The politics of fatshaming

Interesting times on the communist right.

Yep, I've decided to take the plunge. Since "left" and "right" have been dialectically stripped of their class relations, and since Haz came out swinging against the modern left at the recent CPI conference in Austin, the time is probably nigh for me to implement one of the ideas I've had on the backburner for a while, but held off on because I didn't figure people were ready for it: self-referencing as being on the "communist right." Also, other communists that I respect are referring to me as being on the right, so there's that.

These days, right and left do not seem to indicate one's position on the class war any longer, but one's position on the culture war. As far as the culture war goes, I'm really a centrist because I'm interested in egalitarianism, plain and simple. But as we've reviewed elsewhere, refusing to go along with every last jot and tittle of woke theology is cancellation fodder. So my centrism on the culture war reads as reactionary and right-wing to the anarcho-mallgoth ultras on the left. Since I'm not interested in organizing the petty bourgeoisie, this is not only fine, but ideal. Owning their hatred gives me an opportunity to talk to workers on the right, since I now have the hatred of pinkhairs in common with them. A lot of politics is just having something to talk about together, and now we can bond over hating liberals. Ergo, yes, in that non-economic sense, I am on the communist right.

Now, the communist right is a new thing in this country again. It's been here before, and it was inevitable that it would return. Communism getting into the hands of the actual working class inevitably results in right-wing communism, a based order. (That'd be a sick name for a book title; I call dibs, no jousting.) And as the communist right comes into its own, asserts its identity and its right to exist and its core values, cultural attitudes taken for granted on the modern left are being called into question.

We've seen this elsewhere, with the transphobic dogwhistling of the Workers' Party of Britain. (Dogwhistling, because Galloway has worked and is currently working alongside trans and queer comrades to advance the class war, but has chosen this particular form of messaging to wedge some Labour voters away from Labour.) And now, we're seeing it with fatshaming.

Liberals have probably gone too far on the issue, making the same mistake that some trans extremists have: saying anyone who isn't inherently attracted to fat people is bigoted. This is incorrect, on the same grounds as gay people not being attracted to the opposite sex making them bigots would be incorrect. In both the trans and fat rights extremist cases, it's the scorn of the jilted masquerading as theory. But nobody owns your libido, or has the right to tell you that you must be attracted to them. Insisting that they do is a bigotry all its own, a classist bigotry of rich people unaccustomed to being told "no" and assuming it must be a new form of oppression.

All the same, the backlash has formed. It seems to have come first through a backlash to other liberal cultural nostrums, like polyamory (see pic related). And to a degree, this backlash has a point. Fetishizing weird familial structures that are alien to the workers, and saying that they're what the left stands for, is bad praxis. Supporting the creation of child-rearing families with two parents is good praxis; strong multigenerational families all living under the same roof is also good praxis. Those child-rearing families are the fundamental building blocks of society, even if you personally have gripes, valid or otherwise, about the one you grew up in. The left has lost sight of all of that, and to a degree the communist right is a necessary corrective to these trends.

This isn't to pick on polycules; I have friends in two different polycules. I also have been fired from a job because I wouldn't play around with my boss' polycule, so I have mixed feelings on the matter. But I think it's not a controversial statement to make that the left shouldn't be founded on pushing such arrangements. What consenting adults do on their own time is their own matter, so long as nobody's being lied to and nobody's being hurt. Loyal monogamy is the most reliable form to guarantee all those conditions are met, but it's not the only possible one. The eternal cultural centrist, I seek to neither thwart or advance the Boomers' sexual revolution. It exists, it's not going away, but it's old enough that we can and should draw lessons from it and improve society with the knowledge we gain from those lessons.

Well, the fat acceptance revolution is nowhere near as old, and unlike the sexual revolution, it doesn't have any useful historical analogues because the end of famine is only truly possible under a society operating out of social democracy or communism. So there are no widespread mass-based events in history where the entire working class of several nations gained weight; history since 1945 is providing us the first natural experiment to go on because World War II cemented social democracy throughout the industrialized world. But the politics of fat are nonetheless older than that, and like any other thing with a material existence in the world, it can and should be class analyzed.

I initially tried to shy away from doing this, because of my proximity to the subject. No, I'm not fat; but most of my exes are, and I thought and think that every single one of them was physically beautiful. I've lost my temper more than once insisting on the basic humanity of the people I love towards trolls and hateful, spiteful liberal bullies. I was in no hurry to repeat the experience with people who are, in every other respect, on my team in regards to the most important issue of our times, ending American imperialism. But I couldn't stay silent. So I posted the following on Facebook:

Most of my exes have been big women. I'm going to excuse myself from the current of fatshaming going around parts of the left right now.

Not looking to pick a fight about it either; if you're against the empire, I want to work with you. But I'm also not obligated to agree with everything you think, either.

I was kinda hoping that'd be that. Maybe since I didn't post anything inflammatory in long discussion threads where it was being debated, it would be silently noted by everyone, some people who agree would leave positive reaccs, and everyone would call it a day. Well... not quite. Nobody was disrespectful, which is a solid improvement on the arguments I've had on the topic with liberals. But a couple people did drop by to share their opinions. So I decided to elaborate by posting the following:

I led off the post saying I didn't want to pick a fight about it. Simply stating my position is too much, I guess, so I might as well state it in full. Still not interested in discussing it, but I feel obligated now. Honestly I wish this whole topic would just go away.

