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I’ll watch the movie if y’all promise to stop glorifying chuds.
“Can’t afford to be nice” what does that even mean? Being nice literally costs nothing. And when you’re at the bottom you can’t afford to be anything but nice - and that’s true in many different contexts. Gotta be nice to get tips. Gotta be nice to the higher ups at work (which is basically everyone) or you’ll get in trouble. Gotta be nice to your friends or you won’t have anyone to rely on, or anyone to hang out with (which is free entertainment, possibly free therapy, and makes work slightly less hellish). What, is it fucking, like, “Geez, I dunno if I can make rent this month, looks like I’ll have to cut my ‘not hating gay people’ budget?'”
There are some reasons why low-income people sometimes turn to chuddery but this take seems pretty shit. Also the whole thing of chuds being the poor downtrodden workers is mostly right wing propaganda, some are, but there’s plenty more that are comfortable enough to punch down and to think that the system works for them so everyone else must be lazy or stupid.
Edit: I don’t know why people are mad at me.
Edit 2: I’m halfway through the movie and OP’s take is still shit and I agree with everything I said here except that I’m also really bored and haven’t seen any socialist themes or anything like that and I don’t understand why this movie is such a sacred cow to you libs. I’m finishing just so I can say I did at this point 😕
Edit 3: Literally no one in the movie was a “reactionary chud” like OP was talking about. Screwing people over to get ahead isn’t the reason, or at least not the sole reason why reactionary chuds are bad. It’s clear that OP has an idealistic and naieve view of reactionary chuds and I was 100% right to call them out on it. As for the movie, which is a seperate thing largely unrelated to what my post was about, I honestly didn’t care for it. Hoes mad (x24).
This take is really bad, this take is the destination of Lasalles idealism, instead of our friend materialism.
To say :being nice costs nothing is very wrong. It acts as if manner alone and thought determine how you act and you can choose by will how to be. It is not based in material reality, not based in the physical world with laws of biology etc.
If you are precarious you struggle more, your safety isn’t guaranteed, you have to plan, to deny, your living situation is bad, it is more crowded, your bed isn’t as nice, your food isn’t as nice, you more likely have deficiency in vitamins, you have longer, more exhausting days, you have to travel longer and more exhaustingly through the city, you have less time to connect.
All this is ignored if you say being nice costs nothing.
Do you know when it is easy to be nice? When you have no material struggle, the conflict you are in doesn’t cost you anything material. Glorifying the relaxed calm person is not seldom part of classism (and a subtle discrimination in dating when you compare affluent rich kid with part office job to 50 hour minimum wage work week person).
That said not being in precarious relations will mean you have no or little connection to precarious relations and the people living in precarious situations. You therefore lack the ability to understand these struggles (excepts as categorial struggles).
Finally about the pieces I agree with.
Solidarity is the thing that connects us. If we are precarious we have to live in solidarity, there you find being support of others and ‘being nice’ in a way that matters and surpasses classisst ideas of manner and culture (eg how to sit at the table, which words to use, how to dress, having nice teeth).
Solidarity is not about liking each other though, but supporting each other, it has to be practical and it has to have material effect to be practical (sometimes called real) solidarity.
Parasite does show a lot of family /precarious workers solidarity (the family is actually a condensed lower working class).
But about the niceties, just tell me please how a person who is living in mold, whose cloth stink of it, who gets fumigated for lack of money, who gets all the shit from the canalisation in your house, who spends nights in large halls of people in the sane situation (symbolically and practically) should be as nice as me who now isn’t fearing to be evicted and has an own flat for a year now.
Being exhausted means you and your body have other goals and hiding them means you can’t be yourself, which means you have to play act. If you are exhausted you will just say stuff like: ‘I need to lay down a bit (and not necessarily inquire about the others day till you rested for the hour’.
Today we have enough resources on the world that none has to live like I described. With a united working class we can change the world and live 16 hour work weeks and have globally a better living standard if we produce and distribute for our needs, even better material living standard than the lower 1/4 of the US population. Once we achieved that let’s gladly talk about being nice towards each other, till then I accept solidarity instead.
But about the niceties, just tell me please how a person who is h living in mold, whose cloth stink of it, who gets fumigated for lack of money, who gets all the shit from the canalisation in your house, who spends nights in large halls of people in the sane situation (symbolically and practically) should be as nice as me who now isn’t fearing to be evicted and has an own flat for a year now.
“Should be?” Who said anything about “should be?” That person has to be as nice as you. Nicer, actually. You live alone, you don’t have to worry about being evicted, you can be an asshole to people and still be fine. What happens if the person you’re describing is an asshole to to all the other people they live with? Then they lose friendship and trust which are some of the only resources they still have.
Even if you want to argue that poor people are less nice due to shitty conditions, that’s not the same thing as saying that being nice “costs too much.” The act of being nice does not generally leave you worse off than you were before, and in many cases its the opposite. Meanwhile being a bigoted asshole pushes people away and gets you literally nothing. So like I said, there are valid arguments for why low income people sometimes turn to chuddery, but not being able to “afford” to not hate people is just dumb and not how anything works.
I think you have to differentiate more what you say, cause you mix up a lot. It is more than the interchangeability of ‘nice’ with ‘solidarity’ as I assumed first after your response.
The act of being nice does not generally leave you worse off than you were before
Is patently false if you are very tired, exhausted and overworked. There is a reason you have more small talk on the weekend with time, than at 4am buying your coffee from the night vendor on the way to your construction site.
Regarding the living situation :
You live alone,… you can be an asshole to people and still be fine.
Is true in that regard that capitalism gives you the power to feel separated from others as long as you pay your rent (so as long as you work /there is social system). This means I am cut from a part of social relations I was in before. Even though my building block is so shabby that I hear my left, my right, my upper, my lower neighbour and can understand their private chats and smell their cooking.
However let’s not glorify the need to act more in social relations if you are precarious (as I once was), cause often that isn’t about being nice, it is about living in solidarity. There is a difference. I also believe open personal interactions are very important and can be more essential here.
if you want to argue that poor people are less nice due to shitty conditions
I don’t argue poor people are less nice, I argue saying they should be nice if a fucked up liberal middle class take or ingrained tone argument that acts as is materialism is nothing.
To ignore material conditions is to be away from Marxism, from (scientific) understanding. It becomes a moralistic argument, those don’t fare well.
Calls for lived solidarity I gladly follow.
- Addendum:
Part of your first post do hold weight (they likely would hold more if you were a precarious worker), that as worker or formerly as woman (or society took as one) in marriage in the 1890s, you have to do emotional work (in the real term, not the reduced term of smiling at work) to survive (but also smile at work).
Bruh I didn’t say a single fucking thing about the movie except that I’d watch it.
Also the whole thing of chuds being the poor downtrodden workers is mostly right wing propaganda, some are, but there’s plenty more that are comfortable enough to punch down and to think that the system works for them so everyone else must be lazy or stupid
