• SovereignState
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    152 years ago

    Misconception going on in the comments: the U.S. is not ultra-conservative, its state is and its petty bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie and intelligentsia are. The working class is comprised mostly of progressive non-voters, it’s simply that they’re not represented whatsoever in the political goings-on in the nation, through suppression, gerrymandering, or a state-instilled nihilism. Most U.S. civilians support abortion, yet the state just made it illegal in many states. Most U.S. civilians support healthcare for all, yet we may never see it here, etc. etc. Most U.S. civilians are against war.

    • @bleepingblorp
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      122 years ago

      Idk, I sure see a fuck ton of people wearing Gruntwear type clothes, “infidel” t-shirts with Amerikkkan flag skulls, thin blue line prop, and people talking about turning whoever the convenient enemy at the time into a glass parking lot or whatever.

      Remember that Trump, who openly said he would bring back torture, still got nearly half the votes cast. There are a fuck ton of reactionaries in this hellscape.

      Idk where you are, but in the south and vast majority of rural areas, people openly physically attack poc like my spouse for simply being around.

      • @GloriousDoubleK
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        92 years ago

        This is the part that drives me crazy about them. They completely underestimate just how vitally material whiteness is to a lot of these folks they think they can reach. It is as material as a fist full of dollars.

        Sigh…

        • @CountryBreakfast
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          72 years ago

          The inability to realize whiteness as material is inherent to the “hidden” or obfuscated nature of white supremacy. This naturally leads to the whitewashing of the working class, which is the foundation of class reductionism. It reduces class to its simplist form in order to accommodate embourgiousieified workers in the global north, and centers colonial discourse above revolutionary discourse. There is this false conception that any worker with a boss is automatically a natural proletarian (meaning the wretched underclass that has revolutionary potential due to the internal contradictions of capitalism) but the truth is class is more complex than this and simply performing labor for a capitalist does not develop revolutionary potential. It basically reduces class down to another identity politic, but maybe that is not the best way to describe it.

          People make attempts to build class consciousness by utilizing a whitewashed conception of the working class but this has enabled labor movements to extort colonized people to empower white workers historically, which was a major part of developing the US into the empire it is today. Labor movements in the north have actually been instrumental in spreading capital’s empire because it has relied on colonial discourses/means to improve its situation at the expense of the global proletariat and colonized people. It relies on a colonial cultural-linguistic lense to interpret and communicate information and this lense is anathama to proletarian class consciousness because it grew out of exploiting and disarming the proletariat, not organizing it.

      • SovereignState
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        2 years ago

        I’ve spent a vast majority of my life in what could be considered the rural deep south (a town of about 300 people), and the rest of it in the rural midwest. I cannot pretend to speak for everywhere, obviously, it’s just my understanding of the U.S. in totality from things I’ve read and from uber-rurality from what I’ve experienced.

        “Trump… got nearly half the votes cast.” Indeed he did. By a large margin from the petit bourgeoisie and big bourgeoisie, from small and large business owners, not from your average working joe or whatever like the media (liberal and conservative) likes to present. Remember as well, that he got half the votes cast. Most U.S. Americans do not vote. If the vote were between Clinton, Trump, and no-one by result of absentia, the result would have been no-one. Most U.S. Americans do not vote because they do not see any meaningful difference between the two parties, because they’ve been excluded from voting vis a vi draconian voting repression laws, or have been precluded by structural issues related to voting such as voting not being a national holiday, voting taking too long etc.

        In my experience, and not to discount yours comrade, the uber-rural proletariat are ignorant and racist insofar as they like to use racial profanities in a non-directed way (as in to be edgy, to say things like “there are white n-words too” etc), and can be potentially swayed into acts of racist violence by locals with more power than them, like shop-owners and local officials; and these town officials and shop-owners, small landlords and well-off NEETS/retired elders are the ones you’ll likely see strutting about with AR-15s, tacticool gear, decked out F150s with confedo/U.S./don’t tread on me/Nazi flags billowing out the back, ready to assault anyone marginally different at a protest or assault a minority person on the street. Rural proletarians usually can’t afford these things, or afford the time to go out and harass people. In my experience, you’re way more likely to find the rural proletarian burdened by a crisis of meaning and one or two crippling drug addictions than overcome with a violently racist ideology, whereas for those with power within rural areas it’s likely to be vice versa.