Can I still be a Marxist and personally look down on fat people? I just see them as disgusting...

Can I still be a Marxist and personally look down on fat people? I just see them as disgusting, self-debasing lesser-thans, I can't help it.

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Being a Marxist doesn’t preclude you from disliking a particular group on a personal level. Besides, socialist societies placed heavy emphasis on physical fitness.

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There's a difference between looking down on people for an immutable feature/characteristic/quality, and looking down on people for doing something they don't need to do. I look down on people who hurt animals. What if they went and said hurting animals is part of their identity, they're a catkin or some shit, would that immediately make me a bad person for looking down at them? Of course not.

Being fat is not an identity, it's a condition brought on by eating too much. People aren't born fat, they become fat through willful action. Capitalism does play a role by making the shittiest, unhealthy, good-tasting, calorie-packed food the most affordable for low-income families, and I know a lot of working class people don't have time to cook, but I can't help but think that better dietary choices can be made at any income-level. For example, rice and beans are very cheap, and so are potatoes. People lived for thousands of years on food like that and obesity wasn't a problem until today. Even people drinking water instead of juices and coca-cola would go a long way.

Fat people disgust me, but I also feel sorry for them. It is a very hard thing to break out of. I assume someone who is 300lbs, doesn't care about another 20-30lbs. But it is possible to break out of it. The information is out there, people have just been educated and socialised into celebrating their ignorance and hating learning. Nothing I can do about that.

But people who think of fatness (and thinness) as an identity disgust me more than fat people.

Had this thread already >>2834866

literally idealism.
people get fat because of material conditions, and because of mental issues.

because menial labor was always the way most people spent their time, and exercise was highly common. Not to mention that most all foods are full of sugars and corn syrup, and fresh produce of any quality is both expensive and doesn't last as long. Not to mention how lunch breaks are so short, which basically necessitates either going out to eat (with most of that food being garbage) or having pre-packed lunches which usually consists of preserved foods or junk foods, because it is cheap and keeps well. Work is also so draining and time consuming that people rarely exercise or get out of the house for leisure activities, they often just stay home and watch tv because they busted their ass for 9 hours for a wage that hardly keeps them above water. Couple this with poor sleep habits largely caused by the stress of being a wagie and things like caffeine become more and more necessary to stay productive enough to maintain a job. Literally all of this relates back to material conditions, and this was why the USSR's population was universally more fit than any capitalist nation's. So quit idpoling and start fighting the system.

I already admitted the material aspect in my post. I guess you got too emotional to notice it.

Yes, being fit while having a full time job that has short breaks is hard. But instead of watching TV for the rest of the day spend an hour making a healthy meal for the next day. You have all the time on Sunday to make yourself a week of lunches for very cheap. Rice and bean burritos with the cheapest veggies you can find. I can make a big pot of chickpea curry, with potatoes and carrots that will give me 5 lunches.

No one is saying living in capitalism is easy, it's fucking hard. But you can't just waste away blaming capitalism and waiting for that revolution to come, because then you'll be able to "live your best possible life".

And if everyone is fat, who is going to fight in the insurrection?

Defeatists off the board!

Both those anons weren't really being emotional at all. They were just laying out a clinical materialist analysis of why a lot of people are like that. You weren't even talking about people who want to engage in revolutionary action being fat, simply fat people in general, so they layed out the reasons for such a situation existing as you would if you were explaining why certain people hold certain political beliefs based on location or why the current culture is the way it is. Of course if you're thinking about engaging in revolutionary organizing and action you should work out, that is a given, but that wasn't exactly specified here.

Which I did in less words, here:

The problems they list aren't things that prevent being fit, they're conditions that make being fit harder. There are ways to eat cheap and healthy and not spend too much time cooking.

You're talking about material conditions as if it was some formula where if A, B and C are present you will get result Q. If it were then all working class people would be fat, and they're obviously not.

Prevalence of fast food restaurants in the US could account for their much larger obesity numbers for example. Like with littering, the problem isn't the consumers, but the producers. You can also look at cultural eating habits, types of cuisine and look for differences there. Humans are influenced by their conditions, and are to some extent products of their environment. But we cannot remove all agency from people. We can understand how people got to where they are or behave a certain way, but we should also expect people to have some responsibility for themselves. This probably also has a lot to do with the brain/body division in our society, where people see themselves as beings inhabiting an imperfect body, rather than seeing themselves as that body. You often hear on this board Read a book, why don't you hear Go exercise? Telling one to cultivate their mind and learn is the same as telling one to improve their stamina and strength.

Are people's mental abilities not a result of material conditions as well? Of the poorly-funded public school in a low-income area, lack of afterschool activities, parents who cannot afford to buy their kid a computer, or books so they can read? Parents who don't read themselves because they're too busy working two jobs and therefore cannot cultivate such habits in their children? Why tell people like that to read theory if you're not going to tell fat people to exercise? Seems like hypocrisy to me.

People don't hold political views 'based on location'. Location may expose them to certain cultures, or not expose them to certain things, such as the internet or a library, but location alone does not determine someone's political belief.

If we're talking about the working class, and pretty sure we are talking about people who have to sell their labour power to survive, then 'engaging in revolutionary organizing and action' is always a possibility.