Y’ know how the point in Oliver Twist is that working class people are just as good as posh ones (sorta) but in order to make Oliver sympathetic Dickens gave him a posh background and most importantly gave him a posh accent and wrote his speech in a posh dialect?
It’s interesting to me how working class people are only sympathetic, are only relatable, are only given cultural space when they can speak bourgeoisie.
These power relations within the working class weaken us in the power struggle between the classes.
Selma James in Sex, Race and Class.
THIS THIS THIS
This is what I’ve been trying to say forever. This is why I see anti-racist struggle as to my own personal benefit and why I see being corrected when I’m upholding white supremacy not as an insult to my personal worth but as helpful advice akin to
“Don’t put that in the oven, it’d set the house on fire”
Just sayin’ also glam in the US was kicked off by the very working class bridge and tunnel New York Dolls.
Glam metal is working class as fuck.
Class is a material difference based on a social relation, and to abolish the social relation one must abolish the material difference.
All other axes of oppression are social relations based on (often vague and always arbitrary) material differences. One can leave the material difference alone when abolishing these (e.g. you don’t need to abolish people having different skin tones to abolish to social relation of race)
Which I think is why you can have like men who are genuinely committed to anti-sexism and can be trusted, but no bourgeois is a true comrade. This is also why international working class sympathy and solidarity is crucial (with the most privileged members of the working class needing to be the ones who aren’t shitty before they can expect help from the rest of us)
Why are you even here? Go abolish yourself or something.
Nah, you’re not gonna be a boss, darlin’. You’re stuck as a member of the proletarian masses just like the rest of us, quit thinkin’ your better just because you think you’re gonna be some kind of entrepreneur. You’re not.
It’s all of us or almost none of us, and you’re almost certainly not one of the almost none. Organize and get with the program or you’re going to be seriously disappointed.
Cause like public school’s are terrible here and give crappy education intended to teach you how to be a non-self starting drone, the buildings are unhealthy, their social studies programs are bourgeois propaganda, and start too early in the day and damage their tiny brains.
And private schools are unaffordable to me, put them in with the bourgeois, prepares them for a life as a member of the bourgeois or the moyenne-bourgeois and teaches them at best bourgeois pseudo-leftist and at worst essentially aristocratic ideas.
And homeschooling is often… well it leaves them undersocialized, poorly prepared to participate in society and yeah.
I want there to be like a non-hippie-dippy collectively run free school that teaches children to take initiative, and think independently and is steeped in working class, mutual aid praxis, but also teaches them the skills to be “respectable” and navigate bourgeois society when needed. One of the classes I think would be super useful is code switching.
It’s interesting how the fact that people often mistake working class girl’s class membership identity signifiers as signifiers of sexual availability and promiscuity. When in fact they have very little to do with sexual signifying, like the working class girls’ tight clothes and heavy makeup were to indicate which group of girls (and thereby which class) they belonged to, and it had very little to do with performing desirability and availability to boys. In fact the working class girls were often less interested in heterosexual relationships and more likely to consider boys more trouble than they were worth.
I think a lot of these dudes who keep putting me on their porn blogs are seeing the stereotype of working class appearing women as hypersexual, and also not understanding the class identity part. I mean also who does sex work? Prole women.
IDK
May serve the function of keeping working class folks divided and punching down.
Like “Ohohohoh, working class men are such misogynist brutes, not like us good sensitive bourgeois men” is a great way to make working class men hostile to women’s issues because they associate their discussion with class injury and also by acknowledging a bunch of forms of oppression but not acknowledging class they make it easy to use the ol’ “You’re dealing with reverse sexism/reverse racism/heterophobia/cisphobia/etc and that’s why your life is crappy and the people calling you out on being oppressive are actually oppressing you” line to misdirect class related anger
And the especially fucked up thing is from a praxis related viewpoint working class men are much more likely to share childcare and domestic chores… and in my experience treat women as much more equal than bougie dudes do
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 