I live in the deep south in the hills. You quickly learn the difference between working class and working poor. I already talked about how alot of these chuds are gatekeepers to good paying jobs and use nepotism to keep certain people out of trade jobs. That's how they're able to afford all those guns they wave in people's faces at fascist rallies and jacked up trucks while the opposition are left helpless. They also infest unions like cockroaches and bring in their bullshit politics to weaken them while reaping union benefits. They are the working class but they sure as hell ain't poor.
We need to start updating our language for 2020. It's also why i really truly don't care about that red bandana shit. The people that fought at blair mountain are dead and the meaning of words change. In fact the Appalachian part of my state is a fucking no go zone for minorities. I'm country as hell but I dont fuck with rednecks. Redneck revolt wasn't even that successful before it disbanded because it kept relying on the past to recruit red state chuds into the fold. It ain't working on them unless they're already sympathetic. I will say the SRA certainly got that right in regards to their gun club.
The racism in other parts depends. At a job site everytime I went across the corner to check leaks in pipes a coworker would get quiet because he was talking out of his ass about politics and didn't want to say anything around a black person. Phony fuck lol. It's like that alot smile in your face but chuds behind close doors. This is where I suspect alot of them get that "but I have a black friend"shit when they get caught.
Just wanted to respond to you're first point about nepotism within unions as being something that very much exists within NYC politics and these folks are also largely speaking republicans (although maybe some of the younger ones would vote for someone like Max Rose). Some of them would also probably describe themselves as Trump democrats where they're a fan of people like Cuomo who has a lot of support from heavy industry and construction unions.
It's important to remember that these can be high paying jobs, netting people 200k a year.
It really needs to be understood that blue collar does not mean you make more or less money than white collar workers anymore. There are a lot of white collar jobs that pay 30k a year and blue collar jobs that pay 100k a year.
The working poor youth specifically are ripe for radicalization. Especially warehouse and call center workers. I worked in both those jobs and the misery is just beyond describing to the point Im surprise I haven't heard about people going postal in their workplaces.
What te SRA does right is how much in the present they are and how they are a big tent org that recruits leftists from all walks of life. They even had a recruitment campaign for furries lol. They also don't rely on past leftist movements to appeal to rural chuds. Some centrists gun owners were willing to discuss socialism with them simply because they really like all the combloc guns posted on their subreddit.
Redneck revolt wasn’t even that successful before it disbanded
It might be surprising to Redneck Revolt to hear they disbanded, since they haven't.
Yes they have. Founder was accused of rape and the org handled it terribly so a bunch of people left and the org died.
Unless you're talking about the john brown gun club. That existed before redneck revolt.
According to what? I saw that they're still active in multiple chapters.
Aside from that though your comment makes it sound like Redneck Revolt collapsed because they didn't make any inroads, not because of internal shit.
You're really late to the party with this. Alot of it is easily searchable cause I saw it unfold as it was happening. What "chapters" are active ? There are two john brown gun clubs, trigger warning, and something called C.O.AL that use to be part of the org.
If it's easily searchable I ain't finding shit. I'm still seeing articles talking about how Redneck Revolt is active though.
I haven't found those articles about active chapters. I did find alot of statements about chapters leaving to do their own thing....
Do you have any because as you said, it's easily searchable but I've seen nothing.
Put in redneck revolt founder rape. Also go to their subreddit.
Is there a reason you can't just link me? I literally googled that shit and found nothing.
Because everytime I try to copy and paste links in my reply it disappears and I have to start over again.
The didn't work either so notebook
https://davestrano.noblogs.org/responses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/74w00g/torch_antifascist_network_statement_on_dave/ https://psjbgc.org/blog/puget-sound-john-brown-gun-club-leaves-redneck-revolt-network/ https://m.facebook.com/PDLSL/posts/2531614826866297
There doesn't appear to be much about it being dead though. These look like things I found but then I've seen discussions on Redneck Revolt since the incident so it's clearly still around.
The last time I was in reddit one of the organizers for redneck revolt national org said they disbanded. Alot of former members in the SRA says it's dead and broke into splinter groups. And there hasn't been any activity from the org in two years. Those chapters you're talking about are probably just jbgc. It's dead Jim.
One thing the George Floyd protests revealed is that there are a lot more of us than we expected and being able to see each other is huge
This is why regularly going out, regular organisation of marches, etc etc, have all been a important part of prior movements. Visibility does a huge amount to normalise and legitimise something to other people and to its membership.
there is a fantasy that you can get good ol boy rednecks on the commie side. How realistic is this?
Well, first of all, it's not just a fantasy, it can very easily be made a reality, so write that down.
