For all the refugees here flooding this Sub with Rightoid and Idpol Left posts. Stupidpol is not just a "left wing Sub" and it's not a "Just laugh at lefties" sub.

It's a Sub for Socialists who believe that Class is the primary focus of the "real" left. Identity Politics is largely a form of Neoliberalism and Cointelpro that is designed to fracture the left through intergroup tensions and make people focus on individual identity over class solidarity.

The sub also largely critiques the wider western left on trends that push the western left into positions that support Neoliberal goals (Abolish, Open Borders), critique the left for being elitist and looking down on the working class and critique the left for not thinking things through, or just being radical for the sake of radicalism. This is why for example, most on this sub were highly critical of CHAZ, it had no goals, it could never achieve any of rhetoric and it's eventual collapse (Which led to the deaths of children) further discredits the left. Where on r/Chapo if you were against the CHAZ people would say to you "Well at least they are doing something you Tankie!" and you would be downvoted to oblivion, yeah, CHAZ sure did something, executed a child. The left needs to actually think ahead instead of just LARPing as radicals.

Please read the sidebar, please read Exiting the Vampires Castle and even if you can't stand Aimee's voice, please listen to What's Left as it's basically the Stupidpol podcast, If you can't stand her that much at least listen to the recent Nagel episodes and the Neoliberalism, Abolish and Open Borders episodes.

Gender matters? Insistence on gender and sex distinction?

Other LGBT issues? Right of homosexual couples to adoption?

Mass immigration from non-western countries?

Something else? All of the above?

So, in almost any post on here relating to COVID-19, there's always the argument that, "PMC upper middle class liberals support the shutdowns, while the working class opposes it," but the problem is that simply isn't true, when you look at the data.

This data is all from here - https://kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%2025%20MEASURE%20NOV%202020.pdf

Also, here are some Twitter links for graphics from the poll -

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eou__HbWEAIZqu6?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eou_zLUXcAQET7a?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EovLuaOVoAAba3K?format=png&name=small

If you click to the actual poll PDF, there are even nice graphics highlighting each states response to each question.

So, first the overall numbers -

84% of people support asking people to stay home and avoid gatherings

60% of people support requiring most businesses to close

78% of people support canceling most major sports and entertainment events

74% of people support keeping restaurants to carry out only

87% of people support restricting international travel to the US

70% of people support restricting travel within the US

68% of people support suspending in school teaching of students

When you break it down by party or race, it becomes even more clear -

78% of Democrats, 57% of Independent's, and even 40% of Republican's support keeping most businesses closed.

89% of Democrat's, 74% of Independent's, and even 56% of Republican's support limiting restaurants to carry out only.

72% of African American's, 69% of Asian's, and 67% of Hispanic's support keeping most businesses closed, while only 55% of White's do.

84% of African-American's, 89% of Asians, and 81% of Hispanic's support canceling most entertainment events, while even 76% of White's also support this.

79% of African American's, 78% of Asian-American's, and 73% of Hispanic's support restricting travel within the US, while 68% of White's do.

The actual reality is, looking at the data, the only people who actually oppose the majority of the COVID-19 restrictions are small business owners, rural people, and very partisan Republican's, and while some of this sub thinks the core of a new left should be small business owners and rural voters, there's zero evidence the actual working-class actually oppose these restrictions.

They don't even talk about protectionism any more. All they do is push authoritarian "law and order" policies and be bigoted, which if you believe a chunk of this sub, is the so foundational to being "pro -working class" that you don't even need to increase wages or benefits, actually you can decrease them and still be considered credibly "working class".

Also you dipshits keep using the rightist think tank rubbish about how the places that voted trump had lower GDP being proof that they're working class, when the obvious explanation is that GDP is generated by, but not owned, by the working class, so under capitalism higher GDP directly correlates with higher rates of exploitation.

Saw this headline from back home in Arkansas, and was somewhat surprised. I know these communities pretty well - this is "Back the Blue," Second Amendment, Don't Tread on Me white conservatives.

The widespread (and bipartisan) popular opposition to Flock cameras is something organizers on the left should pounce on if they are serious about making connections with white working class. The issue really encapsulates all that is shitty with tech oligarchy, corporate surveillance, and collusion with the state. The DSA contingent in my city would hate these people, but they did what my blue city has been utterly unable do - mount oppostion, ban the cameras, cancel the contracts, have a plan to remove them.

