Permanently Deleted
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).
I don’t recall glorifying being nice because of being precarious. I, once again, never used the words “should be” so I don’t know where you’re getting that from, or why you seem to think that I’m making a moralistic argument, which I am not. Please show me where in my argument I made a moralistic claim.
“Can’t afford to be nice” what does that even mean? Being nice literally costs nothing.
