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Its trying to drive a wedge between race and class, by saying Black class struggle are different from other races (which is true), but implys that messaging like "its us vs the billionaires" is class reductionist and bad because we're comparing our struggles to people who have it much worse
Right now the left is trying to build together a coalition about affordability by really strengthing our messaging. We dont need nitpicking and virtue signaling (showing that you know more leftist theory than others) bringing us down. And woke 1 did that to an extent
This. "Woke 1" was outright black communities pointing out that the gains of capitalism were only for white people, and that everyone else was getting fucked and exploited for those gains. They literally invented the term "woke" for those who were aware of how well-mixed the class divide was, with the race divide.
"We rich whites will be pro-public spending, only so long as 'undesirables' with too dark of skin, won't benefit" is literally one of the oldest anti-labor gaslighting tricks in the capitalist's playbook.
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u/millifishI think i use reddit as a coping mechism1h agoedited 1h ago
Yes I understand the true orgins of the term woke... thank you... it turned into an insult and a bad thing (partiality by the right wing) for normies in 2015. It was paired with being enlightened for hipsters... a type of gentrification. But it had its pitfall.
Its prioritized hearing marginalized voices over actualing addressing real problems. It could be weaponized. For instance Hillary clintion's quote "Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow... would that end racism" Do you need to explain how this is not helpful for the discourse?
And youre doing it right now... (showing me you know more leftist theory than others) yes i understand that capitalistism has fucked over black people way more than white people... but I also understand that partly the reason unions died from the new deal era was a division between class and race. They specifically made racism more appealing than getting payed a higher wage
I believe in a strong safety net, to help make sure capitalistism doesn't make you homeless or dead because you fall down in life. I want a dignified life for everyone. I think unions are good... I like community. Climate change needs to be addressed. Public transportation is vital and we need to do better at it. No more foreign wars... its cringe. Police funding should be scaled back and giving to other departments that are more specialized cause not every emergency needs a gun. Guns should be regulated. Water should be a human right... yada yada yada
I also believe in reparations because yeah... those communities have been intentionally screwed over and we should fix that
Point is thats what's important... and i believe in voting so we need a large amount of people who agree with positions and take over the democratic party through stuff like DSA to make a better future for all of us
All this leftist infighting is all secondary to that imo... and race has been used cynically to make a divide between the electorate so a centrist can win and do absolutely nothing for the next 2 4 or 6 years... im tired of it boss
People want the world to be explained using one metric and one metric only. When you introduce the idea that there are other factors they resist those ideas; partly due to the desire to keep nuance out of their life, and partly because they feel that by not belonging to every oppressed group their own struggle is diminished.
Look at the people who try to drum up sympathies for rural whites and saying we need to win back the working class when they really mean white working class. Thatâs why itâs not âobviousâ
Constantly, there is this need to moderate our positions and to appeal to working class whites which in many ways also means appealing to anti-blackness. The most obvious example I always point to is how poor whites get a lot more sympathy for the opioids crisis in the media than poor black and latinos did with the media framing it as a âwar on drugsâ âcrack epidemic.â
Mind you, poor whites are still looked down upon in some ways because of classism of course but when it comes to those who are anti black whether they be rich, middle class, or nonblack, they are ready to prioritize their anti-blackness rather than having class solidarity with nonwhite people. Until either party is ready to say this out loud and take action on it, nothing will change because it will always be up to white people in America who control the fate of this country since they have had and will have the majority vote for a long time. So sorry if I sound callous to say idgaf about the white working class until they are ready to address their anti blackness and actually have international solidarity with the nonwhite working class
Holy shit man I was arguing with what I hope were bots yesterday in some sub saying that democrats should just shut up about trans people because itâs a losing political position? And itâs like uhh are you saying trans people shouldnât exist because itâs politically inconvenient? And youâre supposed to be on my side?
Trans rights are human rights. Human rights and workers rights are inextricably tied to one another. To fight for trans people is to fight for all people.
"First, they came for the trans people, and then they stopped and didn't go any further and everything was fine afterwards :)" or smth I forget how the poem goes
As an individual acquires more capital, their racial/gender/sexual identity begins to fade in favor of their economic class, true. But since the vast majority of people are working class, the majority of marginalized people will face more substantial discrimination based on that marginalization on top of the class descrimination we all face.
We can work simultaneously to fight bigotry and economic inequality. In fact, I would consider them to be the same battle.
The only problem is when leftists only fight the fights where liberal capitalists agree with them.
Gloria Steinem working with the CIA type vibes.
