“Shoplifting isn’t a real political strategy” is the oft repeated refrain of some socialist who has a strategy consisting entirely of making fun of “identity politics” on Substack and jerking themself off to Zohran videos. I actually watched the video of Tolentino and Piker. They argue basically repeat the same boring adages of the online left critiquing them. If you scream about unions for hours on podcasts and Substack, it doesn’t make them materialize out of thin air. It’s always some middle class person with a nice professional class job telling people what they ought to do. But these people are always unwilling to organize that Whole Foods or Amazon warehouse themselves. You don’t want to do those shitty jobs cause they suck to work at and organize. I’ve worked at a warehouse. They are terrible places to be. Most workers don’t want to stay there and organize them. They want to get another type of job or ascend into management. We live in a service economy, it is materially much more difficult to organize workers in the workplace than when there were a bunch of big factories. It’s all nostalgia for the 20th century labor movement which is gone. The conditions are not the same. It’s very easy to talk about these things in the abstract until you’re developing back problems in your early 20s from carrying packages. We’re all lost in the wilderness. If your solution worked, we wouldn’t be arguing. People been saying “we need to elect socialists” and “we need to rebuild the labor movement” for decades. It’s funny how things continue to worsen for workers despite the smart strategies of the socialists. I’m not saying I have the answers at all, but being clear-eyed about that is something the self appointed vanguard doesn’t have.