Since this is my safe space, I’m going to say that I feel completely alienated from the current progressive flourishing because they keep conjuring with kiddie-pool Marxism.

Marxism is fucking dumb, even if Marx did a good job describing what was happening in cities in his time. It starts with sciencefail—“societies evolve like animals, but not really”—and ends with Marx inventing shit like “lumpenproletariat” to handwave why people don’t act they way he says they should according to his dialectic.

Furthermore, you can critique Marxism by contrasting the theory with it’s applied derivatives—Leninism and Maoism—and how fucked up states that operated under them were. There is a basic bad premise…the same bad premise that fucks up a lot of Western philosophers…that people are homogeneous actors, such that you can invent an idea like “the single-party state run by the workers,” and the “workers” is a meaningful, generalizable grouping of individuals such that axiomatically a “worker’s party” couldn’t turn out to be full of venal shitgibbons and the occasional fucking monster or three.

I’ve read Lenin, god help me. It fucking poleaxes me that Yanks fucking put him and Marx on the same podium, when all his Pravda writing was “well Marx has a point, but these fucking peasants are fucking stupid so we won’t count them as workers and we’ll making all the fucking decisions for these hayseed twats that don’t wipe their asses. Vanguardism is totally different from, you know, other oligarchies because…squirrel!…and fuck you for implying I might be some kind of megalomaniac.” Giant flashing alarm lights this dude was going to pogrom somebody, because he sure as fuck wasn’t going to admit he was wrong.

Idiots.

And I’m especially sick of the square-peg-in-round-hole hot takes where progressives project their notions of class onto Trump supporters because they buy into the idea that “working white people” is a meaningful grouping in the way that “workers” is…which is an incredibly privileged—and, yes, white nonsense—that ignores the long history in this country (and Europe) of power structures that aren’t class superceding the interests of class, such that people who should be fired up about the class struggle are focused on supporting the status quo. Because it’s convenient to their shallow analytical level, lumpenproletariat reactionaries (a la 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) are stupid dupes with no agency, not people making an active choice to value immaterial power dynamics—feeling superior to brown people/chicks/that trash family two streets over—over practical solutions that would help them, but also render them equal to the despised Other.

False consciousness is a fucking copout. The phlogiston of social scientific analysis.

And it’s especially stupid in the current situation, where the “texts” that inform the Trumpian thoughtworld and readily available and completely contradict their premises and analysis. To believe what they believe, they have to ignore the emotional tone, the incoherence of agenda, and the straight-from-the-source statements of the people they’re claiming to speak for.

I’ve been living in Trumpland for twenty fucking years. Their basic operating premise is that they are a priori deserving and others—the bad types of people—are axiomatically undeserving. As such, any policy that lifts all boats in injustice and theft. Which is why they would rather burn things down than improve things generally.

Which is why amorphous “winning” by owning the libs and pretending everything Trump does is a triumph is better than competent governance. Which is why practical measures of governance and foreign relations have been discarded for symbolic displays of dominance. Which is why a constant string of Twitter abuse by the POTUS is lagniappe.

I want to be supportive because I’m theoretical of the same ideological bent, but this is ridiculous. It’s the same kind of own-goaling, smug blindness that’s bit European Marxists in the ass for a century and a half: they insist reality works how they say, not matter what’s actually happening, fail epically, then go explain away that failure as society gets even fucking worse.

Also, why the fuck don’t these people actually read shit they’re invoking? Or getting up to date with the (much better, much more relevant) post-Marxists?