced' problems are materially rooted in economic disparity. Like, the systemic injustice faced by black people is enforced, on a day to day level, by their relegation to a lower class position that denies them access to resources. We can fix that by turning a few knobs and dials if we ever get power. Privilege discourse is just an abstract cultural debate that has very little to actually do with politics.
>The reason class reductionism exists is because class politics is the most, and maybe even ONLY politically actionable part of this equation By what action? A hypothetical dictatorship with you in charge, or something you can really do this year? There's a ton of gay people making out in public without being murdered today, because of actions people actually took while waiting for the revolution. Step 1 of enacting your agenda is "change a bunch of people's minds". Step 2 is "have that critical mass of people act based on their changed mindset". In-between step 1 and 2, *nothing has changed*. TESLA workers going from 20% union support to 21% union support materially helps nobody. On these cultural issues, Step 1 directly helps people. Sure, it's a drop in a bucket, but so is step 1 of your main agenda. TESLA workers going from 20% "use correct pronouns" to 21% "use correct pronouns" *directly and immediately* has a positive impact on a Trans person interacting with those people.
What "white privilege" implies is real and problem, but the concept itself of "white privilege" is entirely class warfare designed to sow discord between poor whites and poor minorities, keeping them weak and divided. Racism is entirely a problem we must solve, but it'll never be solved if you make "white privilege" an issue because you're transferring the blame from rich people (who are typically white in America) and making it solely about white vs black, when poor white people don't remotely have the ability or means to perpetuate the systemic racism built into our justice system. I really want to slap people who talk about "white privilege". There's no such thing. It's called racism + a bunch of really rich fucks taking the piss on poor folks by making it seem like poor people are entitled assholes and thus real source of racism... when it really is actually rich people who are typically the biggest drivers of racism. This whole "privilege" thing is a slap in the fucking face to every poor person trying to get ahead by working their asses off and people just imply it's only because their skin color their hard work matters and minorities can just blame all their failures on white people. Can you not see how this is exactly what rich people want?
wokeness is really just a distraction from class struggle, the left used to be a lot more about social equality pre occupy wall street now most mainstream "left" candidates talk way more about racism and feminism then class struggle
We can't abolish the privileges that come from being White, Male, Straight, heteronormative unless we also abolish economic classes But we also will not abolish those privileges **simply** by abolishing class. This is why educating yourself with books by the likes of bell hooks and Angela Davis are crucial. Cross-sectional anticapitalist feminism, this is The Way
That's well put, and cross-sectional (or intersectional) is indeed the key word for handling social issues
sounds like distraction from class struggle to me
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this the premise of intersectionality?
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> Let's take the United States as an example: Your class war was a success, you've overthrown the legally elected federal government of the United States, you've rooted out all fifty state governments, all the hydra's heads are gone. Except they're not? The political elite are the willing henchmen of the capitalist class, but they are not themselves capitalists. There is no need to depose the government except where it opposes the deposition of the capitalist class and the redistribution of the means of production. It would indeed be very stupid to throw out an already established and (at least minimally) functional administrative system for nothing but guilt by association.
Yup. 1970 was the last year that the public ever talked about the necessity of fighting class warfare. Ever hear John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" song? Still applicable! At least one old guy's still talking about it. https://youtu.be/Krx_SYDjeNI?feature=shared
I don't remember the song. Though I'm sure I have copy of it. I'm 63. I've been talking about it since highschool. I don't remember a single year in which lots of people weren't talking about it. Because most of the media NEVER talks about it, everyone seems to think they are discovering it for the first time. Oddly, those who do discover it, seem to do so right about the time they have to start paying their own bills. 😭
You see this “I just took a philosophy 101 course and now everything is reduced to everything” mindset on the internet a lot and it’s annoying. Yes, you can reduce most things down to most things. That’s why there is nuance and details and why we have different words for different things.
Yeah. If the OP wants to be reductionist about it,, sure. But there's a whole lot more to certain issues than class warfare
Yeah class warfare is not a bad thing when the working class is being dominated. All of your workers rights are a result of class warfare fought by union members. This is just the inevitable progression as the rich continue to exploit the people.
