You can easily imagine some alternate universe where some other race has oppressed what we call white people, but there isn’t even an imaginary universe where labor oppresses capital. That’s what I mean by a mechanical nature, and that’s why I don’t call class identity-based.
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... "The dictatorship of the proletariat" is right there in marxist text as an intermediate step towards socialism. You may not imagine it, but it is literally built into the concept of class warfare.
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There’s never any point where labor oppresses capital because, at any point, any capitalist can instantly stop being a capitalist and, health dependent, start being a laborer.
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If money actually worked the way the on-paper institutions and laws said it did, sure, this would be true My argument is that in the world as we actually live it, this is false, and this falsehood cuts to the core of what was so challenging about Marxist revolutions in real life
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
The USSR and PRC never achieved that classless society because, wouldn't you know it, that "class consciousness" is remarkably persistent no matter what you do
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
The weird thing here is that I think I am a "class reductionist" in that I think race/gender/sexuality/all that good stuff *is class*, they are all "class structures"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
But what YOU call "class" is an extremely weaksauce definition of "class" (which is why the new breed of academics went looking for new words like "power structure" and "marginalization") There is so much more to it than what is written down on pieces of paper
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
This is why I hate the Marxist cultural thing of pitting "idealism" against "materialism" so much It's really just a preference for an institutional, "rationalized" lens (Weber's terminology) for measuring the world, but it's not "material"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
Like come on A briefcase of $100 bills, a title deed to an apartment building, a 51% controlling share in a C-corp All of them are just pieces of paper, ideas in someone's head Snap your fingers and reset the world with no institutional memory, they're all just toilet paper
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
They *seem* more real than other things because they're *written down*, because the system says they're real, but the system is a fucking lie A real radical should know that, and know that lies are always motivated
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There are other sources of power that are just as real that don't leave a paper trail, and that override the official, institutional sources of power surprisingly often
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
If you really think stuff like what family you're from and what "kind of person you are" is mere superstructure and the pieces of paper are the base, you're misleading yourself In a way, you're cheating to make things easier on yourself
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ILoveUTigerLily and
Social change is so much easier when the only wealth that really matters is the kind that's easy to redistribute, the kind you can lay hands on Just move the pieces of paper into different wallets, program a new set of rules into the computer, and we're done
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