My post was too long so I had to post here: https://pastes.io/07p5nd9dxc
Edit: first correction to the paste, our trans community is represented far above the general population. Around 11% of our community is trans, while in the world only 1% of people are. I also only gave absolute numbers for some reason in the paste so here’s the percentage points: 10% trans women, 1% trans men, 7.7% nonbinary.
most of us are white (and live in Anglo America and West Europe)
This is disappointing comrades.
Do better.
looks around
tugs at collar
stands up
Awful lotta honkkkie crakkkers here… y’all should really work on fixing that.
(I didn’t take your comment personally, I just felt like responding, no hostility or antagonism meant nor recieved) The only way I could “do better” on that front is by moving out of here, and as tempting as that is, I have work to do to help those most in need here because our wealthy state refuses to.
Yup my original comment should be taken in jest.
Just do what you can.
I have hope in my Western comrades.
I’m not white. Don’t look at me.
Holy poopy we’re 48% non-heterosexual?! That was unexpected, it’s so good to see that our LGBTQ comrades feel so welcome here. 🥰
Them’s rookie numbers, gotta pump 'em up
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🫡
Wait, there’s another old person here???
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64 or aboveActually that’s wrong too, the question is specifically above 64, so at least 65.
Ok Noam we know it’s you, what’s your username? 👀
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You rang?
It has since been brought to my attention that there are other old people here besides me and the one that did the survey lol
Haha
10 users between 45-54, 2 users between 55-64, and 1 user above 64
Xi himself browses these forums, didn’t you know?
Evil CCPeepee propaganda! What do you mean we aren’t basement dwelling white guys in a Langley basement! You’re telling me there are WOMEN and MINORITIES here??? Unacceptable, the survey was manipulated! Fraud! /s
Choke on a salad!
What?
Err, I was referencing your username.
(It was a joke. Sorry…)
29% trans 🎉 and i forgot to reply lol my bad
we should probably do this either quarterly, or twice a year. people seem to enjoy knowing the demographics. Also, we need to find a survey service that isn’t shit.
My demographics post from a few years ago was hosted on strawpoll, and that site definitely shouldn’t be used. Though, perhaps the next time around that we do a demographics survey, we should include a write-in for ideology. If I remember the results, a large portion of Lemmygrad users back then were ML.
I’m using framaforms next time, it’s open source (although framaforms is the version hosted by the provider, open source != privacy) and allows up to 1000 survey responses, which hopefully we won’t get to yet.
Down the line we might look at hosting yakforms (the self-hosted framaforms) on ProleWiki as it’s interesting to us to host surveys once in a while, and there there are no limits to the responses or anything. Only downside is the question types are severely limited, you have most of the basic ones but no interesting more specific formats.
I am really into the whole surveying/statistics field. Is there anywhere dedicated to helping out with that for the future ones? Specially since after the 30th we’ll have a whole new influx of redditors.
I’ll keep you in mind for the next survey!
I completely missed this, would’ve bumped up the LGBTQ categories a bit more
I missed it too. The queer population is growing. 💪
we call this running on queer time. we are actually 99% queer but we all were striving to be fashionably late
Add me to the transwoman count. Thems rookie numbers!
Me too! Also non-white.
Finished reading through it, the results make sense, considering this is an english speaking community on a platform that still appeals to tech people mostly
Yeah, the culture here is very, err, tech-y.
On the class question (Which class are you a part of currently?), most of us predictably answered proletariat: a whopping 61%. The second most represented class is the labour aristocracy, again predictable considering most of us live in the imperial core (22.84%).
Interestingly enough, I am from Latin America, but from a labor aristocratic background. When I visted a friend in Europe, I noticed I had far better living standards than them
I have been thinking about this a lot, for many US-ians and Europeans who know Spanish or Portuguese and work from home, they could easily live comfortable lives in many Latin American countries. Even have public healthcare. I think it is a neat idea for any Imperial Core comrades who work in tech and want to have more time for communism.
You are not labor aristocratic and I wouldn’t trust the “living standards” too much; people have a weird conception of poverty and “middle strata” and how they actually live.
Yes, comrade, I am. I am the son of two doctors, a profession which is highly valued here in Brazil. My family earns enough not to go through economic grievances, so much so my mother is able to sustain a company just through her salary alone (which is a major drain in the family’s finances btw). So you could consider myself from a petty-bourgeois/labor aristocratic background, but more precisely labor aristocratic, since the family’s income does not come from the company, but from the wages they receive as doctors.
I… doubt that that comes as labor aristocrats.
Labor aristocrats are people that relish and are fine with the way things are and balk at revolution and fight for the bourgeoisie at every opportunity.
It doesn’t mean petit-bourgeois, for example. And you aren’t a labor aristocrat, I can tell.
are people that relish and are fine with the way things are and balk at revolution and fight for the bourgeoisie at every opportunity
Just because I come from a certain class, I am not obliged to defend the interests of my class background. There are some proletarians who also unconsciously defend the interests of the bourgeoisie because knowledge is not accessible, but this does not make them labor aristocrats nor anything close.
