this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Comradeship // Freechat
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Thanks for being open-minded!
I might say that capitalism does work, but only for the ruling class (business owners) and those they can rope into doing their anti-worker dirty work. The system isn't broken and need fixing, it's working exactly how they want it to and it must be destroyed.
Being vaguely socialist is 100% cool btw. No need to get too deep into labels. The most helpful thing is to be class conscious and be active in your community in a way that's cognizant of that. Helping people get better wages, win unions, support politicians antithetical to capital (they're very rare and nobody in the squad would count), support strikes, support social housing, oppose war that your country supports, and so on. Never supporting cops in capitalist countries. Diving deep into left theory is handy for doing those things better and having clear eyes about what is coming next, but it's less important than doing some of these clearly good anti-capitalist things. It can also help you choose a group to organize with, as some groups are do-nothing orgs.
Also nothing wrong with wanting to live in a smaller community or even a reclusive life. Alienated city life is an imposition that violates the connection and community most people want to have. Folks can't plant roots long enough to know their neighbors, let alone create a community. That's a consequence of real estate, rent, and unemployment, a whole other can of worms.
There's a recent book you might enjoy called The Dawn of Everything. It's co-written by David Graeber, who had anarchist leanings but respected Marxist thought. It has many examples of societies defining and redefining themselves relative to material conditions snd relative to one another.
It warms your heart when you see Liberals actually coming here with an open mind and actually wanting to learn more. Wish we could have more of that. Too tired of all the bickering.
Sounds like a good book, i definitely have anarchist leanings, though i do acknowledge that prob wouldnt work atm lol. ive bookmarked your comments. It's hard not to be class conscious when your a victim of class warfare, tho some have definitely had it worse than me. It's becoming less about racial lines, and more about rich poor.
I'd like to think I do my part day to day in what little way I can, even if it's just making one person a little bit more conscious of their own situation yknow.
Enjoyed the discussion so far thanks.
There's plenty of value in reading anarchists, of course. Reading widely is the best bet, as one can become limited and engage in bad practice if they become too embedded in factionalism. Not that it's always wrong to have fights, just that it tends to end up being pointless and based on the people picking fights having their ignorance exploited by ruling class propaganda.
The ruling class under capitalism had and rediscovers many weapons for combatting class consciousness, unfortunately. Living as a worker under capitalism tends to breed a nascent class consciousness through (Marxist term) exploitation, but it needs shaping through education. Unfortunately the ruling class can redirect that nascent class consciousness into a false consciousness of division, condescension, and hate. As an example, whiteness and blackness, and particularly anti-black racism, were literally invented as a form of social control to divide European bonded laborers from African slave bonded laborers and then later exploited to phase out bonded labor of Europeans entirely while still maintaining control over black slaves. An often-ignored fact is that Bacon's Rebellion was an integrated, class solidarity action of a variety of people in bonded labor, European and African and more, and that the ruling class's response to this was to invent racial economic rules and guarantee societal race privileges as a substitute for economic ones.
We can see the same thing play out today, where bosses and management point the finger at "illegal" immigrant labor (a proxy for the predominantly brown labor underclass) for (usually white) workers' ills, when it's of course the bosses picking all workers' pockets.
Same game plan had worked for about 400 years and it requires resistance and organization, the bedrock of communists' work. It's also not restricted to race - the ruling class applies this tactic and tries to split based on:
Basically... we've got work to do in order to avoid increasingly fascistic outcomes, as fascism is just a particular form of false consciousness imposed by the ruling class to deal with crises of capitalism, and it is increasing in visibility with every crisis.
PS not trying to get you to go do commie things, just wanted to add some context on how class consciousness is not inevitable from our working conditions. We are all in our own states of mind and at different points of how we can and want to do extra work.
I've also enjoyed the discussion.