How do we solve the middle class leftist problem Holla Forums?

I work at Subway and live with my parents

It's a bit overblown in terms of students but as a rule i cannot stand most middle class lefties

There's no such thing as a "middle class".

If you work for a wage you're a prole. Only some people are in denial of this very basic fact.

Idiot, there are only two classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Anything else is bourgeoisie propaganda to keep you squabbling amongst yourselves.

How do we solve the working class leftist problem?

Everywhere I look on social media, I see working class idiots who are proud of their ignorance virtue signalling their class whenever a learned person corrects him.

you know the type though

the urban, cosmopolitan, bearded, tattooed, privately educated, probably got a job through nepotism, hasn't done a day's hard work in his life, but feels entitled to lecture workers in his whiny little voice all the time type. he follows all the latest trends, he prides himself on his feminist t-shirt and most likely has piercings.

And what about the petty bourgeoisie?

Regardless, middle class is a good way to identify certain types in society.

I'd beg to differ. While your statement regarding all those working for their wages without ownership of the means of production being proletariat I think the denial of "middle class" does nothing but harm any sort of possible movement.

There are obviously those who work in harsher conditions, those who perform 12 hours of manual labor for their shift will face aches and pains unknown to an office worker. Therein lies the concept of a "middle class" and I think that denying the different conditions in which the proletariat work will only ever help divide the masses as they believe the "out group" cannot sympathize with them.

If we, however, accept that some people have it worse off than others we can begin to examine their conditions in the right frame of context and perhaps find unity in that factor alone.

While your statement regarding all those working for their wages without ownership of the means of production being proletariat is correct, *

tankiddie making another absolute abhorrent post

Im gonna show you how fucking dumb this income bracket division, skilled labor worship is.
Most trades people who you shitbirds think are all not making money are also middle class. They are probably making more money than a university grad working at starbucks or a bar, and they have typically relied on nepotism to get a job. Many of them are also the same guys who are all about labor unity except having to be associated with mop pushers who they accuse of being leechs and welfare scammers or brown skins. they also aspire most to be petty bourgs.
but you know what? at the end of the day we are all proles and i want all of them and mop pushers and students to unite against the bourgeoisie

wsws.org/en/articles/2017/01/18/pers-j18.html

yea fuck doctors and professors.

Working class people don't read

Sorry but Orwell, as much as he was a middle class rat himself, was right about this

wsws.org/en/articles/2017/01/26/comm-j26.html

is this from coming up for air?

favourite bit is fruit juice drinker

no one denied that. im not a 99% and i would never pretend every income bracket faces the same economic pressure. however were never going to win unless we unite the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie

What was that about? Some kind of diet meme among middle class fags in Orwell's time?

*I'm not a fan of the 99% movement. but i am impoverished af

I've been camping with middle class leftists. I really don't believe they will be there with you when things get rough.

The main argument , if you read the articles is that the we are the 99 percent crap allows the 9 percent to use the masses to improve their share of wealth under neoliberal capitalisms. The idea is that the needs of the 9 percent are vastly different from the needs of the lower 90 percent. They aren't implying that all professionals are reactionaries just that they it's in their class interest to go against both the 1 percent above them and the 90 percent below them.

The Road to Wigan Pier

Nazi is right tbh

I'm trying to find the video but there was this amazing scene between an old long-time union organizer who had been invited to speak at some lefty event and one of the attendants. The organizer was making the point that leftists today were too often ok with losing and did not make the effort to go out and actually communicate with people who were not part of their own social circle. Said "It does not matter if you don't like football, do you know how many working class people watch football in this town? If you are serious about organizing why aren't you at every single big game handing out pamphlets?" This guy in the audience speaks up and says and I shit you not, "I would feel much more comfortable at a punk show or a poetry slam, why should I have to put myself in a place with people I am not comfortable with? Why can't I just organize at poetry slams? There's nothing wrong with that."

But seriously how do I fake liking football? poetryfag is a fag. but it wouldnt be mocking and insulting to pretend to like that shit just to recruit them?

What middle class? People working shitty non-manual jobs without job security or work government jobs?

Academics, lawyers, top bureaucrats, sons and daughters of millionaires, artist types etc

maybe marx was wrong and class really means in-group more than anything

These are not middle class at all, they are often bourgeois as fuck.

are often poor as fuck, how are they even upper middle class?

Labourers are discouraged from reading theory. A hundred years ago, labourers organized themselves, created libraries, read books and taught each other about the contents they read. They did all of this after doing a 12 hour shift. They found their passion in this activity.

