As a leftist, I think identity politics and anything else is there to distract us from our real purpose.
First of all, there are things that differentiate humans like gender, religion, race, economic status, social status, diseases and etc. These are the things that cause power dynamics to appear and create the strong and the weak groups. Secondly, these groups can interwine. For example, a person can be black which is considered inferior by most and can be rich which is considered being high status at the same time. A person can also be white but poor af. However, money is single-handedly more superior than any of those traits ive mentioned. In the presence of money, everything else becomes negligible. You can be black, jewish, female, lgbt member at the same time but if you are rich, then you will become far more superior than a white straight man who is poor. So, money in my opinion, should be the only focus of leftists. We need wealth equality more than anything else and everything else should either be ignored or delayed until we establish a sustainable system with wealth equality.
That being said, lets talk about the strength of these groups. As we all know, the enitre point of leftism is to unite those being oppressed and exploited under one flag to revolt against their exploiters to take back what once belonged to them. Then, build a new system where that exploitation will no longer be possible.
In order to achieve this goal, revolters should become stronger than their exploiters and overthrow them and this can only be done with having the advantage in numbers. If the exploited class does not have the number advantage, then they will not be able to win even if they all unite. As I said before, the battle here is always between the opressed and oppressor. So, it is important to pick the sides correctly in order to achieve a successful revolution.
Now, my idea is that the only conflict in which the oppressed side can be stronger than the oppressing class is the conflict between the rich and the poor. So, this is the side that should be picked when arranging the revolting group.
The reason why any other conflict you are going to pick will result in the stronger class being stronger is first, the superior class will always win in numbers. Secondly, as ive mentioned above, these classes will interwine with other categories of classification. For example, as i said, a black man can be richer than a white man. If you think Wiz Khalifa is being oppressed by some white American minimum wage worker, then your brain is rotten. Furthermore, lets say we defend women against men saying that women are being oppressed by men. This means you have to give women more rights in order to balance out this inequality. But this will result in you losing the support of half the population. Same goes with every other category of difference except the economic status of different people.
This is why the American left lost its last elections. They did not focus on economic aspects of leftism but literally anything else. They focused on lgbt education, gender studies, body positivity, wage gap, pink tax, Latinx and etc etc but not the wealth inequality in any conversation. Money became the least mentioned topic all of a sudden.
As a result, the democratic party could not change anything. Normally, for a capitalist country to thrive, there has to be competition among the rich. The US could not sustain that competition since corporations became too strong. For example, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos going on to stages and giving speeches about supporting a political party is something that you can only see happening in the US. Ronald Reagan reduced tax rates a lot hoping to increase competition and the government is the one that has to maintain the competition. For example, The Standard Oil Company was divided to prevent it from becoming a monopoly. This is no longer possible because of lobbying and low taxes. So, what happened was that Reagan gave more money to the rich which meant rich people had more money to use for lobbying. Now, if a person is already rich, then, they will act against competition in order to consolidate their power so that no new person will be able to get rich and they will remain as the sole monopoly. As a result, these companies got stronger and stronger over time until they were able to control the state. Today, as you can see we only have certain social media apps and nothing more. According to Reagan’s economic ideas, there had to be a lot more so that there would be competition among them and we would get better service and products from these sm companies for a lot cheaper prices but that did not happen and now, we have instagram, facebook, X, youtube, google, tiktok, reddit and nothing else. And most of these brands are owned by the same people so there isnt really any competition among these platforms ive mentioned either.
Before continuing, I would like to discuss what competition achieves. Competition means more job opportunities. More job opportunities means and increase in labor demand which means an increase in salaries and good working conditions. Competition also means higher quality and cheaper products. So, competition means you have more money with better working conditions and you can buy whatever good or service you want at the highest quality for the cheapest price. This was what Reagan thought that was going to happen but it didnt. Which resulted in a few monopolies in every sector that can offer whatever quality at whatever price they want to and prevent any government intervention through lobbying and if the government goes too far, they can also use the “liberty” card to prevent citizens from being protected by the government and easily exploited.