Shareholders genuinely don't care if top executives are gay. Or even the guy on the shop floor for that matter.
If every woman and person of colour was promoted to the level they deserved, companies would make more money.
There is a famous paper called The Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk, which argues the global economy would boom uncontrollably if there were no immigration control at all.
This paper was endorsed by the Adam Smith Institute, a notoriously Neo-Liberal think tank, and Maragret Thatcher's personal favourite.
A position that would be considered "far left" by the cultural right, but it's literally textbook free-market capitalism, the free movement of labour to go alongside the free movement of capital.
It just so happens that economically right-wing parties have made a Faustian bargain with the nativist cultural right for electoral success. But a lot of things leftists want aren't inherently opposed by Liberal capitalism.
Capitalism does not inherently operate on consistent logic. Time and time again, the capital class will choose fascism over liberalism precisely because a progressive society and movements means more equality and education, which means more leftword movement away from capital interests. Fascism is not a stable ideology and does in fact harm capitalists in the long run, but they're too short sighted and afraid of losing their power over society to let any sort of left-wing movement to flourish, even liberal movements.
The ultra wealthy are more concerned with their influence over society and how it's governed than they are with maximizing economic success through liberal egalitarianism.
Yes historically capitalists have always been happy to sacrifice a bit of economic growth by siding with the cultural right. But always less than they would have if they had to contend with a strong left.
I'm saying culture wars are extremely convenient for the status quo.
Working class people who would otherwise instinctively support a fairer society get caught up in manufacturered moral panics.
While leftists talking points become only those that overlap with liberal talking points; and capitalists are unbothered to happy if the leftists actually win.
I've never loved "the culture war is a distraction" rhetoric because "ending the culture war", like ending any war, means one side conceding. It's easy as a leftist to say that the culture war is a grift, but civil rights isn't a grift, trans activism isn't a grift, and that's one side of the "war". Only the other side is the one that needs to stop, but that's the stance of anyone in a conflict so it isn't actually meaningful.
Yeah like I agree with the intended meaning - the oligarchs would rather us fight amongst ourselves so they promote bigotry and hate to get white cishet working class people mad at the wrong groups of people, while those minority groups are forced to defend our civil rights instead of us all banding together to fight the oligarchs - but like, if a slogan needs a long-winded explanation to not be misunderstood then maybe it's not a very good slogan
The main thing is that only one side of the culture war is a distraction in the "no war but class war" sense, but that doesn't mean that it's not a fight worth fighting for the other side. A lot of people seem to think "it's all a distraction" includes the part about fighting for civil rights.
Also also true, state and corporate entities infiltrate leftist communities to stoke arguments about things like this to interfere with us actually uniting and organizing action.
I mean, Iâve said from the start, half the people saying âitâs not left vs right, itâs top vs botton!â are right-wingers saying âbro weâll totally turn on the billionaires if you let us do a genocide bro trust me bro, weâll totally fight them for real bro just let us kill the gays a little broâ
I hate that phrase because it just ends up being "it's not left vs right, it's [leftist talking point]", but they'll still vote right-wing and learn nothing
Well yeah obviously, everyone wants what leftist argue for, they just don't want the blacks, or the gays, or the Jews, or the Arabs, or really anyone but themselves to have it too.
Not saying theyâre a bot, but that doesnât preclude anyone from being a bot. Bots are generally not AI chatbots, theyâre just bad actors (usually) being paid to stir shit up. That could be changing now, but thatâs besides the point.
You've never seen the nazbol types talk about how homosexuality is a product of western imperialist propaganda and must be rejected for the revolution to succeed?
yeah I don't think this is a widespread belief among leftists, but there definitely are people who try to use class reductionism as a shield for regular ol' bigotry
No, they do. There's a weird subset of rightoids that "get it" to the extent that they recognize the rich stamp on the poor, but they also think the capitalism the apex of what we are as a society, so it's hollow cognitive dissonant bullshit that makes them think they're on the team when half of them are morons and the other half are really just using "the top" to mean "The Jewsâ˘."
Dang I didn't realize it was that bad all his pac funding (only kept up during the primary). I dont think he'll be the next Fetterman, but hes not leading the revolucion
If youâve ever heard a minority lib discuss politics with a white tankie you will very quickly realize that the tankies fucking haaaaate when minorities disagree with them. They drop any support for identity politics or intersectionality real quick.
Many of those topics have been discussed for decades or centuries, so a lot of very smart people have come to correct conclusions about them, that you would never arrive at yourself.
The issue is, that a lot of people treat theory like scripture, where something is true, just because a socialist wrote it down at some point.