A labor aristocrat, and I don’t know if I got the close Leninian meaning of it, is simply well-off paid members of the working class, either because there’s great demand for their skills and few people doing it or a combination of both, or even through artificially inflated wages for certain functions. I think Lenin spoke of labor aristocracy in the context of imperialist war, but I think the category could very well apply to the internal composition of the working class, as well as the international division of labor. A British proletarian very well earns much more than a Brazilian proletarian, though with the European austerity measures and Russian sanctions this gap is becoming closer lol
There are obviously functions in bourgeois society which tends to be well paid: military generals, judges, police chiefs, senators, managerial and executive offices, etc. I don’t know if these could be considered labor aristocrats as well, but they do work, but of course they work in the interests of the bourgeoisie, they have meetings with bourgeois representatives, receive gifts, dinners, and all kinds of bribery to serve the interests of capital.
But apart from these, there are certain well paid members of the working class, who enjoy high salaries because of the demand for certain functions, such as (in some countries) doctors, lawyers, engineers, academic professors, etc. These are what could be considered labor aristocrats, because they very clearly tend to support the status quo and in many instances are even reactionary, with the possible exception of lawyers and academic professors, for different reasons. But, for instance, my two (doctor) parents are staunch supporters of the fascist Bolsonaro. This is very common among doctors in Brazil.
They also have an inclination of becoming petty-bourgeois through their small enterprises because they are able to concentrate a little bit of wealth. A small minority of those petty-bourgeois can become bourgeois themselves. For instance, I have a distant family member who is a bourgeois, and came from a labor aristocratic condition. He was an engineer working for Banco do Nordeste, and later accumulated capital and set up a construction business with his partner and some rich associates he got acquainted with through his work at bank.
A labor aristocrat is someone that has been successfuly played and paid off and they are not a class, as far as I’m concerned; they’re generally the thin layer of workers around the top, though not necessarily petit-bourgeous.
Look, you know yourself and your background more than I do, of course, so I won’t discuss this more, but if you are a communist and fight against capitalism and so on then I don’t think you really count as a “labor aristocrat” and I’m not sure if your background is really “labor aristocratic” but that’s just me.
I never said a labor aristocrat was a class in of it itself. You measure labor aristocracy in terms of how much someone is in favor of capitalism, a subjective measure, and I measure labor aristocracy in terms of how economically distant someone is from an average working person, a more objective measure.
It’s kind of the only measure that you can use, otherwise we’re just talking about different strata entirely.
One thing I didn’t note in the OP: this survey didn’t take activity into account. It’s possible that the people you interact most in a day on Lemmygrad do not fit in the majorities but the minorities, and the majority of users (white, cis men, etc) are lurkers.
Could add a question in the future survey about activity to see if this rings true.
The problem is the respondents themselves might not even know the answer to the question. What should we ask specifically? How much time do you spend on lemmygrad, how many comments you posted over the last 7 days?
“Do you post or do you want the liberals to win?”
I was thinking about the typical “hours in a week” question but I realise now that it won’t actually capture those who lurk and those who engage.
I guess the latter (amount of comments per week) would work but who actually keeps count on that. I wouldn’t even know what to choose if I were asked it.
Maybe just a simple yes/no question about being a lurker? Unsure if the results would be reliable/useful in any way though.
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In the case of counting comments, they can check their account. In the case of estimating how many hours they spend… I always have lemmygrad open somewhere and I check it routinely during the day, I legit have no idea how long I spend on it during the day
This was a lot of fun! I’m definitely up for another survey next year
Same, also I should probably become more active on here again lol it’s been a while
Damn, I didn’t do the survey. 😑
‘Twas interesting to read. Next time it might be nice to get some charts to visualize information. Also, it might be nice to allow multiple selections for the religion question so I could select both agnostic and Buddhist.
Yeah, as I was around halfway through writing this I realised holy shit this is a book. But it was too late to turn back.
Next time we might just publish the visualised data directly, these survey services do that for you automatically.
Google sheets can automatically graph data if you enter it in. Also maybe use Google forms because it has no limit to the amount of participants-- though it’s understandable if you don’t want to support corporatism.
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Labor aristocracy are proletariat still, just ones that are paid just well enough to have their interests (generally) align with the capitalists. For example, people who identify as “middle class” are labor aristocracy.
To learn more, I’d start with the source: Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this original context it’s used to explain how companies use superprofits extracted from exploited colonies to pay off the working class in the developed world enough to blunt class consciousness at home and suppress solidarity for workers abroad.
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Yeah it’s perfectly fine, labour aristocracy isn’t really a class in the Marxist sense but more of a shorthand to explain why some proletariat align themselves with the bourgeoisie instead of their actual class interests; they receive a share of the surplus value in some way, and this creates false consciousness.
We have this page on PW but it was written by the patsoc (purged) ex-admin: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
Honestly, the term “labor aristocracy” has a lot of flaws in the overall concept.
It’s like the term “lumpenproletariat” in that sense.
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This was fun and thank you for the write up! One of my favorite demographics read throughs I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy 😁
