Like first of all, the guy is pretending the working class is way more reactionary than it actually is. Secondly, who’s organizing a group of iron workers in America anymore? Like I know it happens, but they’re obsessing over a job that a very small handful of people have at this point. And the entire purpose is to build up right wing narratives of what the working class is, like the left isn’t going to magically win if we pretend that the working class is entirely composed of socially conservative evangelical white men who work at coal mines or steel mills.
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i know it’s drivel but I kind of want to answer the question seriously
Like you said, there’s an image of the “working class” that entails a bunch of broad shouldered white guys who like beer and go to a Baptist church on Sunday. In reality it’s every demographic and organizing the working class means organizing for universal issues. Even entertaining the example. Ok, they’re about to go on strike and don’t support gay marriage. Is step 2 after the strike is successful to go abolish gay marriage? Is that part of the platform of the iron union?
In reality the working class is diverse and complicated, united by the common aspect of being laborers. I’ve tried organizing before, nearly twice forming a union, and we had a few chuds lining up. They never really brought up their socially reactionary nonsense because they were A) outnumbered about 4 to 1 and B) they had awareness enough to know it would be disruptive, so the chud elements were immediately diluted out from the start. We didn’t succeed in forming a union, but I can only imagine maintaining stability would become of even greater importance going forward. The chuds would have probably been even more scrutinized and more encouraged to fall in line, since their money, healthcare, etc would have been on the line if they made themselves poor examples of the union or were being disruptive with saying slurs or whatever.
Any wide working class organization in the USA that manages to get off the ground would have socially reactionary elements within it, but they would be vastly outnumbered simply by sheer virtue of who the working class comprises of.
Also, this is a wider concern, but what should leftists care what values a person has in their soul or whatever if they have no power to exercise those values? Ok so I’ve got a bunch of iron workers who don’t like gay marriage or abortion. So the fuck what? Let them seethe and mumble under their breath how much they hate it as long as their organizational capacity gives them no power to unilaterally execute those values.
Over half the world doesnt fucking support LGBTQ rights mr twitter poster so what point are you trying to prove
have gay sex with them
marry their dad
Press Enter to go on Strike!
presses Enter
And the entire purpose is to build up right wing narratives of what the working class is
Target alone employs over 400k people. The entire iron industry employs less than 100k people. But according to these people, retail jobs aren’t “real” working class jobs…
Its almost as if the most effective way for bigots to lose their prejudices is for them to regularly interact socially with the targets of their prejudice
So many wokes and leftists think that people with reactionaries attitudes are irredeemable. Certainly they can be a hard nut to crack, but the message of solidarity is powerful and can thaw the hearts of a lot of assholes. It’s weird to think that just working together to help each other can have such a positive effect on people’s attitudes. But a lot of people have been immersed in a social darwinism pressure cooker their whole lives, and have literally never experienced solidarity with their fellow comrades until they became involved in collective labor action.
what if a white child with cancer only had 3 weeks left to live and their last wish to the make a wish foundation was to be able to say the n word just once are you telling me it’s not okay for a white person to say the n word in that instance?
You put a progressive in charge of negotiations to make sure reproductive healthcare is in the contract.
You might be mixing up iron workers and steel workers. Iron workers do a construction trade. The job is probably about as relevant as it has been for several decades.
I execute them all on the spot, obviously
“What would Vladimir Ilyich have done in this situation?”
I love it when people make up awful hypotheticals to try and prove a point. “Wot if the only way to do the revolution was to disembowel yourself in public, would u do it?”, like damn dude im doing a great hecking think right now.
Fucking deal in real actual situations instead of deliberately awful hypotheticals, also dont fucking keep pushing this reactionary concept of workers as wife beating, gay lynching, racist coal miners and sweaty construction workers who just drink beer and watch reality tv. I seriously see this shit all the fucking time and its obscene how far from reality it is, I’ve literally seen an org have a local split over how anti-refugee and islamophobic they should be in order to appeal to workers.
This reminds me off “What if I have to yell the N-word to distract an active shooter???”
Workers
Are
Disproportionately
Brown women
Wadb :very-smart:
I also hate the use of coal miners and steel workers because they are an incredibly tiny subset of the working class, only chosen to appeal to the middle class middle management types hate fantasy of the working class. There’s like 35k coal miners and 70k steel workers in the US total. Like why wouldn’t they have chosen a (marginally) more realistic example involving fast food workers, warehouse workers, or general retail workers?
All 3 are too obviously diverse and young to be maliciously stereotyped like this, except maybe warehouse workers.
You interact with fast food workers and retail every day basically, you’re rarely incidentally meeting a coal/steel worker.
it’s the opposite of what u/4zi said
the stereotype was concocted by the right, to appeal to the white. The liberal use of the stereotype is a reaction. (they are being unwitting dupes)
It’s exactly the same as “we’ve lost 5,000 American soldiers!” when there are like 2,000,000 Iraqis deadAmerican soldiers aren’t the real victims, and “muh iron workers” aren’t the real working class
Finally, PatSoc “What would you do in a Zombie Apocalypse?” just dropped
If only we had some sort of tool to guide us in working with workers with varying levels of consciousness and reactionary views…some kind of…Mass…Line…
Based on every ironworker I know the more likely scenario is: “You’re organizing a group of ironworkers to strike for higher wages when you discover half of them are already unionizing and didn’t tell you because you’re not also a vegan like the rest of the shop, so they assumed you’d be against a union drive.”
If people are being taken care of by their union and their government, it doesn’t matter what their stances are. If leftists are doing their jobs correctly then the real reactionaries aren’t going to be anywhere near a real seat of power to actually shape society towards their goals. As long as their not the head of the union and the union isn’t leading some kind of push for public policy, then it doesn’t matter. I mean, it does matter because then it’s a question of how are they treating their coworkers and union members. You don’t want them harassing people. But them just holding an opinion and stewing in silence is not our problem. We can’t actually force people to believe in stuff we can just give them enough reasons to not care about those beliefs or feel they’re the only issues that matter.
Generally speaking, I agree. My problem with the post is it fabricates this scenario to paint the left as too woke, but it’s a pure fantasy. The chances of this actually occurring are pretty small, both abortion and gay marriage are broadly popular and most resistance comes from older folks. Having this many people against them in a union shop doesn’t seem very likely to me.
You bring up a good point about simply holding a position. It becomes obvious how to handle it if you simply reverse the positions and consider how it’s done now.
The US government lets us have our leftist forum and identify as leftists on Twitter because that’s us just stewing. We’re not an identifiable threat to any structure they’ve built and no amount of stewing will change anything about the current power dynamics. They come after us once we start doing things.
