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Why the American left struggles to win the “proletariat”

2023-11-30 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Despite all the claims to fight for the working class, a lot of American leftists don’t know how to talk to or about your average working-class person. (This probably applies to other countries that were on the left side of the Iron Curtain too, though I can’t be 100% sure.) And no, this has nothing to do with identity politics—that’s for later. Right now, I’m focusing on the struggles of daily life.

I grew up working class. I knew very few adults, other than teachers and medical professionals (and a single relative), who had bachelor’s degrees, much less master’s degrees and PhDs. Having a degree was a big deal; most of these people finished high school and went straight into the workforce if they didn’t do a stint at a community college first. People do not throw around terms like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “material conditions.” Instead, they’ll say “the little guy” and “the bosses.” People talk plainly and clearly; they don’t go in circles using management-speak and Marxist jargon.

When working-class people talk about their material conditions, they give concrete examples, not turgid treatises on Engels and Žižek:

“When I was growing up in the 1960s, you could get a burger for 16 cents. Now you’ll be lucky to get one for $6.”

“They closed down the factory 20 years ago because they outsourced all the work to China. Dad had a hard time getting a job after that and needed to go on benefits.”

“I broke my hip and couldn’t do my job any more, but unemployment couldn’t cover my rent. I got evicted and had to stay in a shelter just to stay alive.”

“They’ve got us under surveillance all the time. You can’t even get up to go to the bathroom without logging it on a time sheet.”

“I’m getting early and late shifts stacked together at Amazon and can’t get any sleep.”

“I need to see the doctor, but my job doesn’t give me benefits, my state didn’t expand Medicaid, and I can’t afford an Obamacare plan.”

Despite their purported focus on material conditions, many leftists (especially Marxists) spend more time spouting academic-sounding jargon rather than listening to the people they want to defend. I’ve lived in the professional middle-class world for just over a decade now. But I’ve tried not to forget where I came from or what my values were. I still detest jargon and doublespeak and piles of abstractions that sound pretty on paper but mean nothing in practice.

Want to support the working class? Then listen. Don’t call them the “proletariat.” Say “you and me,” “your average person,” “the little guy.” Don’t talk about the “bourgeoisie.” Say “the bosses,” “the big guys,” or give names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett. It’s a lot easier to grasp it if you talk about specific people rather than a nebulous “bourgeoisie.” Put down Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Make it easy for people to imagine a better world. If you want to talk about material conditions, then fucking describe them. If you want to talk about how companies exploit their employees, then give examples. Some leftists do this, but it’s typically covered in a pile of jargon.

And your average working-class American isn’t going to be thrilled to talk about communism or socialism, either, especially if they’re older. The same people who want the government to provide them with healthcare and housing, or their unions to protect their rights, are the same ones who will turn around and denounce communism. “The country’s becoming more communist every minute,” someone—a sixtyish woman working in a unionised job—said to me recently. Communism isn’t a concrete set of political demands; it’s an abstract evil force that they associate with the Soviet Union (though they’ll usually call it “Russia”) and the Cold War. Like it or not, Marx’s better ideas have been tainted by association with the terrors inflicted by Stalin and his imitators. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is going to make people think of Stalin, not workers’ taking control over what they produce, as they do in worker-owned cooperatives. When you ask them to think of a socialist country, they’ll think about dictatorial regimes like the USSR and North Korea.

This isn’t to say that working-class people are stupid because they think of Stalin and Kim Jong Un when you mention socialism. Quite the contrary. They may not have read a word of Marx, but they can tell you exactly how alienated they are from their job, how exploited they feel by their bosses, how much they want to put food on the table without accounting for every penny, how frustrated they are when they talk and no one listens.

If you want workers to rise up against unfair conditions, if you want to spur a mass movement, you need to be able to meet people where they are. You can’t just wait for everything to suck so much that people will join the Socialist Equity Party of Liberation instead of voting for the tried-and-true Republicans and Democrats who actually know how to win an election. They’re just going to pull the lever for Biden or Trump. It’s impossible to have a mass movement if you don’t know how to reach the masses, but a lot of “materialist” leftists don’t seem to get that—they’re trapped in the ivory tower as much as their “pseudo-leftist” progressive counterparts are.

Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Ditch the jargon. And then you’ll have a movement.

Cripticism: Inaccessible disability activism

2023-11-27 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

I’m sick of finding writing on disability that’s inaccessible to the general public, much less people with cognitive disabilities. If you’re resorting to academic jargon and social justice buzzwords, then you’re not speaking to the majority of your audience.

For example, Sins Invalid’s 10 Principles of Disability Justice is a US-centric mess of academic jargon and buzzwords. (The Arc of Minnesota tried valiantly to turn this list into plain language, but it’s still too abstract—it still includes expressions like “bodyminds” instead of “bodies and minds,” for example.)

You can get an idea of their writing style with their introductory sentence:

From our vantage point within Sins Invalid, where we incubate the framework and practice of disability justice, this emerging framework has ten principles, each offering opportunities for movement building…

Why can’t you just say “Sins Invalid has created a set of 10 definitions of disability justice and ways to incorporate these principles in your organising work?”

