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rudatron posted:Umm....how are exactly are you 'forcibly labelled'? Hail a cab. Congratulations, you're being labelled!
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Dec 3, 2014 17:20
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Poizen Jam posted:I'm about as left as they come, but I'm finding it funny that people are criticizing an article about the dangers of dogmatism, group think, and witch-hunts/purges within leftist circles as not being ideologically pure enough, it really isn't a 'PC gone mad' article and writing it off as such is really selling it short. That's all for now. Also the comments about a gay woman speaking from a position of privilege. Talk about circular firing squads.
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Dec 3, 2014 17:35
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rudatron posted:Umm....how are exactly are you 'forcibly labelled'? How does that even work? Actually, forget it, because I want to talk about this bit: Well I'll address this real quick. By being labelled a person of colour, I'm assumed to have gone the oppressions a person of colour goes through, and that I identify with other people of colour. This is all based off my skin colour, without regard for other attributes. It also creates an 'us vs them' mentality which I object, since it places me in an adversarial position against others, often whites. It's no different than assuming that I like Reggae music and know the latest artists, like the one lady who approached me out of the 6 staff standing in a group for suggestions when I worked at a record store. I personally hate reggae music, but similar as to how the lady deferred to me on a topic she assumed I would be more knowledgable on because of my perceived race, radical activists assume that I understand or undergo the same kind of oppression other black people due. The author of the article warned of the return of essentialism in the movement. quote:The use of 'internalization' in this context is , I think, a tacit admission that the standard way of subjectivizing truth is internally inconsistent. I don't understand your second paragraph. SparkPeople fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 17:38
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SparkPeople posted:I don't understand your second paragraph. Basically, the supposed importance of "subjective experience" (in that only people who have experienced oppression can accurately speak about it or act against it) is at odds with the concept of "internalized oppression" or "false consciousness" (that people can be deceived by their oppressors into holding false views).
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Dec 3, 2014 18:20
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Internalized bigotry is definitely a thing though. Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly though, it seems the author is suggesting we take into account the personal experiences of the oppressed, and definitely listen, just that we don't privilege such experiences as the objective, unimpeachable truth. Otherwise we have to accept Cosby's rants about the problems with black culture at face value, just as much as we accept a more critical race theorist's opinion about social disenfranchisement/oppression. And clearly those interpretations are at odds with one another.
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Dec 3, 2014 18:30
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This reads more like a critique of 'privilege theory' that internet left-liberals love rather than a critique of left-radicalism. Which is fine because privilege theory is really bad for guiding activism and useless as analytic tool
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Dec 3, 2014 18:47
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Poizen Jam posted:Internalized bigotry is definitely a thing though. Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly though, it seems the author is suggesting we take into account the personal experiences of the oppressed, and definitely listen, just that we don't privilege such experiences as the objective, unimpeachable truth. Otherwise we have to accept Cosby's rants about the problems with black culture at face value, just as much as we accept a more critical race theorist's opinion about social disenfranchisement/oppression. And clearly those interpretations are at odds with one another. I don't know that this is required - Cosby or the hypothetical CRT opinion can just be wrong without it being internalized bigotry. On the other hand, internalizing bigotry is something that happens. Jesse Jackson posted:There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating. That's what I think internalized bigotry looks like - societal inculcation regarding minority groups that portrays them as abnormally dangerous, or predisposed to crime, or whatever. I think this kid has a point that treating people who belong to marginalized groups as fonts of impeccable wisdom is flawed, but it's an overcorrection to the perception that those voices can be devalued or shouted down in discourse because of the very phenomena that they're seeking to combat. It's pretty natural that it happens in college, which is where a lot people are really developing a political identity outside of a familiar context for the first time. That said ... quote:My politics still lean to the left, just not quite so far, and now I view economic and political systems with an engineer’s eye, rather than in the stark colours of moral outrage. quote:Fourth, take a systems approach to the political spectrum. Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals. Would they actually work? Deconflate desirability and feasibility. Refine your categories beyond simple dichotomies like capitalism/socialism or statism/anarchism. It seems like this kid is just trading in one label with strict prescribed beliefs and analytical frameworks for another.
