White leftists are so insufferable, racist, woman-hating, and unable to understand nuance that they think a little girl from a small island in the Caribbean who was born to a single mother who had to work 3 jobs to keep their family afloat, making her dreams come true and eventually becoming a billionaire by making the worlds most shade-inclusive makeup company is the same as some white dude inheriting his fathers slave-run blood diamond mine wealth and becoming the worlds richest man via his own greed and incapability to create anything that will actually help humanity. Really?

Solidarity: a Curious Cat Response

Someone in the comments asked for the full text, so here it is:

Hey, my name’s Bemundolack. If you follow me on social media, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been busy lately. I was at a Trans Day of Visibility even that got attacked by neo-confederates. I'm had to look for a new place to live because I got evicted. I’m trying to organize positive praxis with my comrades. It’s a busy time. But I always appreciate getting CuriousCat questions. It usually takes my mind off things and makes me reason through an answer. I have a habit of writing novel-length answers to fairly simple questions. I recently got a question that kind of feeds into what’s been happening in my life, though, so I thought I’d make a video response. -clears throat-

“I do want to learn, I just notice the ones who cry loudest for socialism are the ones who didn't do well in life. I know school doesn't mean everything, I just find it hard to feel sorry for someone who had missed their opportunity because they picked drugs and booze. For people who failed, of course socialism is beneficial to them. I legit dont mind helping those with born diseases or disabilities. But I feel very iffy giving money to druggies. I'm not saying drug addicts dont deserve help, but iono, they seem lower on the order of people who need help.”

Let's examine some of the assumptions under this question. Whenever you ask something like this, you’re basing it on a set of premises that build a world-view. In this case, I think the asker has some bad premises. If people “pick drugs and booze” instead of choosing to be successful, then they should not have the same material benefits that people who choose success should have. That’s the first underlying logical thread that I see.  

So let's first look at why people "pick drugs and booze." One of the primary reasons people abuse drugs is a form of self-medication. People who don't have access to healthcare, especially mental healthcare, may turn to alcohol and opiates to treat various health problems. If a therapist is $200 per session and alcohol is $1.50 for a 40oz, the path of least resistance when you're feeling suicidal is obvious. That's where people's first drink comes from. And a culture where that is the path of least resistance for everyone creates peer pressure to participate in alcohol consumption. Addiction and trauma tend to be intergenerational, especially in families with a background of intergenerational poverty. Alcohol is more heavily advertised in poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities. Those communities tend to be poorer because of a history of things like redlining, rent discrimination, Jim Crow/segregation, gentrification, and mass migration caused by US imperialism. Everyone who is born is born at the raw edge of a set of material conditions with a history of how they arose, and a limited scope for the continuation of that path based on current material conditions, whether that's good or bad. People don't usually start opiates with IV drug use, they usually start because they were overprescribed opiates, or because they were normally prescribed opiates but have a family history of addiction that may be genetically linked, or because they were born in the circumstances described above and were pressured to accelerate their addictive behavior because of sheer cultural momentum. People don't wake up in the morning and say, "Damn, I currently have all my needs met, but I would like to be dependent on a substance and jeopardize my position on the hierarchy of needs." People usually become addicted out of an effort to meet some unmet need.

Even rich people. Even capitalists. Marx's theory of alienation talks about how the working class is fundamentally alienated from our labor, each other, and ourselves. But that must be doubly so for the capitalist class, in some ways. If your needs are met via the exploitation of other people's labor, that is fundamentally alienating. The working class is alienated by the mode of production, the capitalist class are the agents of the mode of production. If you work is managing other people’s labor, then your work is to alienate yourself. I think that's why rich people suffer from addiction, too, and why they all turn out to be artists when they recover (because they can afford to recover because they have health insurance and can go to rehab, poor people just die). Art is (usually) labor that fundamentally serves no one other than the artist, and then secondarily serves their audience. It's labor that we're not alienated from, and it connects us to other people.