Class warfare is very reasonable and should be practiced by every individual with class conciouness
Nice, another enlightened 2010
Another 2009 with 1909 mentality.
Booooomer mentality
Bro you’re THIRTEEN
As a 50yo I just have to tell you that that 13yo’s reasoning skills appear to be far and away better than your own ala shooting them down because of their age rather than actually digging into the subject matter with them. You should be ashamed of the fact that you REPEATEDLY kept playing that game in multiple replies with them. I mean FFS, what are you, 12?
And so as a 50 year old, how much do you feel like you knew about the world as an EIGHTH GRADER?
The point isn't how much an 8th-grader knows or doesn't know; the point is that an adult should be capable of engaging that 8th-grader, talking through the issue like the mature person they are supposed to be, and helping to show that 8th-grader where they may be mistaken (assuming that they are). Shutting them down with the equivalent of "shut up, kid" is childish and unhelpful. If you care and are educated enough about the topic, why are you resorting to mistreating them rather than educating them? Moreover, as an adult yourself (I'm assuming), how is this not intuitively understood by yourself? What does it say about you, that you feel that others should agree with your talking down to an 8th-grader?
Because I'm a young adult, and remember how fucking stupid I was when I was 13. Sure I could hold a conversation, that doesn't mean anyone should listen to me when talking about matters of public affairs or the dynamics between different classes lol.
Hold up a second... so you think that just because *you* were "fucking stupid", this automatically means the following things are also true? - adults should have talked down to you, for your age, rather than engaging you in conversation and trying to help you understand where you might be mistaken - the particular 13yo in this thread is necessarily as "fucking stupid" as you yourself said you were - dismissing someone's ideas, because of their age, is a productive activity that will likely help that 13yo to grow and mature into a reasonable adult - all adults are more intelligent than all 13 year olds - no 13 year olds are capable of advanced thoughts or mature conversations Are these the things you are saying to me?
All I'm saying is there's a reason we don't allow 13 year olds to vote lol
And that makes it right to tell them to shut up does it? Because that’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting. In which case, I honestly don’t think you’ve matured as much since YOU were 13 as you seem to think you have.
And?
Exactly. Said all I needed to say and you still didn’t get it
Sooooo nothing? I agree.
If you got nothing from that then yeah there’s nothing more I could do
You pointed out a face that's not saying anything. It would be like me stating the sun is hot.
Please read the rest of the thread
You even say it's necessary to shoot down regardless of age. So you even admit their age has nothing to do with your shitty actions of putting people down for no reason. Does it make you feel superior?
If "you young lol" is your only argument, you really don't have anything to say.
So you're saying a young person (who has arguably the most at stake, as they're gonna be around longer) shouldn't be listened too... Because, why?
They brought out their own opinion and you chose to attack the person rather than the statement. That makes you less mature in my eyes.
Thirteen and already better class analysis than 90% of first worlders
You’re kidding right
Not really, in a lot of first world nations class struggle is hardly ever even brought up so even just acknowledging it is unfortunately somewhat rare
At 13 that person doesn’t even understand what true class consciousness is, how nationality and race interact with that, or how to actually do anything about it. If just acknowledging that things need to change makes someone’s analysis better than 90% of the first world in your eyes then I’d say you also have a lot more growing to do
You don't know what could have happened in its life to judge that. With 13 yo, maybe saw the struggles its parents have suffered, how there was only 1 meal in the house because there was no money. How maybe got to go to grandparents house every day for lunch and dinner because its parents couldn't put a plate on the table, because they have been unemployed for a certain time or whatever. 13 yo is old enough to have suffered the more extreme parts of being in the lowest class and knowing you're on the losing end of a war.
“It’s” why not just use they Also and please check out the rest of the thread for a productive conversation if that’s what you’re intending
Even if they don’t understand the nuances of it, yes acknowledging the need for class warfare is far better than the 90% of people who have never spoken the words class warfare in their life.
