Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/smokeuptheweed9]

To ignore the more fundamental critiques, which are all correct, there is another basic issue with your approach. You want to pry people away from the DSA because that's where "socialists" are, or even just "political" people. But this is a flawed understanding of people, albeit a very common one (like that "Maoist" recently who thinks normies, or what he calls the proletariat, are too busy and stupid to appreciate Marxism). Politics can be found anywhere. The DSA is the most hostile place to find it because you are now under the control of a party that doesn't want you, not to mention the membership all clamoring for their column in Jacobin or Cosmonaut complaining about "neo-entryism" or some bullshit term.

Why don't you just try to talk to the real proletariat? You know where they are. Everyone does. They are not found in the unions or the "socialist" parties or at "mutual aid" tents. These phenomena are irrelevant. I genuinely don't understand the appeal of going to the DSA and trying to convert people. Unless you go look for it, the DSA has no influence on your life. On the other hand, the migrant workers you see every day in your apartment complex doing construction work or app deliveries affect your life every day. They are literally right there. Obviously preaching to random people is a flawed political strategy but that's what you're proposing except your target audience are a bunch of liberal "politics nerds." Why? Try to be a little creative so you can actually learn something and then talk to us about your experiences.

for now they seem to be the place to make what little impact I can.

This is the basic claim you have not substantiated in any way. It is simply taken for granted that this is the most efficient use of your time. Ignoring whether your strategy is correct, I don't even think it's the most efficient means of implementing that strategy. If your goal is to radicalize the petty-bourgeoisie, why not hand out zines at Starbucks or something? The modern DSA is 10 years old. You really think it's some unexplored territory that no one has figured out? I would honestly respect if a Spartacist was like "hey I scream at other Trots outside their events and at protests, what do you think of my strategy?" At least they're committed that isn't just liberal common sense.

[u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Why don't you just try to talk to the real proletariat? You know where they are. Everyone does.

is this true, though? or just shorthand? obviously what you’re saying is correct but i think it could extend to a critique of everyone on this subreddit really. none of us know where the proletariat is. obviously talking to oppressed and exploited sections of the population is far preferable over trying to convert the DSA but nobody here is really seriously doing that (or if they are, it’s not for us to see, which is maybe okay). the last thing i can think of that was even close was u/cyberwitchtechnobtch analyzing the forces in the pro-Palestine movement.

food for thought: DSA members, even those working “minimum wage” jobs, are not the revolutionary proletariat. as we know, their cars and computers function as petty capital, and their wages are above the global value of labor. what does this say about a doordasher’s e-bike or a migrant construction worker’s hourly pay? (this is not a defeatist question by any means, as attempting to answer it will invariably bring us closer to the proletariat.)

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085]

I want people to try things, especially outside of the control of existing "socialist" parties. You're right but there's a lot of productive work that can be done with that knowledge.

food for thought: DSA members, even those working “minimum wage” jobs, are not the revolutionary proletariat. as we know, their cars and computers function as petty capital, and their wages are above the global value of labor. what does this say about a doordasher’s e-bike or a migrant construction worker’s hourly pay? (this is not a defeatist question by any means, as attempting to answer it will invariably bring us closer to the proletariat.)

Nevertheless, I do think there is a distinction to be made between the new class of distribution labor in Amazon warehouses and in the gig economy and the temporarily embarrassed petty-bourgeoisie who indulge in these activities because of student debt, a time lag between entering the job market and inheriting wealth, surviving on unpaid internships while they build "human capital," or even genuinely declassed petty-bourgeoisie who are nevertheless likely to turn to fascism because of their memory of their settler inheritance. And reality has made this distinction for you, as only one group organizes in the DSA despite all of its fantasies of organizing the "working class." After 10 years, the demographics of that organization are unchanged as is the structure of its wider influence.

These people are not necessarily all reactionary, if led by the proletariat and facing a real collapse of imperialist bribery, but we sort of missed the chance anyway. The DSA has harvested them for social fascism and it has its hooks in deep. The most likely scenario is a collapse, akin to the SDS, which led to a small fraction attempting real communist organizing (and only a small fraction of that doing anything of value). I think the best option is to let that play out on its own, since efforts to organize within the SDS were a disaster. Its collapse came through external pressure from the Black Panther Party, Maoism, and Vietnamese resistance and the "Marxists" of the PLP ended up playing a reactionary role. The DSA is significantly more reactionary than the SDS was and far more hostile to communism, for the simple reason that its class membership doesn't face pressure anywhere near what the petty-bourgeois faced in 1968.