Now only the intelligentsia read. Labourers go home, watch soccer/football, drink something, browse the internet, listen to music or play with their kids. If anybody reads something, others ostracize him/her: "don't act like those intelligentsia, are arrogant and don't do any useful work".

There is no real solidarity among classes. They hate each other. That's modern capitalism for you. Some middle-class deviants pay attion to this but they can hardly achieve anything, given they are so low in numbers and they are patronising (they don't step down from their "intellectual high ground"). Trump spoke to the lower class with their words. They saw themselves in him. Succesful populism requires adequate communication to the audience. Most leftists cannot leave behind the jargon of leftism, so nobody understands them.

That's how I see this.

It would be fake and poser-ish and wouldn't win over any hearts or minds. If you really want to organize people you're going to have to get in their shoes. Live their lives, enjoy what they enjoy. Everybody hates an outsider who knows nothing about their lives coming and telling them what they should be doing or how they should feel. I'm too comfortable with my middle class existence to do any of that, but… If there's one thing those sorts of people do respect its a good fight, particularly when its a little guy taking on someone much bigger than them. Even if the little guy gets stomped they'll say you have brass balls for trying. Go pick a fight with somebody real big, a power company, a bank, a real-estate developer paving over old ladies gardens. Heckle them until they give you a black eye and tell you to mind your business. Then haul your ass with that bruised up face to the football game and I guarantee you you'll run out of pamphlets.

People care more about in-group and out-group than class but that's about psychology, class for Marx was about economics.

Go with friends and get drunk. It's not that hard, even if you hate sport.

which lead to the conclusion that economics determines all the others, which just isn't true as in-group and out-group class doesn't match economic class

This is where the middle class left's contempt for the labor classes comes from. Those dumb workers don't know what's best for themselves!

That's like a lifeguard getting mad at a drowning victim for flailing around.

I'm not sure if Marx ever said that all social groupings were ultimately determined by economic class. He argued that all the proletariat had something in common, a fundamental class interest that united them. But he was certainly aware that race, culture and other divisions were used very effectively to prevent workers from realizing this shared interest they had. Workers from different cultures or races being pitted against eachother to drive down wages was common even back then.

They don't know, but it's because manipulation. One of capitalism's tools in modern times. Read Chomsky. I don't feel contempt for them, they are all doing their best but most of them don't have the skills needed to identify basic manipulation techniques. I think anybody can make use of that skills, they need to be taught. I'm currently writing a book which is concerned with this topic among a few others.

I hate that. Nothing makes my blood boil more than classism.

In my experience the middle-class and intellectual types are just as bad at spotting manipulation as the working class. You are being fed a different set of lies and misinformation based on your social station. Some of the lies told to the working class seem painfully obvious given the information you have. But have you ever stopped and wondered what things you believe seem like obvious lies to the working class given the information they have?

Few people will ever find that the best use of their time is reading political theory. This is true of all populations, of all political persuasions, of all times and cultures. People who read any political theory have always been a minority, and always will be.

The real question is how is that politically literate minority distributed throughout the classes. Is the politically literate minority restricted to the middle+ class, or are the labor classes represented in that politically literate minority? This is where your social manipulation comes into play.

100% agree. If you have had the opportunity to read political theory that resonates with you then you are beholden to share the insights you've gained with others. I go to bars all the time and talk to people about Trump and how nationalism isn't a bad thing. I even live in a libshit city and we voted for Trump at a higher % than any republican has gotten since Reagan.

There are so many more distractions nowadays then there were in the past. People read any book they could get for pleasure.

Class in practice seems not to be a strict matter of income level, but to correlate well with the mode by which its members are apportioned the bulk of their income. People who offer their time and skill for wages have a distinct set of material expectations from people who offer their availability for salary or from people who offer the use of their material means for return. All of them have material expectations distinct from and often in competition with those who offer their misery for alms.

All of them have their particular levers of control over the MoP and access to it.

It is admittedly an imperfect classification system, but it describes neoliberal praxis well enough. The bourgeois drive to innovate relations to the means of production, and in turn relations in society at large, would require that class theories evolve to match the local structures workers would presumably be contesting, if only for working purposes.
>>>thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/01/donald-trump-and-politics-of-resentment.html

Better analogy: a lifeguard getting mad at a drowning victim for not understanding fluid dynamics as taught exclusively at lifeguard school.

What? There's no universal One True Perspective? How illiberal!