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Dec 3, 2014 18:48
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Poizen Jam posted:Internalized bigotry is definitely a thing though. Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly though, it seems the author is suggesting we take into account the personal experiences of the oppressed, and definitely listen, just that we don't privilege such experiences as the objective, unimpeachable truth. Otherwise we have to accept Cosby's rants about the problems with black culture at face value, just as much as we accept a more critical race theorist's opinion about social disenfranchisement/oppression. And clearly those interpretations are at odds with one another. I generally agree. I still dislike the concept of "internalized oppression," however, since it presupposes some kind of set of "correct" beliefs that a particular oppressed group is supposed to have. Its most frequent use is to simply shut down debate by accusing someone of thinking "incorrectly" for how they're "supposed to think" (as a black man, as a lesbian, etc.), rather than actually investigating and debating their ethics. It also erases the dimension of class from the equation, which I think is pivotal to any sort of progressive discussion. You have Charles Barkley talking about how correct the Mike Brown grand jury was. In that case, I don't think it's because Barkley's been bamboozled into internalizing oppression. Rather, I think it's because Barkley, as a multimillionaire, has accepted the general views of his particular class: that the poor underclass are wild and violent, and that only a firm police presence can protect people against anarchy.
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Dec 3, 2014 18:51
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Theres a term I heard for some of this stuff recently. Epistemological privelege. The idea that particular identities posess a priveleged insight into their own oppression and nobody without that identity could possibly understand them and therefore should not comment. Its kind of bunkum but it also has some elements of truth to it. In my view part of this turn in left politics comes from the lessening influence of marxism and post-marxism on the left. Not necessarily big M marxism and all its baggage of economism and party rara trotskyism and stuff, but the general underlying mechanic of viewing oppression as being a social system thats amenable to analysis as a system. In this thinking personal experience not only isn't that useful, its anecdote, and anecdote isn't data. The actual type of analysis isn't really the important part here. You could view it from a strictly marxist view of class relationships to capital, or you could look at it from the perspective of foucaultian analysis of power and discourse, or feminist analysis of patriachy, and so on. All of these analyse their subjects sociologically rather than psychologically, as interactions between groups rather than as individuals. Unfortunately with a lot of activists now learning their politics from tumblr outrage blogs and loving facebook memes, that central insight just isn't being transmitted and its like all that hard earned wisdom from a couple of centuries of activist and progressive theory and praxis is just being ignored. I mean gently caress. Foucault would have vomited blood at the practice on tumblr blogs of enumerating lists of priveleges and disadvantages. He'd be shouting "THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT!!!!!!" when he basically bootstrapped modern queer theory and laid the framework the third wave feminists built their house upon. With that said, those that DO get it make the reverse mistake of assuming everyone who isn't an activist gets this. When a white dude complains about racism after being badmouthed by some black dude, the WRONG approach is to tell him theres no such thing as racism against white people, even if its true from a sociological perspective. That statement assumes he understands the theory of racism as a system, when he's just talking about racism as an event, and whilst wise activists discount the personal for the social, it behooves one not to silence individual experience either (which might sometimes confound our theories from time to time), simply because its spoken in non compliant common tounge. In short. Activism has lost its smarts, and as a result is getting angry at all the wrong things.
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Dec 3, 2014 19:19
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[The founding document of Privilege theory] "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" was first written in 1989 and published in 1990. that means that privilege theory as a distinct theory (and all the language, terminology, and general strategies that accompany it) is about 25 years old. it is more recent than the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, both First and Second Wave Feminism, and the Stonewall Riots. It is tempting to think that critiquing privilege theory is somehow damaging to feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic movements. but people struggled and fought long before the words "check your privilege" were ever uttered. this is a theory that took root in the early 90's, spread throughout academia, and later to the Internet. it is not an inherent (nor, i would argue, a necessary) part of any struggle.
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Dec 3, 2014 19:54
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It seems that the much maligned SJW and associated groups including but not limited to otherkin are evidence of privilege theory becoming more widespread, which should be celebrated. I'm reminded of studies I've seen that have shown that while we bemoan poor spelling and text speak online, the number of people writing on a day-to-day basis has gone up considerably with the advent of the Internet. I agree with an above poster that it is not the theory itself that is the issue, it's a shallow understanding of it. I'd see the rise of some people using the vocabulary of leftists to bully others not as a condemnation of leftists but a side effect/growing pain of the concepts entering the collective consciousness.
