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Why being a Marxist makes you a hated individual
(tankie.tube)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Communism
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I don't think most people here are petite (not petty btw) bourgeoisie.
Are you thinking of the "middle class" (higher earners) and their false consciousness maybe?
It depends on your definition. I personally have let go of the idea that someone in the west who owns considerable sums is a proletarian.
Most people who have a bachelors degree and upwards are much less dependent on their income as they think/let on.
Especially those whose boomer parents have paid houses and cars and can easily leave a sum of 100k plus have considerable loss to be feared if capitalism is ever to fall.
I absolutely despise the term middle class as it is a reactionary term used to divide the working class.
For me, working class is someone who has to work every day, take their 20 days vacation and otherwise will starve/freeze to death soon.
The ones who have stock, private healthcare, private pensions, yada yada are not strictly working class. Their reactionary potential is huge and they will fall for opportunism more often than not.
Being of a working class background, I know the cruel differences and privilege blindness of the petty bourgois people. They think everyone can have a univerdity degree or just open up a company but thats bullshit. And to make them understand that is a huge task.
Proletarian is a relation to labor not entirely about how much money you make at the end of the month, otherwise Doctors & Lawyers would be "the same" as Small Bussiness tyrants. It also depends on the county, Education in Germany is heavily class segregated, social sciences for example are completely unavailable to most proletarians, as are law & medicine for example. This is different in other countries, like america where most of the people who have a bachelor or even a master, work dead-end service jobs.
Higher educated proles & union leaderships/bureaucrats are the classical labor aristocracy, and their tie to the system (They have something to loose) breeds opportunism. They are still proletarians, as are high-earning doctors, despite it all. Though I am of the opinion that the overemphasis on the treatler discourse often veers into leftcom territory and often seems to me like an intellectualized excuse to "do nothing" by local leftists. Mao even stated that downwards trending intellectuals/labor aristocrats are prime material for radicalization.
Who is and who is not proletarian is not mystical and ought to be not so hard to decipher, and if it is, then maybe one has went down the wrong road, on a theory basis.
I get your points i think.
But you do realize that you're contradicting yourself kind of.
Doctors and lawyers are, by their system designed high income and status, labour aristocracy and work against the proletariat.
Yes, they are technically workers but they do not understand the first thing about bring a prole.
Most leftists I met who think it is important if you technically are wage dependant are of that kind themselves and try to apologize their own privilege instead of facing it.
I do not view people with capital as proles. Feel free to cite theory to convince me otherwise but so far i'm quite convinced that a prole does not own shit.
NGL, seeing the libopedia entry on he bear of various state PTO laws broke me.
Feel free to link it. I havent seen that one yet I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country
I guess it depends how on one classes "self-employed" - still wouldn't be the majority but it could be potentially 15% of the population.
(Petty is just the anglicised form. I have no loyalty to the French)
The better heuristic is to consider the revolutionary potential; how much value is given to private property and how much one benefits from the fall of the US empire. It cuts like a knife through warm butter and better illuminates which parts of the labour aristocrats, western proleteriat and the petite borugoisie to target.
https://redsails.org/stalins-shoemaker/
Haha fair. Never seen someone use "petty" over "small"
Agreed. Also, nice, another one for my reading list
I think there's a misunderstanding in the use of the word. Petite, petty mean the same thing, "small, not having great significance." So "petty officer," is of small significance to an officer, "petty cash" is for small cost purchases, where an order of significance needs to be placed with approved suppliers through appropriate established vendors, "petty grudge/behavior" (aka microaggressions) while exhausting, take emotional energy better spent elsewhere, like focusing on self care and the task at hand, rather than feeding the beast that will simply and calmly DARVO us, causing lost income for survival, friends via abuse by proxy, etc.
The problem is Western institutions dumbing us down and emotionally ramping us up so that the hunger games odds are even more ever not in our favor.
Huh, i learned something new. I thought petty really was only ever used as in "petty squabbling" and that it had no other meaning outside of that. It makes sense with your explanation.
Thank you!
🫡