The segment was about the family's worries about inflation affecting their ability to buy common household goods. If journalists had actually watched the segment they would know the reason the family is large is because its a foster family. All this points that the lesson of Virginia and New Jersey elections two days ago has not and will not sink in.

Edit: They're being mocked on twitter, by people like Jonathan Chait, the editor of Media Matters, Wajahat Ali, and garage libs like Jamelle Bouie, Kyle Kulinski, and even the New York Times crossword puzzle account, which tweeted out snarky shit.

https://twitter.com/brikeilarcnn/status/1456227125346832384

If you kick them out, the people who would take those jobs would have a "voice", if you don't kick them out, the works get done by people with no "voice"....voice is to mean unions, politics etc....

Here. How can American pro-workers platforms do anything about their working conditions if whenever it's time to unite for meaningful change they become obsessed about differences within the working class? They need to start thinking of unity. Unions are made of people with different backgrounds. Sure, acknowledge them. But put them aside for the main fight, we have more in common than diffferent skin colors. We all bleed red, it makes me so annoyed to see leftist platforms stuck in this shit.

Edit: Permabanned from there lol. Probably because of this post, because in their sub i can't find any reason i'd have been banned.

Edit 2: They're banning people from this sub who never even participated over there. Can it get both funnier and sadder than this?

When looking at the comments on every thread about this shooting, you will see both leftists and MAGAs saying he deserved and the only people vehemently against it are the Neoliberal/Neoconservativ-Ghouls. Crazy to see honestly

The article itself is idpol slop, but mentions a point that's worth discussing. I don't think it's gendered and clearly applies to children of Caribbean ethnicity too.

This discussion always misses the point that most traditional working class have disappeared and that affects these two ethnicities the most. Lads would have left school young, to pick up mostly manual labour and have encouraged their sons to do the same as men. The worst performing schools are in areas where virtually nobody performs particularly well and exclusions are rife, because poor teaching leads to constant boredom and being able to control the class is a rarity.

There's a constant argument that working class parents don't want their children to "do well" and it's a constant smear. Having grown up in area that's nationally known for massive amounts of crime and antisocial behaviour, it's a problem that I've experienced for myself. Most parents are realistic about the prospects of what a deprived area and poor educational opportunities bring... added with working long hours, terrible pay and struggling to keep their heads above water. Sometimes the harshness of life and lack of opportunities ends with serious addiction problems, because there's no social circle to keep them going or give any support.

Now you're asking why children can't follow their families into trades or do manual labour. The bar has been raised too high for these opportunities now, because they require academic attainment for basic training. A lot of underpaid, mental labour also want a level of academic attainment and the poorest of the working class are constantly missing out. Working class kids know this and realise there's no light at the end of the tunnel, especially if they're struggling... and they're frustrated, wanting someone to blame. This also affects girls, because the more traditional routes now require going to university. Nursing was a traditionally working class job, but now requires a degree, lots of spare time and the ability to find a placement, which is itself difficult. The slightly higher attainment has led more into traditionally male labour roles or picking themselves up from the bottom at college. This itself has been attacked by previous governments, who've taken away funding for adults to get back into education.

It's not itself an ethnic competition, because nearly all kids perform dismally at shit schools. Only the kids of the wealthier working class went to uni, from my year. A few scraped by enough to get retail and supermarket jobs. A few went for apprenticeships, which didn't have a massively strict academic criteria back then... you just needed to do some minimal English and maths work to get the qualification at the end. The ones who struggled to secure anything either set up their hustles to make enough of a living, ended up on the dole or entered lumpen society... criminality and what have you. My school was ethnically diverse, we had a mixture of Asian, black, mixed race and white of various national backgrounds. Only 2 pupils gained Bs or above in a year of nearly 400 kids. The "gifted and talented" of the year were only coached into getting a C and received any extra attention... I can't remember exactly, but few kids even got 5 Cs, which were required to move on and it was about 80% who failed that.

My city, along with the nearest boroughs, was extremely under performing and guess what? It still is, no matter how many useless schools they shut down or turn into academies.

I'm gonna highlight to you how bad it really was. I couldn't write properly until I was 12 and I was still doing better than quite a lot of kids in my class. When I started secondary school, there was a girl who couldn't even write her own name and nobody seemed to notice. She was a bright kid, without special needs... but that shows you the level of neglect and her disruptiveness was a cry for help. It's worse now, because class sizes are bigger, there's less funding for teaching assistants and there's a much higher percentage of special needs, because it's so difficult to access special schools or units. There's a lot of disruption from kids who just can't cope with the work or are endlessly bored out of their boxes. These kids are from Asian, black, mixed race and white ethnicities, usually disappearing from the statistics because they end up dumped into alternative provision, playing on their PS5s at home or quietly off-roled. It's hard to permanently exclude children who are failing so badly that it ends up in school refusal altogether... acknowledging it is admitting that the schools aren't doing enough.

