For me, it’s occasionally coming up when I listen to comedians. A year back I also heard a story about a white person who grew up poor, became financially stable with a good job, and then punched down and started calling other white people “white trash.”

To me it’s obvious this is poor-shaming. But I have a feeling it’s far more complex than that. I’m not even white and I feel degraded whenever I come across those words. I barely know what it means, but it breaks my heart anyways to hear.

  • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    36·
    2 months ago

    They are the lumpenproletariat. Marx wrote about them in the Communist Manifesto:

    The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

    Marx predicted frothingfash

    • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      The 1800’s were arguably (INarguably?) worse for the poor than today; it may sound like hyperbole for Marx to say society saw them as social scum, but science claimed that the poor and the mentally unwell needed to be killed or sterilized off for the sake of society; we’re talking about the era that birthed eugenics.

      Conditions today are less drastic, but it doesn’t help that the poor and the mentally unwell have been demonized even today.

      I’d say there’s a combination of this and the mentality mentioned in that (Steinbeck?) quote (paraphrasing cause I don’t remember it word for word): “socialism never took off in America because people envisioned themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” at play.