I think this is a uniquely important topic. Class disgust. The reason that right wing porkyism flourish in the western world even without the immigrants. Hell I too am effected with it to a large degree. One of the reasons working class all over developed world is gripping its guns and shouting 'get off my lawn' at any socialist attempts, one of the main reasons reactionary thought is so common among the proleteriat is because the left can not address class disgust.
Ive worked construction jobs to pay for my education, and now I work on gas turbine engines. And I noticed something. Engineers I work with today always show up sober for work. Construction crews I worked with werent always sober. Engineers always washed themselves. Construction workers do not. Engineers have over a thousand reasons to screw up their job, and yet they rarely do. Construction workers have very few reasons to screw up, and yet they often do. Building functional engines is very difficult and every blade of the turbine has to be weighted individually so the weight is distributed evenly around, pouring concrete is can hardly be any easier and you dont have to be careful at all. Engines provide a massive benefit to society and require a very high skill, mixing concrete also provides a benefit to society but arguably anyone could do it.
This is why high skill people look down on low skill people and think they rightfully deserve more. And why even low skill people who have no skills and just serve food or mix concrete look down on junkies/criminals/less productive people in the same category and so on. And this is why they all together collectively rush to protect the establishment and beat up leftist protesters, break up leftist unions, etc. All these things would benefit them. Your average right wing retard (who is a working class guy) would benefit from leftist policies. But your average right wing retard uses his youth to be the muscle of the establishment that breaks leftist policies in his country.
I think the failure of the left is that it doesnt address the need of a worker to feel proud of his work. In its pursuit to dismantle unjust hierarchies, it doesnt point out there is nothing wrong with meritorious hierarchies. In pursuit to return the stolen wealth from the rich back to the workers who created it, it doesnt point out that some rich got there by their own work honestly and without exploitation.
And this is how you get majority of honest workers of all social status and income joining up the right and the establishment in order to protect their sense of pride.
yeah, well, this is why marx was a shithead and so are you
the proletariat is not one indistinguishable, fungible brown mass. there are hierarchies even within people in the same occupation, let alone between.
Jeremiah Jenkins
The right likes to pretend that leftists are all offended cry babies. Yet feeling offended is what fuels the right entirely.
High skill worker will feel offended if he is not acknowledged as such in contrast to the low skill workers, and will join the right because he feels insulted. Low skill worker will feel offended if he is not acknowledged above a criminal, then you have junkies, beggars, religion, immigrants, jews, doesnt even fucking matter, people can fabricate this out the ass, you can have people seeing themselves above utterly imaginary 0.001% of the population that doesnt even have to exist, and they will raise hell unless the institutions acknowledge them.
Think of the people in a small town hunting down satanists who do not even exist. Whole town could be up in arms against these secret satanists, and a porky can just say "these leftists want to take our tax money and give it to the satanists!" and there you go.
Brayden Murphy
Engineers do deserve more than Construction workers. it wouldn't be any different under communism.
Ryder Diaz
But no one is saying this. Image of socialism is completely distorted. Average person on the street believes commissar is coming for his toothbrush and so he clings to the free market where he could at least demand his own price for his own work.. If the left promoted a better picture of their ideology than "moneyless, classless utopia of infinite free shit" maybe the working class people would know better. People dont read 3 volume works, hope you know that.
Right wingers took 3 volumes of kapital and condensed it into "infinite free shit for everyone" for the masses and now the workers who could be leftists joined the right because they fear "government is going to do all stuff" and force him to be equal to the people he is rightly disgusted by.
Ian White
And I even completely forgot to mention the crypto right pseudo intellectuals like Lobster Peterson who correctly points out that merit based hierarchies work on even basic biological level let alone societal, and then goes on about cultural postmodernist neomarxist [insert all the buzzwords here] as proof that the left wants to destroy all hierarchies and merit based hierarchies especially.
And so you have the entire working class fearing "cultural marx" coming to destroy their pride and everything they built with honest work. The left generally preaches peasant vs aristocrat while the right got the peasant AND the aristocrat up in arms against "cultural fucking marx".
Josiah Flores
programs negatively influenced by opportunists, who willingly limit the demands of the workers' movement as always the biggest problem
Jason Scott
the premise of your post is wrong
I know sloppy engineers, and meticulous construction workers.
That is true, but the class system is not based on merit. None of the rich can possibly have merited it, sorry that is just physically impossible. Nobody can work that many hours, the days are just too short.
Even the differences between a construction workers and engineer are not based all that much on personal qualities, statistically speaking.
If you look at the distribution of human potential and the distribution of opportunity to realize it, you see that is doesn't even remotely match.
The capitalist system actively seeks to degrade people, a underclass that gets wrecked is hard-coded in system. It serves as fear mechanism to keep the people that run the system in line.
Sorry but there is no class disgust, there is ruler degradation, and the fear of it. You do not see humanity as it is you see what capitalism has done to it.