This video by Innuendo Studios illustrates the inherent problem with this question: hierarchy. Hierarchy clip

So far, my answer to “If people choose drugs over success, they shouldn’t have the same things as successful people” has been “People don’t choose drugs in the way that you’re thinking, there’s an element of economic coercion and social momentum.” But there’s another thing that I would like to point out: prioritizing the needs of the “deserving” over the needs of addicts or the “undeserving” is an unjustified hierarchy when scarcity is manufactured for profit. We have enough food, shelter, clothing, and other things to meet the basic needs of everyone, at least where I live. We have such a surplus that food gets thrown away, the dumpsters locked and monitored with cameras so that hungry people can’t access their basic needs for free. Houses remain empty as investor properties, helping to raise the rents around them and make money for people who already have incredible amounts of money, while people sleep on the street and get rounded up by cops just for existing in public. We currently, right now, prioritize the greed of people whose needs are met to an excess that we can never dream of over people who are starving and dying of exposure.

Socialism is NOT about giving people money. Socialism, at least the type that I’m a proponent of, is about eliminating money as a system for distributing resources. It’s about changing the nature of work so that our work affects our material conditions directly instead of giving us a wage to pay for our material needs. It’s about abolishing the system that causes people to live in luxury while others starve.  

I don’t want to place myself above anyone else on a hierarchy. I want there to not be a hierarchy. The idea isn’t to make the owners and bosses into underlings, and turn the underlings into bosses and owners. It’s to get rid of the ideas of bosses, underlings, and owners. We don’t need people to occupy those roles to have a functional life together as humans.  Our hierarchical systems are inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and unnecessary. And if you feel like you need police to tell you not to murder people, and you need a boss to tell you to do something with your time that meets your needs, and you need a landlord to allow you to live in your home, then... Maybe you’ve got some internal soul searching to do.  

The people that attacked us on TDoV and the type of person who would send me this message would probably both say that they value freedom, but how can you have freedom when you’re constrained by a rigid hierarchy? When you’re alienated from those around you because you’re dead scared of them rising above you, or because you’ve got to do everything you can to rise above them? Are you free when even the idea of real liberation makes you cling fearfully to the bars of your cage?

Specifically referring to the Curious Cat question, we should give alcoholics and addicts what they need because the liberation of others around us is a vehicle for our own liberation. You’re not expected to break yourself out of the hierarchy single-handedly. Anything you can do to meet people’s needs when they don’t “deserve” it is subversive to the hierarchy. It connects you to other people in a way that allows you to work together to free each other. We call that solidarity.  

We need to have solidarity with people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol because we are all in the working class. The vast majority of us will never be capitalists; that is, people who own private property, the means of production, or a significant amount of wealth. We need to have solidarity with people who are addicted or homeless or living in poverty because that could be most of us in just a short amount of time if something went wrong. A mentality that says, “Well, I’ve got everything I need, why should I care about others?” isn’t just cruel, it puts you at risk. If you’re willing to sacrifice someone else’s wellbeing for your comfort, then your wellbeing is subject to forfeit as well.  

Capitalists don’t care about you. Capitalists care about themselves and their profit and their property. If you want them to care about you, you have to threaten one of those things, and we are no threat to capitalism as isolated individuals. Solidarity is power. Solidarity is liberation. Solidarity is life. We need each other, because alone, we are powerless. Alienation is death.

If you’ve watched this entire video, thank you very much. I know this was short, but now I’m a little more stable, so I should be able to put out more content. If you wanna follow me elsewhere on the internet, I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and Curious Cat @ Bemundolack. If you’d like to support me, you can like this video, subscribe to my channel, and consider supporting me on either ko-fi at ko-fi.com/bemundolack or on patreon at patreon.com/bemundolack. I really have to thank my patrons this time around. I’ve been in a very precarious financial situation, and I couldn’t have made it through without you. Your support actually does mean a lot to me. Special thanks to the following patrons: