I’ve heard the term here too, though a more common term here is ‘armchair socialist’ and that strikes a lot closer to the point: an armchair socialist is someone who talks about socialism but never does anything but talk about it (maybe one protest a year if it is organized by the right people), who prides themselves on being a socialist but also wants you to know that socialists can be civilized and well-sproken and educated (as if that doesn’t shit on all the amazing socialists who aren’t), etc.
These people will constantly declare ‘ignorance’ as the root course of racism, ignoring how much middle class support racist movements have and how middle class leg racist moments are. These people will jabber on about education, making it very clear that they think better of people with an education.
And then there are also socialists with a savior complex. There are people who think that their university education has given them the tools to save the working classes if they would just listen. Someone who has never been on a strike, never been poor, never been evicted, yet thinks that their education gives them an authority on working class struggles. When talking to working class people, pricks like that will use their long words to defend themselves, because they care more about being right than about listening.
I mean, christ, I have heard people quote latin as a meeting on socialism without translation and expect to be taken seriously.
And then there are the over educated perfectionists who will try to push out every worker who doesn’t learn and evict every slur from their vocabulary at the same speed that they did. Who think that getting rid of racism, sexism etc. means enforcing a performance of political correctness with all the right language. Who insist on only vegan snacks at a union meeting where moral has always been upheld by having sausages and a beer together.
People like that exist and more. I could talk for hours about the educated white middle class feminists and LGBT organizers who think they could save queer homeless sex workers if only those sex workers would accept them as leaders. It’s a long list.
And of course there are people who do call people a ‘champagne socialist’ for no reason other than the person is not working class. And LGBT people who use ‘ally’ as an insult before an ally has done anything wrong. Where there is inequality there will be people who see having privilege as a character flaw and there are communities that encourage that kind of thought and encourage people to win arguments by calling someone privileged as an insult. (hi social justice tumblr!)
But if you get called a ‘champagne socialist’, I wouldn’t start off by assuming that you got called it for no reason. I would start off by looking at whether there was something about your behavior that gave off the impression that university educated voices matter more, or that working class people could solve a lot of their problems if they would only listen to your enlightened reasoning, or that you would have won an argument if your opponents had just bothered to read some big books.
A thing I forgot to mention:
Most champagne socialists have a deeply rooted dislike of working class culture. That’s not intentional, it’s a hangover of growing up middle class or higher. They don’t know it, in fact most champagne socialists will claim to be passionate about working class culture. But what they love is a vintage romantified version of working class culture from the 1980′s or earlier.
When quized more specifically, almost all middle class socialists have a deep dislike for everything about modern middle class culture. They hate every tv-show that is popular with working class people and every fashion style.They mock the stores working class people shop at. They mock accents and sweat pants and overweight people with a lot of children. They talk about chavs or trailer trash or thugs or tokkies and estates or banlieue.
They might not always realize that all of the things they’ve been told are tacky and trashy are most popular or more common among working class people, but it doesn’t change how they respond to working class people. They believe on a fundamental level that their own clothing, music, stores, accents, tv-shows, books and interests are just inherently better.
QueerAnarchism 