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Dec 3, 2014 20:50
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Blue Star posted:Sounds like another "political correctness gone mad" opinion piece. I don't buy it. Oppressed people do not have to take the feelings of oppressors into account, nor should they. Most men are misogynist. White people are racist. Sorry if that hurts somebody's feelings. It's kind of funny how 'political correctness gone mad' has evolved into something left wing activists use to hand-wave away any criticism. Coolness Averted posted:No but being oppressed or having another vantage point on an issue doesn't make that vantage point inherently correct. There's a whole bunch of grad students out there just using concepts like hegemony and cultural imperialism in critiques without really backing them up or providing a real link or harm. This is a bad thing, since it undermines legitimate arguments and stances. Yea this is really where the problem becomes really apparent. Not only are bad studies constantly used if they agree with __activism cause #33__, but pointing out the issues with the argument / study becomes an attack on the cause itself. Of course if the study disagrees with the cause all these shortcomings will be extensively pointed out- in short intellectual honesty is rare on either side of the aisle. Anyway Chris Rock basically said the same thing as the OP: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/chris-rock-colleges-conservative_n_6250308.html quote:
I always thought the point of the Freep thread was to make fun of them for both their views and the hostile/ angry way they express them, but honestly the hostility to opposing views here is just as bad.
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Dec 3, 2014 20:52
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duck monster posted:Theres a term I heard for some of this stuff recently. Epistemological privelege. The idea that particular identities posess a priveleged insight into their own oppression and nobody without that identity could possibly understand them and therefore should not comment. I generally agree with your analysis- it's also worth noting that iirc when this set of concepts were developed (before the "privilege" framework became more popular), the term that was used, which was not intended as a criticism, was "standpoint epistemology". Most of the discussion so far has concentrated on the privilege stuff. What do folks think of the anti-intellectualism stuff? In my eyes they're closely linked. SparkPeople posted:The word oppression has been abused to describe any minor inconvenience, any uncomfortable reality by connecting them to a systemic nature. My personal experiences about being educated about how 'oppressed' I am have always come from some white girl or boy. Any rebuttal is a symptom of 'internalized racism' or ignorance on my part. In this context it's also useful to discuss the concept of "microaggressions". Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 21:11
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Privilege theory and intersectionality are amazing, there are no problems. People just can't handle them.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:18
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SedanChair posted:Privilege theory and intersectionality are amazing, there are no problems. People just can't handle them. People not being able to handle them is a pretty big problem.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:26
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SedanChair posted:Privilege theory and intersectionality are amazing, there are no problems. People just can't handle them. I have certainly known self-hating gays and I suppose you have self-hating (whatevers) in any minority group. I don't think you can just tune them out but Uncle Ruckus does not become correct about black folks just because he himself is black.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:31
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I think our ability to disseminate information cheaply has outpaced the general level of critical thinking in our society.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:32
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I think that's been the case since the days of the travelling bard.Discendo Vox posted:People not being able to handle them is a pretty big problem. Yes exactly. It is the entirety of the problem, just like people couldn't handle postcolonialism. The problem is not, Mr. Let's Make Friends, that people are talking about things that are real. Nessus posted:What exactly does intersectionality mean, anyway? Like, I have never clearly been able to get a sense of that. A thumbnail sketch is fine. It can be way simpler than people make it out to be. Basically that you have many axes of privilege (wealth, appearance, learned social skills etc.) and any one of those axes can be at any value. Example: "We were poor and white growing up, so I don't know why people always talk about black people like they're the only ones who are poor." Response: "You still benefited from society's response to your being white, while being challenged by poverty. Just as a richer black child, all else being equal, benefited from being more prosperous and was challenged in other ways by society's response to their being black." Morons call this "playing the oppression olympics" because they are desperate to leave these issues unexamined.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:40
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think our ability to disseminate information cheaply has outpaced the general level of critical thinking in our society. Many of my friends are run of the mill democrats who are not activists or particularly politically aware. They are not familiar with privilege theory or any other radical leftist concepts except in the most vague sense (or to laugh about tumblrcon). However, I've noticed a shift in behavior. Just as recently as a few years ago I could hear my friends dropping "human being" and "slut" left and right, but now among the same individuals those words are never uttered. I think the work of leftists has an important effect even on those who will never be more than dimly aware of their work. They are, in effect, shifting the Overton window, at least for those who would call themselves "moderate democrats" or apolitical (but leaning left).