Today, as you can see, these companies will provide support for every cause such as body positivity by selling fast food and xxxlarge clothes and make ads showing off fat people. They will mention pink tax in their ads and even make tshirts about them. They will produce movies featuring black actors, trans characters, fat characters, they will show powerful female figures but none of them will mention anything about income inequality. Furthermore, they will even show white working class men as mean and oppressor people. This is how your attention is diverted. Another example is getting a female president. Margaret Tatcher was the british equivalent of Ronald Reagan but she was still a woman. Getting a female president will not solve anything. As I said all of these things are there to divide yo and distract you because all of your opinions are being controlled. You have lgbt education in your schools right? Do you also have a class about “wealth inequality”? which is a far more important subject and i think everyone can agree with me on this one. NO. They will never teach you abouut that. You will learn absolutely nothing about the hardships about life until you start working and until then, your brain will be filled with these garbage things so much that you will not even realize the real problem once you start working. Furthermore, you will support movements that divides the left such as people saying that white men created capitalism, white men are the reason why we dont have nice things etc.
As a result, the left wing will always be lower in terms of numbers and power compared to the class they want to revolt against unless if they only produce policies by taking only money into account. Everything else will ruin the left and make it weaker and weaker and in the end, even those who are poor will no longer support you. The right wing does not support them economically either but they support them in other issues such as cultural issues like defending white people from the accusations of the left. Money is still the most important thing and those are secondary issues but since the left does not care about wealth inequality anymore, they will think that the right wing at least helps them at something while the left does nothing. You guys dont even have free healthcare and you talk about “white people not being able to pronounce black people names right”. So, please dont be surprised when Europeans call you “stupid” the next time.
In conclusion, the left in the US and in some European countries are being manipulated very harshly and they dont even realize it. Those rich people made every single thing they could do to distract you from economic issues and you fell for all of them. Instead of offering help to the people who cannot get married and have a children, which is the most natural thing a human would want since the emergence of mankind or even before that, and instead, you accused them for being too conservative to build a family, you said men want to get married to oppress women, which resulted in you losing almost all support from men and some women. So, please only care about economic issues and nothing else if you ever want to bring america back to the days when worker compensation was equal to productivity. See ya.
This was a long-winded way of saying “no war but class war.”
My family is extremely rich. My father is a contractor. So, I know how these companies think. I also studied management. The management will always talk about how they should care about environmental issues, gender issues, political correctness and always talk about how this will improve our reputation. This is also the same thing thought in university to me. However, you will never hear from none of them anything about economic inequalities. Never. I wrote this because I know how companies work and how naive the people are. For example, we arrange salesmen according to the traits of our customers. If the customer is a female, we arrange a handsome salesman. If she has colored hair or fat, we arrange a fat woman etc etc. You will not believe how naive people are.
Being a contractor is a far cry from “extremely rich”.
I wanted to post on your original post, but you deleted it.
So here’s my reply:
yeah, class is the big one. billionaires run everything, wages are trash, housing is a joke, healthcare is a nightmare. no arguments there. but saying “just focus on money bro” is like saying you can beat Elden Ring with half a controller. sure, you can try, but you’re not getting past phase 2.
ppl don’t experience capitalism in a vacuum. a Black woman making minimum wage isn’t just underpaid, she’s also dealing with racism and sexism on top of that. a gay kid getting kicked out of their house can’t just be like “well actually, my real problem is Jeff Bezos.” like yeah Bezos is the macro-boss, but daily life oppression isn’t optional side content.
and you’re dead right libs are cringe with this stuff. rainbow logos on banks, Disney patting itself on the back for making Stormtrooper #5 gay or whatever, while nothing changes materially. but that’s not identity politics’ fault, that’s corporate co-opting and lazy liberalism.
rich ppl want us divided. they want poor white dudes blaming immigrants, poor Black folks blaming white ppl, everyone fighting about pronouns while they hoard the bag. if you just go “ignore identity, only focus on class” you’re literally helping their divide-and-conquer strat bc now the ppl who are dealing with identity-based oppression will look at you and go “nah, this guy doesn’t get it.” worker unity doesn’t happen if half the workers feel like you’re erasing their lives.
so yeah, class is the core. but pretending racism, sexism, homophobia, etc are just distractions is cope. they’re how class oppression actually gets enforced on the ground. ignoring them is a good way to stay forever in the “posting essays online” stage of revolution.
edit: calling it now, OP’s gonna get mad someone pointed this out and double down like it’s a reddit comment section.
