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He's done it again folks.
(hexbear.net)
Material conditions determine consciousness
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
I’m lowkey worried I could get a call from HR saying I’m being fired for my fucking IG posts
I don’t understand how people politic post on mainstream social media platforms without instantly going insane
they dont ?
Just don’t use your real name
It's way easier to ask what a person does for a living than to ask for their political orientation. I have a 100% success rate in figuring out if my coworkers would be open to unionizing based on their position in the company and what their parents do for a living.
In fact, just get rid of the political compass. It should be two questions. "How much money do your parents make?" And "what is your main source of income?" Because those two things are nearly always what determines how a person truly operates.
Where do downwardly mobile middle-class people fit into this framework?
Asking for, uh, a friend.
That means you’re an average Hexbear poster
Where do downwardly mobile middle-class people fit into this framework?
Stalin has something to say about downward mobility
Here is a simple illustration. Let us take a shoemaker who owned a tiny workshop, but who, unable to withstand the competition of the big manufacturers, closed his workshop and took a job, say, at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in Tiflis. He went to work at Adelkhanov's factory not with the view to becoming a permanent wage-worker, but with the object of saving up some money, of accumulating a little capital to enable him to reopen his workshop. As you see, the position of this shoemaker is already proletarian, but his consciousness is still non-proletarian, it is thoroughly petty-bourgeois. In other words, this shoemaker has already lost his petty-bourgeois position, it has gone, but his petty-bourgeois consciousness has not yet gone, it has lagged behind his actual position.
Clearly, here too, in social life, first the external conditions change, first the conditions of men change and then their consciousness changes accordingly.
But let us return to our shoemaker. As we already know, he intends to save up some money and then reopen his workshop. This proletarianised shoemaker goes on working, but finds that it is a very difficult matter to save money, because what he earns barely suffices to maintain an existence. Moreover, he realises that the opening of a private workshop is after all not so alluring: the rent he will have to pay for the premises, the caprices of customers, shortage of money, the competition of the big manufacturers and similar worries — such are the many troubles that torment the private workshop owner. On the other hand, the proletarian is relatively freer from such cares; he is not troubled by customers, or by having to pay rent for premises. He goes to the factory every morning, "calmly" goes home in the evening, and as calmly pockets his "pay" on Saturdays. Here, for the first time, the wings of our shoemaker's petty-bourgeois dreams are clipped; here for the first time proletarian strivings awaken in his soul.
Time passes and our shoemaker sees that he has not enough money to satisfy his most essential needs, that what he needs very badly is a rise in wages. At the same time, he hears his fellow-workers talking about unions and strikes. Here our shoemaker realises that in order to improve his conditions he must fight the masters and not open a workshop of his own. He joins the union, enters the strike movement, and soon becomes imbued with socialist ideas. . . .
Thus, in the long run, the change in the shoemaker's material conditions was followed by a change in his consciousness: first his material conditions changed, and then, after a time, his consciousness changed accordingly.
The same must be said about classes and about society as a whole.
In social life, too, first the external conditions change, first the material conditions change, and then the ideas of men, their habits, customs and their world outlook change accordingly.
That is why Marx says:
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."
Like the shoemaker, I am fully grillpilled at this point.
Recognizing you're downwardly mobile probably puts you into that weird grey zone where you end up either a typical western socialist or weird crank anime fascist based on other, intersectional factors. Liberals don't recognize class and won't acknowledge being downwardly mobile.
That’s honestly such a good political compass. Wealthy parents + shit job (and a boatload of student debt) was the near entirety of the Sanders coalition
well yeah obviously. "what is your main source of income" determines which class you're in, which determines basically everything about you
Death to America
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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