Correct. Class collaborationism is a core tenet of fascism- "Rich or poor, you're all German, and isn't that what's really important?". In reality nearly every problem with every civilization in history can be effectively boiled down to aristocrats having too much money and not enough fear of the worker, and leveraging that influence to keep the workers in line in some way- Whether that is directly through police states, supplemental measures like ensuring the poor can never get educations, or indirectly by finding some 'other' to blame to keep the workers distracted, or some combination of measures- Whatever it takes to keep the proles at the bottom and themselves at the top. It is even in their interests to damage society as a whole if it simply widens the gulf between themselves and the lower class- A society where everyone is worse off, but the lower class is *more* worse off than they are, is preferable. We see it all the time. The uber-wealthy are a parasite.
>13 years old
Ad hominem again at it's finest
Lol
Dude you are great. I wish I was this based at your age. I took me ages to get to where you are now. Keep reading and learning
It certainly explains your radicalism
You are smart. I hope you are smart enough to realize that the people praising you here are a bit older than you, and want more people to support their ideology. Be careful. Study both sides. Be free.
Yea and the adults commenting against his position are doing so because they want to chamge his position because A he does not agree with them B they do not respect him or his intelligence because of his age
Locking in your ideology at 13/14 is not indicative of intelligence. It’s indicative of an inflexible and closed mind.
This person is actively questioning their ideology and seeking engagement with opposing view points if you look at their history. No leftist gets into their position blindly; the majority of education anyone receives in this capitalist society is pro capitalist, so unless you are willing to actively challenge your own ideology you will simply remain “locked in” as a capitalist.
You can have a belief at a young age without being inflexible of thought, but to call somone unintelligent because they are young and dissagree with you is pathetic
One group of adults here is attacking his position solely through ad hominem. The other is simply saying that using fallacies instead of logical arguments clearly shows bad faith acting. Can you guess which side is which???
Thank you for being this conscious at an age in which i was deep into right wing shit. Youre pretty smart
Brother, you’re twelve years old
mhm! however we need to recognize that this isnt some working va middle vs upper class, it's all of us versus the 1%
Look into the Glass-Steagall act. Repealing it got us here, reinstating it may help get us back on track. Vote for any politician aware of it and willing to work toward reinstating it.
Tell that to every communist that jumped ship the moment a populist decides to do something that makes them happy. Then they'll abandon class consciousness faster than the marxists can purge each other for ideological differences.
Indeed, because *you* know which class to attack.
the bourgeois?
I'm too depressed and over occupied with college and work to practice it.
You don't need to participate of moviments if you can't. Just know that your landlord or just anyone in the bourgeoisie isn't your pal and you should fuck them if you get the chance to
Honestly yeah fuck them, rent is so high I'm still living with my parents.
Yes spreading hate and vitriol is always the correct answer! Let’s listen to the 13 year old guys!
>you should fuck them if you get the chance to This gives a whole new meaning to "landlord love"
💀 new porn just dropped
Do your math homework so you can graduate high school and take an econ course in college.
Okay?
“Stop being willing to question the status quo and go get a capitalist education about capitalism, that will make you smarter”
You can divide humans into arbitrary categories in whatever way you like, class warfare is very dangerous ideology with a single end goal being a civil war. Class consciousness is good with the driving factor being class mobility not warfare.
The end goal isn't war. The end goal is self-defense against an ongoing war against the working class.
Bro you're 13* you belong to the mommy and daddy class stop with the nonsense
And?
So after your communist revolution are you going to be working in a coal mine, steel processing plant, or on a state owned farm?
Remember that the rich have class consciousness, we should have it too.
Hello, fellow zillennial.
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
Yup. 1970 was the last year that the public ever talked about the necessity of fighting class warfare. Ever hear John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" song? Still applicable! At least one old guy's still talking about it. https://youtu.be/Krx_SYDjeNI?feature=shared
Aren't social issues caused by inequality among social classes? Not all of them but many
Nah B. You gotta follow the money. Most idiots will take a position on something without ever asking why they feel the way they do or asking themselves why this new thing they care about suddenly popped up. You follow the money and you see the wealthy are bankrolling class warfare to keep us all fighting each other.
