Tag: my problems with the left
For my money the absolute weirdest thing in leftist discourse is when folks get the (very sensible!) notion that it’s necessary to be aware of how economic class influences our experience of certain social phenomena twisted around into “my experience of X is the universal working-class experience and anyone who differs is clearly bourgeois scum”, and you end up with a bunch of working-class people loudly accusing each other of secretly being wealthy over slight discrepancies in lived experiences.
Aye. For example a lot of poor people I grew up with had 4 different TVs —all salvaged and hobbled from scrap parts— in their house. One in the kitchen, one in the parent’s room, one in the children’s, and one in the dining room. Cue me going to college and meeting friends who read a lot and didn’t watch TV, assumed they were secretly wealthy and snobby, only to find out they spent days in the city library because they couldn’t afford to keep the heating on during the day. Lots of things poor folk do can seem like luxuries sometimes. Eating freshwater fish and game meat? Eating rabbits or quails? Things my 8 aunts and uncles did to feed themselves way past reaching adulthood. Be in a boarding school? It was that or 50 miles of road every morning.
Poverty is both an universal experience in that it sucks, but also that it happens to anyone (except the wealthy of course, but I mean it in a geographical, racial and cultural way. Black Lutheran poverty in the Midwest differs a lot from Southeast asian diaspora poverty in Berlin)
Anyhow while wealth is wack, hunting down folks for their seeming richer than you while having the same ideals goes a long way into maintaining an ideologically sanitized and dogmatic, and thus divisive, which is not the reason we got together to fight in the first place
Want to know what pisses me off? When people say things like “support this Jewish person who had to deal with [insert antisemitic incident here]! She’s pro-palestinian!!”
Like… Jewish people’s opinion on the complicated subject of the state of Israel should not be the prerequisite to caring about whether we face discrimination and hate crimes.
If you need to know someone’s view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict before deciding whether or not they’re the “type” of Jew you support, then newsflash… you’re not really supporting Jews.
I mean, the idea that withholding your vote is an effective way to send a national political party a message that they should only support candidates that you like regardless of any other considerations is such an incredibly individualistic, neoliberal approach to politics. And like, we just went through this two years ago. Come on.
I think that line of logic comes with growing up in the US and believing that we live in a democracy and that your participation in that democracy matters. Better idea tho: if the majority of the working class withheld their votes/stopped participating in the current oligopoly masquerading as democratic governance and created a new system where workers ruled themselves, that would be more effective than voting in centrist democrats for the rest of eternity 🙂
oh yeah, of course, just create a new system. Shit how did I forget about that? How’s that going anyway? You guys got something ready to go in the next month or two? Everything’s in place? The whole working class is on board? I mean, it’s so simple, and obviously everyone will go along with it. I know you guys are great with planning and logistics and aren’t just wasting your time posting guillotine memes. I’m so glad you added this helpful suggestion to my post 🙂
the-emergency-medical-hologram:
i hate when someone says “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies” and some white 21 year old trying to be ‘woke’ says “haha… go ahead and cry your white tears sweatie (:”
no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.
you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.
people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%.
the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.
the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.
when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.
and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.
here, since y’all are too fucking obnoxiously incapable of taking 2.3 seconds google and instead want to claim I pulled random numbers from my asshole
also here https://www.arc.gov/assets/research_reports/Health_Disparities_in_Appalachia_August_2017.pdf
a big problem with the people who say stuff like this is they don’t realize just how many “rednecks and hillbillies” are non-white. there are so many appalachian and southern POC that also suffer through these conditions but people like to cling to their idea that the only hicks are white hicks, so they couldnt care less if places like WV or KY just fell off the map, and to hell with who it is that’s actually hurting.
people also act like it’s only appalachian and southern whites that voted for trump and that vote republican and it’s not true – half of all white women voted for trump. the rich ones and the poor ones. it’s not a problem that’s tied specifically to southern and appalachian white people but it’s an easy scapegoat and allows people to not think about what they’re actually saying.
as long as they can say that it’s just them shitty racist white hicks that are suffering, then they don’t have to actually care about them. they can ignore them and not do anything to help them. like another person said in the notes, the teacher strike in WV is a better example of leftist organization than a whole lot of the people saying shit about hillbillies have ever done but they don’t care about that because, well, theyre just white hillbillies so what does it matter?