It doesn’t get any better as you kep reading, either:

Leadership of the most impacted: When we talk about ableism, racism, sexism & transmisogyny, colonization, police violence, etc., we are not looking to academics and experts to tell us what’s what — we are lifting up, listening to, reading, following, and highlighting the perspectives of those who are most impacted by the systems we fight against. By centering the leadership of those most impacted, we keep ourselves grounded in real-world problems and find creative strategies for resistance.

We already have a catchier expression for this principle: “Nothing about us without us.” “Leadership of the most impacted” sounds clunky. Also, I would say “transphobia” rather than the specific “transmisogyny,” since the term is more recognisable—and because transphobia affects trans men and nonbinary people, too. Classism belongs on this list as well. Let’s try to make this more memorable:

Nothing about us without us: We don’t need academics or “experts” to explain injustice or discrimination to us when we’ve gone through it ourselves. We need to listen to people who have gone through injustice and discrimination themselves: disabled people, women, people of colour*, LGBTQ+ people, working-class and poor people, and victims of police violence. They know themselves best and are the experts on their own lives.

And it continues…

Anti-capitalist politics: Capitalism depends on wealth accumulation for some (the white ruling class), at the expense of others, and encourages competition as a means of survival. The nature of our disabled bodyminds means that we resist conforming to “normative” levels of productivity in a capitalist culture, and our labor is often invisible to a system that defines labor by able-bodied, white supremacist, gender[-]normative standards. Our worth is not dependent on what and how much we can produce.

The last sentence needs to be the first, and there needs to be an actual definition of what “capitalism” means. Activists will know what it means, but the average Westerner (and American in particular) is going to think of capitalism as a good thing, since they’ll contrast it with the Soviet Union and North Korea. Also, the definition of ruling classes is obviously US-centric. In many countries, the ruling classes may not be white, since most countries that aren’t in Europe or don’t have ruling classes descended from European colonists. As for Europeans themselves, most countries’ ruling classes belong to the same ethnicity as the working classes, even if there are immigrants from Africa or Asia living there.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty plain-language translation:

Our worth doesn’t come from how hard we work, or whether we can work at all. Our lives matter no matter what. But we live in a capitalist society. In capitalism, regular people have to work hard so that corporations, landlords, and banks earn money from their employees’ work. These owners keep all the money for themselves and don’t do much work themselves. They just want you to do all the work. Under capitalism, we have to compete with each other to get jobs and get enough money to eat. Because we’re disabled, it’s harder for us to work. People don’t always see the work we can do, or they don’t think it’s important. Capitalism hurts disabled people.

Here’s another winner of a quote, complete with some “noble savage” idealisation of pre-contact North America:

Interdependence: Before the massive colonial project of Western European expansion, we understood the nature of interdependence within our communities. We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities, as we all share one planet. We work to meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, without always reaching for state solutions which inevitably extend state control further into our lives

Again, there are a lot of assumptions that aren’t going to be shared by your average American, much less a disabled one who’s been exposed to only conventional narratives about US history. In a country rife with brands like “Rochester Colonial,” “Swiss Colony,” and “Imperial Margarine,” you need to clarify why colonialism is bad or cut out the mention altogether.

Here’s another quick-and-dirty plain-language fix:

Interdependence: We all need each other to live and grow. Unfortunately, a lot of us learn that we have to just rely on ourselves and not get help. But everyone needs to work together to protect ourselves, our community, and our planet. When we work together, we won’t need as much help from the government, since the government often has too much control over our lives.

Once I turn this into plain language, it’s easier to identify a political position that may give some progressives and socialists pause: the idea that disabled people should find support within the community rather than seeking help from the government. This part sounds specific to anarchism and doesn’t belong in a general set of principles. (Yes, I do point out biases even when they match mine!) Also, what do they mean by “liberate”? That word is thrown around a lot, but they’re never clear what they mean.

In general, the 10 Principles of Disability Justice are a well-meant attempt to combat systemic ableism, but the academic jargon, buzzwords, and identitarian focus prevent it from becoming the manifesto it could be.

* I hate the expression “people of colour,” but I’m using it here to avoid writing a long list of ethnic groups or using the expression “racial and ethnic minorities,” which this crowd tends to hate.

You can capitalise “Nazi,” but not “Russian”?

2023-11-25 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

A Ukrainian fact-checking website has failed to notice that writing “Nazi” with a capital N, but using a lowercase R for “Russian,” makes them look as though they have more respect for the Nazis than the Russians. Considering Ukraine’s track record with Nazis and Nazi collaborators (Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Symon Petliura…) and their apologists (especially Volodymyr Viatrovych), and the Russians’ false claims that Ukraine is a “Nazi regime,” this is an especially bad look. It’s the kind of thing Russian propagandists would seize on: “Look, those Ukrainians love Nazis so much that they lowercase ‘Russian’ and capitalise ‘Nazi’!”

