For a better critical analysis of human pyramids

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Fauve Noir
For a better critical analysis of human pyramids

Is this... class struggle or just caste dynamics?

Class is an outdated attempt at socio-economic categorization of humans within the industrial society. Marxists, especially the former Marxists, as well as all the Left tendencies inspired by Marxism, have relied on the same-old tripartite categorization of society dating back to Aristotle, now divided into three big classes.

Contemporary sociologists of the (waning) Marxist schools will tend to be using the stats of median income to show how they’re right about it, where indeed the «middle-class» exists and it’s been going down toward poverty levels in the last few decades, where the upper group of ultra-rich just kept getting wealthier and more powerful. All of this is true, yet a so tiny, limited aspect of the mastodon. It shows us where most people are situated in terms of income, yet not saying much about all these people located elsewhere up or down the curve. That these people aren’t actually part of a unified class, of either «middle/proletarian», «poor/lumpen», or «rich». In reality -or I mean closer to what could be the social reality- a median in statistics only best represents where a bell curve is located within a spectrum of linear-organized data.

Having lived through years of being on the workplace, in the streets, outside of academia, will reveal that the «world» is a much more complex and especially fluid, dynamic place; not made of categories and classes, but people. Especially groupings of people, constantly organizing and plotting for power. Either to gain more or maintain their «acquired rights».

This narrow interpretation also serves another purpose than showing the social inequalities capitalism creates. It is useful for hiding or overlooking the privilege-building or consolidation of these same groups of Left-oriented middle-class intelligentsia, or petty bourgeoisie commonly found backing Center-Left parties, NGOs, trade unions or more pervasively running a vast portion of the nonprofit sector, especially the sector more politically vocal about issues of social justice. They are struggling for their own elevation through the social ladder, in conflict with who they perceive – with a level of accuracy – as those limiting their access to higher positions of power.

Same goes for the «rich». As if you’d ask me, for instance, who is the richest person/family on the planet, that’s a question no one can definitely answer. Also an equally complex question : who are the « rich »? Not only wealth is a more complex notion than just net worth, but the super-wealthy do not only deal in monetary values... they’re also using other kinds of more «hard» assets and currencies like resources, precious metals, and now big data. The super-wealthy also tend to be super-connected people. Their wealth would not be very meaningful if this wasn’t a factor of power within social networks.

The question of their might makes it even more complicated when you look at their political schemes and networks. And even among this super-rich crowd, there are factions, milieus, gangs playing Monopoly with the world’s con-o-mies. Ever since Trump went into politics, for instance, this became clear there wasn’t only one power gang in the US, that the most repulsive of these, the White supremacist Christian ultra-conservatives, was engaged in an unprecedented upward battle against the neoliberal establishment, or at least dominant gang. This is even true in a totalitarian rule like China, who has different factions fighting within the Party, down to occasional vendettas, in order to consolidate power. Everywhere across capitalist societies there are smaller rich of the upper middle-class, all the way up to the mega-billionaires, with differing stakes in the industry, or gradients of political entry – and positions, from the progressive Left the Rothschild family and Soros to the ultra-conservative Far Right like Murdoch and the Koch. Hence categorizing the « rich » is always more complicated than it seems.

But to me, the ultra-rich aren’t as important as they used to be as social antagonists. I know they are doing terrible things, engaged in running awful schemes that keep billions of people into misery. And they are, in all appearance, holding the reins over governments, the media, NGOs you may work for, and most businesses you might work for.

However you might notice that your local progressive resources center for the homeless is managed by rather middle-class people. This is adequate, as here we are dealing with a charity service, notoriously structured by this same-old Christian binary relationship between haves mores and lesses, or between the higher-educated and the low-educated. The moment you’ll see a homeless resource center run by the homeless, well, that’ll no longer be charity, but rather autonomy. Yet social relations keep being structured into hierarchies between castes of differing levels of privileges.