Christopher Ramirez
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Joseph Rogers
first of all look into that reddit spacing, seriously no need to press enter after every 5 words second of all cmon, and another thing is also absurd enough to send the normies running off to the right to protect them against big bad commies
what about labor amplifying machines? what about working smart instead of working hard you see if you build a truck, over time you can transport much more than if you carried it all on your back what if some of the rich are self employed workers with no underlings who simply use the truck instead of pulling a sled?
when anecdotes become a common sentiment of the millions, maybe they should be addressed a little better than your post? this is exactly what im talking about
Isaac White
Nah youre fucking retarded. Youre pointing out a small, obvious thing, and acting like its not only a novel idea ("class disgust" lmao), but that it somehow explains "what is holding the left back". Fuck off, you should try to read more so you dont sound like an idiot. I mean, come on, do you really think people are unaware that people look down on the unproductive? Your giant engineer brain must really look down on usSeriously, its almost the entire point about the bourgeois! I think its hilarious you boil this down to pride. Fuck material conditions, fuck an actual material analysis of culture, propoganda, or anything at all, OP has found it, it was muh human nature all along! You realize you dont have to literally own a business to be an exploiter? You can be over paid, and guess where this extra value is coming from? Its coming from the underpaid workers below you. This is literally babys first Marx for you, yet you still think someone can be ridiculously overpaid and it can all be okay because of the bourgeois meme that everyone who works is a prole. Jesus christ, does anyone here read Marx? Ever? Haha, I just went through this thread some more. You are absolutely mentally hopeless. Stop condensing everything! Try to think dialectically, instead of "A is caused by B which is caused by C". Societal problems are not simple cause and effect; they are caused by many things in a dialectical process. If you really want a main problem with the left, it is that it doesnt have enough popular support. That is THE main problem facing the left, and at best you could seperate the myriad of problems into categories. We arent going to say "Engineer-san you are beautiful and worth more money come to Communism" and then have the Socialist World Order. I cant believe that even has to be stated.
This guy is right too. I might come back and start spazzing about the whole "hes not a good worker so im better" mentality.
!???! If there was literally ever a doubt that you never understood Marx, it has been dispelled in my mind. You are so stupid that I can almost guarantee I'll be back here to laugh at you.
Charles Kelly
pretending merit doesnt exist and that being successful is physically impossible is why the normies proles flock to the right wing to protect them against you screeching "success is undialectical!" ignoring personally destructive choices people make and infinitely excusing people who are drunk or show up late for work doesnt help either
Nicholas Gomez
what you are pointing out has already been defined by Marx as labor aristocracy. It is quite a normal thing and even he pointed out that high skilled laborers will often times defend large capital because they are favored by it, simply because there is less of them in the job market, there is a larger demand for them and their labor is worth more. There will always be less of them as it takes more years of study to become a skilled laborer, and many don't even have access to the education necessary. This is all very clear to anyone who isn't a LARPer, you are inventing hot water.
Although this 'superiority' you talk about is completely irrelevant. The west might still be subsiding their skilled laborers, but in the majority of the world's countries teachers, doctors, technicians and the like are getting shafted just as hard as the average prole. We have yearly teacher and doctor strikes due to small wages and engineers work for a pittance, and it shrinks every year more and more. It really doesn't matter that construction workers are stinky or that they are less careful, because the skilled laborers are shafted in the same way as they are, on a class basis. This gives skilled laborers plenty of reason to work with unskilled labor, and I see it often in strikes. And weather you work in a bread factory or build it's machines your labor is stolen all in the same way, the concrete stirrer is not a parasite and the engineer is not a parasite but their employer is.
Brayden Reyes
I didn't realize you did a survey involving millions of people. Tell us more about it
Blake Thomas
addendum: the wages and value of labor of skilled laborers themselves is only decided by their abundance in the market of labor. As soon as you have more doctors they become just as 'cheap' as unskilled labor. This happens quite a lot actually and countries even encourage it trough mass immigration, bringing in skilled migrant workers from other countries.
Nicholas Bell
You kind of went on a rant and I missed the point. Where did you spot class disgust actually? I 've never seen engineers being disgusted by construction workers despite the vastly different lifestyle that comes from different income and education.
Ethan White
but you do realize that only a few of the medical centers in europe can even perform certain high risk heart transplantation surgeries, and that most parts of the world do not even have these centers, and that these specialists require 30 years of education over here we have a saying "young doctor" when we refer to 50 year old doctors cos they are 30 by the time they complete the basics of heart specialization
if we could flood the market with advanced heart experts, why dont we?
Brody Walker
you are thinking of things like labor and value and "success" in the ways that capital has dictated to you. you are lost in the woods.
Connor Gray
This did not arise organically, it is the result of decades long sustained government and private propaganda campaigns. They have to be fought, to be sure, but it's not like you are inventing the wheel pointing it out. Unless you have concrete merhods to propose you add little that is new
Nicholas Gonzalez
we can't flood the market with advanced heart surgeons, that's the point, that is where their value comes from. If it was possible their labor would be cheap however. What you are pointing out doesn't contradict what I am saying, I agree with it.
