/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

An image beloved of both the internet right and the left. The worker. "Imagine going up to a worker", they say, "and saying what you've just said." Often they are specific: The steelworker, the tired coal miner, the teamster, etc. But one must ask: what does the worker of today look like?

This figure is everywhere, watching over us. We like this idea of the worker, he is pleasing to have around. He works a real job, a job that produces things. There is unfortunately a catch: A soldier is closer to a representation of the average western worker than he is. (Some quick numbers: US coal mines employ about 50,000 people. The US military has 480,000 soldiers.) No, if you want an image of the average worker today, you're looking at the other pictures. People with smartphones and Twitter accounts. People who'll talk your ears off about films, not good films like Blue Collar (1978), films like Black Widow (2021), which they don't even watch in photogenic cinemas - no, they watch them in bed on their laptops, or perhaps if they're still students then with a HDMI cable awkwardly slung from a precariously balanced MacBook Pro in the middle of their shared flats. They're not the people you wish were your dad, they're the people you went to school if you're not underaged. A disproportionate number of them have degrees. Or perhaps they're the old people, practically invisible to you now. The middle aged ones who sit watching daytime television. The unemployed. The people who get in your way at the supermarket, the people who sit beside you on the bus when you'd really rather be left alone listening to your spotify playlist.
They are not, by and large, "aesthetic". There is no gigantic repertoire of social realist art to look on that will make you appreciate the low paid social worker in her office tabbing through an excel sheet of case-work. No obvious visible end product from the care workers looking after forgotten retirees. Some think "after the revolution, I will be a miner", but who thinks "after the revolution, I will work in the [former] amazon warehouse."? And it is this force, this lack of a clear image in one's mind that is so pernicious. Without a clear image of the modern working class, people quickly fall back to their file photo - the working class of the days before everyone had a colour television.

So what? "Well", you think "First of all I object to your characterization, you haven't specifically highlighted…" yeah, great. That's not relevant. Here's what's relevant: If you're marketing anything from Anti-Aircraft Guns to Pepsi to Zimbabwean holidays, you've got to know your target market. Socialists rarely do. /leftypol/ in particular has a glaring vulnerability in that it's also interlinked with imageboard culture, which has its own set of norms which are often clashing and contradictory. It's not uncommon on /tech/ to see, for example: We are leftists, we love the workers, and yet we hate 'normalfa–normies!'' - bad news! You're talking about the same people! Put the "um actually" screencap away: It's the same people! Your lot just don't know how to market to them!
Even those socialists who aren't naive enough to fall into the trap of "What would THE WORKERS think of this?" often fall into it by stealth when trying to advance their cause. It is surely a fact that communist parties have devoted more time fretting about how to make REAL socialism appealing to the relatively small number of unionized railway drivers than they have to finding a way to make it appealing to the much greater number of underemployed Tumblr users. That's something that will have to be resolved as a simple matter of fact, however much you might not like many of the groups that entails rallying together: You can't say "workers of the world unite!" in one breath, and then go "except the Tumblr users, the ones with bad taste in films, the ugly ones, the university educated, the deviants, the Windows users, the call centre workers, the Polish, the ones without a "real" job, the city dwellers, the unemployed, the country dwellers…." in the next.
No, if you want to lead the working class, the first thing you're going to need to do is get clear in your mind who actually composes it. Then you're going to have to remind yourself that your job is to rally them all together based on their common class interests.