Society, being in itself a wide-open pyramid scheme, is thus filled with a myriad of people involved in more or less filthy games that deprive others from having the same quality of life they enjoy. When it’s not about White nuclear families raveling in their comfy private bubbles on the countryside it’ll be urban hipsters keeping nice apartments for their artsy gangs of friends. But as usual, there’s a share of good economic motives behind all this privilege-building. In big cities targeted by intense gentrification, renters are better be organizing with friends, or building networks of friends, in order to share the rents between people they know so the rents remain as low as possible. That also gives the more radical-minded the possibility for conducting rent strikes on more large scales or do other kinds of anti-eviction or anti-hike campaigns that got more effects than just isolated renters filing formal complaints. Worker coops are a way for them to avoid « falling » in the streets by having decent self-managed jobs that may also contributed to accumulating social capital. As usual, collective organizing is a powerful flagship for gaining more power.

But then again, when more power is gained, what is done with it? When peer groups create their housing and workers’ coops, or even collectively-run squats wherever they still exist, what is the place left in their world, at the end of the day, to all the lesser-empowered outsiders? To those often ending up being -yet again- at the receiving ends of privilege-building social machinations. Being « socially-awkward », being misfits makes these seemingly more « horizontal », « democratic », collectivist schemes as yet again exclusive to those disabled, handicapped, aged, gendered or just not enough socially-skilled for inclusion. Because, like in the rest of society, these projects are produced through in/out-crowd dynamics, generating social exclusion as byproduct. One way or another, it goes down to be facing locked doors, walls, fences, more sleeping on the sidewalks or at best navigating through precarious rents with deranged roommates… so therefore the social hierarchy of prisons is being maintained. Of course this has to do with landlords and « bosses » owning your life by the balls (e.g. a class relationship), but how do people also not reinforce this through caste dynamics?

Even when these schemes are considered to be helpful or charitable, the separation they induce (this is one of the places where these late Marxists known as the Situationists got it right) is still, by essence, and functionally, alienating. However there is little doubt of the good that some of these people do, despite the alienating structures they’re working in.

So how does a caste system works?

Essentially, with the reproduction of identitarian cults, clans or families, and more importantly their related cultures, that allows them to relate to each other. Culture -including cultural representations- is the tie that binds them; as cultures are being used as a means to reinforce the caste’s status quo, redefine its morals, and set the boundaries for inclusion/exclusion as well as serving other control imperatives. These aren’t patterns we observe through big social categories such as classes, that only defined by their mutual economic productive activity. The caste reproduces its own systems of representations and relations, beyond its mere socio-economic activity. The former actuates the other, and provides a kind of appeal, by hype, notoriety, prestige, edge, luxury or any other sort of added social value to it. A sense of privilege, without really providing with meaning.

I’ll be elaborating more on this in an upcoming text on countercultures and normalization, but in the Western rich urban hellholes we could have witnessed over the past years a movement from parts of the punk subcultures toward hipster, more streamlined upper castes of artsy citizenry. Mainstream fashion of the trendy urban lifestyles was reinvigorated by what used to be signifiers of marginal milieus... tattoos, piercings, punky black clothing and asymetric hairstyles, even dog-herding (that for some has been replaced with having children), are all now predictable, unsurprising elements of the urban environment, found in just about any of the world’s metropolis, even outside the Western world.

This has been a way to be part of the «in crowd», to be accepted not not only into squats, but private rented spaces, get decent jobs at trendy hot spots, and more importantly, get relationships aplenty. That’ll be controversial to say about the same of the normalization of the «LGBTQ+» as social identities, that have played the same socio-economic roles and with the same ends, even tho by themselves they represent a fourre-tout of different minority gender identities and sexual preferences.

The idea is not to be criticizing any of these subcultures or their values, or even to be blaming urban trends for normalizing them, but to look into how caste dynamics are functioning, thanks in great parts to the use of cultural signifiers and their related politics. Also to realize how the individual, or the person as themself, is being kept silent and invisible by these caste politics, despite all the social media celebs, who’re really not standing for -and by- themselves but literally posing on a stage through a set of prefab representations. How if you aren’t identifying as one of the recognized identities, just choosing to identify as a «yourself», or a «person»; this becomes a void for the social management of privilege and oppression. There are no non-gender pronouns for persons, only for objects.

