So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I’ve spent more than a few hours chatting with “the guys,” and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I’m extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the “good” ones that provide their treats. (They’re also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we “really needed” a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has “made some money” through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA’s future (and climate change) and has said that he’ll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It’s wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that’s a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.
What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from “collectivist” to “individualist.” Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers’ political views much easier to understand. They’re individualists. They don’t like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they’re happy to be rich (at everyone else’s expense) and to have the same police protect them.
As an aside, I’ve been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you’ll see that I’m a communist, which means that it’s impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I’m writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there’s so much money in this field and I’d like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There’s tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it’s more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I’m interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
I feel like the core to the inconsistency of your average USian’s politics is that they have no idea how the world actually works and everything they know about US history is basically a lie. Their world view is built on US mythology and a heavily maintained echo chamber saturated with neoliberal spectacle. My radicalization tactics largely consist of doing my best to recommend left leaning content and creators that will appeal to their interests in the hopes they’re exposed to enough truth from sources/experiences they enjoy, that their echo chambers will begin to seem untrustworthy. That’s when we bring out the big guns.
Right down to calling themselves libertarians, a historically leftist ideology that now apparently means you’re just too embarrassed to call yourself a republican
what blue collar work are you doing that pays so well? and how long/difficult/expensive was the training? without compromising opsec of course. i ask because i’d love to move out of white collar work
I’m interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
this sounds sick but how are you going to deal with county and state level officials fucking your shit up? if you manage to boot out all the landlords they’re not just gonna pack up and leave, they’ll put up a fight by appealing to higher levels of government which you won’t have control over and will probably be hostile to you bc you’re a communist
Death to America
what blue collar work are you doing that pays so well?
My spouse found out about a month-or-so-long class for fixing oil burners. Fuck oil but I decided to go for it. The class was also free (thanks to covid relief money, not sure from which president). It was definitely not easy. They used a lot of words I had never heard before. But I survived! And graduated. I took my state’s license test a few weeks later and passed. At that point, I started calling local businesses. All of them were super excited when they talked with me, but none of them followed up and some even canceled interviews they had scheduled (presumably because they googled me and learned about my sordid political past). Maybe the fifth business I contacted, which is probably the biggest in my state, brought me in for an interview the morning after I called them (in the evening). I’ve been working with them for two weeks and so far it’s been alright. They said they’d start me off with $18/hr, but my first paycheck amounted to $13/hr, so I’m like, what the fuck is going on with that, I have to ask them in a couple of days. They said that once I’m comfortable enough to be working on my own, they’ll pay me $24/hr. The thing is, they charge customers $200/hr for service, so starting your own business is extremely tempting. A worker co-op could be life-changing for a lot of people, too. We could train communists in the trades and also radicalize blue collar workers (although the former is a million times easier than the latter). There are thousands of burners for every technician within like a hundred miles, and the best techs can only fix about four per day, so there’s no end of work to do and a lot of the customers are loaded. The only issues I can foresee are climate change destroying everything or oil burners getting replaced with heat pumps (which I welcome honestly).
What I would say at this point is that a lot of businesses of all kinds are desperate for help and would probably train you if you ask. You can call them, talk with them in person, see if the vibes are positive, and there are so many businesses it’s probably not an issue to quit and move on if it doesn’t work out. My experience thus far has been that blue collar work seems intimidating at first, but it just takes guided practice to understand. I don’t know that the class I took was necessary. It was also, like, eleven hours a day when commuting is included, and even more than that when you factor in all the homework and studying I did, so yeah. Doing hands-on work with people probably makes it a lot easier than listening to three or four hours of lectures per day, which is what I did.
this sounds sick but how are you going to deal with county and state level officials fucking your shit up?
Guns. It’s also not impossible that within five or ten years, the state will actually be too weak to bother with us. Who knows? Building up local power (backed with force) might be the only way we can even survive. I don’t know. The plan is just: learn blue collar work. Start worker co-op. Train communists. Build (or purchase) housing. Expand into other moneymaking fields. Run candidates in elections. Defund the police. (Other towns around here don’t bother with having police, though sometimes they pay the sheriff to patrol there.) There’s also so many empty houses here (in excellent condition) that even if every single full-time resident remained here, we could still bring in thousands of squatters without having to build a single house. Squatting laws in this state basically make it impossible to legally seize someone’s home—unless you have plenty of people with guns.
