I grew up in a liberal wannabe leftist bubble in Western Massachusetts. Middle class women wore no makeup makeup and were virtuous in jeans and polar fleece. People went hiking. People recycled and didn’t eat meat. I had to read a People’s History of the United States at my hippie dippie unschooling program, but I remember mostly a sense that if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t buy clothes or makeup or shave my legs, if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t consume, if I wanted to be virtuous I shouldn’t be like the bad (read: poor) girls who highlighted their hair, and wore orange foundation and ice blue eyeshadow. The revolution would not be televised because good earth loving bourgeois types don’t own televisions, and it wouldn’t be a revolution per say, because one had to be committed to nonviolence. To me this co-opting of revolution by smug men who eat organic and wear sweaters is the most insidious anti-communist tactic of all, when they take the most liberal words of the most liberal of “radical leftist” thinkers, and create the perception that that is what leftist, what anti-capitalism looks like, while holding themselves above us, we unvirtuous, we consumerist, we high fructose corn syrup swilling proles, they are the most effective anti-communist propaganda possible. They tell us their for us unattainable and unappealing to all but acetic bourgeois method of revolution, while capitalism offers us what only communism can deliver, pleasure, material plenty, comfort, if only we devote ourselves to it.
It is the most effective anti-revolutionary scam imaginable, a keep out sign on theory and history that belongs to us, those with too big hair and too much makeup, we eaters of processed foods, we consumers of “environmentally unsound” beauty products. How intellectually starved and morally bankrupt must one be to fail to see the contradiction, how can a man in his polar fleece vest, with his activist tourism vacations and his free range children be, to fail to see that the legacy of Haymarket belongs to us and not him. How can he fail to see that his attempt to lead and teach the “underprivileged” is a bourgeois imposition, that his consumer activism, and children’s biodegradable wooden toys are part of the problem, and that the girl in hoop earrings with bright highlights is the solution?
I’d rephrase to hipster shit, personally, but sure. Still, there is a middle ground to find.
The key thing maybe is to chuck the all or nothing thinking. I am not either consumerist or idealist, I am a person with basic needs to meet that include some comfort, including the comfort of knowing I have earned some of it myself.
You have to have some experience of plenty and some experience of poverty to appreciate having enough, and then you have to not be afraid of losing everything – which particular fear is at the core of the popular experience of capitalism.
Enough is not a sexy ideal, sufficiency is a hard sell. And seeing your neighbor’s safety as your own requires a communal culture. The real failing of massive efforts at communism is scale, that caring is hard to build into a bureaucracy, hard to rely on in any group larger than 1,000 people. And so we form cliques, self-stereotyped groups of imagined greater virtue.
But it’s not us or them. We are people with basic needs that include comfort. Ease. Acheivement. Earned success. Safety.
I’ve experienced both, the bougie ass fleece jacket folks are still smug privileged fucks
I think you misread me. I intended to say that the “bougie ass fleece jacket folks” and all such groups were the ones with the all or nothing attitude.
Ah
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 