a big ”gotcha” moment reactionaries have against communism is that some communists are relatively well off and have some wealth to our name.
however, i find that the poorest in society dont have any energy to study theory and look at the world in certain ways.
i know that this was true for me. i used to be quite poor earlier in my life and money was scarce.
during this time, i used to spend the money i did have on stupid consumerist things. however, when i actually had a stable income, i found that i didnt want as many things (because i could always buy them)
furthermore, i used to fetishize the 1st world and a big goal of mine was to move to a 1st world country thinking they were ”better”. after my financial situation improved i was able to see that life isnt actually better over there and most their better conditions are because they still engage in neocolonialism and steal resources from the global south.
the way i looked at things changed a lot and i eventually stopped being a liberal.
many reactionaries like to say ”how can you be a communist when you have fancy things?” but being poor was such a psychologically taxing experience that i couldnt look at things from a rational perspective at all
i think this is why the united states keeps their population poor and in constant debt. they accuse north korea of actively harming their own population to keep them from revolting but i think its actually them who do this.
Either way you can’t win. If you’re well off and a communist you’re a hypocrite and how dare you have nice things and why don’t you give your wealth away. If you’re poor and you’re a communist you’re just envious and/or lazy and you’re just bitter others are more successful.
It is true however that people who are in constant survival mode have less time to learn, analyze and question their circumstances.
being poor was such a psychologically taxing experience that i couldnt look at things from a rational perspective at all. i think this is why the united states keeps their population poor and in constant debt.
No doubt this is part of it. Keep people so busy and exhausted that they don’t even have the energy to think about rebelling or demanding something different. Being in perpetual debt is like being in chains.
And what is even more pernicious is how the system uses that desperation to turn people against each other, to see fellow workers as their direct competition. This is a huge suppressor of class consciousness, when everyone at the bottom are just fighting each other for scraps and desperately clawing to get higher up the ladder.
Fanon said something about revolutionary movements requiring a privileged strata to form its theoretical basis because only a privileged strata has the time and energy to devote to theoretical pursuits. That the Western Marxists most devoted to and knowledgable of theory are often relatively well off shouldn’t be all too surprising.
However, the majority of Communists are not these people. The theory producing subset of Communists is small and effectively impotent without working acting Comrades. The majority of whom are radicalized because of their poverty.
The idea that most marxists are stuffy intellectuals disconnected from reality comes from this relationship imo. People who do not engage with communist praxis aren’t going to be familiar with its practitioners, they are going to be familiar with its public facing theoreticians.
Yup. Lenin founded Iskra to spread Marxist theory amongst the economically and educationally underprivileged workers. The economists (mensheviks and Bernstein) criticized his approach and suggested that theory should only be formulated by the intellectuals while the workers should get the simple content. Lenin severely criticized the comments of such ‘intellectuals’.
At the end, it turns out Lenin was correct. His approach brought the revolutionary theory to the masses.
I very quickly radicalized after high school. Being Black and realizing this country wasn’t built for people who look like me was a big eye opener. Having to pay for shit I ain’t wanna pay for like rent and tuition did the rest.
I’ve been poor my whole life and that has never changed. I’m still just as poor as I was when I was born.
Actually I’m probably poorer since the average family was wealthier in the late 90s.
The more money I make for doing less and less work, the more I realize what a crock of shit this whole system is
I am middle class, and a son of a liberal professional. Even though when I was a kid, my dad wasn’t very well off, but even so I had access to good private education. I attended to a school where people’s financial situation was much better than mine. My father prospered as I went to my teenage years and I was living well off.
As an adult, after the first two years after I graduated, I had a very good position for Brazilian standards and was very well off. I am currently living in Canada and I still earn better than average family income.
Interestingly I got attracted to communism/socialism during the pandemic. Bolsonaro’s management of the pandemic was awful, my wife had a mental breakdown as she was a health care worker, and this led me to get very angry with Brazilian capitalists that were encouraging people to get sick. After I got introduced to Brazilian communists through Reddit and YouTube, I got hooked and started reading more and more material.
So in the last 4 years, I started reading and listening theory like crazy. When I was driving or doing chores I was always listening to audiobooks. Every day I read something in the morning.
So, being better well off didn’t stop me from dropping my liberal views in favor of socialist/Marxist theory. Not only that, but now making sense of the world is much easier now with diamat than it was during my liberal years
That said, Marx was very favorable to pushing reforms and better conditions so workers would get better off and could have more time for theory and engaging in political activity. So this accelerationist idea that making people’s condition too bad will make them socialists is not true. But unfortunately the opposite is also true, making people’s life better, don’t automatically make them socialist.
So this is why it is important to workers who are well off to do agitation and propaganda, so in this process, people who are in worse conditions get experience in fighting and mobilizing to get better conditions and in the process they get political and delve more into theory. So the process to making people socialists is through praxis, not by reading theory alone.
I am also in favor of learning to manage cooperative enterprises, so less dependent to wages, in parallel of helping workers unionize. I think we should also try to get revenue streams to fund professional revolutionaries.
