I have seen people on this site say similar things to your joke “actually you don’t hate your job” response above. Someone will complain about work and a response will be “actually work is necessary, you just hate capitalism” or something. Which similarly annoys me. Because that’s why I took issue with your response, not because you dared to dislike cities, but because the original post is complaining about unfounded conservative fears of cities, and you come in and go “oh actually they have a point” and go on about trees or something. The op was not talking about trees, and not even denigrating rural life. He was complaining about conservative reaction. It’s like the people who come in to a post complaining about work and go “uh actually you don’t hate work you hate capitalism.” Unnecessary and unhelpful.

But also, I do believe there’s a utopian tendency especially prevalent among baby leftists, in which socialism or communism or anarchism or whatever is equated with not having to work, ignoring the extremely difficult work necessary to get to communism, and then of course maintain it. I don’t consider this a hill to die on or even a real issue because it’s pretty well understood that when we’re complaining about our jobs we’re complaining about capitalism and the lack of worker protections under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and also when we complain about our jobs we’re reacting often to a direct threat on our lives - being overworked, dangerous working conditions, the lack of rights afforded us in the workplace. What is the larger point to your complaining about cities? What are you directly responding to when you complain about cities?

Air pollution? I agree that’s an issue, but to portray rural areas as somehow free from pollution shows a lack of understanding of many peoples’ experience of rural life. Unless, as I charge, you’re playing into the conservative ideal of rural life. I agree there can be an opposite reaction, in which rural people are portrayed as all uneducated hicks who can only survive through the goodwill of the civilized city folk, but frankly I don’t believe I’ve denigrated rural life at all in any of my comments. Everywhere I am stressing rural areas to be treated as real places that have their pluses but also are not immune to the issues reactionaries would have you believe are confined to cities. You however have denigrated city life as dirty, polluted and crowded, which shows that you have an experience of rural life that many are not afforded that you can act like these are not issues in the country.

Nor have I denigrated rural people except to take issue with the individualist mindset many who hate cities have (which is not even directed at rural people specifically), and I’m honestly not trying to accuse you of also having this mindset as I said to the other person, but trying to point out how this rhetoric can play into this mindset by portraying cities a certain way and rural life as a certain way when the reality is much more complicated, especially when your original comment was to respond to a post about conservative reaction that said nothing about rural life to say actually they have a point rural life is better.

Your analogy to farm wage-labour is silly. Yes, those those thoughts are actually wrong /in form/, and yes it is a characteristic of reactionaries to essentialize existing conditions. But the point is that you cannot stop there as that would conceal its contradictory elements, its laws of relation, and so on.

Yes the farm worker is suffering under low pay, and long hours, but what's important isnt the just the truth of said claim, but the /history/ of its development. No, wage-labour is not natural--it had a historically specific development, so how did it come about and what are its contradictions, what is the specificity of farm work compared to other kinds of work, etc., Etc...

Without a dialectical, historical materialist approach we cannot understand the world scientifically, and thus all of our actions will be blind in a sense.

So given the discussions about cities and suburbs the question is /why/ are they like that--we all already know /what/ it is--so what is its concrete history that lead to its specific form today? With that know that valorizing a thing is not just valorizing its affect, but also its valorizing its history, and its function within the system as a whole. You may say that the comment you've made are simply about personal preference, but there is an (unconscious) probably) ideological component underlying them.