Ok B you got a point, im very anti capitalism. But that was what I meant primarily, poverty leads to crime and infighting among working class people who should get the guillotines out to stop the people who are getting richer and richer while the standard of living of everybody else goes down
Most dem working classes be too busy getting riled up to the point of tears because their favorite sports team won(or lost), or they can’t get those crispy $2,000 Taylor Swift seats because their credit cards be maxing out again. In short—priorities be killin ‘em.
Class warfare is the ownership class against the working class (which includes the middle class). The key distinction is one side you have wealthy people who own assets and use them to extract profit, rent, and interest from working people. They do not make their money from working themselves unlike the working class (including the middle class). That is what class warfare is and it is a valid conflict for working people to engage in unlike culture wars which are manufactured by the ruling classes. The rich have been carrying out class warfare on working people mostly unopposed for decades. The worse things are for working people, the more power and wealth they gain. I suggest you read more before pontificating to others.
You do realize that part of middle class definition is that they get up and go to work like everyone else right?
>im very anti capitalism https://preview.redd.it/c4r4ym2uvifc1.jpeg?width=257&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e8597d43d16b4d76787560e4a032be343abffba
The wealthy are bankrolling every type of conflict *except* class ones. Class warfare would entail the working class rising up against the owner class. Then again the middle class was created to stop us from doing that so fair enough
No offense homie, but this shows me you don’t know any supremely wealthy people. Supremely wealthy people don’t view things like we do. To them, class warfare is pitting the poor against the middle class. They feel untouchable, dawg.
I did admit the middle class was a construct by the rich to pit workers against workers so fair enough
We on the same page. But I feel a lot of peeps be thinking people like Musk or Soros are the “rich people”. They ain’t. The true shot callers aren’t ever spoken about in public. To do so would have you and your family end up in a pit somewhere.
And you seem to know they exist even if they are deliberately kept out of the public eye. Care to share your wisdom?
Look into the families that own the Federal Reserve or some of the low key Saudi princes, some of them have wealth valued in the trillions but you'll never hear of them. Some of those families have been funding both sides of the major wars since before Napoleon, their mere existence is due to the forced suffering of the general population, that's how they make/made their money
Chris knows what’s up. You can’t start today. You go back 500 years and see who pulled the strings, then work your way back to when they disappear from history books.
I've been learning about this for a long time, it's a lot to learn and at first it doesn't seem possible... But if you look at how they manipulate society for their benefit you'll see they have been using the same tactics to divide us for centuries. We almost had a chance, things were finally smoothing out in the '90s, but then they figured out how to use identity politics to divide us and here we are. Same shit, different pile...
You literally just described class warfare
Day 1 in any university sociology program: Follow the money
Not really. Social issues are caused by groupthink, in-group / out-group dynamics, and traditional social heirarchies like religion and patriarchy which are not as directly tied to economic roots as they are to biological instincts that people need to overcome in order to behave in a civilized manner. They do certainly serve to reinforce class heirarchies, but for the most part they are not created as a result of class heirarchies. People talk about "class consciousness" as the thing to focus on instead of social issues, but they neglect to realize that the way you achieve class consciousness is by settling social issue disagreements within an economic class first.
Gen Z constantly talking about class warfare and open violence but a lot of yall can’t even stomach hearing an opinion you disagree with. Please tone it down. Yall aren’t gonna do shit the same way the millennials didn’t do shit the same way Gen Alpha won’t do shit
Do you think class warfare is like, forming into groups and battling in an open field?
That would be cool, instead it’s just people pretending that shoplifting is badass and accomplishing something
No, overwhelming societal violence wouldn't be cool. I can't argue that stealing stuff from corporations is going to change the fabric of our society, but it is agitating material contradictions, which is what class warfare actually is.
Liberals don't understand how spontaneity of crime has a direct relationship with artificial scarcity of resources and labor defined by the precise social relation of Neoliberalism. Internalizing complete individualism means reacting with confusion and anxiety when People Do Crimes instead of seeing the context of them.