This is -in my view- the deepest cause behind the epidemic of mass-killings we especially got in the US. While some of these are mostly based on demented ideologies of hate against more or less specific minority groups, many of the mass-killings are often committed by disenfranchised, misfit, socially-isolated males who for a reason or another, lacking a better analysis of what’s happening to them in this world, decide to stick it up to those they see as their most direct oppressors. Namely, the social castes in their environments. And in a way, it is true that crowd/mob dynamics tend to make human groupings in general to become more oppressive while losing self-awareness as their numbers increase in a given context.

If the Left would be truly understanding the dynamics of social exclusion, oppression and privilege, how do they work, perhaps they could be helping to some level against such sprees of murderous violence that only now benefits more despotic police controls of the public place. But the Left has been stucked, as some anarchists know- in this endless spiral of outdated analysis of social and political dynamics, centered on our well-known cartoonish representations produced by Marxists. Castes are defined by a lot more than just the productive activity of their members, and equally the socio-cultural reproduction that defines them goes beyond their mere socio-economic productive roles, when they got one in common, even if we consider society as « meta-factory ».

But the issue of how Leftists could make it better, with a better analysis is beyond me. More so, it ain’t really my own interest. And as usual they aren’t to be expected to listen to critics anyways! Still, I find it harder to not be caring about the mass-shootings, and in fact the « not in my lawn » approach to social problems might not so easily apply here, as anyone could potentially be affected by these sudden bursts of extreme interpersonal violence.

The purpose of such a perspective on social relations around us is to not be fooled by deluded beliefs in the radicality of our « projects » or initiatives, and to look at those with a more realistic lens that shows their shortcomings and weaknesses, standing in the way of the total anarchy or the social revolution you might be after. As to be reproducing caste relations can intrinsically undermine any initiative aimed at equity or free of association.

As I said too often, anarchists and nihilists have a specific opportunity -often wasted- of being able to create a social tabula rasa, which negates both the dynamics of privilege-building by putting the deeper issues of property and capital-building into question, while also, through patterns of free-based relations, to be making the issue of «social progress», pushed for decades by the Left, to become irrelevant.

Like there’s no need for work within the industry if we choose to liberate goods instead and creating a commons around everything, where everyone can enjoy shit without the trappings and hindrances of both bureaucracy and property, from being on welfare to «buying land», we’re still being submitted and deprived from an immediate relationship with the natural world. There’s no need for affordable housing if you find a way to occupy spaces for living, and especially shared living. There’s no need for better working conditions if you abolished the need for money -in the first place- in order to have good living conditions, as especially to be able... to just make friends, lovers, accomplices or just have a good conversation with some other human, regardless where they’re from. There’s no need for these demoralizing homeless shelters if you got organized squats where everyone has at least their shot at a living-together, and from which other occupation projects may arise.

The power of negation, is one not being asserted by the liberal agency. Neither the one of supposed « radicals ». Or this false negation will be held contained within their own communal bubbles, yet never outwardly-asserted. And in fact, the Marxists have an historical tendency at postponing negation, as revolution is an evolutionary process where, first, we must build the conditions for the proles to be able to negate the State and capital... as if they had found the secret to immortality!

Therefore, like with the rest of the liberal bourgeoisie, breaking the law, seeking pleasures against the dominant morals, will be reserved for the private space, of the caste, the communal in-crowd, or the family, or on a private island. And the more harmful immoralisms (such as rape, abuse and other violences) might also break loose due to the safety bubble promised by privatized spaces, in milieus where they hardly would be allowed to happen in broad daylight.

