So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I’ve spent more than a few hours chatting with “the guys,” and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I’m extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the “good” ones that provide their treats. (They’re also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we “really needed” a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has “made some money” through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA’s future (and climate change) and has said that he’ll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It’s wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that’s a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.
What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from “collectivist” to “individualist.” Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers’ political views much easier to understand. They’re individualists. They don’t like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they’re happy to be rich (at everyone else’s expense) and to have the same police protect them.
As an aside, I’ve been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you’ll see that I’m a communist, which means that it’s impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I’m writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there’s so much money in this field and I’d like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There’s tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it’s more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I’m interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
I hate the “collectivist” vs “individualist” framing, it’s so loaded towards “individualism” when what people usually mean is atomization, meanwhile us so-called collectivists don’t as the myth goes, believe in submitting one’s individual interests to the Greater Good of The Collective, we believe that most people have most of their interests in common with other people and should work together to pursue those interests rather than against each other. Because of that, I prefer the framing that is loaded the other way of “pro-social” vs “anti-social”. The people you describe are significantly anti-social and disliking individual corporations has no bearing on that.
It’s a terrible framework that was introduced by libertarians, the original liberals and monarchists understood that we inherently live in a collective society, the question is where do your laws and authority, and therefore freedoms, derive from?
Do they come from God or are they independent from that concept? If they do come from God, who then embodies God’s authority on earth? If they do not, then where does ethical authority come from? Can authority ethical at all? If authority is inherent what is then the ‘most’ ethical system?
The original ‘rights of individuals’ guys believed in those principles because they believed it was for the benefit of the collective, individual rights were not considered to be opposing moral aims because it was understood that exploitation of your fellow man is not only bad for the trust within the collective society, but it was bad for the individual as well because they still lived within that collective society.
The issue is that we now live in an era where technology and higher levels of concentrated wealth has allowed a larger number of people than ever to completely remove themselves from living in society, and become.the Randian individualists that the libertarians envisioned. But unlike Rand’s protagonists, they do not simply remove themselves from the equation, they then additionally seek to influence society so we must all be like them, either exploiters or exploited. What they don’t realize is that by doing this weakening of the collective, they are weakening the very social fabric that their power rests on.