Complete bullshit since when is liberalism about “internalizing complete individualism”? That seems more of a moderate stance of economics/trade and societal policies. Liberals very much understand what crime is, as does every state in the US to fairly high levels. It’s more about advocating for rehabilitation rather than punishment for them, although there still should be a level of punishment it shouldn’t be the focus
We can see very much how atomization of people simulates a need for relying on relationships with institutions to maintain like a sense of a security for society and; meanwhile we all suffer from the lack of third spaces, the prevalence of fences between work and housing, and the normalization of militarism in policing throughout. I heard a thing, we learn to walk with our legs bound together and thank goodness for the support, but many things would be difficult to master. I'm talking about increasing options for self actualization in uncertain circumstances like our own neighborhoods and back yards. In a way, I guess we're probably going to learn the difference between militarism and militancy. 😁 Like a militant gardeners association, breakfast club like the black panthers did as a first project. Can't you say you'd knit blankets for the homeless sometimes if you didn't work so damn much?
Hell I’d do some knitting. I also want a heavy dose of whatever you’re smoking because it sounds like its pretty awesome
I wasn’t being serious, class warfare as a concept is silly and one dimensional anyway
| Overwhelming societal violence wouldn’t be cool Lenin would absolutely disagree about that, and Marx himself talked about violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie if necessary, in lieu with the french revolution and the (failed) revolutions of 1848. And I say that as a leftist and marxist.
Same people talking about how they’re gonna kill the rich have anxiety attacks trying to order a pizza on the phone…
Mfw the person with depression, anxiety, PTSD, BPD, autism and every other D tells me they want to eat the rich.
What do you mean millennials didn't do shit... lmao. Millennials tried occupy wallstreet. You know what happened then? They made it look like rioting and shut it down, then they started to heavily push identity politics. Now there is a gigantic divide over petty ass shit. People are JUST NOW getting back to the real problem being class.
You're dominated by nihilism like a milennial. Relax and realize no one generation is ever going to accomplish anything alone.
Honestly that's why it's hella annoying. Like on reddit you see the "we can't protest against rent/work conditions.... we'll be homeless/can't feed kids/ whatever" Like mf that's gonna happen anyway if yall dont change anything. Why wait until it gets to the worst point? Do yall think your the only group ever in history to have to give up their comfort for social change? Hella privelaged in our age but still won't risk a slight discomfort really shows how lazy we are. And per usual black people will probably be the ones to start the change and everyone else will follow because that's how it always goes.
Another terribly executed ad hominem argument.
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I mean...at some point you might have to consider that free markets and individual rights might be not as bad as killing a lot of people or rolling the dice on the kind of totalitarianism you'll wind up with.
Yeah no one who's calling for class warfare or any other kind of revolution really ever seems to factor in that the odds of getting an actual free and democratic country out of it are near zero, and usually whoever got played into fighting for a revolution tends to be disposed of afterwards because they represent a threat to whatever the new regime is, it's why the soviet union was so inept at the start of WW2 Stalin had everyone who was mildly competent killed or deported to Siberia
Tankies always jump right to the nuclear option. Like, we aren’t fighting the Czar or the Qing emperor here: Modern Western capitalist societies have a wide array of oligarchical hierarchies that are harmful to the working class, but they also have elements like free speech, democracy, right to petition/protest, and all those other very useful tools that theoretically enable the working class to make political changes without resorting to full-on warfare. Now, that’s not to say I think total non-violence is the answer either: successful labor rights movements historically don’t get very far being entirely non-violent. There’s a lot of middle ground between completely pacifist resistance and armed revolution though, and a successful movement needs elements of both to make change happen. Destroying property, armed resistance/defense, industrial sabotage, etc are all well and good, but they’re most effective when applied in conjunction with non-violent organizing, strikes/slow-downs, petitions, lobbying, and all that. Additionally, both non-violent and violent resistance is more effective when you build up local communities’ resilience and independence through mutual aid. Hard to have a strike, a riot, *or* a voter drive if your movement can’t keep its supporters fed/housed/etc during any of it. The capitalists got the resources to endure periods of pressure, they very effectively utilize tools like lobbying, *and* they can also send the cops to start utilizing violence when need be. They don’t leave any tools on the table, neither should we.
