[Noob]

This has nothing to do with the left, don't smear us with these silly middle class crusades that pass for politics in the modern age, do you think Kier Hardie would have done this, Uncle Joe Stalin, do you think the struggling masses living one payday to the next give a damn about this? It is just rich people with no problems of their own looking for something to moan about.

The left in the West has disavowed practically all of its values and has come to represent not the interests of the working classes, but increasingly those of the upper-middle class. The left that you pine for is dead. It has been infested with an endless empty abstract egalitarianism and the ideology of human rights best exemplified here.

Since the ancient ideas of 'citizenship' and 'democracy' and actually participating in public life mean nothing any more, there aren't citizens, but only persons born with natural inalienable rights. If human beings have these inalienable rights, these ideologues ask, why can't we extend those same equal rights and personhood to animals? 'It's only fair', they say.

[Decky]

Not dead just resting. We need to find a way of starting a socialist party and not immediately having it packed full of people like Godberk and Pants of Dog and turning into the Labour party. If we can't do that then the working class is fucked (and if we can't keep our parties clean and ideologically pure then we deserve to be fucked imo).

[Thompson_NCL]

Not dead just resting. We need to find a way of starting a socialist party and not immediately having it packed full of people like Godberk and Pants of Dog and turning into the Labour party. If we can't do that then the working class is fucked (and if we can't keep our parties clean and ideologically pure then we deserve to be fucked imo).

Which other PoFo members would meet the criterea? Most of the left-wing posters on PoFo are cut from the same cloth as Goldberk and PoD.

Who are the actual working-class posters, Decky?

[Decky]

Erm... I'm not sure what Ingliz's background was before he retired but if we have him then we might be up to two people. Oh and there is the Clockwork Rat of course, that's three.

[Dagoth Ur]

Yo son, what about me? Also I think klasswar is working class too (I may be wrong on that front).

[Decky]

Good point I had forgot about Klasswar and I wasn't sure about your class but there we go we have confirmation. That's 5. Goon comes from a working class background too but is now a university lecturer and is a dirty Trot to boot.

[Dagoth Ur]

Yeah TIG is too ensconced in his Ivory Academic Tower to understand that the People need Comrade Stalin, in fact we demand it.

[fuser]

Count me in, my average is 3 strikes per year.

[Decky]

Bankers don't count.

Kidding, there we go we have another. It might just be a case of the fake left being "louder" on the forum than the real left. There are plenty of us here.

[fuser]

I am not technically a banker though, I work as an IT officer.

[Decky]

I already said I was kidding Fuser.

[fuser]

My working class credential is not a laughing matter. I am prolier than all of you.

[Decky]

Nonsense, working with your modern computer magic and working indoors out of the rain and the cold, you are living the life of a rich man! It's a hammer and sickle not a mouse and sickle you know!



Here is the tool of a worker, a good honest brick hammer!

[Dagoth Ur]

The cook feeds his comrades and breaks his back to do so, in intense conditions for low pay and zero ability to organize. Clearly I am the arch-prole for my Dickensian work environment.

[fuser]

Your inability to organize is clearly a sign of weakness and sabotage. I smell a counter revolutionary here, clearly my striking average is better than all of you, hence the one true prole is me.

[Dagoth Ur]

Our inability to organize is a direct result of a saturation of young college students in the kitchen labor pool. And then there is the part where they'd just fire us if we demanded anything. Our struggle is underground but determined!

[Decky]

Everyone started off from the point where they would be fired if they demanded anything. Some trades organised and some didn't.

[fuser]

Come to think of it, what the hell Orangutans have to do with any of these things.

[Dagoth Ur]

Orangutans, class struggle, who-is-and-isn't-prole, these are things that just go together.

Everyone started off from the point where they would be fired if they demanded anything. Some trades organised and some didn't.

Prejudice plays a role here. I don't have a "real job" according to a large section of society, even fellow workers. There is a push for organization but it doesn't really have any presence outside the coasts.

[Cartertonian]

I also think there's an opportunity, here, to disambiguate social class and economic class. From my PoV, even die-hard Stalinists like Decky (deliberately?) confuse the two and stoke the jealousies that exist between social classes to further their agenda. In economic class terms, I'm every bit as proletarian as any hammer-wielding tradesman, but in social class terms I'm inescapably middle class. Further, I self-describe as being of the Evolutionary Left rather than the Revolutionary Left and I would far rather work toward a society built on an economic proletarian revolution than a society whose Vanguard were hammer-wielding tradesmen. And, by the way, my first job out of school (aged 16) was as a hammer-wielding tradesman, so I do know whereof I speak.