But are these really negation, or just reconstruction of same-old patterns of appropriation and exploitation, inherited from the dominant morals? A transgression ain’t necessarily negation of an order, but rather its protracted contradiction, as rules are meant to be broken. The «anti-» principle is not an «a-» principle; it is an against not a without. Satan exists because of God. So the bank robber or cryptominer is still into making big money, only innovating in their fulfillment of the well-known capitalist imperative (unless of course they throw the money in the streets). I ain’t saying it is wrong... only that it is not negation of an order and its values, where the person takes the liberty to make their own of the latter, asserts power over their own world, making themself emperor and god over it.

Absolute negation of all orders -the questioning of everything- is what is necessary to revert the power of the totality over ourselves. Therefore we cannot truly avoid or abolish these caste relations that separate us both from each other and from ourselves -as well as the world around us- without putting their imperatives, values under the crushing mill of the cold, concrete logic of total negation.

Property is not only theft. Fundamentally "property" is just not something that exists. Your comfort zone known as your household, or friend’s commune, or mansion on top of the hill... are only a privatized space made-up by capitalism’s territorializations and reinforced by walls, doors and locks. It is only «real» as far as it is a relational construct, enforced by the threat of judicial or interpersonal violence. You cannot pretend anarchism, even less «communism» while at the same time enjoying these levels of privilege provided to you by an invisible, unavowed caste system. Well you can... of course! But that is more of the same-old Victorian hypocrisy, reinforced by equally Victorian-era ideologies pretending to oppose the dominant system. You may choose to be a conservative so to be less an hypocrite -indeed- yet the status quo of the caste system will be maintained, only more bare. My postulate, that is not so important to consider, is that 19th century classical liberalism has kept Western civilization from being a full-fledged official caste system, or at least this was delayed by a century of class-defined struggles.

Regardless. The wild, the feral, the natural domain does not know these territorializations. Or neither cares about if they know. The wild one only cares about their own sustenance, protection, pleasure and well-being. Anything else, any attempt at accommodating with any level or sphere within the caste system, means becoming more civilized, or over-civilized, as these are the mostly-intangible yet highly-recognizable walls of civilization, defined by culture above politics and economics. A vagabond can keep freeloading luxury hotels or chic cafés, in order to partly avoid the misery related to homelessness, or even hang out at student parties or exec clubs, but what will chase him off from these spheres will not be their bank account, official status or even their political allegiances; it will be their external appearance, their tenure, their speech and etiquette.. or lack thereof. As the cultural standards are what makes these social categories to be castes. Not classes. Because, to repeat, castes are culturally-defined -more than socio-economically defined- groupings.

So I am not here posturing for an anticiv purity by rejecting caste relations; but this could be useful as an ideal for a direction. Or giving rationale and analysis to a life where the radical critical thought makes you a social misfit, anyways. It can be interesting to be social hacking across the cultural layers of this garbage every caste uses to reinforce themselves, and many of us do achieve this, to different levels of effectiveness. But then again, will be driven by a will that is your own, or only reflect the desires mass-produced for the masses to follow? As for every caste there are different means and modes to attain what everyone in this society is after.

Doesn’t the wild one only contents in seeking power over their own existence? Why, otherwise, would they be seeking any larger power, if not for chasing the aims defined by the dominant power dynamics? For having the privileges they envy so much from any of the castes above them, or for « ruling in Hell, instead of serving in Paradise »?

Perhaps because such dynamics as the terrorism of the judicial system are hindering on this self-power. That the goal would not be to become yet another layer of judicial system, like the call-out culture appears to be doing.

There lies the importance of the initial thesis of this tension. That the Marxist and Marxist-leaning tendencies of the Left have been from the start adopting the class struggle analysis in a way as to brute-force the emancipation of people only through their own hierarchical systems. This is why they’ll always be confined, mentally-restrained, to the notion that any self-empowerment, self-defense, and liberation can only be attained through mass social avenues and means; as these reflect, more deeply, the need for empowerment of a more or less specific caste of «intelligent» educated middle-class people, over what they’ll always perceive as a mass of people who are in the dark, who need saviors or organizers or hot-blooded, loud-talking revolutionary leaders to pull them out of their politically-induced trance.