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Dec 3, 2014 21:43
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SedanChair posted:I think that's been the case since the days of the travelling bard. The internet gives everyone an echo chamber for their idiocy. It's worse that it's ever been.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:43
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Nessus posted:What exactly does intersectionality mean, anyway? Like, I have never clearly been able to get a sense of that. A thumbnail sketch is fine. The nutshell version is that previous civil rights movements, such as feminism, would try to tackle their set of issues without considering or incorporating the problems of oppression that, for example, african-americans experienced (beyond it not being the thing they were focused on, no big surprise, feminists can be racist). This meant that people whose existences were at the intersection of multiple oppressed or prejudiced groups weren't being helped by civil rights efforts. Acknowledging the different experiences of those groups, and incorporating them into theory and response to oppression, is at the center of intersectionality theory. Intersectionality was a big deal, and a huge step forward. The meaning of third-wave feminism is disputed, but intersectionality is one of the most common things identified as the shift to the third wave. At the same time, intersectionality can introduce complexities and forms of self-criticism or policing that grind civil rights and other such movements to a halt. When this happens, it's usually because intersectionality is in the hands of the politically self-interested or people who don't have a good understanding of its original purpose- to make the movement more inclusive, not to make it more ideologically pure or outcomes-perfect. Such abuses occur both from lay internet people and, infuriatingly, from academics and others who really oughta know better. Privilege is usually a more troublesome set of concepts, because it can be used directly as an attack "check your privilege" in a way that directly and immediately invokes the relativism and standpoint epistemology that others were discussing above. SedanChair posted:Yes exactly. It is the entirety of the problem, just like people couldn't handle postcolonialism. The problem is not, Mr. Let's Make Friends, that people are talking about things that are real. That's the opposite of my meaning, because the "can't" is categorical.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:44
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Discendo Vox posted:That's the opposite of my meaning, because the "can't" is categorical. They can handle it by growing old and dying.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:46
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OK, now I see the miscommunication- I was being unclear, my apologies. The group of people who "can't handle" these theories, especially privilege, are the people who are trying to use them. That's sort of at the core of this discussion.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:50
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here's a much better critique on toxic activist culture that came up in the gibbis Tumblr thread: http://quinnae.com/2014/01/03/words-words-words-on-toxicity-and-abuse-in-online-activism/ some money quotes: quote:But in the process, “the tone argument” came to be understood less as a complex piece of social machinery than an easily identifiable trope; it then became a badge that could be waved at will in any discussion to absolve one of responsibility for their words. Even though we as leftists quite literally wrote the book(s) on why and how language matters, we suspend that understanding when it comes to our own community members because we have come to value the sanctity of their anger over the integrity of the wider group. Some of us excuse this on the grounds that we provide the only safe place for certain people to express anger without being shamed for it, and that living with oppression leaves us with pent up rage that demands expression. A big flaming stink fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 22:01
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Discendo Vox posted:OK, now I see the miscommunication- I was being unclear, my apologies. The group of people who "can't handle" these theories, especially privilege, are the people who are trying to use them. That's sort of at the core of this discussion. Oh yeah no I would disagree with that. I'm sure we can cherry-pick examples of kids misusing the terminology or trying to apply it to them not liking One Direction or something but it's not worth thinking about. Most recent college grads I've worked with seem to understand it very well.
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Dec 3, 2014 22:02
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SedanChair posted:It can be way simpler than people make it out to be. Basically that you have many axes of privilege (wealth, appearance, learned social skills etc.) and any one of those axes can be at any value. I remember one of those fine fellows saying that women's privilege included "existing" and "continuing to exist," which he counted twice, and which was rooted in the higher average female lifespan.
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Dec 3, 2014 22:02
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Nessus posted:Makes sense. Is this where the MRA people are going 'well I may be middle/upper-middle class, white, healthy, more or less without disability, but women won't have reproductive sex with me now who is the oppressed one??' This is also a genuine problem within protest circles, and within the academy. I just got back from my field's national conference, where they made the opening panel discussion, i.e. the really big one everyone attends, about how to make the organizationa and field more inclusive and respectful. The panel was made up of major critical theorists and caucus leaders from various divisions and sectors, and they had a long and mostly productive discussion of concrete goals and changes that the organization could make to be more inclusive. The entire time, though, one of the panel members was actively attempting to police the statements and claims of everyone else on the panel, and attacked all of their ideas, as well as the panel itself, as an example of protest puppetry from the oppressive majority. She argued that nothing anyone could do would be sufficient to satisfy her, and devoted her own time to questioning the motives, experience and legitimacy of everyone else in the room. This panelist and a group of like-minded supporters have prevented the organization from rewriting its constitution or making any major changes in any other governance area, mostly by litigating the race, gender identity, sexual orientation and politics of, as near as I can tell, anyone involved. This isn't someone on the fringe- it's someone quite prominent and respected in their part of the field. These are problems, and they're problems because some of the tools and concepts of left protest and critical analysis invite abuse.