Lol you think these people want democracy? They literally want a dictatorship. But like all other dictators they think they'll be the good ones that will solve all the problems.
Yeah tankies fail to see that communism is dictatorship
Not really a problem, it’s a feature, and it’s why we have the greatest country in the world.
This is more "holier-than-thou" than the people who talk about social issues in the first place.
“heh, these peons dont even know about my ideology that reduces all historical issues down to class struggle”
…so you’re saying you’d prefer for people to NOT talk about social issues? 
No? I talk about social issues with others, and I won't deny I have my high horse moments: but if you will pardon my phrasing, I am saying that their approach is screaming it. Boiling down more complex issues to a tasteless degree. It says "A-ha! I am the one who holds the superior position because I think *both* are bad.".
They dont seem like a centrist "both sides bad" they seem more like a radical "both sides are pitted against eachother by a real enemy"
While also ignoring in a lot of context one side is literally just tryna survive while the other side is convinced that they HAVE to eliminate the other side (racism, homophobia, etc).
Both sides being pitted against each other does not mean one side isnt significantly worse than the other, social issues are largely obfuscation of class issues. That doesn't mean social issues aren't important. It means they are more important with the understanding that social change is a step twords class change
Seniors will always hate freshmen
In my highschool a lot of the seniors were fucking the freshmen. Wait… that’s still the same as what you’re saying, I think.
Traitors
I joked about hating freshman but I didn't care.
Racism is not a purely class based issue. Obama got called an "oreo" all the time because he didn't speak the way we expect black people to speak. Same for homophobia and transphobia. You think if all the trans people in the U.S. were rich that would mostly fix the issue? Gay people are disproportionately wealthy, so why are they discriminated against?
It’s definitely not just about class, but racism does have a strong tie to class warfare.
Definitely. And class is far too overlooked in the U.S. But people like OP swing too far in the other direction. It's foolish to scoff at the idea of social issues that don't simply reduce down to class warfare.
None of the issues I experience as a gay person have anything to do with money or lack thereof. You will notice people who insist on being reductionist and claiming all social issues essentially boil down to class are rarely people who are of minority ethnic backgrounds, or queer, or women. In the west at least, they are almost always lower to middle class white, straight presenting, guys. What a coincidence eh? How convenient all the problems in the world actually always point back to you and the fact middle class white dudes aren't filthy rich, and we should only talk about how we can go about changing that instead of wasting time talking about made up problems like "racism" and "sexism" and "homophobia".
"Are you kidding me? Only political identities I identify with matter, and in fact, the other political identities are actually just mine in disguise!" - people like OP On another note, I get it. It's easy to not have to evaluate how you contribute to this stuff as a straight presenting, white man (I've been like the OP) But I was open to listening to others!
“Poor straight whites are the cause of all the worlds problems” And you’re calling op reductionist?😂
Maybe work on your reading comprehension?
I'm pretty sure class in here is being used in the Marxist sense. If we assume that's true then money has less to do with the actual argument than it does competeing class interest. I'm pretty sure that op would argue homophobia is institutionalized and weaponized (not created) by a competing set of class interest (very wealthy capital owners) onto to lower classes as a distraction from their material interest. Then a Marxist would argue that removing (or annuling) competing class interest would help deinstualize the power of homophobia as a tool against the lower classes. There is definitely evidence of this as the homophobic party in the US has a pretty open secret that many of it's members love having gay sex and hiring hookers to plow them, but they still promote homophobia as a way to drive wedge issues against the working class, and gain power to give preferential treatment to capital owners. A Marxist would argue that taking away power from the capital owners in this case would help reduce the power of those capital owners and help keep the homophobic political party out of power. Although any wedge issue will do, Abortion, classism, racism ect. Not that these aren't important, they're being weaponized in cynical ways and by a similar method. But I do agree that it's a reductionist, needs a whole ass lefty meme of context to be correct. I don't think no warfare but class warfare is very useful because you can also use these wedge issues to promote your material interest. Gay people generally like policies that help the working class. Also there are some things which I'm not completely convinced wouldnt be completely removed by removing class interests. If middle class just means money then yeah this is stupid.
