What the Working Class Needs to Do Part 2
Let’s continue from my previous article in this series.
We must focus on class unity, not identity.
The idea of banding together based on identity connected to immutable traits and/or religious choice may appeal to the emotions and make us feel we’re “sticking it to” other groups of the same sort that held us down in the past. However, it appeals to a dark part of our emotions; the part that leads us to bitterness, perpetual trauma, the glorification of victimhood, and complicity with authoritarian measures to “resolve” grievances.
It keeps the mind of its proponents focused on ideas of revenge that generally ignore or downplay the main cause of all forms of oppression: unequal distribution of the resources. Demanding an inversion of this core injustice would not resolve the problem, because it only addresses a symptom of the main issue. Instead of resolving anything, it would keep the resentments that maintain divisions among the working class going on indefinitely, creating an endless cycle of Oppressors and Oppressed taking turns in each role.
It also provides counterproductive opportunities for grifters of all stripes to take advantage of the situation by seeking power for themselves while hiding behind a racial or sexual Virtue Shield. BLM and Critical Race Theory area good examples of this on one front, as is fourth wave feminism and what the #MeToo movement quickly morphed into on another.
And in the meantime, the capitalist class, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion etc. continued merrily on, using all of the internally hostile workers as useful workers and self-destructing dupes.
We need to be loyal to a set of principles, not to any particular political party or personality.
This means, in short, that we must understand that all political parties can be infiltrated and corrupted, and this is particularly true as long as we live in a system where a small number of people have a tremendous amount of power over everyone else. And when there are numerous ideologies and tendencies among the working class who do not support class unity, or think other issues are more important.
All parties need to be filled with diligent people who maintain focus on the class war and class unity. That is, and must remain, the crux of our focus.
We need to adopt the committed belief that we are capable of creating a better world. And that we deserve one.
We need to cease supporting variations of capitalism under the cynical and defeatist belief that we cannot do much better than the system we currently have. This means rejecting Social Darwinist attitudes or twisting the definition of “merit” as meaning that some people deserve power, privileges, and comforts far beyond others. Or that denying people even the right to basic physical and psychological comforts is somehow ethical or justifiable, let alone conducive to maintaining any type of society that glorifies such a tenet.
The class war must focus on the understanding that human nature is, first and foremost, adaptable. That our behavior and motivations will depend upon the socio-economic nature of the environment we must operate within. It is not “hard-wired” into our genes or biologically immutable.
The ruling class benefits from the promotion of such beliefs in a very obvious way, much as the royalty of the feudal era benefitted from convincing the serfs that God had decided who is most fit to have privilege over others. The Social Darwinist thinking is a modern, secular variation on that type of propaganda.
Expect a part 3 in the future.