Class reductionists forever failing to grasp that solidarity means not telling your ally their own struggles are unimportant. And always preaching to the left to put aside those struggles rather than seeking out the poor racist and convincing them that their shitty wage is a whole lot higher priority than being racist 24/7.
Okay but by taking those allies into your movement, you end up pushing away a lot more people that would normally support you.
Yeah I realized i can only post links there didnt know that so i deleted it. Im new here.
For your reply, as i said, I still think that money is the most important thing and a lot more important than taking the risk of dividing the left. I think every other category that has inequality among its members can be ignored if it is going to prevent breaking the economic inequality. So i think the left should accept anyone who wants to bring economic equality regardless of how discriminating or racist or any other thing they are. There is a reason why the only issue that corps dont want to be heard is economy. I dont get mad btw opinion is an opinion.
That just sounds like strasserism
Also forgot to mention that those who try breaking conflicts in other categories such as race, gender etc usually lose their focus on economic inequality. They will literally buy products from companies which support their views. My family is extremely rich and I dont buy anything except a few clothes that will be enough for a year once a year, eat salads and cook them myself. I dont order food from restaurants. Why? Because as i said, there are no companies that apply with my views since as i said, the only thing those companies will not go against is income inequality not even my own family company. I hope this will make it clear how most leftists lost their focus on economy.
For example, a person can be black which is considered inferior by most
Sorry buddy, you lost me in the first paragraph.
Your suggestion is to ignore all of the injustice in the world and fix the economic disparity? As if racism, sexism and homophobia haven’t influenced that disparity from day one.
You are rich, by admission, so I understand that you assume everything is about money and manipulating people, but if the Left’s sole aim is to manipulate people into voting for them, we have that party already, and they suck at it.
Why can’t we strive for equality in all forms?
Thats not manipulation. What I was trying to say was that the leftist movement should only be about economic inequality until we solve it. This is not manipulation since you would not be promising other groups of people anything else. So, your supporters would know that the only thing they will get will be economic equality in return of their support. So its not lying to anyone. I should tell you that being rich is awesome. Its the best thing a human being could ever ask for after health of course. Money is so great that it makes anything else unimportant. I can live a luxurious life without even moving a single finger. Im 22 and I have a total of 200k dollars in my account on different assets. This is just the amount i made from the money my parents gave me throughout my life to spend it with my friends. Now that I graduated from university, my father will give me my first house next month. it has 4 room and a very large house. So now Im asking you, do you think i would give a single fuck if someone was racist to me or sexist to me or anything else? NO. Because I have everything I want my ears wouldnt even hear what they are saying. Im writing this so that you can understand how important money really is.
So yes, we cannot strive for equality in all forms since as i said, the only class which will have the upper hand when united is the poor class against the rich. Any other weak side of any conflict will be weaker when united than the superior side. The only time the oppressed class will become majority against their oppressors when united is the working class people. For example, trans people will be less in numbers against non trans people, gay people will be less in numbers against non gay people. This will result in you pushing away those superior side people ive mentioned and thus, you will not be able to create a revolting group against the rich since those people you pushed away will start defending the rich. Why do you think so many young people voted for trump when they cannot even afford to have a family? Because the left of today failed to have the upper hand in terms of numbers by taking only minorities on their side and pushing the majority to the other.
You set your sights too low.
Leftism isn’t about keeping wages in line with productivity, that would be conservatism, preserving the social contract.
Leftism is about liberation, not having to worry about declining wages because wages don’t determine who holds power and access to resources.
I told keeping wages in line with productivity do describe how it was before Reagan in the US. I didnt say its leftism.
I don’t understand why people want to write these long manifestos about their random political thoughts when they themselves never actually read any political theory.
