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.
There is not “moral” purity or higher rate of virtue in poverty and struggle. It’s a negative phenomenon, that exists to be solved and can be regarded as entirely negative if given any sort of value (to us as communists). This is just unexamined Christian idealism common in the western left.
The goal of revolutionaries and communists is to emancipate the working class and oppressed of society. “Moral” Virtue and “Goodness” only exists as a subjective byproduct of our actions and goals, and are not our motivation.
Hell Lenin had to deal with idealist cosplaying as poor people (actually giving up their wealth and living amongst the serfs in the countryside to become “purer” communists). It was not very successful.
Any american mass movement will include these people, whose status is rapidly dwindling. But they should not be the strongest pillar and not be the one “tailed” after.