Sometimes when a socialist is lil’ booj/labor aristocracker, I see this canard used to console them that just because they’re a part of an exploiting class doesn’t mean that they can’t be a traitor to that class and aid the revolution. A similar sentiment is expressed when someone brings up that Engels, Lenin, and Mao all came from priveleged backgrounds, or when someone brings up the clapback that Zhou Enlai made against Kruschev. However, I really can’t shake the feeling that that’s just copium, especially in the context of the imperial core.
When not invested into making more money, the income of this strata goes into consuming treats. So, so many treats. Services like Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, and Steam are high powered treat beams aimed directly at their brains. On top of this, the places people own their own homes (or rent, but they make enough income that they don’t need to worry about not making rent) are invariably in white flight crackerburbs and gentrified parts of cities; I like to call such places the crackersphere.
Considering being an actual communist requires being among the masses, this presents a pretty big issue for would-be communists within the crackershpere. How is one supposed to relate and build comradery with proletarians when they share none of their struggles? Not many are willing to give away their things and become proletarians themselves. Hell, the most famous living socialist in the Great Satan is currently a millionaire parasocial treatboy.
If this post seems kind of half cooked and rambly, that’s because it is. This is a thought that’s been haunting my mind for awhile now.
Edit: I’ve read all of the responses to this post so far and you’re all right. I definitely have a lot of Christian idealism I’ve yet to purge from my mind, and it’s an individualist lens that ignores how to figure out how to collectively change material conditions in favor of individual moral pissing contests that are as connected to reality as debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. This logic, if taken to its extreme, results in the kind of left deviationism perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
While this is a point often used as a purity test, I think I posted this as more of a call for help. The atomization and alienation of this society is literally driving me insane.
Not quite considering conditions, even someone that’s unemployed, homeless, in the most precarious of jobs etc wouldn’t be able to escape some of the labor aristocracy bourgeoisification of the proles and lumpenprole logic in the core.
Biggest issue I think is not only failure to relate to the prole at large but fail to capture their imagination and inspire/create hope in something beyond fascism and the abuses of brutal capitalism that doesn’t wait until the afterlife. There is no movement that reaches out to them, or frankly anyone atm in the imperial core that provides this; at best its a sort of education by outrage and shock, which don’t get me wrong is useful and required, but there needs to be this other optimistic area as well. A full pessimism run mopes too hard to move a mountain, though inspiration and hope maybe can.
My experience in the west is movements are focused on endless purity tests only accessible by the petite bourgeoisie if not outright bourgeoisie, not just in entry education level to join, dues and such, you have to earn a way afterall, but in structure and time. Content almost feels somewhere between old school churchy in Latin and college lecture if you’re not super familiar with theory. On the other hand education by meme has its dangers as well, but I’m sure there’s a balance. Then you’re fucking fried if you’re doing prole tier work, its hard to attend a meeting considering 12hr night shifts no holidays and such.
Then let’s assume you live among the prole, join the most precarious of work as one of the lil boojies, everyone is going to lose massive respect because you took a paycut, you purposely lost money, even your fellow max exploited workers will not totally be with you. Anyway, I think this part will naturally happen and adjust as conditions worsen in the core.
While I knew my post would reek of idealism and individualism, this was an angle I completely forgot to anticipate. If someone did deliberately take a worse job or refuse a paycut without some kind of insurmountable external pressure forcing them to do so, I (and I reckon most people) would think they were insane.