Too relevant, yet again: THE LEGACY OF SOCIAL DARWINISM IN APPALACHIAN SCHOLARSHIP
I LITERALLY MADE A POST ELSEWHERE ABOUT THIS.
Because I have gotten a lot of anti-rural life jokes thrown at me. Most people don’t know I’m from a rural area, because I currently live in a big ass concrete city, so like… The concept of rural is super obscure. I told someone where I live, and they thought I meant some place with some farms, so they were like “ugh, rednecks, that must be awful.” Fuck off, because I come from a place with real farms & rural land, and just cause you think we work at a super progressive place, and because you think “rural” folks are all Trump-humpin’ far religious right, LGBT-hatin’, POC hatin’ folks, that’s your problem.
So the place I grew up in? Yes, it tends to vote Republican, but in the current primary? There are folks runnin’ for Republican that very specifically want to support things what we need: there’s a major development that the city side of the state wants to produce, which means it would royally fuck over the rural side–it would destroy environmental reserves, especially, which is what we all survive off of in the rural areas. The Democratic side is literally the “bad” guy in the race. Destroying the natural resources of the area would be terrible for everyone–if you only care about POC, yes, it would screw them over too. Because we all live off the land.
A lot of the redneck types require the land, because remember: it’s cheaper to buy a box of bullets than it is to buy meat for the year. That’s how most folks I know who are poor survive… And this is why I struggle in the city. I’m used to thinking “If I need to, I could always trust the forest & river.” If I need food, it’s there. It’s in the land; I can plant it, or I can hunt, fish, and forage. If I need something, I could… Make it. Because materials… They exist. Somewhere, out there. But the city? I have to fucking buy berries? So I don’t eat them too much. I need wood? I have to fucking buy it, what the hell??? I need leather? I have to buy it; I can’t just ask a friend to barter for it (or maybe pay ‘em, but the leather out here is more pricey). Especially as an artist, this astounds & disgusts me in some way. You can barter, too. I helped out a friend on their family cow farm; they gave me meat & a skull. You can weave and whittle. There’s a sort of backup.
But the city is harsh and expensive. We can’t maintain a garden here. I can’t trust the land to provide. Even suburbia suffers that. So the poorer you are, the less you can live in a city. And its not like it’s all happy & fun in the rural areas. Poverty is shit. But to me, I feel a little safer. Sometimes you barter… (At least its pretty; the city isn’t very peaceful or beautiful.)
And yea??? There are queer folks in rural areas. And a lot of the ones I know find it horrifying, the idea of leaving. I went back early this year & chatted to one woman I know, who is a lesbian, and she was… Sort of disgusted at the idea of leaving and of the hatred that city folk have of rural areas, especially through an LGBT lens. There’s a major communicative disconnect, because what works for LGBT rights in the city doesn’t work for the rural areas, and this ends up drowning out the rural folks’ voices. Which is especially dangerous, because they may not be great support for the issues of rural LGBT folks. This stereotyping or hate of rednecks/hillbillies/rurality is damaging the people ya’ll claim to say you’re trying to help.
I’m just so frustrated with some leftists on here, it’s like y’all just want to perpetually lose, because then you can just toss shit at everyone else with no repercussions.
You want to shit all of our opportunity to actually shift the mainstream of American politics to the left for first time in almost half a century because, what, it isn’t black and white enough for you? It’s ridiculous. I know incrementalism is a dirty word on the left, but the right figured out that they can push things in their favor over time, AND IT WORKED, so why can’t we?
Y’all really think we can build a mass movement in a society where the overton window is shifted so much that Eisenhower would be considered a fringe leftist? That we can have a revolution when the average worker is scared of even the word socialism?
