blue collar workers¶

Railing against "intersectionality" and "postmodernism," by positioning them against "blue collar workers," for whom we must "become a better option than Democrats."

These are the shibboleths of a descent into tailist chauvinism. https://t.co/1wNGH94f7e Terms like "postmodernism" are not rigorously defined, and instead are assigned vague and infinitely flexible vibes, allowing them to be slotted into any discussion as an unassailable recrimination against an ideological opponent. Or, usefully, against a strawman "other." The strategy of right deviationists is to allude to an idealistic "true working class," one which is not only unconcerned with, but actively antagonistic toward progressive causes, and to exhort "true revolutionaries" to divest from pluralism in the name of winning them over. Contrasted with left deviation, which mistakes non-antagonistic contradictions for antagonistic ones, right deviation presents antagonistic contradictions as being non-antagonistic. Chauvinism being the major one. Put simply, they think ideological enemies of revolution are allies, and demand to ostracize allies in the name of getting them on board. They don't come out of the gate saying this, or even necessarily believing it, but that is always where this form of idealism ends up. Whether in the form of trying to placate "winnable liberals" by toning down rhetoric -- and then eventually sidelining revolutionary priorities -- or in the form of being "anti-woke" to endear yourself to "the heartland," the end product is the same: you abandon revolution. It is impossible to "sneak" a revolutionary line into your dealings with the masses. You will never frogboil liberals of any stripe, whether conservative or progressive, into communists. You will only ever find yourself shifting inexorably toward the right to meet them. This happens because your "organization" (to the extent it exists) operates on the basis of its membership. No matter how anti-democratic you intend to be, if it doesn't reflect its membership, the members leave. If you purport to hold liberal ideals, you cultivate liberalism. Because liberalism is hegemonic, there is always an unlimited supply of fresh liberals to enter into your "movement" without having counter-revolutionary attitudes challenged. You are not filtering for a willingness to radicalize, you are pandering to what already exists. Your "organization" acts as a landing strip for regressivism -- the dominant trend of our society. Because the people who arrive are not wet clay to mold to your will, they bring their priorities with them, and those priorities reflect the contradictions of the masses at large. The masses are complicated. Their attitudes are eclectic, constructed from the influences of a diverse range of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic currents. The particulars of their material interests are highly contextual and deliberately fragmented by the capitalist regime. Although Marxists ought to recognize the unifying elements that can be used to tie all oppressed peoples together into one struggle, we cannot simply ignore the material basis for the latent regressivism that the superstructure is designed to reinforce. That basis, by the way, is not some mythologized "economic anxiety" that transmutes the "white working class" into misguided bigots to cope with their own poverty. Quite the opposite. The social system is designed to tie their material interests to the well-being of the regime. Attempting to court this mythologue requires you to find them. And in your search for "socially conservative dudes who just want to keep a roof over their heads," you will come up short. Instead, you will be forced to expand your criteria of "economic anxiety." You will find plenty of that archetypal "economy-focused, but tired of intersectionality" among the labor aristocracy, petty bourgeois, law enforcement, and so on. Your search necessarily becomes filtered more by bigotry itself, and less by economic precarity. This is a consequence of a simple fact about the shape of our society: the most socially marginalized are also the most economically marginalized. The purveyors of "intersectionality" who fail to adequately unite the theory through the lens of class still get that part right. In fact, if your political project is actually starting from a place of addressing economic precarity, and you are truly organizing from the bottom, you will quickly find yourself working with a section of the masses that looks a whole lot like the "intersectional" model. This is why, no matter the actual political priorities of the people saying it -- earnest but misguided radical, callous grifter, reactionary hoping to launder their shit -- the rhetoric of "blue collar vs. intersectional" is always a bad sign.

I respectfully urge recalibration.