It's true, but if we do manage to mostly equalize those (and in an ideal world they would be!), it will really sharpen the criticism of the top because there will be nothing left to divide us.
Ignoring class divisions and real-world material conditions while we get rich and kibbitz about trivialities is the whole point, you can't run out of trivialities.
Spot on. I'd add... you can't run out of irrelevant trivialities.
Often though today, the things mentioned are not only trivial (not having any meaningful effect) but also irrelevant (in that the causal relationship hypothesized is extremely strained if not non-existent).
Right now the US is so divided and there's no strong left coalition to make demands. I feel we are in a nascent rebuilding phase where we have to knit together groups and build groups from unorganized elements. My current thinking is that these are issues people care about, so we should help them and explicitly link them into economic class struggle so that the nascent coalitions build towards something.
People that engage in the movements in any capacity AND talk with class conscious activists become more radical over time. Participation in solely liberal movements can do it too, but mostly to the point where the people participate feel something is missing as the liberal demands always undershoot the problem. They need to read and talk to socialists, and socialists need to listen more than they talk in those conversations.
My ire is for the tech 'activists' who spend their time deciding which innocent turns of phrase should be banned or which marvel movies needed more representation.
I've been slacking recently because of my fear of COVID-19, but previously I'd been doing community and workplace organizing. The real world is the only place that will actually improve things. The pandemic is a real bummer.
The condition of the capitalist system is declining and more people are feeling it. By removing things the elites can point to, we narrow their ability to navigate.
The right wing is turning to conspiracy and nationalism as they usually do. However, they are the minority of the country (the friends and family of the ownership class is necessarily smaller than the prolaterians), they just have the ability to do a LOT of damage.
The key is for the working class right wing, these ideas are often against their material interest in either the short or long term and so they are a softer core that can be peeled away. Probably not with direct appeals, but by substantive action.
Only about 30-40% of the country are convicted right wingers, somewhere between a minority and a super-minority of the population, and a reasonable fraction (guessing 5-10%) of them would be peeled away by a positive material change in their circumstances by a re-distributive economic policy.
I spent just a few seconds looking at photos of 1960’s police brutality photos on Google and see white people in most of them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+pr...
Good time to also point out that conservative voters make up something like 24-25% of the population and liberal voters roughly the same. Half the population doesn’t vote in general though the numbers are higher for presidential elections than your average election.
EDIT: Looking at some side-by-sides with the George Floyd protests, it seems apparent to me that while there were some non-black participants in the 1960s, the proportion of them significantly increased.
https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=is...