I'm from a former logging town in Oregon. The town is rural and deeply conservative, but definitely not poor. Almost exactly median household income. 90% white. Not sure if it's exactly the locale your asking about but a few thoughts anyways:
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The point about racism is correct. Nobody's like, in the Klan, and most people had the tact to keep it to themselves unless they trusted you or got even a little bit drunk. But once it got out, it got out, especially in years when race issues were in the news. In pretty much any gather of hicks, I'd say about a third of them are vocally white supremacist after a few drinks. Lots of grievances about black people taking their welfare and committing crime. A lot of the rest of them think simultaneously that racism is wrong and that there's genetic differences between races. I was taught in elementary school, for example, that black people have denser bones and more ligaments in their arms in legs than white people --which is why they can run fast but can't swim well--, but that we should treat others like equals anyways.
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"Avarice, fear, and hatred" does a good enough job of describing their feelings toward the future. They're pretty much always scared shitless of whatever boogeyman is on the news. The big one right now is that Antifa is starting the wildfires. Every conservative from my hometown that I know believes this. Every single one. I do not know of a single conservative who isn't afraid that Portlanders are going to come to their house and light them on fire. When I was at my brother's house a few days ago, two cars parked in public parking across the street from him. He got his gun set up and took his huge dog to go check them out to make sure they weren't antifa terrorists. Even when there aren't real and serious natural disasters threatening their lives and homes, anxiety over change is a big part of the psyche. Driving downtown and seeing someone who had like, idk, died hair or a shirt from a metal band would elicit "God, you wouldn't have seen any of these freaks here back in the day" from the passenger seat. A lot of anger directed towards Portland, liberals, and the Democratic party, too. Like, if you think that internet leftists are wild because we make guillotine jokes sometimes, you don't even know. It's definitely gotten worse since the internet, but I really try not to spend time either in my hometown or on Facebook, so I don't really know the extent of it.
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Rural conservatives are not sleeper communists. They despise the idea of the state doing anything to help poor people, and a ton of them want to be rich business owners. The Wright quote about temporarily embarrassed millionaires rings true, to the point where I've called people that and they agreed with it. That being said, there's a big split between pro and anti-union attitudes, with older people tending to think union workers are lazy and younger folks tending to see unions as one of the last opportunities to make a living through work. They also have a soft spot for an outsider, and plenty of some of the most conservative people I know were willing to give Bernie and Yang's ideas a shot just because they're a break from the mainstream. I wonder if some kind of union/ ODOT worker to leftist pipeline could work.
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Kind of off topic, but the culture is really weirdly artificial and imported? A lot of dudes driving pickup trucks to their office jobs in Portland. I remember in high school kids would develop drawls after listening to country music. Had someone tell me to my face that "round these parts we call it a crick" after I said creek, even though that's absolutely 100% not part of the dialect. Kids who lived in town would come in wearing cowboy hats. I remember watching the scene from Mean Girls where they discuss what days of the week they would coordinate their outfits play out in real life, except it was a group of 17 year old dudes discussing when they would wear their new Carhartts and Romeos together. Lots of confederate flags, even though the state was never part of the confederacy. The aesthetics and culture of "The Country" as an abstract was more in the forefront than our geography or logging history. Cowboys were cool, lumberjacks and fur trappers were not.
if you think that internet leftists are wild because we make guillotine jokes sometimes
Wait... You guys are joking?
In pretty much any gather of hicks, I’d say about a third of them are vocally white supremacist after a few drinks
Get out by La Grande/Wallowa/Enterprise area, and I don't think you even need the few drinks.
In reference to number 2, the fear of loss of status is the essence of the petit bourgeois mindset. They are afforded many comforts but not the safety of wealth. Rich people aren't scared of getting kicked out of their house, and poor people don't have a house to begin with. The petit bourgeois and labor aristocrats are more protective because they feel besieged on both sides, from the poor coming to steal from them and the rich coming to exploit them or screw them over. Except they know they can't punish the rich and that they will get away with it. So they fight the poor. They base their lives on fearing the underclass. They fear the rich like they fear God; with a perverse underlying respect. Their fear of the poor is turned into a visceral hatred of them and you get the modern chud.
I moved out west recently and the more I learn about Oregon the more and more it seems batshit insane. It’s literally the Wild West with modern politics.
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if you could repackage and rebrand socialist ideology into just enough of Jesus’s teachings, anti-corporate pro-union messaging, and patriotism, you’d have
most likely a brutal nationalist movement.