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Dec 3, 2014 22:24
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Nessus posted:Makes sense. Is this where the MRA people are going 'well I may be middle/upper-middle class, white, healthy, more or less without disability, but women won't have reproductive sex with me now who is the oppressed one??' There is a negative aspect to it as well, however. For example, there's a number of people saying that if you're a man, you should avoid walking directly behind women or close to women so that you don't intimidate them. Consider how this applies to a black man and a white woman, given the huge part of anti-black racism that amounts to "where all the white women at?". Now, you might say that intersectionality demands that a meeting ground be created between them, but that's not how people use it. They use it as a way to cut off perspectives- if feminism is predominant for them, the racial aspects are meaningless because they're coming from men. Anti-racism must be intersectional or it is bullshit. If anti-racism is predominant, the sexual aspects are meaningless because they're coming from whites. Feminism is for white women. You can say that this isn't what intersectionality should be, but that's how it's been used recently.
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Dec 3, 2014 22:42
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Effectronica posted:There is a negative aspect to it as well, however. For example, there's a number of people saying that if you're a man, you should avoid walking directly behind women or close to women so that you don't intimidate them. The issue is that all these things are an evolving process and many things that seem weird now are there to address a previous issue. Regarding men walking behind women - it's that men sometimes walk right behind women for the purpose of intimidating them. When confronted, they would say "I didn't know what I was doing was scary!" (the cousin of "Can't you take a joke?") Being able to separate the genuinely clueless from the malicious is doable on a case-by-case basis but to save time, some have issued the blanket "Don't walk right behind a woman," as a way to try to stop these people who are trying to lawyer their way out of the consequences of knowingly acting in bad faith. Like the privilege theory discussed previously it is often applied in a shallow manner not entirely in keeping with its original purpose.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:02
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Ppl should read more Frantz Fanon
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Dec 3, 2014 23:06
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So the author, based upon personal experiences, aligned herself with 'radical' leftists to combat the social surpression she faced. Then upon graduating and becoming a professional (engineer), she adopted the ideology of her employer as is the custom. This article is a pretty good picture of kicking the ladder out from behind you once you finish climing it. It's also analogous to creating a psa warning people not to fist their own rear end in a top hat while they're trying to wipe it after taking a poo poo. E: Sure vox, you're cool. Ill give it another crack. Kristov fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 23:18
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Kristov posted:So the author, based upon personal experiences, aligned herself with 'radical' leftists to combat the social surpression she faced. Then upon graduating and becoming a professional (engineer), she adopted the ideology of her employer as is the custom. This article is a pretty good picture of kicking the ladder out from behind you once you finish climing it. You might want to reread the article- you're pretty badly misconstruing it.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:31
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I love identity politics. Hell, it makes me who I am.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:34
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Xibanya posted:The issue is that all these things are an evolving process and many things that seem weird now are there to address a previous issue. Regarding men walking behind women - it's that men sometimes walk right behind women for the purpose of intimidating them. When confronted, they would say "I didn't know what I was doing was scary!" (the cousin of "Can't you take a joke?") Being able to separate the genuinely clueless from the malicious is doable on a case-by-case basis but to save time, some have issued the blanket "Don't walk right behind a woman," as a way to try to stop these people who are trying to lawyer their way out of the consequences of knowingly acting in bad faith. Like the privilege theory discussed previously it is often applied in a shallow manner not entirely in keeping with its original purpose. Hmm, thanks, but I was already taking it as meaningful.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:37
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Given how quickly this article has been spread around the web I think it is clear that it addresses something important. Obviously part of the appeal here is that it may tell certain people what they want to hear, but I also think it's pretty clear that people really do feel, wrongly or rightly, that this article is relevant to their lived experiences. As such I think it's important for serious leftists to read this article in a thoughtful and careful manner. I have to say that from my own experiences I think that while there are some pretty serious issues with the author's argument, she does have a point. Anti-intellectualism and groupthink are serious problems amongst the contemporary left. Now I hasten to add that I don't think they are problems unique to the left. They are common symptoms of any political movements. However, I think they are a problem for