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Notes -
Do men and women political radicalization work differently?
Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born; a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means (they are too poor or too isolated by the access to political power, and they revolt by necessity) decide to adopt countercultural ideologies, often violent and revolutionary, in order to destroy the status quo and access the means of power.
But what if our model is obsolete, because we applied it to men and masculinity?
Being a middle-upper class European man, I have a lot of access, both personal and social, to my peers and to what they think. Last day, an homicide made by a men towards his girlfriend happened in Italy, and an enormous cultural war has started with all the related news (including the sister of the victim advocating a "cultural revolution", shame campaign by the media, storms of social media posts by women, and the "fascist" right-wing government immediately folding, promising some kind of introduction of sexual (ergo lgbt) education in the schools).
Well, the model of radicalization that I observed is the following; young, often upper-middle class women with no material problems and often with prestigious (but not high-earning) jobs adopting the position of intersectional or radical feminism in few days, moving quite a lot the Overton window to the left. From this, the following observations I gathered;
Women's political radicalization happen in different echo-chambers compared to the men's ones. While men's radicalization happens because of lack of material means, in women's case it looks like the more they happen to be privileged, the more they radicalize. As if material means have no matter for their well being, and the high status position is the source, not the solution, for their growing radicalization.
Could be that the de-materialization of post-Marxist politics happened because women are anti-materialists themselves and do not care about all this stuff? Okay all the discourses on post-industrialization, post-marxism, Foucault or whatever, but I do not think that, politically speaking, women cares at all about the well being of their societies at large.
Cultural-war-speaking, another demonstration that there is no opposition to the women's tears and resentement in Western Society, and we have still not produced the necessary antibodies to resist them. Far left organisations and ideologies have it far too easy, because they are free to propagandize using traditional medias and social network as an instrument of expansion.
A lot of normie women fell in the vortex of radicalizations. But unlike real radicalized womens, if you speak to them personally, they will not strike back at you. A distinction still exist between the mentally-ill woman and the woman who is only pushed by social media and social pressure to act.
And that I am lucky to have a girlfriend that does not give a damn about social medias at large.
I think you touch on a huge number of interesting questions in this post.
My view on why 'material' (ie 'orthodox marxist'; economic) socialist views have declined is that the average quality of life for the 'urban proletariat' is vastly higher than it was at the high point of communism. Especially if you look at the richest, most industrialized countries (where Marx predicted the revolution would happen first), ie. Germany, the UK, the US, the 'high point' for massively popular radical leftism was 1880-1930. Even by the mid-1930s in the UK (I choose because Germany saw democracy end in that time, while the US had a weird double dip recession due to extremely stupid policy by FDR) newfound prosperity had marginalized the truly radical left, which had its last great moment in the general strike of 1926.
You just can't compare the 'material conditions' of a miner in Lancashire in 1905, or a worker in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1890, to the conditions of a modern 'American proletarian', like a nurse, a content marketing manager, a mid-level employee of the local municipal government, or even a skilled blue collar worker like a modern steel industry worker. In 2010 pay for a fresh miner, in a huge recession, right out of high school was $70,000 a year in West Virginia. Still tough work, but much more than many 'white collar' jobs paid at that time fresh out of college (if you could get one at all), and in a state with a low cost of living.
This has happened every six months since the invention of social media, and nothing changes. As the old quip goes,
Lesbian separatism failed for a reason (well, many reasons, but one primary reason); women like men too much to commit.
Well - you actually can. If one thing they all have in common is that their only source of income is their wage/salary i.e. their own labour is their only means of survival, and they have (practically) no savings, no inherited wealth, no silver, no gold, no stocks, no livestock, own no land, and don't own any real estate besides (maybe) the one they live in, then yes, objectively speaking, according to socialist terminology, they are the proletariat. Whether they use smartphones or not, what color their collars are, whether they perform physical labour or not, is of no importance.
Marxist definition has a big 19th century assumption that the proletariat actually produces the material goods keeping the society alive and can threaten the existence of the entire system if they simply stopped.
This largely doesn’t hold anymore since most of the manufacturing is shipped to a myriad of third world countries who are willing to use extreme coercion on their workers (which was common in turn of century western countries as well and eventually got an ideological banner under European fascism) to keep the production going. If the workers of a manufacturing country somehow gets the upper hand, the country is cut out of the international trade system and replaced by one of 50 other willing nations.
Western proletariat in this system still technically fit the Marxist definition but not really. They are by and large service workers who don’t hold such power because usually they don’t make anything really crucial to the functioning of the economy. Their role is not to produce but to manage some steps of the production happening abroad, and to serve the wealthy few who got rich from being adjacent to offshoring. Their strikes can hardly cause a nuisance and are easily broken.
Labour immigration acting as inverse offshoring also has a strong effect here. Many lower level jobs are held by foreigners who don’t even have citizenship rights and are glad for the opportunity. They will gladly act as strike breakers.
So no, this isn’t really what the word proletariat was meant to apply to.
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