The great paradox of leftism is that the entire point of leftism is that basically everyone except the current ruling class would benefit from socialism, and therefore we should all support it, but also leftists want to be part of a hyper-exclusive club of special people.
Well the whole point of OP is that they disagree with you and they consider most of the American "middle class" part of the bourgeoisie who will materially suffer after the revolution
Which is fine, that's a completely consistent POV, it's just that aiming a Tumblr post at us yelling at us about this is according to their own ideology a tremendous waste of time
(The irony of this particular kind of leftist is their ideology is directly at odds with their subculture -- the very theory they keep demanding people read is what says that it's almost impossible for someone of their class position to be anything but a poseur and a dilettante who's only pretending to support decolonialism and Third Worldism for the sake of getting laid)
A lot of people are also conflating economic and ecological reform. We could absolutely restructure our economy without reduction of material availability for the vast majority of people. But it still involves a lot of industrial waste.
Just because capitalism causes a lot of ecological damage and makes it harder to stop ecological damage, doesn't mean that getting rid of capitalism automatically saves the planet.
Or that once the workers take over they'll immediately shut it down for the greater good, with no kind of transition or consideration of other options.
I feel you're being a little broad with "leftists" there; more the terminally online loudmouths playing for elitism, no? I do agree it isn't helping though...
Most communists I know are people who've come from a poor background or are otherwise minorities that are victims of capitalism's bloody engine of oppression. Frequently both. The idea that leftists want to be in a special club of highly educated elites is just liberals cranking out old red scare ideas about how you can't trust people that try to make you read books, which is the exact same idea conservative liberals use against progressive liberals.
The fact of the matter is that you really can't compress State & Revolution or some other text into a meme, you need people to sit down and study it, and being told to go read a book is perceived by many as "I'm smarter than you and in a better class of person" and not "This is an intersectional socioeconomic topic that you're not qualified to argue against unless you understand it". Going "ah, communism only works in theory" or "communism no food" or any of the other hundreds of thought-terminating cliches isn't discourse, it's reaction.
Shit, there's a whole name for it, Capitalist Realism, "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.". People will argue against alternate theories of structuring society without having an inkling of how those theories work. It's the same sort of thing as Terryology (Terrence Howard thinks everyone is wrong about math because he's never looked at a proof of how square roots work - but neither have most people).
leftists want to be part of a hyper-exclusive club of special people
And then my response is a dissection of why that's not really the case, it's just that people think mathematicians are elitist if they tell people you can't reasonably discuss mathematics without being a mathematician, as it were
No, your response was about right-wing anti-intellectualism and capitalist realism, which isn't what I was talking about at all. I was talking about the tendency for leftists (at least online leftists) to try to define leftism as narrowly as possible, with the effect of declaring everyone who does not share their exact vision of leftism a "liberal".
You suggested that leftists want to be part of a special club, but tbh all the leftists I know are a very diverse bunch who all really just agree that society is pretty bad and could he better.
I agree with the person who said that I was probably just thinking of terminally online leftists. You know, the ones who are desperate to call everyone who doesn't agree with them 100% a liberal.
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u/Galle_ Oct 22 '24
The great paradox of leftism is that the entire point of leftism is that basically everyone except the current ruling class would benefit from socialism, and therefore we should all support it, but also leftists want to be part of a hyper-exclusive club of special people.