Not to say this was the case of enlightened, fearless rebels like Fred Hampton, Geronimo, Novatore or Harriet Tubman. These were in my opinion more like the feral ones that undermined the consolidated powers of their times, the society subjected to a predominant caste. Needless to say… you’ll also notice they were also not our well-known arrogant, power-hungry White college kids from the suburban middle-classes.

So the Marxists need this vague, Cartesian model for a social category -the class- that is inherently defined by a position within the production chain of Industrial Society. As in their view, one cannot be else than a Worker, or a Prole (and perhaps including the lumpen prole) in order to take part in this class struggle toward the liberation of all the Workers. But are these leaders, or organizers, ever been really the Workers they claim to be leading to liberation? Aren’t they instead positing for their own empowerment over the Workers, by the use of these Workers workforce to push for a change of power dynamics, where this intelligentsia caste attain a higher privileged status within the processes of production? In the neoliberal society the best they’ll do is to have well-paid white collar positions, perhaps even an entry into state politics within a minority party. Which doesn’t discount for the sleazy corruption of the lawyers and real-estate profiteers taking higher positions of power within the dominant parties. But, restating the obvious that I said earlier, they’re all chasing the same sausage, only through slightly different means and modes. And think about... if they’d, once again, come to terms with the whole capitalist state like the Soviets did, they’d have the highest positions in society!

So you are anticapitalist? Great. But "anticapitalist", just like "antifa", is a negative position, which doesn’t say much as the kind of world you want in the place of the existent order. What does it means to you in daily life, beyond a few protests and graffiti?

You are maybe communist? Super. And given it is still subversive thing in many parts of the Western world, this gives you a little of rebellious edge. But then again, whose communism? If you are only after the Commune then which commune are we talking about? The Communal form of property Marx himself told us about, that the Ancient Greeks invented, those brutally partiarchic, slave-owning landlords, who weren’t that different, actually from the Founding Fathers? The Commune of Friends, where all you need is to become a "Friend" in order to be included and treated as equal? So what is it you call a Friend, then?

My intent here is not to drag everyone in the mud of their own grandiose projects or claims (no matter how I’d love to!) but to be looking into what people are really after, and for whose specific interest. As, like a Stirner would say, as far as the Commune is not my own, or as long it is not knocking at my door for any friendly motives, it is strange to myself; it means nothing to me, as it is only to the benefit of a specific group of others.

Not only it is not so much benefiting to me, but a very vague mass of «proles», comrades or Friends that I may or may not be part of, depending on the analysis of the leading core group in charge of defining the social categories and their narratives (also known as the "ID politicians"). And only my being included as a proletarian comrade I may benefit from the leftovers of this nomenklatura. I do eat the leftovers of proles on a regular basis, as part of my means of survival and for secondary ecological aims, but it is never as retribution for serving under the wing of a social category.

The world is driven not by money, but by narratives and their representations. There were times where men couldn’t live without God. Or without a hunt. Or without fire. Equally, a « world run by money » is a capitalist, materialist narrative of the late industrial age. Such narrative, just like any other, becomes existent due to its supportive system of power relations. Yet it won’t necessarily be meaningful… most often it won’t. If you let yourself be defined and driven by these, written and drawn by a group of others, you let yourself, again and again, be fooled and controlled by the group(s) enforcing it, then it will become an unavoidable fact of existence. Hence this group de facto becomes a caste above you... the hierarchs owning all the secrets of your forever-delayed liberation. Accepting them to define me is accepting the hinges of their control over me.