Like, yeah, no shit AOC and Bernie aren’t these hard-left vanguards of the glorious revolution, so what? They aren’t supposed to be. They’re not above criticism or scepticism (no one is), but we really need to stop eating each other alive and actually build something that can actually idk help people on a large scale for once in a long damn time.
Y’all can’t see the value in moving the mainstream Left position from “some deportations are bad, but most are good” Obama/Clinton days to “most deportations are bad, but some are good”? That there isn’t value in countering right-wing scaremongering about how even a mild social safety net will turn us into North Korea with something even reasonably left-wing as a positive in people’s minds?
Most of y’all don’t even have a viable set of praxis, you’d rather just sit behind a screen and throw stones all day, and I’m just getting tired of throwing stones while people starve. I get that some of y’all are accelerationist, but I’m not talking to you (because I don’t have time for edgy bullshit that’ll get millions if not billions harmed), so why not at least try to move things into our favor?
“If anarchists, as a rule, don’t vote – or at least don’t go in for
all the wasted energy and fruitless illusion of electoral politics –
then what do we do? Are we, as those who earnestly see voting as a
social duty might suggest with a condescending chuckle, just sitting
around waiting for the revolution?Bluntly, no.
This false dichotomy is ever present. You can either sit around
waiting for the revolution, with a V for Vendetta mask or Les Miserablés
soundtrack ready according to taste, or you can suck it up and vote. An
X in a box or the heads of the bourgeoisie on pikes – there is no
in-between.Aside from being transparent nonsense, this line of non-thought
ignores the main reasons that people consciously reject voting in the
first place. That is, that voting on the individuals who run the state
doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the state itself and that social change doesn’t come from the ballot box but as a result of organisation and struggle.Anarchists are revolutionaries. That much is apparent from the fact
that existing capitalist society cannot be incrementally reformed into
anarchist communism. But revolution isn’t a “moment,” something that
happens out of the blue and has a definite start and end point. Societal
upheaval isn’t like baking a cake – there’s no set recipe and no
pre-determined length of time in the oven which guarantees success.Even aside from this, improvements in our present conditions come
overwhelmingly from extra-parliamentary activity. Sure, it’s the
politicians who enshrine our victories in law, but not because we voted
for them. They do it because our strength as an organised movement made
that the least disruptive option available.In the workplace we win, advance and defend our pay and conditions by
forming unions and pitting our collective strength against the bosses.A powerful, militant campaign by workers at Ritzy Cinemas last year forced bosses to pay the London Living Wage. Cleaners at the Royal Opera House scored a similar victory
with their own campaign of action. Both of these results, as well as
improving the lot of the workers directly involved, has also served as
an inspiration to other workers to advance similar demands.The knock on effect of this is felt by even the likes of David Cameron declaring that he supports the idea in principle1 and a number of parties putting minimum wage rises in their manifestos.
But, of course, this doesn’t mean you can vote for the living wage –
it means that as we win by exercising our class power, those managing or
seeking to manage the state will try to divert any possible momentum
from these wins towards electoral politics. The fact remains that the
impetus for this change grows with the victories won through direct
action, and wanes when the pressure that creates goes away.This isn’t just evident in the workplace, but in the community too. The Focus E15 Campaign successfully resisted eviction by Newham Council and residents of the New Era Estate in Hackney saw off a corporation looking to evict them and treble the rent, both of which put housing on the national agenda. Organised community campaigns have made the Bedroom Tax one of the least popular measures of this government and built a cohesive, tangible solidarity that has seen off a number of attempted evictions. Workfare came to the brink of collapse as a result of campaigning and pickets, forcing Iain Duncan Smith to change the law in order to revive its shambling corpse.
These are a few, recent examples. The point is that where people
organise and take action together they can resist attacks, win
improvements, and force change.While the #NoVoteNoVoice position is that not voting lets politicians
off the hook, in fact it is defining politics as something external
which happens in parliament that lets the state off the hook. If we want
change, we need to organise – to build a movement which can resist
attacks on our rights and conditions and fight for positive
improvements.By organising and taking direct action, we can win improvements
ranging from extra benefits at work to the passing of beneficial laws.
