Please stop falling for efforts to divide the working class.
Amy such efforts should immediately be viewed as suspicious. The divide is not old vs young, or white vs black, or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class.
Boomers grew up in a very tiny slice of global history where the working class actually got improvements in their material conditions, so it is hard for them to understand the struggles of people before or after… but they are being ground down by capitalism the same as the rest of us.
Your comrades at work may not understand the importance of unions or collective action, but they are still your comrades. Your grandmother may not realize that all of her extra productivity went to make billionaires richer, but she is still your comrade.
Thank you for saying this. One of my posts where I tried to express similar things got voted down to the extreme, lol.
The moment right after WWII was a very unique period of time. Virtually every other country had their manufacturing decimated and we were about the only ones left. Labor unions were strong, taxation was not so regressive (top rate in the 90s) as now, etc.
And the boomers were born into that environment. And they were huge in numbers, too. So they had outsized influence and were probably given more of a chance at the lower and middle class levels than many generations before or since (though new numbers show that maybe Gen Z and Millennials have surpassed everyone). Probably as a general rule. But also, during their youth, many of them agitated for making things better. So I just don’t understand why an entire generation (even though I lived in their shadow my entire life - believe me, Gen X are the OGs when it comes to resenting boomers - we resented a lot of them very much long before it became a mainstream media hit by pitting Gen Y against the boomers decades later) can be trashed like that, just en masse. It is rather absurd and is hardly a complete picture.
They also had a lot of struggles and not all financial, either. If someone makes blanket statements about how all of boomers had it better than everyone since, well, that’s rather silly, since I bet if you look at the typical experience of a Black boomer as contrasted with a typical Black person of later generations it might be a completely inverted situation. Same for LGBTQ. Same for women. If you know any boomer women, ask them about something simple like getting a credit card. Or being allowed entry into college.
It is genuinely difficult not to hate them for it. But you need to keep telling yourself that they’re victims to propaganda from media and their upbringing. It’s hard to overcome that.
There’s a quote from a Heinlein book where he talks about how Communists can only exist in places where there are real, not imagined, ills that are not being addressed, and I feel like something similar applies for Trumpists. Their lives have gone wrong somehow, likely driven by forces beyond their control, and they’ve been promised easy answers by a vile con game. I don’t appreciate that they got hoodwinked, but I can understand how it happened.
There are plenty of people that don’t consider themselves poor or who most people would not consider poor who are still in the labor class. If you produce value more than extract value from ownership then you are labor class.
There are plenty of people that don’t consider themselves poor
That doesn’t make them right. That just makes them less poor than those that are dirt poor.
If you’re not floating around on a yacht then you’re comparatively poor. They can afford things these so called rich people you talk about could never afford.
Just because theyre not “right” doesn’t mean this person doesn’t have a point; when you use the word poor, lots of people can’t or wont identify that way.
I’m in agreement with you generally, and I have made the same argument as you before. But people wont get this, they wont hear your argument because theyre too busy feeling like youre ridiculous for calling them poor. The sheer magnitude of wealth disparity is not well understood by your average joe.
The other commenter is offering more precise wording thats less likely to be understood wrong.
If I want to teach you to cook, but we can’t move on from whether its called a “spatula” or a “flipper”, nobody is learning anything.
Please stop falling for efforts to divide the working class.
Amy such efforts should immediately be viewed as suspicious. The divide is not old vs young, or white vs black, or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class.
Boomers grew up in a very tiny slice of global history where the working class actually got improvements in their material conditions, so it is hard for them to understand the struggles of people before or after… but they are being ground down by capitalism the same as the rest of us.
Your comrades at work may not understand the importance of unions or collective action, but they are still your comrades. Your grandmother may not realize that all of her extra productivity went to make billionaires richer, but she is still your comrade.
Thank you for saying this. One of my posts where I tried to express similar things got voted down to the extreme, lol.
The moment right after WWII was a very unique period of time. Virtually every other country had their manufacturing decimated and we were about the only ones left. Labor unions were strong, taxation was not so regressive (top rate in the 90s) as now, etc.
And the boomers were born into that environment. And they were huge in numbers, too. So they had outsized influence and were probably given more of a chance at the lower and middle class levels than many generations before or since (though new numbers show that maybe Gen Z and Millennials have surpassed everyone). Probably as a general rule. But also, during their youth, many of them agitated for making things better. So I just don’t understand why an entire generation (even though I lived in their shadow my entire life - believe me, Gen X are the OGs when it comes to resenting boomers - we resented a lot of them very much long before it became a mainstream media hit by pitting Gen Y against the boomers decades later) can be trashed like that, just en masse. It is rather absurd and is hardly a complete picture.
They also had a lot of struggles and not all financial, either. If someone makes blanket statements about how all of boomers had it better than everyone since, well, that’s rather silly, since I bet if you look at the typical experience of a Black boomer as contrasted with a typical Black person of later generations it might be a completely inverted situation. Same for LGBTQ. Same for women. If you know any boomer women, ask them about something simple like getting a credit card. Or being allowed entry into college.
All my coworkers voted R. It’s really, really hard to consider them allies in any sense.
It is genuinely difficult not to hate them for it. But you need to keep telling yourself that they’re victims to propaganda from media and their upbringing. It’s hard to overcome that.
There’s a quote from a Heinlein book where he talks about how Communists can only exist in places where there are real, not imagined, ills that are not being addressed, and I feel like something similar applies for Trumpists. Their lives have gone wrong somehow, likely driven by forces beyond their control, and they’ve been promised easy answers by a vile con game. I don’t appreciate that they got hoodwinked, but I can understand how it happened.
And men under 30 voted for Trump by 16 points[1]. This is NOT old vs. young.
[1] https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-gender-and-age-analysis-of-2024-election-results/
isn’t it fucking weird? I’ve been so disassociated for weeks now, getting some things done but it’s very hard.
Just another fancy way of saying rich vs poor. The difference is the poors don’t realize they are in a war.
There are plenty of people that don’t consider themselves poor or who most people would not consider poor who are still in the labor class. If you produce value more than extract value from ownership then you are labor class.
Most poor people don’t consider themselves poor because it is considered a terrible thing to be poor.
That doesn’t make them right. That just makes them less poor than those that are dirt poor.
If you’re not floating around on a yacht then you’re comparatively poor. They can afford things these so called rich people you talk about could never afford.
Just because theyre not “right” doesn’t mean this person doesn’t have a point; when you use the word poor, lots of people can’t or wont identify that way.
I’m in agreement with you generally, and I have made the same argument as you before. But people wont get this, they wont hear your argument because theyre too busy feeling like youre ridiculous for calling them poor. The sheer magnitude of wealth disparity is not well understood by your average joe.
The other commenter is offering more precise wording thats less likely to be understood wrong.
If I want to teach you to cook, but we can’t move on from whether its called a “spatula” or a “flipper”, nobody is learning anything.
My grandparents aren’t comrades. They’re dead.