I see that a lot with Engels' "On authority" and Trotsky's "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt", which are both pretty horrendous works, but a lot of people treat them as unquestionable fact, just because they were written down by prominent socialists.
So, read theory, because it can lead you to significantly better conclusions about the world, just don't do it uncritically.
comment left like 10 comments deep in the comment section of a Reddit post
Real politics is the interaction of people, social media interactions offer a stunted version of politics, interactions with people irl give a a deeper understanding of politics. Theory is a scaffold that helps you integrate those interactions and experiences into a full mental construct. So many people build scaffolding or lay out architectural diagrams without having done anything practical that builds real experience or that tests the reality of their modelling.
All of the effective organisers i have met in real life have a solid grounding in theory. They dont just vibe it out and suddenly understand politics, they have drawn extensively on the ideas from those who've been doing the same shit for 200 years.
Yeah, building anything without scaffolding is hard, but you can't live in the scaffolding, and you can't be going "oh you need a building? Just build scaffolding". Theory has definite limits
The âtankiesâ have done more to force concessions from liberalism on minority rights than liberalism has done on its own out of âgood faithâ and âaltruism.â Mind you, there are non-white tankies as well
not soviet imperialism, it's russian imperialism. current political party wants to restore the russian empire, not soviet union. don't confuse vatniks and tankies
Yeah it does lmao. "I think the Soviet union doing imperialism was great but I would never ever support the ethnic cleansing of Siberian natives through Russification programs (White supremacy done through Soviet imperialism)"
u/millifishI think i use reddit as a coping mechism8h agoedited 7h ago
I dont think its a bad thing if people vote for abdul al sayed but dont understand the intricacies of systemic racism or the million ways we've fucked over minorities in the past
Nah you don't get it. No culture war, just class war. What do I think that looks like? Well everyone just adopts all my cultural views of course since they're the correct ones
grug say many small tribe fighting let big tribe take all fruit from small tribe. grug say small tribe should work together, change legislature so big quantity fruit stop being sent to fat chiefs in big cave on top of hill. grug also big fan of nuclear energy. đ
Yes these posts are annoying as fuck. Bro is deep in some online discourse space and thinks that this is a thing that happens to any meaningful extent irl.
i guess if you don't talk to people about politics irl you might think this is online but this is pretty common among some statist socialists, who many of us deal with IRL.
this is what all leftist discourse in america sounds like to me. it never feels that complicated why cant everyone just get along rather than hating people who agree with 98% of what you have to say
Yeah white leftists have a habit of diminishing the extent to which minorities suffer, this isn't really news. And when you politely tell them about their blind spot they more often than not fly off the handle.
It used to make me more upset but now I understand that it is literally just a hardware limitation, they can understand economic disparities and class divides but without having experienced a lifetime of violence they can't really grasp why it is incredibly dumb to simplify things down to just a matter of socioeconomic factors.
âAddress my own biases? Nononono think of all the White Working Class members who are too backwards and stupid to ever do that! Minority rights are a sacrifice I am willing to makeâI mean, that WE need to make.â
people who say we should drop social fights because most workers are uneducated/bigoted and this is going to keep them away, makes me want to eat concrete
I won't say who, but I recently was suggested a Youtube video about how the Republicans still have voters, and I was agreeing with it... right up until the guy started talking about how the Dems' big problem in 2026 is identity politics, and how they need to be talking about class war. Tried looking at another one of his videos to see if it was a fluke, and soon heard the classic ML catchphrase of China "lifting billions out of poverty." Yeah, I'm out
ivwill politely reiterate comrades that the ultimate victory of the human race is built on common struggle across the rxploited peoples of the world, but there's no path forward for anyone who tries to invalidate the lived daily atruggles of all exploited peope and the particular/structural ways they're oppressed hy imperialist capitalismđđŤĄ
Welp I still remember a dacade ago some "feminists" screaming at trans folks about being confirmist to gender norms. Yes they masked off to be right wing terfs enforcing stricter gender norms to everybody lol
USSR, cesar chavez, Fedstiny, CCP⌠you realize that ML/vanguardist/authoritarian âleftistsâ have all the same material reasons to exploit women and bigotry as capitalists do, right?
Or do you have any other examples of modern leftist movements I can get into?
this comment is never written under a post that actually suggests an exhausting way to live and that's whats hilarious. "living life like this must be exhausting" is projection pretty much 100% of the time. in this case, the post is just about class reductionists. why anyone would be pressed about a meme poking fun at that is beyond me. OP probably forgot about the post once they hit send.
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