Joshua Thomas
i like the spacing
it's absurd to think any of these super wealthy people could have generated it on their own,
made possible by science, designed by engineers, build and run by workers, monetized by capitalists. Capitalists deserve credit for breaking out of feudalistic-theocracratic systems. After that they caused crisis after crisis, they still can't get everybody fed and housed, and the wealth they take for them selfs just represents less resources for investment.
Sure but lets look at what the capitalist have done, they build sweatshops, that's not profitable but not very smart. How many potential Einsteins got destroyed in some hell-hole. For all we know we could have had anti-gravity generators.
I grant you that capitalists have to fight technophobia, and resistance to change, and deserve some credit for overcoming it. but com-on they aren't even all that good at tech-upgrades , theres just so much technology paths that were better but got discarded because it was harder to commodify. And capitalist deserve blame for that wasted opportunity because they perpetuate the system.
no underlings huh ? where did the truck come from, those don't grow on trees
Michael Williams
this seems like mixing merit with punching down, blurring the line between achievement and exploitation, and seems as if "the need to feel pride" is somehow linked to looking down on somebody. This feels like an appeal to join the chorus of blaming a scapegoat, and worst of all linking merit to riches. Sometimes reward and merit correlate, but it's never causal. And praising self-exploitation, that just makes you a useful idiot. I still don't understand how their pride can be used against the current order.
Austin Mitchell
OP was bullied by construction workers for being a nerd and now needs to vent.
Probably Cockshott indicated this somewhere, that the revolutionary potential of working class is not that they are exploited by capital and in antagonism towards the capitalists, but because they work, they create things, their labour which makes tools and transforms the world.
As a scientist working in the field of physics, there are many things that I envy the construction workers. Their work makes them have natural strength and muscles. My noodly arms are good for setting up instruments in vacuum chamber and optical table. Kinda makes me ashamed of my body.
People are overpaid to create their consent with the system of exploitation and become materially interested in upholding it, even though they do not do the exploitation themselves. They are corrupted, just like the proletariat of the imperialist country is corrupted with the spoils of wealth extraction from the colonies. One can hardly make an assertion that they are exploiters.
That is exactly the convenient what if that if it existed it would support your argument. Last rich self employed workers were the craftsmen of the feudal cities, forming later part of the bourgeoisie that overthrew the aristocracy.
Some countries do it because the homeland doctors are migrant worker themselves, working in richer countries for better wages. This happens in europe mainly in the eastern europe. Ukrainian doctors come to Czech Republic, Czech ones come to Germany. The state requires stable healthcare for its function and this is one possible solution.
Josiah Robinson
Lol. Such a false equivalency. Whereas the right seeks to preserve a power structure which has directly benefited them and lead to their culture and economy and military utterly dominating the entire globe through the sheer dynamism of their unstoppable societies, the left invents new definitions for gender, then uses that definition to build fake "gender identities" for sick and neurotic people to identity themselves with, and promptly wines as the rest of society rightfully reels back in disgust and revulsion. All while not advancing the state of worker's rights in the slightest. In fact, devolving the state of worker's rights by dogmatically supporting illegal immigration which is nothing more than a bourgeois upper middle class ploy to gain a disposable and helpless population of low skill workers to depress wages and work on pennies on the dollar in landscaping/service/food/maid positions.
In other words the right (at least the white right) seeks to preserve a power structure which has benefited them in an immeasurable way, first via conquest and settlement of technologically/culturally inferior, savage populations, and then by complete world dominion to the point where conflicts between each European power have taken on global proportions since the 1700's. The answer that the left has to this situation is not to accept that world history is a story of domination and exploitation, slavery and rape, and to thank Europeans for using their position as the best and most powerful conquerers in history for creating pluralistic, semi-democratic societies that find human sacrifice appealing (unlike Imperial societies of other races/) No. The left's answer to white excellence is to call for whites as a discernible ethnic group to disappear, either because of miscegenation, economic discrimination. or deliberate killing as was and is the case in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Faced with these prospects, unless you confer legitimacy on whites continuing to exist as a discernible ethnic group in a dominant position in their own countries like others, you can't expect whites to do anything but detest and hate you with all their hearts.
Inequity is present even in socialist society. What OP described are all proletarian. The engineer did not employ people did he? If not then how could he be "rich"?
Brody Torres
Whites don't exist. You'll see. When America falls you will be begging for scraps from the former third world.
To be proud of your work, it has to be your work. There's nothing to be proud of when you're breaking your back every day for shit pay, flipping burgers only to get screamed at by fat fucks that treat you like a robot, or any of the innumerable other shit occupations that treat you like a disposable cog.
Because they don't care about benefiting, they care about someone else losing. They don't give a shit about material reality, but their spooky pride and seeing whoever they don't like punished for what they imagine to be their unjust circumstances.
Jaxson Ortiz
If Apple Were A Worker Co-operative, Each Employee Would Recive $403,000 Dividend On Top Of Their Salaries
Ryder Richardson
what were you just saying about false equivalency.
