lumpenproletariatgo to hell
LibertyLizardWhat happened to worker solidarity?
People gotta eat. But some jobs do call you to at minimum throw some sand in the gears. If you’re not doing that then yeah fuck you.
Do you have solidarity with cops?
To some extent yeah. That doesn’t mean I support what they’re doing but they still workers.
DonkterAnd often they’re pitted against workers on the side of the ruling class.
Doing a bullshit job to feed your family is defensible, doing an evil job is just stupid.
Just keep in mind your argument can be/ is used to defend brown shirt and military personnel commiting war crimes. We know memetically at this point that “just following orders” is not a valid defense. We need more people to actively choose not to become cops and not to become defense contractors.
See, I think all jobs are evil. Just because you’re not the one holding the gun doesn’t make you less culpable. You’re still serving the interests of capital and the state when you work, pay taxes, etc.
It’s certainly true that evil work supports hierarchy and should be opposed. But contextually how do we oppose it? If we could achieve 100% solidarity and get everyone to refuse to support these systems, they would end instantly. But let’s be real. If conscientious people isolate themselves from powerful positions in society, does that actually interfere with their fulfillment in any meaningful way? Or does it just fill those positions with people who are more ideologically invested in them and more likely to use that power against us?
First you have to win people over. And I think there is hope that even the fascist foot soldiers can be won over with the right messaging.
A lot of this comes down to a society that idealizes individualism to an extreme degree. We are focused on how we as individuals can evade moral culpability for our participation in an evil system, and that requires scapegoating someone we perceive as worse than us. But even if we convince police or soldiers or whoever to quit, that won’t protect people from harm. Instead we need to focus on building new organizational power that can get as many people as possible to oppose that harm in a concerted way. And in fact at the right moment I think we will want police, soldiers, arms manufacturers, etc. to participate, because those people have power and we need that power to win.
OBJECTION!I’d rather have solidarity with the people the bombs get dropped on than with the people building the bombs. Include war profiteers in your “solidarity” and shifts it away from class lines and into nationalism.
Solidarity with victims is important. But my personal view is that fighting the state requires a broad coalition that includes people within the state’s social infrastructure.
War profiteers aren’t generally interested in fighting the state. But even to your point, obviously if you want to convince such people to fight the state, you should be criticizing their role as war profiteers. If you don’t call out what they’re doing for the evil that it is, then why would you expect them to “throw sand in the gears?”
Well, the reality is that most people in all professions have little to no interest in fighting the state. But the flip side is that there are some people from all walks of life that will be receptive, so assuming such people can’t be reached is locking important people out of the movement.
Criticism is important but I think it requires a different approach. If you tell people they’re evil they will not listen to you. Almost everyone’s worldview has “I’m a good person” at its foundation, and information that contradicts their foundational viewpoints will be rejected. So I think criticism should be focused on systems and organizations rather than this meme which focuses on individual responsibility.
I’m not “locking anyone out of the movement” by calling them evil war profiteers. If they want to join the movement, they can simply stop being evil war profiteers. I am simply telling the truth.
On the other hand, by welcoming and babying such people, you are alienating their victims. It makes it abundantly clear where your priorities lie. Why would a victim of these war profiteers want to be a part of a movement that whitewashes those who perpetrate or enable the violence they’ve suffered?
What is your vision for what “being part of the movement” would even look like for these people? Unless they’re taking direct action to sabotage and support their industry (in which case they will likely be caught and fired), they are undoubtedly doing far more harm there than they could possibly offset by voting or attending some protest.
I’m not saying it isn’t true. But I just think practically speaking, requiring all leftists to be morally pure nonprofit employees or whatever it is you think would be a more ethical way to survive under capitalism excludes a lot of people. Sure, they could theoretically still participate but if you treat them like shit they’re not going to.
These are huge companies that often have little ideas of what their employees are doing. There are absolutely ways they could be sabotaging their activities without getting fired.
Even if that were true, you’re simultaneously claiming that these people are willing to sabotage their company, and that they’d be alienated by saying that the work their company does is evil. That doesn’t make any sense.
I’m just saying it’s not tactically useful to point out their personal culpability. There are ways to criticize the company without focusing on the employees and I think they will find that more palatable.
It is tactically useful to point out their personal culpability, though. Very much so. Guilt is an incredibly powerful weapon. You just don’t want to wield it because you care more about protecting their feelings than you do about getting them to change.
Look at how much influence the Catholic Church has been able to wield in history by using guilt, and theirs wasn’t even based on the truth. What do you mean it’s “not tactically useful?”
Leftists aren’t the Catholic Church. Their attempts at shaming people were effective because they already had power over people. Something we lack. We need to gain power first, and that means persuading people who don’t currently support or agree with us.
By not tactically useful I mean it’s counter to what I see as a useful strategy to achieve leftist ends–in other words, liberation from state and capitalist oppression.
But if you feel otherwise maybe you can articulate whose behavior you think will be influenced by this kind of messaging and what you expect them to do differently after seeing it?
First off, you again frame this entirely around “expanding the coalition” to include the perpetrators while ignoring how it excuses (practically speaking) their victims. This is pure chauvanism, it’s failing to recognize both the inherent humanity of the victims of imperialism, and their ability to contribute to a cause. I’d rather come across as a “preachy weirdo” to war profiteers than as an imperialist to the victims. When you describe this as “anyone who doesn’t share [your] exact lifestyle and worldview” you are minimizing what’s going on and trying to make it a subjective issue when it’s not. That makes it clear that you don’t actually share any kind of moral outrage at them, that you don’t share my goals at all, and you’re just trying to pretend that it’s an issue of “tactics” because you don’t want to openly voice what you actually think.
Second, this babying, whitewashing shit doesn’t really work to achieve anything. At best, you might get them to vote for a more polite warmongerer, while continuing to do real, tangible harm on a daily basis - but most likely it won’t even do that. The way to change people’s minds is not through that kind of nonsense, it is by confronting them and bringing the conflict directly into the open. This is exactly what MLK said:
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
Your passive, whitewashing, can’t we all just get along approach is counterproductive and flies in the face of creating the necessary tension required to change people’s behavior. Which again, I don’t think you mind, because you’re not actually opposed to what they’re doing.
The Nazis were just following orders to feed their family too.
There are plenty of ways to feed your family with more moral integrity than joining the oppressors. For instance, robbing a rich family, stealing copper wire from oil refineries, or gasp growing a garden with your community.
You can always use rich people as fertilizer if you want to be a little more morally acceptable.
explodicleThat’s a few very moral ways to fail at feeding your family. Thieves from the ruling class often wind up in prison, and family farms were driven out of business.
The majority of us weapons were built to fight communism or China. You don’t need a trillion dollar stealth fighter program to bomb poor people.