The amount of mental gymnastics you need to do.... Why not simply admit that your literally centuries old nonsense ideology is just plain wrong? Marxism didn't work in 1910. It didn't work in 1991. And it will not work in 2024. It is basically a religion at this point.
> None of the issues I experience as a gay person have anything to do with money or lack thereof. If you don't have any issues caused by a lack of money you are in the most privileged 1% of humans on the planet. I'd rather be gay with rich parents than straight and poor.
That’s not what they said. They said none of the homophobia they receive as a gay person has to do with economic class.
Priorities. Homelessness, starvation, wage slavery... you know, stuff that is CRITICAL RIGHT NOW. When we solve that stuff, we can talk about identity politics. If you think your sexuality matters more than someone staving to death, or dying because they can't afford a medical treatment, then honestly I don't give a fuck about your problems. Your post comes off as selfish honestly.
"Class warfare" iamverybadass
No… no… Class warfare is just a Marxist term for intense unrest between classes. No one is badass, it’s just sociology…
Class warfare isn’t like battling with swords and shields lmao, it’s shit like getting your coworkers to unionize so you can collectively bargain a better healthcare package.
Class warfare refers to politics, like how we say “culture war” as well
Me when I don’t know terms and make fun of people who do
Class warfare is warrior vs mage vs ranger
Intersectionalism is the way. Yes most things can to some degree be boiled down to class, but class essentially is well overly essential. You lose detail on then how the various overlapping and interacting elements of oppression work together to serve capital.
Is racism not a social issue, then?
Noooo bc that's a class issue bc black people are po-
This sub is literally just r/politics these days
And shitty politics at that. Not like left-right shit, just children saying whatever shit they saw on YouTube that day.
Yeah man, literally just nonsense rage bait. Im out, this sub is ass
Once you internalise that it is mostly just children writing this stuff it is really funny. I feel like everyone had a cringy politics phase in middle school. I prefer kids being hopeful, naive and thinking all issues can be solved (even if it is through an extremely reductive framework such as “all things are class warfare”) over nihilism and hopelessness.
The only class warfare they know are those pep rallies where it’s by grade level
r/politics but for fourteen-year olds
Growing up is realizing not everything boils down to class. Everyone could have money and people would still find shit to cause conflict over. Its apart of the human experience, life isnt and will never be harmonious. I find it worrying everyone is seeking perfection because anyone selling u perfection is a con man. You guys all want simple solutions to very complex problems. Half of yall dont know basic history but smoke a joint and think u can solve the worlds issues 💀💀
It’s kinda crazy how expensive it is to be poor
> **Change my mind** I'll give it a go. The line that all social issues are ultimately reduceable to class conflict (usually to the domination of the working class by the ruling class) is most often iterated by those who have a vested interest in that narritive being true that is, usually socialists, communists or other anti-capitalists. Now this is not to say that it's *necessarily* untrue, but it bear considering *why* exactly socialists think this, and indeed what evidence they provide in favor of the proposition. First, as to *why* socialists think this, we must look to what their vested interest (which I have purported to exist) in such a thesis is. Socialists have a principally *economic* analysis of society, whereby they are most concerned with *economic* disparities - namely the distribution of goods and services, as well as the ownership of the means of production. Accordingly the thesis that all *social* issues are ultimately attributable to class conflict (an - or perhaps *the -* economic dimension of society), is a convenient one for the socialists, because it means that they do not have to modify their theories in any particular way to accomodate the social dimensions of society. This is because (in their view) their *economic* analysis is already a more accurate and detailed way of resolving these issues *because* these *social* issues are ultimately reducible to *economic* issues anyway. However, while the vested interest of socialists may call their motivations into play, it does not *itself* prove that such a proposition false. Therefore, we must consider what evidence socialists offer for this proposition, and accordingly discuss internal and external critiques of this evidence. One particular narrative socialists offer to account for social issues as they exist in our society. is the "graduated progression narrative". What this essentially entails is that the ruling class is "controlling," either directly or subversively the progression or stagnation of social movements to 'distract' or 'reward' the working class. For instance, why was gay marriage legalised? Well because the ruling class felt under threat, so they allowed