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Where are all the free childcare programs? The American left does nothing but throw protests (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by BigHaas@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that's it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn't seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.

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[-] bubbalu@hexbear.net 21 points 8 months ago

How are you going to party build without mass organizing? How are you going to develop working class revolutionaries without engaging with the working class? Virtually all of the PSLniks in my rust belt city are middle class white men with advanced degrees and jobs very few understand or relate to. The same goes for the trotskyite organizations and most of the whiter anarchist crews.

[-] AlkaliMarxist@hexbear.net 23 points 8 months ago

The "middle class" is not a class in the Marxist conception, those people are as working class as anyone else because they have the same relationship to the means of production. You can say that these parties have failed to gain wider appeal without resorting to this liberal conception of class as a set of social signifiers.

[-] bubbalu@hexbear.net 14 points 8 months ago

It's farcical to imagine a tony professor and a warehouse worker hold the same relationship to capital and society. If the entire powerbase of the capitalist class in human terms were just the 200,000 car dealership owners, 15,000 bank owners, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, they would be eaten overnight. There must be a broader base of support built through material conceptions and reinforced through superstructural elements or "social signifiers".

These two groups do not "have the same relationship to the means of production." one section is exploited in the main, the other is mixed and facilitates greater exploitation of others in exchange for security, comfort, and social prestige.

[-] AlkaliMarxist@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago

Where exactly is the cut off line for 'middle class' then?

White collar work is pretty thoroughly proletarianized.

[-] bubbalu@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago

I'm not here to point out a specific point of delineation; a mound of sand is not a few grains of sand even if the point where it becomes a mound is undefined. The important thing is to work to understand the structural forces on different segments of society. If the proletariat is just the proletariat, where do reactionaries arise? Where does the tendency to social chauvinism?

You correctly point out that white-collar workers are under a greater or lesser degree of exploitation at different times. Now as the empire weakens, they are going to be squeezed more. There interests vacillate but you can't see and act on that by sticking your head in the sand and declaring all workers are equivalent.

I have yet to see a revolutionary organization in my city that is not terminally white and from a substantially different labor background than the people in my city. That gap does not exist for no reason! As marxists, we must examine the problem and work to solve it. We must build a movement of the broad masses and not just the intelligentsia.

[-] Hmm@hexbear.net 8 points 8 months ago

What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.

Here's a few examples.

The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:

Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.