Being healthy as a revolutionary is all well and good, but what's meant by fatshaming isn't health promotion, but bourgeois beauty standard policing. And that's a different matter entirely; that's letting enemy propaganda through the front door and teaching it to each other.

In these material conditions, we do all have an obligation to be healthy enough to fight the enemy, if it's in our power. But I went to college in a state where 75% of the economy is agriculture, and I can tell you, most of the people who pick your food are thicc, as the kids say. But they're also pretty healthy, because of all the manual labor, and probably in better shape than most of the people posting here. I mean, yes, there's a point where that's no longer true, but your average worker, who is fit enough to do their manual labor job, still falls afoul of these bourgeois beauty standards that are being promoted.

And what are those standards? Not thin enough to be healthy, but thin enough that there's no fat visible whatsoever. It's Calvinist morality applied to the body. Most human bodies are not naturally capable of such feats except in special circumstances. The bodies of workers, who cannot afford special diets and personal trainers and gym memberships, are especially not capable of passing through this liberal form. Therefore, as a test unpassable in its completeness to the majority of the working class, it is a modern-day cultural poll tax or literacy test that only serves to culturally disenfranchise the workers.

Were the class fat politics always arranged in this way? No, it only really emerged after the widespread adoption of social democracy globally after 1945 made it possible to support such diets for the masses. Before that, having enough food to get fat was a feat only the bourgeoisie were capable of, and thinness was mocked by the bourgeoisie as a class weapon against the workers. And because the dialectic reversed this with our changing material conditions, the bourgeoisie can now use this history of their own wicked class oppression against the workers anew, by confusing the historical class relations behind these positions and associating the proletariat with their bourgeois ancestors' notions.

Look at the proletariat today, and look at how the "war on obesity" is mostly just an excuse for the most naked classism. Oh, look at the dumb ugly fat poors at the Walmart doing dumb ugly fat poor things! They are very dumb ugly fat poor. These are weaponized stereotypes that would be seen for what they are were it happening to an identity instead of a class.

That said, stereotypes exist for a reason. Scientists have discovered that the more stress exists in someone's life, the likelier they are to be attracted to larger partners. And who's the most stressed in our modern society? The working class. Therefore, in material conditions that allow it, they will tend to be a little thiccer on average. Sure, becoming bedbound Jerry Springer fodder is bad praxis, to put it mildly, but that's not what the working class being targeted by this propaganda is doing for the most part. They're just slightly larger because they're stressed. Unless you're gonna ban alcohol, cigarettes, and all drugs and extreme sports, this is the sort of measured risk we let adults take so long as it doesn't get in the way of anything ideologically important.

As someone who upholds the rights and interests of the working class, I must therefore stand against this bourgeois propaganda when pressed. I still didn't seek this fight; this isn't a conversation most people are prepared to have, because the bourgeois propaganda on this runs deep and these are usually the least productive conversations I ever have. But yes, although we must encourage everyone to be healthy enough to fight the bourgeoisie, we must also not let that encouragement itself become a weapon the bourgeoisie can lawyer against us, as they are so presently and expertly doing.

Also, comrade or no, anyone who talks shit about the looks of or concern trolls the health of anyone I date is done. No exceptions.

That seems to have been received thoughtfully; it didn't spawn any real disagreement and a couple people positively reacc'd. This is the kind of disagreement I want to see in our movement; I don't know if I changed anyone's minds, but we're all focused on what really matters and not cancelling each other over it. And the politics of fat doesn't really matter, unless it becomes an impediment to anti-imperialist action.

One final thought about the politics of fat, for after the end of capitalism. Sometimes people enjoy unhealthy things. What is a socialist government to do about that? A liberal government's typical reaction is to ban the unhealthy thing unless it's rich people doing it, which is the idea behind sin taxes. But we do have an example of a communist country, a heavily sanctioned and broke communist country even, dealing with this situation.

One of Cuba's main sources of foreign revenue is the export of cigars. Cuban cigars are world-famous for their quality, and notoriously hard to get in America outside of a few specialist shops in Florida. They are also, y'know, cigars, and will kill you.

When capitalist corporations like Philip Morris gleefully rake in billions killing their best customers, nobody could blame Cuba for taking a similar attitude towards their customers in capitalist nations. But that's not what they did. They directed a lot of research and development towards creating a vaccine for lung cancer instead. It works, it's widespread in Cuba itself, it's driven the incidence and mortality rates of lung cancer way down in Cuba itself. It's also illegal for Americans to get because our own government would rather us die than give a penny to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.

Well, if a communist country can develop better medicine to address the drawbacks of a popular but unhealthy pastime, surely a future communist government could do the same thing for fatness? Figure out some kind of way to cheaply address the health drawbacks of fatness so any workers who do go in that direction don't suffer for it, rather than baking Calvinist morality into our healthcare system as currently obtains? Seems like a future correct line to me, when we have the resources and the lack of anything better to do.