Something that's been worrying me recently is A) We're not gonna overthrow capitalism without a bunch of people who are chuds right now and B) the path for the left to radicalize them is very similar to the path that fash a re going to have to take and they've got a huge head start on us. They've just got to get them to criticize capitalism as it exists right now and build solidarity among the straight, white, middle class against the spooky jewish globalist. We have to convince them that capitalism must necessarily exist in opposition to all workers and build solidarity among the entire working class. I get that it happens in steps, and we can bring people on board with anti-racism, anti-queerphobia, feminism, etc. by hooking them with the economic platform, but God it's gonna be a challenge to thread that needle.
i listen to beau of the fifth column pretty frequently and i really like the game he's playing right now. it's something worth taking notes on for getting through
My favorite is when they say the n-slur and you call them out as racists and they insist whites can be n-slur too, even though you've literally never heard them, or anyone else for that matter, ever call a white person the n-slur.
I grew up in a fairly rural area of another Anglosphere country.
Here's how you frame it.
Bosses are shit and incompetent, unions good, workers should run things
For social issues, dont attack the bigotry directly. For instance, if they're homophobic just point out that its clearly a conspiricy of the ruling class that there's a gay agenda to r i le up and divide the city from empathy with ordinary people.Like a bunch of wierd rando city people could control the national narrative.
Also say its a bit rich that the ruling class will dunk on some consenting adults while they run Epstein parties the whole time.
You can do this all down the line. Abortion, a stalking horse to rile people up while cutting welfare and starving mothers and children.
The Jews. Nice of them to hide behind 3 rich jewish people when its actually wealthy evangelicals that are funding Israel and who hold the real reigns of power. This works especially well in catholic regions. Burn the heretics.
Basically just say every prejudice they have is part of a grand conspiricy. They lap that shit up and it's not, you know, far off the truth.
Just tell them QAnon said “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles“ and so on
There is widespread racism in rural areas for sure. I'd like to chalk it up to mostly a feature of material conditions, but that would be a lie. I grew up in a 99% white, chuddy town in a rural part of a solidly "blue" state. There were maybe two people darker than cream cheese in our whole community. It was pretty much exclusively white people competing with white people for jobs, land, state or federal benefits - you name it. Didn't matter. Hate for other races was and is pretty universal. The BLM discourse in my hometown boggles my fucking mind. People hate the movement so much despite it having absolutely no impact on their lives at all. There are pockets of libs, mostly transplants from urban areas. If your family has been in the area for three generations, though, then you're almost certainly a proud racist.
Where does the racism come from? I honestly don't know. Maybe part of it has to with being from being such a homogenous community that your whole experience of other races comes from movies and cable news and maybe that one time you took a trip to a city. Part of it could be the forces beyond their control that cram propaganda down their throats to protect financial interests. Part of it could be that the rural people in America feel their political agency decreasing more every year and hatred helps them feel powerful again. Part of it could be that people are just really, really shitty.
That said, I do think there is an untapped well of leftism in the boonies - but you have to know how to speak the right language. If you hold a community meeting in my hometown and say "hey comrades, wanna read Marx? Did you know China good? Who wants to do praxis with me? Mutual aid?" you will get ignored or punched. But if you say "people here don't have enough food to feed their kids and the Deep State/rich elite don't give a shit about us, so let's start a community garden and take money out of their pockets," I think people would be really into that. There are very few issues that can't be recast in terms of sticking it to the libs and the satanists. Q and Trump have given us a gift by showing us how to reach these people. It's not about the facts. It's about feeling good.
Yeah, I've living in rural GA most of my life and the only unions in my hometown were the ineffectual teacher's union and the cop one. This is way more my experience. Before Obama I think I'd gone a couple years since hearing the n-slur, but once Obama was elected that facade dropped and they've only been more radicalized under Trump. Tons of anti-government sentiment, even against Rs, but don't dare criticize the military and Dems are the worst because they'll abort your babies and steal your guns.
Grew up in literal cornfields and hay baling TX. Lived in NYC for almpst a decade as well. Yeah, racism has some deep roots (culturally and physically) in lots of rural places but the actual values and sense of community people have (when the racism is not part of the equation) are leftist in practice.
Yeah I can't wait for governor hot wheels to turn APD into an occupying force and my family to think that's a cool and good thing.
Abbott really feels like he is an black horse for Trump successor. He presses all the right buttons and given four years, he could shape himself up well.
I dunno if the proto fascists would want a guy in a wheelchair. Besides that, Abbott has virtually no charisma (on camera, anyway), so I can't really imagine him whipping up a base like Trump does.
But who knows. He'll certainly try.
Reading this makes me realize how tricky a revolution would be. Basically we could get the cities, but the reactionaries will have the food which would pose such a massive problem.