And let’s make it clear to some of my potential detractors, that the Marxist Left here was used only as example among many other iterations. The Far Right or Alt Right, as we could witness over the past few years, tends to be more successful these days at their games of gaining domination over yet another mass of (much) less educated/intelligent peoples for their own caste benefit. They are, after all, connected to specific groups -the old White supremacist aspect of the wealthy establishment- fighting to regain the power they apparently lost through the Post-War, and especially post-Civil Rights Era neoliberal order. Instead of the class, they’ll be using the more retrograde social categories of race and/or national identity. These were, after all, the first identity politics of the Modern world, in the republican, industrial, post-religious world where scientism and Nation-States purportedly replaced the old religious ideologies. The retrograde Alt Right, more classic liberal than actually conservative (and much less « libertarian »), equally got their own priests and popes of social justice, pandering on inherently shallow, brutish definitions of the «human» as if due to being older, or before, they were any more accurate or righteous than the recent «corruption» of the LGBTQ+, the Women and the non-White social identities, undermining their former, ages-old domi-nation over bodies. Are these new categories produced by the new Left and reproduced by the social media empires – led by retrograde White men, by the way - any more authentic or accurate? I doubt that.

The only social identity that is accurate, is yours, or mine. The question that you may represent, not the prêt-à-porter answer. That is the only one, removed from even the official citizen and corporate definition enforced by the state from shortly after your birth as physical living being- that can define you.

Who are you? Or what are you?

Am I, the author, in a position to know better than you? I only know, for sure, that you may not be what you pretend, but something more, or less, or else. You may even possibly exist!

- Fauvenoir

anon (not verified)
on a new brand...

That "slashed 0" sign might have been the best brand ever invented to replaced the over-used @.

anon (not verified)
The slashed 0 was not

The slashed 0 was not invented to replace the @. I’m saddened you think this to be true.

lumpy (not verified)
oh fauve ... there's just not

oh fauve ... there's just not nearly enough housing at a decent price, full stop.

they've deliberately replaced real economic growth with inflated property values for decades in "canada". it's end-stage boomer neoliberalism, no sense blaming the renters who happened to grab something before you, they're just dangling from the cliff by their fingertips, same as you would.

anon (not verified)
Oh Fauve! swoons

Oh Fauve!

swoons

anon (not verified)
Is this WET panty tyme yet?

Is this WET panty tyme yet?

Wayne Price (not verified)
Class is not the issue

The problem with the author's dismissal of class, a political-economic category, is that they treat class as an alternative to other possible social-cultural-economic categories. But the key issue is not "class" as a category but "exploitation." Some people produce the wealth and value of society and some others get to take that wealth, to absorb the lion's share of society's wealth, and to decide how that wealth will be treated (including re-invested). Class is a way to divide society up according to people's roles in this dynamic of production, distribution, and reinvestment.

anon (not verified)
One of the great strengths of

One of the great strengths of Marxist/left thought that anarchists could really learn a thing or two from is that - in theory at least - it starts from a broad as possible analysis of the world as it exists, proceeding from there to understand how to change it for the better. Anarchisms most often are based on positing ideals and analyzing the world from that standpoint. I’m not sure whether any anarchism could survive a total decentering of ideals, but ideals are unstable, especially when they are formed and disseminated mainly within a cultural fringe. Thus the scores of often contradictory flavors of anarchism. “The world is driven by narratives” but narratives are composed and institutionalized within materially existent social history. Idealism wants to ignore that.

Immediately the author opens their critique of the left with the most simplistic possible straw man: the concept of class is a tool of classification, it is not assumed to refer to really existing, self-conscious structures like the “unified proletariat” which will only come to exist as part of the process of building communism. This is Marx 101, if you want to engage with it, try to know what you’re talking about, please! After that we muddle through to what- another vague prescription for utopian drop-outism and intersectionality. Well, fine.

Per the totw I do wonder what a more serious anarchist engagement with the analytical traditions of the capital-L Left* would look like or what fruit it could bear. I read a comment here a long time ago that said something like “a lot of anarchists seem to enjoy reading things they already agree with” and I often still think of that, especially when encountering such mis-aimed non-critiques here.

