Juice

You're right, the petty bourgeoisie will have to work with the proletariat to abolish their class, just as the proletariat will have to work to abolish our class. They will have to work against their interests as capitalists. This has happened before and it will happen again, because if revolution is to happen it will be a necessity. So "appealing to" material interests as capitalists is impossible, I agree. But unless you plan on guillotining millions of people, there will have to be an appeal to a material interest that emerges as a contradiction to their interests as capitalists, that will emerge from the struggle for revolutionary conditions. So you caught me out on a technicality, but my point still stands. The mass movement will include people who are from the petty bourgeois classes, unless you disqualify them from it on essentialist grounds. If you can't deal with contradiction in your analysis then you're not doing critical analysis, you're participating in an aesthetic.

The original argument was "any form of investment is a form of rent seeking, land lords are rent seeking, landlords are bad, so investment is bad."

I didn't say landlords aren't bad, I said that what makes them bad isn't their individual consumer decisions, but the decisions they are likely to make with the ruling class against our working class.

When I'm talking to other leftists I'm hoping that we share some common values. My fear is that we share values but we don't understand the material circumstances from which those values manifest. There is a reason we are against private property, rent seeking, etc., but it isn't ethical. We use a materialist dialectic. If not we are no different from religious zealots and liberals. Our beliefs aren't shibboleths, they emerge out of revolutionary necessity. I'm not picking friends or people I agree with, I'm trying to engage with messy, contradiction laden politics; History, not dogma.

The action of rent seeking is bad, but it doesn't make someone a class enemy by sheer virtue. It dehumanizes over time, people become class enemies, they arent born evil. And people can change. All I was saying was there are cases where regular people are just going along with what their material circumstances dictate, like op, and there's absolutely no point in trying to make them feel bad about it or alienate them from the broader movement. We should be bringing people in, not locking people out. This is an ethical value that I believe more than nit picking their investments or lack thereof. If we don't understand why rent seeking is bad, then we end up making lousy formulations like the one I was responding to.

When you quote me like that its like you're just trying to misconstrue what I'm trying to say, and I don't know what the point of that would even be. The post I was responding to used a really bad example, with the $200k investment even, so it was clear to me where they were coming from. You seem to want to make it look like I'm saying being a landlord is okay. What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."

This is literally what the national bourg of the western consensus fears most, hence the constant "China's economy is going to collapse any day now" posting in the media.

a small contradiction

Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.

There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.

I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.

Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote a children's book about Lenin with gorgeous illustrations: https://ladyizdihar.com/blogs/izdihars-soviet-archive-2/childrens-book-vladimir-ilyich-lenin-1975

Where We Go One, We Go All (except for that one guy who was actin like a librul)

Learn to think dialectically

I agree 100%, and I make this little dialectical formulation wrt the specific circumstance of white HBs posting about how they should be genocided.

But yeah when workers are united, race is used to divide them, and once they're divided by race whites get exploited well beyond what anyone would consider privilege. Using the privilege formulation, I used to think about privilege being something thrust upon whites, where privilege becomes a sort of "not-oppressed" status. But I've become aware of WEB DuBois's formulation of a "white wage" that is paid to white workers, and while I haven't yet read Black Reconstruction I have begun to think of it in those terms.

Take my statement above as something more like optimism than hard critique

One of Paulo Friere's theses is that to the oppressor, moves toward equality feel like oppression.

While it is always good to be ruthlessly critical of everything, rather than just merely being "white people making it about them," or self-hating whiteness (a reactionary trope in virtually every other context) or even just toxic and cringe, when you have a large group of whites saying, "yes I deserve it, violently oppress me based on my skin color," assuming it isn't some awful kink, it really could be an authentic way for white people to say that we truly desire equality.

Can you always pick what you are getting yourself in the zone about? Like can you get really into doing the most pressing, urgent and important task of your day, and then move on to other urgent, important tasks? Can you spend extended time on organizational tasks?

I (ADHD) can be extremely interested in a subject and really committed to learning and growing, as long as it isn't what I should be doing in order to like get my bills paid or maintain a calendar. As a result I'm really well read, I can play multiple instruments, I can code, draw and paint, pretty good at math; but I was behind for much of my life and not like professionally successful because I could focus on just about anything else other than like paying bills or going to bed at a reasonable time. All this other shit compounded and I used to constantly screw myself over in like 50 different ways before I started to get treatment. But I also have a lot in common with certain HF autistic people and feel validated by the fact that they are interested in things. There's some overlap between autism and ADHD, depending on how the symptoms of the autistic individual are clustered.

Why wont Sony let us have any more Bloodborne?? No 60fps remaster, no sequel, not even a fake ass meme racer game