All true. I thought about this for a long time, that's why I started writing. There is not much stuff on this in my native language.

True. The difference between the classes is the expectations about teh individuals the and social norms in the class. If they expect you to be well-versed in politics, you read a little more - at least, newspapers.

At some point I need to introduce leftypol to Fromm and the idea of symbolic labor, he does a good job of elaborating on it but basically the idea is that there is a type of job that does not produce material, it produces or manipulates symbols and symbolic relationships. The role of much of what is considered the middle-class is in fact symbolic work of various sorts either through disciplines such as law which involve reasoning with and manipulating these abstractions or professions like teacher which involve embodying a certain symbolic role. His argument is that the method of thinking and personality cost of symbolic work is fundamentally different from the method of thinking required for concrete work. As a consequence of this you see people grouping up socially with people who approach the world in the same way as them. So for instance artists despite often being fairly poor hang out in social circles with lawyers and programmers and such because they are all symbolic workers.

Good stuff, the targeting of manipulation can get pretty absurd. Particularly if you're crossing language and culture boundaries the media and powers that be will just say completely contradictory things to the different groups. If you're writing about manipulation I bet you could show a lot just by finding media that talks about your culture and country in English and translating it. A lot of it will look like real obvious lies to the people who live there.

Good idea, I'm going to do it.
The book is about the internet and how to use it. More precisely, how to use it responsibly and being conscious about it. (Like not trolling others into suicide or realizing that the internet is part of the reality and not just a sandbox)

One topic is rhetoric (since a lot of communication happens on forums). Another is validating the truth in the news ( there are a lot of hoax news and trash journalism/propaganda here, most of them are extreme right-wing ). There are a lots of other topics, but these two are the main reason behind the motivation.

IT education is far below the the lowest acceptable level in my country and internet access is really common (an EU country). The book should be usable for teaching.

The problem is that nobody reads books nowadays and the topic is pretty important, so I'm considering starting a blog to post the individual chapters to get it more accessible and known.

pic related

I've heard of Fromm here and there, mostly in relation to the rational/irrational/anonymous taxonomy of authority. Other than random snips around the Internet, what's a good way into it for a non-normie beginner?

Excellent analogy.

I just graduated le STEM and just graduated making a pretty good fucking salary. No shame here, I'm a middle class fuck now and proud of it. Fuck being poor, that shit sucks, and fuck anyone who thinks they deserve brownie points for not actively trying to improve their own situation.

I'm not a fan of most 'leftists' that you seem to be talking about either. These people IMHO aren't leftists though, often times it's just anarcho-liberals, e.g., delusional utopians that follow people like Noam Chomsky. They talk up their minimum wage jobs like making money makes you a "sellout" and shit. It's completely ass backwards IMHO. The left needs skilled workers that know how to run shit if they are ever gonna build anything worthwhile post-capitalism. This means welders, doctors, software guys, security people, the whole shebang.

Most lefties I ever meet completely fail to grasp this, though. They think LARP'ing as a "proletarian" is good enough, despite being born a muh privileged middle class shithead just like me. However, they see themselves as the "exception" to the rule – they might have dropped out of private school, got "lonely," or some other bullshit excuse and they now use that "tragic" period to endlessly cover up their lazy fucking work ethic.

Meanwhile, right wingers are found everywhere you look, and in great abundance. They share media, don't agree on everything, but understand true camaraderie. The janitor at work is able to talk to the programmer about what they were listening to on Alex Jones for the drive in.

Can you say the same about the Left? No. Not at all.

In most people's lexicons, 'leftist' might as well mean 'hipster' or 'liberal'. Baristas, waitresses, and other people have nothing but contempt for the STEM crowd. If you need proof, just look at Reddit and all the bullshit charges of "brocialism" and how if you're an IT guy, you *must* be an "anti-feminist" or something else. There's always something negative to hear from these people, and its rooted in a weird mish mash of identity politics and liberalism. Yet, they'll gush on and on about how "socialist" they are all the while.

Get more actual working class people interested in Leftism

At the end of the day its about the proletariat anyway.

I think STEM crowd doesn't do anything other than doing their work. I was there at the founding of a new party in my country and they were surprised that STEM people also care about politics, the public and problems of the country. They were genuinely surprised. It's easy to have preconceptions about less social people how are immersed in their studies most of the time. Engineers and academics are required to constantly educate themselves to keep up with the advances. Probably most of the STEM people needs to be learning all the time.

True. We have to use common people's language and be among them from time to time so they know that we aren't patronising assholes but care about them.