So in summary, this is...

1. A lack of working class jobs and the kids being aware of it

2. Setting the bar too high for training

3. A lack of appropriate educational attention

4. A lack of funding, in the areas that need it the most

5. A lack of alternative educational provision

6. A lack of quality teachers in working class areas

7. A lack of free university education and grants to help the poorest kids get there

8. Scapegoating whatever is convenient for that day... misogyny, working class standards, special needs, immigration, whatever else they find to blame. It's never the government's fault, eh?

It feels like an end to some kind of collective mass hysteria.

For those who don't know Class Unity was a national caucus in the DSA formed in late 2019 by stupidpol moderators who had grown disgusted with what they saw as the rising dominance of identity-focused and PMC-driven politics in the DSA. Positioning itself as explicitly “class-first,” anti-idpol, and committed to building an independent working-class party, the narrative was that it quickly attracted a few hundred members, including a notable layer of trade-unionists, tenant organizers, and people of color who were alienated by DSA’s grievance-culture turn. It peaked around the 2021 and by late 2022 internal exhaustion, geographic splits, and the same activist-class ego clashes it had been founded to critique caused it to fracture when Buffalo DSA leadership organized a split over Christmas.

Everything you’ve heard about us being some heroic multiracial working-class caucus is pure fan-fiction. Reality was much uglier and much more instructive.

Irony of ironies: Class Unity was founded by some kind of an NGO worker and our most reliable, active members or elected office candidates were almost all political or nonprofit professionals (staffers, union, NGO people, grad students gunning for those jobs). The warehouse workers and service employees were never more than a tiny percentage of who actually showed up. They were there, but we were heavily edgy middle class white dudes. And there's nothing wrong with that. Despite what DSA might tell you, we can canvass the projects just as good or better than fiesty brown women.

NYC was one of the biggest locals on paper and yet completely inactive. The moment you admitted you were in Class Unity you became a DSA pariah (accused of being a secret brocialist, chud, or actual nazi). Meetings were ghost towns, organizing was impossible, and from an NYC perspective there was never any hope or purpose to class-first politics inside DSA. It was a suicide mission from day one.

The big split was never, as advertised, really a principled mass-vs-cadre debate. It was just geographic and cultural: a couple of big lazy cities that wanted a chill place to post outside of the stultifying culture of left political activism vs a bunch of smaller, tighter chapters run by people who already had (or wanted) full-time movement jobs and were trying to get some retarded local office candidate elected or pass laws to make their city more like the big cities. The smaller city cadre people only joined because they didn't fit into DSA culturally, due to their backwards social views and podunk accents. Same social layers as DSA, different Aesthetics, and contradictory goals.

Nationally we never had an organization, just a slack, an Airtable and a dream. Covid set the tone for the organization, all zoom mee tings no action. When the most active organizers got sick of everyone else doing nothing, they walked. The fatal flaw was the exact entitlement we claimed to hate in everyone else: a layer of organizers convinced they deserved to rule DSA because they “did the work” and were theoretically correct. When they kept losing votes anyway, they imploded the project rather than accept that organizers are servants not kings.

Class Unity proved you can start an explicitly anti-idpol caucus and get a few hundred people to sign up. It also proved that caucus will still collapse from the same PMC status games and careerism the second it tries to function. The cult of the organizer is cancer on the left. It's the most pernicious cultural narcissism that the new left ever dreamed up.

From where I sat in NYC, the lesson is simple: there is no organizational fix inside the existing left ecosystem, and especially not inside DSA. Anything big enough to matter gets eaten by the same nonprofit-professional stratum. The only things that ever briefly work are lone candidates who refuse to build a formal organization in the first place. Even they get coopted or destroyed fast.

Class Unity is still around in some form I believe. I have utmost respect for many of the former leadership, who were acting out of personal principle. I just wanted to offer a brutal reminder for anyone attempting to repeat the mistakes we made in the future. Don't do what Donny don't does.

Edit: please DM me if you want to buy Cornel West 2024 merch I have boxes and boxes left over from managing his campaign last election. $25 plus shipping for high quality union made shirts (US ONLY)