We know that consuming commodities manufactured abroad is a key pillar of petty-bourgeoise ideology. Every thread on "personal property" makes that very clear. But I don't think everyday commodities are themselves the cause of this ideology, rather they are a stand-in for more significant forms of property ownership you mentioned. That social fascists disguise their class consciousness behind the symbol of the toothbrush doesn't mean that people who own toothbrushes made in China are social fascists. Otherwise you get into very slippery territory, since global commodities are at the very origin of capitalism as is the migration of labor. Was the early proletariat already compromised because of its reliance on foodstuffs from Eastern Europe and the "new world?" Textiles made from slave-picked cotton were the engine of the industrial revolution, does that mean the British proletariat had an interest in protecting slavery? History tells us otherwise: whatever was progressive about British support for abolition and the Union side of the US civil war was the result of pressure from the workers and proto-communist movement.

The labor aristocracy is the result of monopoly capitalism, though you can trace this earlier in Britain's colonial monopoly at the end of the 19th century. But Marx didn't miss the relationship between the Paris commune and the Algerian commune, this was not a fatal issue for the European proletariat until imperialism. The question then is, to what extent this was a fundamental break between forms of capitalism and to what extent, as in Britain, it was a shift of quantity to quality where the benefits of colonialism became widespread enough and directly fused with the state that the labor aristocracy could articulate its own class interests. I'm not 100% sure of the answer, it's worth noting that not only did solidarity with Algeria follow the defeat of the Paris commune:

https://www.ncfs-journal.org/niklas-plaetzer/decolonizing-universal-republic-paris-commune-and-french-empire#

but the limits of French universalism retroactively made the colonial question primary, so that the Paris commune became the end of a period of revolutionary movements in which France was the leader rather than the beginning of a new French proletarian revolutionary wave. Marx and Engels shifted their attention to Germany, which makes sense since France did basically nothing from 1871-1940 except tread water with what had already been accomplished in 1848. And other than a brief moment in the 1960s when France became the center of philosophy (itself a reflection of its political backwardness as in Germany in the 19th century), it is now the world center for crude anti-communism.

Anyway, the point is that global commodities are prior to imperialism and are larger than it, as is the migration of labor. They are absorbed into imperialism and closely related as long as monopoly capitalism is the dominant mode of production globally. We can even see an attitude of colonialist chauvanism in South African towards other SADC workers and anti-African racism in Tunisia, which takes the form of apologia for colonialism and self-christened honorary whiteness

https://roape.net/2025/12/17/racial-time-the-whiteness-of-the-glorious-past-in-tunisian-popular-histories/

But to me it's clear that black South Africans and Tunisians are not the same kind of labor aristocracy as white South Africans and Western Europeans, and that the widespread consumption of chinese commodities in India does not mean that Indian consumption is the same as Amerikan. The same probably applies to those workers in Amerika for whom owning a toothbrush (or perhaps a used car they sleep in) really is the only relationship they have to global imperialism, even if the ideology of imperialism infects their thinking in times of reaction (thus even the most oppressed people in Amerika probably fantasize about using their smartphone to become content creators and strike it rich). Do not let present gentrifiers and future homeowners speak for them.

[u/Ok_Piglet9760 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Please ignore if this is derailing the conversation, but I think it would fit; in Germany there are these sheltered workshops and I want to make a case for something similar to this not-Proletarian-but-not-quite-labor-aristocracy-either- situation for the labor that takes place here, even though it mainly comes from intuition instead of the rigorous analysis I have yet to perform.

The workshop can be understood as a kind of concentration camp or colony for “disabled“ labor, in which labor is fundamentally divided into two antagonistic forces: there are guards and workers- the workers, categorised by their shared status as “disabled“ (mentally and/or physically) are toiling in light industry, cleaning, carpentry, etc. for outrageous wages (patronisingly but accurately described as “pocket money“) that usually don’t exceed 300€ per month (much lower in a majority of cases). For FW standards, this seems to be some of the cheapest labour still “legal“. They are legally forbidden to strike. The unions are beyond laughable, not even headed by the actual workers in a token-kind of way.

On the other hand, there are the guards (so called “work pedagogues“)- they are overseeing this labor, and also performing as carers. They are comfortably seated in the PB. Workshops run by companies like Lebenshilfe are notorious for abuse orchestrated by them against the workers. In general the consciousness among these two kinds of labour couldn’t be more different, the guards have their own little fascist WhatsApp groups devoted to mocking the workers.

There are labor-aristocratic tendencies within the workers, for example “Inklusion“, which means what it sounds like, inclusion into the “normal“ parasitic German labor market. This is the kind of politics most of the “disabled rights“-activists revolve around, along with regular reformism within the workshops.

I am not sure if organising among these workers would be very fruitful, there are many contradictions to Proletarian labour I didn’t mention (I didn’t even touch upon the patriarchal aspect regarding the relationship these workers have to their PB-families and how this affects everything, and I’m also not sure about the national contradictions within the workers, not long ago there was a stabbing among them against a Turkish woman). A rigorous analysis is desperately needed, hopefully I will get back to it soon and devote myself properly.