But this case isn’t unique; it’s part of a pattern of petty and juvenile behaviour from certain Ukraine supporters. I’ve seen one Ukrainian software company get rid of the Russian localisation of its app and replace it with a Ukrainian one. Before that, they had only Russian and not Ukrainian. Why not both? Russian is spoken in multiple countries—why punish other Russian-speakers because Putin is a shithead?

And some Ukrainian news sites will write “Russia,” “Putin,” “Belarus,” “Russian,” and other words connected with Russia (and sometimes Belarus) with lowercase letters, which sounds as though a twelve-year-old dreamed it up. I also saw one quoting someone using “Kiev” (rather than the government-approved “Kyiv”) and writing it with a lowercase K… presumably because it’s “russian.” Even Russian propaganda doesn’t lowercase “Ukraine.” (They just refer to it as the “Kiev regime,” the “Nazi Ukrainian regime,” or “the Zelensky regime” in every other article.)

Most Ukrainians or overseas supporters do not do this, but there are enough of these people to piss me off. I don’t remember the Allies writing “Hitler,” “Himmler,” “Japan,” “Germany,” “Italy,” “Mussolini,” “Tokyo,” and “Nazi Party” with lowercase letters. I saw people writing “Trump” with a lowercase T on forums and social media, but no news site or paper, no matter how left-wing they were, would print “trump” instead of “Trump.” I’m fine with the flags and “Support Ukraine” fundraisers. But this crap?

My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse…

2023-11-25 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:

Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping 👏 hand 👏 emoji 👏 or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Greyzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
Treating politics like a sports game
Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or sometimes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings

Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)

Right-libertarianism and Marxism are more similar than you’d expect

2023-11-24 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

I use “Marxism” and “right-libertarian” loosely to refer to ideas that, respectively, focus on the dichotomous struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production, especially people who extract labour from their employees or consumers) and the proletariat (people who have nothing but their work to give), or the dichotomous struggle between the winners (those who benefit from capitalist conditions) and losers (those who have not managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps).

Both these ideologies present a zero-sum view of humanity, though they take different perspectives: Marxists focus on the conflict between collectives, and right-libertarians seem these conflicts as individual. Both have a zero-sum character that reminds me of Social Darwinism. For one to survive, the other must be eliminated. This kind of winner-takes-all thinking is pervasive and seems to have brought us nowhere.

The frustrating thing is that right-libertarians often have valuable things to say about freedom of speech and expression, though they are often dismissive of how groups of people experience systemic oppression. A lot of them think that sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia will be vanquished in the free marketplace of ideas—or that these forms of prejudice are even justifiable because they continue to exist. And Marxists have an acute understanding of how economic inequality and exploitation lead to poverty, suffering and misery—but they don’t always care about individual rights and support the suppression of dissent. And like their right-libertarian counterparts, they may pooh-pooh racism and other systemic oppressions—or uphold them—because they’re secondary to the class struggle. (And then you have the identity-reductionist counterparts, but they are distinct enough from Marxists and right-libertarians that I’ll deal with them separately.) All these are counterproductive, reductive mindsets that ignore the complexities inherent to human existence.

Vengeance is not justice.

2023-11-20 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

The key to breaking the cycle [of tragedy] is to move social discourse away from the quest for vengeance (often mislabelled “justice”), to the goal of building a society together with one’s former enemies.

—Nicolai Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine

EU gives Kiev carte blanche to weasel out of accommodating Russophones

2023-11-14 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Ukraine’s continuing efforts to impose a rigidly ethnonationalist agenda on a deeply divided country. Ukrainian officials have claimed that ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians aren’t a “real” ethnic minority—they’re just Ukrainians who happen to speak Russian—and don’t need special protection under the law, unlike Hungarians, Romanians, and Tatars who live in Ukraine. Go ahead and force them to stop speaking Russian—after all, they’re not a real minority worthy of protection. The EU has no plans to intervene on Russophone Ukrainians’ behalf, either. (Link is in Russian.)

I think this is yet another own-goal by the Ukrainian government. One of Russia’s “justifications” for invading Ukraine was the country’s supposed oppression of Russian-speakers. By constantly doubling down on anti-Russian-language laws and statutes, Kiev is simply giving the Russians talking points. If I were less informed about Moscow’s propaganda, I would have thought Putin was telling the truth. (In general, Russia has a tendency of noticing real problems—Ukrainian ethnonationalism and its connections with Nazi collaborators, racial tensions in the US, labour disputes in France—and using them to justify its own actions and deflect criticism.) Remember, the best lies contain a grain of truth, and this is no exception.

(To learn more about the divisive nature of Ukrainian nationalism, I strongly recommend reading Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine or some of the articles that preceded the full book.)

The Woke Contrarian

Page 6 of 10

Why the American left struggles to win the “proletariat”

Cripticism: Inaccessible disability activism

Right-libertarianism and Marxism are more similar than you’d expect

Vengeance is not justice.

EU gives Kiev carte blanche to weasel out of accommodating Russophones

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