Race War or Murdering Your Parents: A Left Debate

What are the liabilities of a lazy, violence-fetishizing generational warfare position, which ignores actual conditions on the ground in favor of rhetorical bombast? In case it isn’t clear:

It’s so easy to mistake cleavages in the working class as substantive capitalist antagonisms that you can jump right to race war in one easy step! After all, if you are “fighting the capitalist state” we can justify practically anything after the fact. Go for it. La historia te absolverá.

Some people will tell you it feels good to call other workers “old,” that threatening the meager resources of our cat-food-eating forebears draws on “affect.” They may even claim this is “material” to make it sound more like Marxism and less like bargain-basement Oedipalism. At the risk of getting too Godwin’s Law on you, there’s a historical precedent here. The Nazis explained Kristallnacht exactly the same way: as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, an embodied feeling of outrage. And, lest we forget, this country tried to base a Left movement off generational tension. It produced the baby boomers.

So a bit of advice to our comrades in the clownish Left. Next time you get pissed off at your parents, think a bit more objectively. If your parents are part of the bourgeoisie, then they might indeed be the enemy. But then again, you might be too. Don’t expect the Left to help you claim your inheritance early.