* not to say progressives, Anarcho-liberals, tankies, etc, who are not just not representative of the left, but are all too often lumped together and fixated on, with all the glibness of a Fox News host who casually asserts that “Nancy pelosi is the leader of antifa” or something

anon (not verified)
The tripartite class system

The tripartite class system is what is oversimplistic, and you can't deny it is a funfamental part of classical Marxist analysis... that there is an upper class of Owners and Bosses that are running the economy. You're misattributing the statement about class.

lumpy (not verified)
kind of like how you can't

kind of like how you can't deny that no serious person today uses "classic marxist analysis" to talk about the present or the future?

well... you could deny it but that would make you a fool or a troll ... or a foolish troll

Karl (not verified)
I am a sex worker that

I am a sex worker that performs weekly humiliation on lumpy. Part of that involves making him reply to every comment on anews that mentions Marxism or Marxist-related ANALysis.

Sometimes I just shit on his bare chest.

I'm very glad to be here.

lumpy (not verified)
then where's your sense of

then where's your sense of professional discretion "karl"?

Karl (not verified)
You know that costs extra

You know that costs extra

anon (not verified)
Wtf where've u been, Lumps?

Wtf where've u been, Lumps? Shouting against 'the rich" has been in every Leftie and even some anarcho demo of the past 30 years or so. Even in academic articles, who does NOT talk of rich/middle-class/poor?

I have no evidence that the narrative has went beyond the Bell Curve crap.

lumpy (not verified)
you have no evidence cuz you

you have no evidence cuz you're not looking.

media sound bites and narratives aren't the actual thing.
did you want to name a contemporary marxist economist? who you've bothered to read or listen to?

go ahead ... i'll wait.

anon (not verified)
Ok, a simple indicator is the

Ok, a simple indicator is the property and rent prices that keep going up. If this isn't driven by a quest of some lesser rich people to get more rich and powerful, then what else?

The drive for power is all over the place, likely including your own circle(s). That's why there are no longer revolutions like those that brought down the monarchic systems, coz theoretically everyone can get in the game. And many are. In herds.

anon (not verified)
Peek capitalism

Yeah the old class syztem has gone in affluent Western nations, not such a distinct line between master and slave. Now the neo-liberal Randian pursuit of entrepreneurial individualism has a huge demographic investing and becoming small business owners themselves, and becoming BOTH master and slave within the one, thus freeing the State from organising and controlling them. They have become stressed self perpetuating capitalists. Greed and overworked despair combine and mutate into the modern Westerner.

lumpy (not verified)
reading comprehension fail...

reading comprehension fail... i said name a person besides your strawman. spoiler: you can't.

love how you tried to change the subject to some weird, generalized appeal to greed or power tho?

anyway, you're so far behind, you think you're first. have fun! i sure did.

Fauvenoir (not verified)
Hey, it's a me, Fauv! So my direct answer is...

....you have no evidence cuz you're not looking, Lumps.

Class-based narratives are ubiquitous in the dominant discourses, so much that even the Right is using it at times. At least Right libertarians are often talking about the Middle-class and the Ultra-Rich. And just which Leftist text, statement or protest included an analysis rather talking about caste dynamics, or at best herd power dynamics? None. As the antagonist is always, anyways, some externalized "rich" people; the Bosses, the corporate owners, the Wall Street Banksters, the Fat Cats, the 1%, etc. This stuff was all over Occupy for instance, but neither started or stopped there. So I suppose you can't dodge these references everyone knows by now. No, don't try it.

And now we got an internet trend of billionaires being shamed for their few-minutes private jet trips and how they contribute to Climate Change. This I find inteteresting. If we assume that Climate Change is the new war horse of the Left, then it is *implicitly congruent* to the same old pattern of imputability, right? So here, again, the Masses of brave, honest Workers are being given a moral waiver from guilt (where they are partly responsible by collectively contributing to an ecocidal mass economy, mainly by using cars, going to barber shops, and consume-trashing in so many other ways), redirecting all on the big rich guys of this world.

So thanks to keep my GOLD MIND busy with those troll attempts ao it makes some stimulation while on the road! Cya there, Prole?

