The Panthers did free before school breakfast and after school babysitting and all sorts of actual community building like that. The PSL does protests and craft events and that’s it. I guess providing consistent services is an order of magnitude more difficult than organizing marches but it just doesn’t seem like the marches are getting us anywhere.
Pretty sure because the government has made it illegal or really expensive to do those things. You will go to jail if you try and feed the hungry without the right permits. Not to ensure that all involves parties are safe or being safe, but because the State has decided only it can decide who can feed the hungry.
But then what is the plan just do protests and book clubs until we magically build a dual power structure?
i guess it’s catch charges until nobody hires you anymore.
food not bombs exists. sure an ML version of that would be cool and i’d be down to help it monetarily but i can’t catch anymore charges
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How are you going to party build without mass organizing? How are you going to develop working class revolutionaries without engaging with the working class? Virtually all of the PSLniks in my rust belt city are middle class white men with advanced degrees and jobs very few understand or relate to. The same goes for the trotskyite organizations and most of the whiter anarchist crews.
The “middle class” is not a class in the Marxist conception, those people are as working class as anyone else because they have the same relationship to the means of production. You can say that these parties have failed to gain wider appeal without resorting to this liberal conception of class as a set of social signifiers.
It’s farcical to imagine a tony professor and a warehouse worker hold the same relationship to capital and society. If the entire powerbase of the capitalist class in human terms were just the 200,000 car dealership owners, 15,000 bank owners, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, they would be eaten overnight. There must be a broader base of support built through material conceptions and reinforced through superstructural elements or “social signifiers”.
These two groups do not “have the same relationship to the means of production.” one section is exploited in the main, the other is mixed and facilitates greater exploitation of others in exchange for security, comfort, and social prestige.
Where exactly is the cut off line for ‘middle class’ then?
White collar work is pretty thoroughly proletarianized.
I’m not here to point out a specific point of delineation; a mound of sand is not a few grains of sand even if the point where it becomes a mound is undefined. The important thing is to work to understand the structural forces on different segments of society. If the proletariat is just the proletariat, where do reactionaries arise? Where does the tendency to social chauvinism?
You correctly point out that white-collar workers are under a greater or lesser degree of exploitation at different times. Now as the empire weakens, they are going to be squeezed more. There interests vacillate but you can’t see and act on that by sticking your head in the sand and declaring all workers are equivalent.
I have yet to see a revolutionary organization in my city that is not terminally white and from a substantially different labor background than the people in my city. That gap does not exist for no reason! As marxists, we must examine the problem and work to solve it. We must build a movement of the broad masses and not just the intelligentsia.
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What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.
Here’s a few examples.
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:
Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:
You start with a single grain of sand and then you get a beach.
Same thing applies to childcare. There are a lot of rules and regs that make it very expensive to establish and run a child care operation. Idk if the penalties for doing it “wrong” are civil or criminal, probably varies by jurisdication.
My mom is a preschool teacher, she’s done everything from an aide to even owning a daycare for a few years before giving up due to the insane laws, especially the ones passed in the wake of the Satanic Panic.
It is a very hard industry to be in because of how hard it is to take care of other people’s kids and that you can easily be persecuted for the lightest mistakes and the business you work for shuttered.
Now, leftist could get away with in home daycare. Essentially the parent waives a lot of protections because the kids are being babysat by a “friend” but it gets more and more grey the more kids are involvedm