this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I hate to say it but I kind of agree with her, as someone who has family in Appalachia. There's a bit of fetishization of the rural working class (especially Appalachia due to the history of miners unions) on the left but I don't really think we can compare the material conditions of these people to that of Russian or Chinese peasantry. For one most of these people at least own the land they're living on, they may be poor otherwise but that gives them a degree of autonomy and dignity tenant farmers lack.
But regardless there still irony in a bunch of anti-ML libertarian socialists suddenly calling the rural poor "backwards" cuz they voted for a cheeto.
I agree to an extent that it is foolish, or maybe naive to think that the rural working class will easily ally with the left because of guns or whatever, but its at least as ridiculous as leaning the other way with the "country bumpkin" schtick. Its twitter though, where nuance goes to die. Shitposters shitting on shitposters shitting on shitposters
Until it becomes an acute class struggle instead of a passive culture war I don’t see the rural working class siding with socialism. It will take a few very bad years, as Engels said
Can't argue that, for sure
Most rural poor in the US aren't farmers though. For them a lot of the value of rural living comes from the lifestyle, they like having a piece of property to drive ATVs and shoot beer cans on.
And mind you I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, I loved that shit back when I'd visit my family in western VA. But I think it does feed into the culture war, they see liberals calling for bigger and denser cities as an attack on their lifestyle.
Yeah, that's part of what I meant by nuance being outright impossible on twitter.
I’d still argue that “Berniecrat + gunz” is more likely to be a winning platform in some areas of flyover country than something like
You also need Bernie, who is a likable white dude to a lot of people
Yeah that’s one of the core problems with the Democrats from a pure campaign horse race perspective. They refuse to buil up the local and state parties outside of the coastal enclaves and they have a centralized, focus grouped control of everything. So instead of local characters people will like, they run the most soulless, out of central casting robots.
Russian peasants also owned their land post-1861, but their plots were just so small (peasants called the smallest guaranteed allotment кошачий надел - 'cat's allotment', because it was enough to feed a cat) that it was barely enough to survive, so they called for the land reform and partitioning the land held by noble landowners.
As someone else with Appalachian family, they aren't secret socialists, but most of them are politically pretty disengaged and uneducated. I think treating them like they're all Klansmen or some equivalent is ridiculous.
And from a Marxist standpoint, remember that the peasants were important to those revolutions because they were the bulk of the population, but revolutionary organization should be easier with a proletarian population than with a peasant population so long as the proles aren't labor aristocrats (as many of them ended up being with the development of imperialism). Neglected backwaters aren't at a disadvantage for not being literally feudal, the feudal backwardness was an obstacle to socialist organizing.
Because urban libs are brain wormed. And I’m not dogwhistling about the downtrodden, I’m talking about the pmc fucks that make up a significant amount of the Republican and Democratic base. These people, usually suburbanites, epitomize the callousness and depravity of the empire. Proles are increasingly priced out of these cities
You bring up a good point about landowning making a difference in their class characteristics, but not all rural folk own land.
I should spend some more time solidifying my thoughts on this but as a brown dude who moved to rural NewEngland, I simply find the people here a lot more amenable to class struggle than a lot of the libs in class B cities like Boston, Dallas, etc. A lot of proles. Maybe my region makes a difference and that I’m in a supposed Blue state