TheConquestOfBed

If beehaw bans transphobes and homophobes on sight then plug yourself. But I'm done debating these people. My existence is not up for debate and there is nothing to discuss. I will continue to be trans regardless of people's opinions and disgusting namecalling.

Liberalism

Sup, nerd?

An interesting take I've seen from some marxists is the idea that "race is class". It more or less functions as its own class system. Gender is also a kind of class. It gets close to the idea of intersectionality but hasn't been co-opted to be toothless yet.

I hope for my ashes to be mixed with the soil of the land my ancestors were stolen to build.

I would hope that socialists would at least be aware enough of the culture to be open to reparations.

Bigots are occasionally good at multitasking.

Wasn't he rumored to be softening to legalization during his campaign? Funny how that turned out.

Imagine thinking the people you buy your computers from wouldn't be able to engineer them too.

CORRECT, YOU PASSED 🎉

Almost one in four of the respondents – equivalent to more than 60 million Americans – could conceive of violence being justified “to preserve an American way of life based on western European traditions”.

The hoi4 nerds have entered real life.

I agree in that I think bourgeoisification is a bad term to use when Labor Aristocracy is a perfectly good term for the same idea. But I think some context is needed:

• America has 20 million millionaires.
• 50% of Retiring Americans have at least $100,000 in savings, and depend heavily on investments to supplement their income.
• 16% of millenials have at least $100,000 in savings.
• 25% of Americans make over $100,000 per year, which puts them in the class of people who can enjoy owning a boat, buy a "second property", or pay off their debts in a few years without too much hassle. The system is working well enough for these people.

Obviously there is a huge rift between these people and the 60% with less than $1000 in savings. I'm not going to deny that they're exploited, as I've said before. But they're essentially fighting the 30-40% with savings and financial planning. The top half of the country lives vastly different lives from the bottom half. It doesn't know what a food bank is and thinks most people using food stamps are exploiting taxpayers. They think they should pay for their own healthcare so they don't have to share it with the dirty poors. They think home ownership is just a matter of personal effort. And they fight tooth and nail to pay less taxes than the bottom 50%. They think they owe nothing to society and society owes nothing to them, and the richest among them propagandize the bottom 50% into believing all the same things.

I think Engels was correct in saying that speculation and investment banking need to completely collapse before most Americans are willing to look at the situation honestly. Until then, PoC seem to be the most likely to understand how bad the situation is, and I've seen them dunk on white libs. Downwardly mobile white people come at a close second place, but it seems like only a small percentage are capable of self-crit. Most seem to prefer the air of superiority their party ideology gives them.

This convo is happening in two places, so I'm going to focus on the other one, except for two points:

The basic premise of Gramsci's theory on Hegemony is that colonial powers bribe the proletariat and use cultural norms to convince their own citizens to consent to their own oppression. Yes, white proletarians are oppressed, that is not in question. What is in question is their ability to recognize and respond to this in a way that is not simply reaction.

As far as the Lenin thing, Lenin actually had a lot of faith (at least in some of his speeches) that the growing labor movement in the US would succeed in bringing about the Revolution if it could align itself with the Comintern. Books like Settlers and Hammer and Hoe go over in detail how American labor movements ran into friction with local populations and within the American Left itself, ultimately weakening itself to the point that capitulation was inevitable at the start of the Cold War. A more robust party could have weathered the storm. But American socialists simultaneously couldn't prevent factionalism and outright racism from splitting the movement, and consistently received pushback from a liberal population that was resistant to change, particularly during the era when FDR's reforms improved material conditions for tradesmen and landowning farmers.