I hate the “collectivist” vs “individualist” framing, it’s so loaded towards “individualism” when what people usually mean is atomization, meanwhile us so-called collectivists don’t as the myth goes, believe in submitting one’s individual interests to the Greater Good of The Collective, we believe that most people have most of their interests in common with other people and should work together to pursue those interests rather than against each other. Because of that, I prefer the framing that is loaded the other way of “pro-social” vs “anti-social”. The people you describe are significantly anti-social and disliking individual corporations has no bearing on that.
It’s a terrible framework that was introduced by libertarians, the original liberals and monarchists understood that we inherently live in a collective society, the question is where do your laws and authority, and therefore freedoms, derive from?
Do they come from God or are they independent from that concept? If they do come from God, who then embodies God’s authority on earth? If they do not, then where does ethical authority come from? Can authority ethical at all? If authority is inherent what is then the ‘most’ ethical system?
The original ‘rights of individuals’ guys believed in those principles because they believed it was for the benefit of the collective, individual rights were not considered to be opposing moral aims because it was understood that exploitation of your fellow man is not only bad for the trust within the collective society, but it was bad for the individual as well because they still lived within that collective society.
The issue is that we now live in an era where technology and higher levels of concentrated wealth has allowed a larger number of people than ever to completely remove themselves from living in society, and become.the Randian individualists that the libertarians envisioned. But unlike Rand’s protagonists, they do not simply remove themselves from the equation, they then additionally seek to influence society so we must all be like them, either exploiters or exploited. What they don’t realize is that by doing this weakening of the collective, they are weakening the very social fabric that their power rests on.
I’m interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords.
Lol. Good luck. Dozens of fascists and libertarians have planned this and failed miserably, and they have the money and political connections (and most don’t even want to change the status quo). I can’t imagine a communist with only money being successful. People generally don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere just because the community aligns with with them no matter how romantic the idea may be, and people generally have no idea how to form and run a brand new community. It’s highly unlikely it’ll become American Chiapas and more likely to become the libertarian town where bears drove away its residents
I’m just going to take it one step at a time and see how far I can go. It wouldn’t be the first worker co-op in the USA. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do, aside for “wait for a revolution.” I know people here are like: “organize.” And I’m like: I am literally the only communist for a hundred miles. There is no one to organize. I am surrounded by liberals and fascists. The only proletarians around here are seasonal laborers, many of whom don’t speak English and have numerous reasons to be distrustful of a random white person talking about communism in broken Spanish. Etc.
Your only choice is to agitate among the people who are there. Lots of reactionary people are just inadequately educated, and things get much easier if you can build a small base of people. The people discouraging you are worthless doomers waiting for more-overt-fascists to take over, don’t listen to them.
I feel like you’d have more success just organizing a community space within an existing town or city, along with a worker coop. Like the other guy said trying to form a rural commune usually just ends up either in failure or things getting culty.
Yeah the cult potential for a rural co-op is an issue.
Well the worker co-op is a fine idea. I encourage it. But I just don’t see how anyone, not just you, can manage to turn that into a full community.
I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do, aside for “wait for a revolution.”
Do people actual live in this area? If so you’ll have to take their thoughts into consideration or else they’ll make enough noise to actually attract the authorities. And it’s unlikely you find many communists here, so you have to go with the second option of working with locals and radicalizing them.
You say that you work with oil burners and that they could be replaced. What then? Will it just turn into Detroit or Appalachia where the town is abandoned and there’s nothing to do?
You say the community/town will be defended with guns. What is there to defend if there are not enough jobs for everyone, especially if climate change or substitutions phase out the primary and most lucrative job (I.e. the one you have now)? Given the current capitalist system, it’s unlikely that most people are okay with a large portion of the community doing whatever while being subsidized by the other portion working - that’s just commune brain and it rarely works, if ever.
Do people actual live in this area? If so you’ll have to take their thoughts into consideration or else they’ll make enough noise to actually attract the authorities.
There’s nothing illegal about anything we would be doing, not until the final stages, when there are hundreds or even thousands of us here and we’re too powerful to stop.
And it’s unlikely you find many communists here, so you have to go with the second option of working with locals and radicalizing them.
The locals consist almost entirely of reactionary blue collar workers, retirees, and landlords. I’m not sure anything short of ten years in a re-education camp for each of them would radicalize them.
The locals consist almost entirely of reactionary blue collar workers, retirees, and landlords. I’m not sure anything short of ten years in a re-education camp for each of them would radicalize them.
It’s not illegal to do your plan. But I suspect a population that’s almost exclusively reactionary will not combat this with the full support of more powerful forces
And yeah it’s hard to persuade them of anything, but usually existing communities aren’t big fans of other people coming by and benefitting from them without any consideration for them. I’m not suggesting you compromise down to their fascist politics, but they will be there.