More than that, by organising and building a movement on such a basis,
we build the consciousness and the confidence of the class in its own
power. This is a necessity if we are to take seriously the idea of
revolutionary change.At the moment, that movement
is embryonic. It needs to grow, and it needs to be acknowledged that
electoralism isn’t an accompaniment to that but a competitor for time
and resources.”I think you’re misstating my argument for your own purposes.
I’m not saying entirely ignore direct action and mass organizing, I’m not even saying electoral politics should be our main focus or even that you have to go in and mark an x in a box, I’m saying don’t actively sabitoge people who will be useful to us in achieving by making the political climate more amenable to the Left. Doesn’t sap just as much if not more energy from mass organizing? From the Revolution? How does doing this help the cause?
What good are labor gains when a neo-liberal or conservative governor or legislature can come in and strip it all away with a pen stroke? You really think we can build a mass movement in the current climate we have right now? In some states even the most mild Unions are considered poison, almost terroristic, because the decision to cede electoral power to the Right.
Look at what happened to Wisconsin. Wisconsin used to be a haven for the labor movement in the US, and now it’s tetering on the edge of a full blown right-to-work and all of labor’s achievements gutted with Unions having almost no power in the state, all because electoral politics were ceded to the Right.
I’m not saying it’s one or the other, I’m saying stop sabitoging any attempt pushing the climate, because we’re going to be able to build shit after 4 decades of hard-right Neoliberalism.
Let’s play a game: why am I, an ostensibly well-intentioned leftist, banging on about the “sacrifices” that will have to be made under socialism this time?
- I’ve uncritically swallowed the ancap canard that all economic activity is a form of capitalism, and I’m tying myself into knots trying to imagine a society with no economy
- I’m fixated on the aesthetic of a society of enlightened
artist-philosophers subsisting in genteel austerity, probably from
watching too much Star Trek, and I’ve built my entire notion of socialism around the assumption that this sort of society is both desirable and inevitable- I like the idea of social safety nets in theory, but I haven’t gotten over
my upper middle class suspicion that somewhere, somebody might be
getting something they don’t deserve- I’ve only managed to overcome my unexamined productivity fetishism by replacing it with an equally unexamined efficiency fetishism, and I’ll blink at you like a confused owl if you bring up quality of life
- I’ve bought into the narrative of personal responsibility and I honestly believe my massive carbon footprint stems primarily from my individual consumption choices rather than from institutional inefficiencies
- All of the above
I got extra aggravated at that bit of Amazon strike commentary, as another demonstration of how much more value too often gets placed on using the right words than on actually behaving decently.
Like I said in tags, I learned about this stuff (in age-appropriate ways) before I started school, with another round of mining strikes going on then not far from home. The folks I learned about this from were not that big on rattling on about “powerful acts of class solidarity”, in those terms. They were probably too busy not freaking scabbing.
I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to say this, but there are tons of anarchists of color out there and most people insisting that all anarchists are white are doing so for ideological reasons.
There are also many anarchies outside of the milieu of social movement anarchism which are for the large part made up of people of color.
Okay, listen. Private and Personal can often mean the same thing
“Private” can apply to either a group or an individual.
“Personal” can apply to only an individual.So you can see how people could get confused.
And the Private/Personal distinctions is done by the Marxist,Socialist,and Anarchist schools of thinking.
So not everyone is going to understand it. Because you are the one making that distinction.
Also… abolishing Private property isn’t a fix all solve all because owning a land (private property) isn’t something that ONLY capitalists do.
small peopole also do it. Someone’s home, and the land of a small farmer.Thank you.
Also… maybe I’m underestimating communists here but I really, really, really would not be surprised if “personal property” Just Kinda Ended Up defined in such a way that owning durable medical equipment or assistive technology was Wrong or at least We’re Gonna Look At You Like You Did Something Immoral (because to nondisabled people, it would mean “owning something very valuable when others don’t.”)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.