biscuitdough wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:12 amWell. You should care about the proletariat. You should care about building a proletariat. Proletarians have class solidarity.
So regarding my first comment.
It is not possible to really be of the people, to be able to say "I am of the people" and continue to be of the people. Because the people are always that thing over there. At least in the shape this idea immediately arrives at us, how we are conditioned to receive it.
Liberals generally fear the people, the mass, the mob; and they are mocked for this by leftists. But the latter are inclined to take on board too eagerly this idea as an antithesis to the ruling order, not examining how, or even embracing the fact that, a romanticism remains for them in this idea. A romanticism for which this "people" stands for authentic existence. This is solidified when the people is given a
personality in a leader, someone who speaks for the people. The image (in thought) of the people precedes the physical person of the leader, the leader corresponds to that image. This image is recognized by bearing certain characteristics - mannerisms, ways of speaking, lifestyles, "values", modes of cultural consumption. All these are taken to represent the people as such, and to be the ways of "ordinary people", and by extension thus of authentic existence.
In so far as one is able to identify with this image, one is of the people. If one does not identify with it, one is expected to altruistically sacrifice one's claim to individuality for the sake of the people. This sacrifice is expressed as a duty taken on by all, but as is clear only certain people are expected to bear it. If you can identify with the leader, your individuality is validated by default, since the leader is taken to be identical to the people, a direct extension of popular will; even though the unity of the people on the surface rests on giving up individual claims.
Now the leader of the people and the intellectual serving the people, as a rule come from the ruling or middle strata. For such a person, the people are by default something that was never them. They are frustrated by the falsity, pettiness, ugliness and purposelessness they experience in their environment, and the image of the people says to them "at least here, there are people living authentic lives". The romantic idea of the people is a pretty typical upper class fantasy, of the same species as the noble savage. Romanticism lives side by side with fear and contempt (compare perceptions of criminals).
Along with this romanticism therefore, leftist intellectuals are historically very often accompanied by an aversion to the very people-ness of the people - consumerism, mass culture, rambunctious pleasures, even politics (The communist utopia is a place without politics. Worth noting is that politics is economy in the classical sense, negotiation of diverse interests. Such self-interested negotiation is much too base and "Jewish" to accord with the romantic idea of the people.) To the intellectual, these excesses are often taken to be intrusive aberrations corrupting the pure people. The concrete reality of the people destroy the fashioned image of the people. Early socialists, raised as they were on the modernist ideal of totalist rationality, can often be seen to be irritated at the
unpredictability of the people. There are constantly attempts to constrain, to regulate, to discipline, to hold fast to a
plan based on a
correct interpretation of truth.
Similar to this is how right-wingers and certain pseudo-leftists want to protect non-western peoples from being corrupted by "western values", as regards LGBT recognition, civil rights in general, etc. These "western values" are of course imagined as "forced" on other countries by "Soros", and the "rootless cosmopolitans" being his lackeys in the first world. 1:1.
But even the class origin of the leader or spokesman are less important. The leader could come from humble origins, but their essence would be the same. The leader functions just as well no matter the concrete class origin of the leader. This suggests that it is in fact not the concrete circumstances of the people (those disenfranchised, lacking means, whatever) which is at question, something which would in some way justify the claims of anti-elitism; but the image of the people, certain characteristics which are identified with as being the concrete people, and thus anyone, even someone concretely belonging to "the elites", can drape themselves in the dress of the people, and the practical effect will be the same.
This person, as a function of their subjective conditions, has certain individual desires. However they inherit an ideology or traces of an ideology (protestantism, for example, but there are probably many others that work the same) in which simply affirming your individual desire is not allowed. Individuality is taken as something which must be sacrificed for the sake of solidarity, and such sacrifice is taken as the very condition for a moral action. You can only therefore make an individual claim on the basis of seeming altruism - making clear that you are acting
for the sake of someone else, that you do
not care about your self. But as Nietzsche clearly saw, it is perfectly possible for purely egotistical self-interest to continue under the guise of such a sacrifice - indeed
this is the way in which such self-interest continues to be expressed, since the very obligation of sacrifice creates resentment, especially resentment against those who
do affirm their desires.
The fact that claims on behalf of the people tend to express themselves as "anti-woke", stems from the fact that these controversies arise between members of groups which for their existence and in the course of their practice have required individuals to give up certain enjoyments (such that come with one's gendered conditions, etc.). Claims on behalf of the people, or of "class first", as they have hitherto functioned, always allow someone to reinstate their lost enjoyment, with the justification that something else has greater importance, and indeed that the very practices and principles of this group, as they exist, are a mere distraction from the real issues. Underlying this is therefore an
individual desire expressed in a way which is socially acceptable (relying on the fact of a pre-existing assumption that acting for an other is always preferable to acting for oneself, that the popular majority is the rule and the individual the exception). If this were not the case, there would be no reason to pose a politics of the people or of the class as antagonistic toward those of gender or race, etc.
I am aware of course, that this same dynamic exists in the opposite direction. Robbing other people of their enjoyment can be its own form of enjoyment, and so can being able to enforce the rules on others, or to present oneself as the good person who has been able to overcome their conditioning (which can be a case of the same self-denial mentioned earlier). But the point of these practices is not denying or repressing desire, but reclaiming desire by recognizing your desire as conditioned, appropriated by the spectacle and presented to you in an image as
your desire, something which you are to strive for and attain (by means of all these other things also provided you by the spectacle). Redpill/PUA is basically this, and they draw their power from representing repressed desire which cannot speak itself openly, and the pleasure not only of attaining this desire but of transgressing against the law of political correctness, and significantly from being presented as
real desire, "natural" desire, beyond the artifices of law and regulation.
Hope this helps.
PS. Stay away from Hegel, people. You will never stop thinking.