Now where's the evidence that I FIRST asked for? Won't be holding my breath.

lumpy (not verified)
wow ... we're really

wow ... we're really struggling here

I said NAME SOMEBODY who actually thinks that "classic marxist analysis" (aka vulgar marxism) is how to understand the modern world or predict the future. you can't because they don't exist, nobody seriously thinks that. it's a strawmarx. you're strawmarxing.

Karl (not verified)
I just had a huge plate of

I just had a huge plate of vindaloo. Get your sweet ass over here. Daddy needs to drop a deuce.

Fauveoir (not verified)
So Lumpy, you wanted "NAMES"...

Seems like you're the one struggling trying to take me down with flaws that are just the normal, controlled water leakage out of dam... Class-based analysis of social dynamics is so ubiquitous among the Left especially that it doesn't even deserves authoritative sources.

But I'll give you better than just names of two unvoidable Leftist authors:

https://jacobin.com/2021/06/noam-chomsky-class-war-universal-health-care...

This rather awful text where he fully backs authoritarian Covid policies, along with that puzzling statement on the Pfizer vaccine being actually the creation of German Turkish scientists: https://chomsky.info/20201230/

Chumpsky btw just ain't not-anarchist. He's also an authoritarian, determist, Neonazi-supporting piece of shit who afaik also collaborated with the same imperialist military-industrial complex he's denouncing.

Then that other (much better) Left celeb:

https://tsd.naomiklein.org/articles/2001/05/us-poverty-comes-out-closet....

https://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein

Here I can agree with some of what Klein says, but in relation to the latter text she should have been reading some Jacques Camatte as Milton Friedman ain't the only critic of traditional Marxist class analysis, just like the Chicago School's neolib politics aren't the only force that made class consciousness become irrelevant.

Also adding to that the "The Continuous Appeal of Nationalism" that I dunno if Klein has read. .

SweatBot (not verified)
One Eternity Later...

One Eternity Later...

"He's also an authoritarian, determist, Neonazi-supporting piece of shit"

Provided EVIDENCE of this assertion or no dumpster poutine for you!

anon (not verified)
We don't have to go through

We don't have to go through this every year, right?

I heard about a Duckduckgo, didja? You can put search terms like those in your quote, and it gives youna bunch of things to read. Many good stuff!

SweatBot (not verified)
Fun! Let me try.

Fun! Let me try.

Canadian anarcho-tourists btw just ain't not-anarchist. They're also authoritarians, determist, Neonazi-supporting pieces of shit who afaik also collaborate with the same imperialist military-industrial complex they're denouncing.

How's that rank on the Fauvenoir Assertion Scale?

anon (not verified)
feelin' lonely perhaps?

So I ran a web search... and the only evidence I found of Fauvenoir being the assertion in your comment is the assertion in your comment.

anon (not verified)
I refuse to believe your

I refuse to believe your reading comprehension is this poor. Try again, “anon” ;-)

anonnonanonanon... (not verified)
yes, thank you

I was sure you'd finally come to terms with the fact of my rich reading comprehension skills!

anon (not verified)
I can totally deny it because

I can totally deny it because this is another very basic thing you’ve got totally wrong

anon (not verified)
You're right!

Ok I messed up my argument on "other thing". And maybe that second other thing too. And the surely the third one as it's poorly thought and problematic.

anon (not verified)
"mis-aimed non-critiques here"

oooor.... mis-reading?

anon (not verified)
I only read about half of this.

Overall, a lot of good points: social stratification has more to do with it than social class...however, this "caste" you describe isn't an improvement on some sort of *yawn* class analysis. Maybe neo-liberalism is a caste/class/clique society. I think your use of other vague identifiers ("marxist","white") is really what sucks the wind out of what you are talking about...it's better not to sound like a bureaucrat just because they don't make a whole lot of sense.

I like my class analysis where there is only really the upper class, most because i find if someone comes from a similar income level family background, does not mean we will have common interests: everything now adays is based on some very perfectionist, socially skilled, and clean type of worldview that's not terribly different from the old-world boog.

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