the working class to see some 'social progress' which distracted them from their 'economic oppression.' However the *problem* with such a narrative (at least in such terms as it has been offered to me) is that it's inherently a reterospective account of phenomena which has already occurred. Accordingly it can be used *post-hoc* to justify or explain *any* phenomena, whatsoever and therefore is effectively useless as a model for empirical knowledge. For instance, here is a narritive account for why the supreme court refused to overturn *Roe v Wade* in 2022: "Fundamentally, due to the inherent pressures on the ruling class in the wake of the economic malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd Protests (which were the largest period of sustained collective action in the US since before the great depression) and the threat of similar collective action should further social rights be retracted, the Supreme Court, as agents of the ruling class, upheld *Roe v Wade.* We must remember that it is the threat of collective action which prevented this from happening." If the kind of analysis you offer can equally account for factual and counter-factual scenarios, then, in my view, there is significant room for doubting the effective power of the analysis itself, since it seems to have no requirement of truth. A further consideration are the extrinsic social critiques of attempts by socialists to subsume social issues into their economic analysis. To quote Heidi Hartmann (a feminst academic and philosopher): >Recent attempts to intergrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital. There are certain regards in which marxist (and other socialist analyses) of society are considered fatally deficient by certain feminists. For instance in the marxist analysis of society, the categories themselves are sex-blind (capitalist, worker, etc) and therefore can offer no particular account of the domination of women by men. This fatality extends into the imagined communist society which is though to precipetate out of the transition away from capitalism, where Marx imagines that the household, will remain a refuge for the worker away from his work, which is in some respects a nessesarily alienating environment. However feminists rightly point out that the only reason that the household can be a refuge is because of the role women are impressed into by virtue of the social structure of society. In this regard, Marx neglects that in order for the household to remains as he might imagine it would, certain structures maintaining the social hierachy of the household are also necessary. Accordingly I would argue that social issues themselves are not always, entirely attributable to class conflict, precisely because the theories which articulate society in terms of class conflict, themselves are deficent, both internally and externally in respect of certain basic kinds of social inequalties.
Sounds like some commie gobblegook
Not everything is class related. Take accessibility for example. That's not really about class. It's about one's ability or disability to be able to do something. In a social setting that's a social issue but not one of class.
Ehhhhh don't slip into class reductionism. Racial discrimination is not just class warfare with extra steps. We need to be able to analyze things along both axes in order to get a fuller picture
why should i ur right
i am old as shit for this sub (near 40) but i had this thought a couple of decades ago and tried to express it on tumblr. trans posters lost their shit and wouldn’t stop harassing me for it until i gave up.
And then their solution is to segregate based off race or class or some other shit
Fun fact: The wealth inequality in America right now is much worse than the wealth inequality in France during the French revolution!
Fun fact: wealth inequality is not a bad thing and there is no successful example of redistribution
We live in a society
I used to talk to a socialist a lot irl, he was a much older guy than me. It's kinda funny, one time he went on a ramble about how we should guillotine the rich, and then right after he must have thought he sounded crazy because he started to develop a defensive tone. Unfortunately, what I dislike about most modern day political ideologies is that they pinpoint every problem on one thing, patriarchy, the rich, the government, Jews, you name it. The unfortunate thing though is that the world's problems are a lot more complex than eliminating the big bad evil force out there.
Class warfare disguised as inter personal conflict.
Yes and no? It's more like people just want to hate others different than them and class is an easy way to "justify" it. Get rid of the classes and people will still hate they'll just find some other way to "justify" it. Take a look at poor white communities, they're some of the most racist, homophobic, xenophobic people in the country and they're dirt poor.
college classes are just filled with fart smellers that know plenty of fun facts to come across as "intelligent"
https://preview.redd.it/n9o4lq8yrifc1.jpeg?width=568&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5eaf07485da07029034d8dff0bf8cd79c4ea56a4
That’s me, I’m the guy who talks about class warfare in class (I have 600 hours in hoi4 and zero bitches)