Comradeship // Freechat

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:

• Gender
• Age
• Nation of origin
• Language
• Religion
• Job class

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.