the left because the left is much weaker than the right. A right wing organization can sustain a lot more groupthink because they have access to corporate largesses and are typically welcomed into their respective movement. The right is articulating ideas that are helpful to the people in power so the right gets a level of institutional and monetary support that radical leftists are simply never going to receive. By contrast, the left has very little institutional support and very little money (which is necessary to do most things, like rent an office, print flyers, publish journals, pay people to do full time organizing, provide food and drink at gatherings, attract speakers, etc.). So while the left and the right (and liberals for that matter) all indulge in dogmatism and groupthink, those practices are going to be a lot more damaging to a leftwing organization for the simple reason that the left is weaker and just cannot afford to waste resources or energy. I also think the author does a better job than they intended of illustrating why rigorous theory is so important for the left. Here's what I considered the most interesting passage in the article: quote:Anti-intellectualism is a pill I swallowed, but it got caught in my throat, and that would eventually save me. It comes in a few forms. Activists in these circles often express disdain for theory because they take theoretical issues to be idle sudoku puzzles far removed from the real issues on the ground. This is what led one friend of mine to say, in anger and disbelief, “People’s lives aren’t some theoretical issue!” That same person also declared allegiance to a large number of theories about people’s lives, which reveals something important. Almost everything we do depends on one theoretical belief or another, which range from simple to complex and from implicit to explicit. A theoretical issue is just a general or fundamental question about something that we find important enough to think about. Theoretical issues include ethical issues, issues of political philosophy, and issues about the ontological status of gender, race, and disability. Ultimately, it’s hard to draw a clear line between theorizing and thinking in general. Disdain for thinking is ludicrous, and no one would ever express it if they knew that’s what they were doing. The problem is that when you're low on theory and high on moral outrage you produce exactly the sort of activist that the author turned out to be. Just look at how the author was superficially attracted to anarchism, tumblr-feminism and generic anti-capitalism. She developed these beliefs more out of passion than out of any kind of theoretical understanding of why, say, contemporary capitalism and patriarchy might have a strong and substantive link. So once the author's passions waned it was very easy for her to abandon these beliefs since their actual intellectual roots were very shallow. She may have been genuinely outraged at one point but she never seems to have developed much of an understanding of the theoretical left. She just had this powerful but vague sense that capitalism and oppression were linked. That clearly isn't a sufficient position from which to launch a sustained critique of capitalism. If the left can't provide convincing theoretical explanations for why it can solve the problems of capitalism then it's never going to migrate far off of university campuses, and it's going to constantly lose recruits once people graduate and are forced to deal with the pressures of getting a job, paying off their loans, and generally starting their adult life. So in conclusion I'd say that the biographical details given by the author actually support her thesis: her leftism was based more on emotion than reason, and as such once she left campus she quickly abandoned her commitment to any kind of radicalism. But while the author doesn't display much theoretical understanding of the left, her comments on the attitude of many young activists rings true for me. More humility and less dogmatism are in order, and there are too many leftists who are basically unwilling to acknowledge any viewpoint except their own as legitimate. Unfortunately I think certain theoretical tendencies currently in vogue on the left exacerbate this problem.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:58
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I think her point was that there is no intellectual basis or real-life objective for the radical left. Once you've come to terms with everything being problematic and that no solution is possible within a liberal capitalist framework then all you're doing is furiously attacking everything you see. At the end I think she's laying out that she left because there was no objective, no goal, nothing to move towards. Everything is Problematic. I'm not surprised she got exhausted of being angry at Everything all the time.
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Dec 4, 2014 00:44
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Yeah but that isn't a symptom specific to "the radical left", it's a symptom specific to a particular kind of radicalism that has become very prominent on campus. For instance there's a community group in my home city based around the 'Jane-Finch' neighbourhood, which is generally considered to be one of the most deprived and stigmatized neighbourhoods in Canada. The group is composed of locals, mostly older folks, mostly from immigrant communities. They mostly come from extremely precarious economic backgrounds, face constant police harassment, feel their stories are basically erased by the media, and feel both exploited and unrepresented by their local politicians. While there's some mixture of diversity in the group's views (for instance, at a discussion whether they should ally with a campaign calling for a higher minimum wage there was an older Italian man present who said that this would leave to job losses) there is a pretty broad based distrust of capitalism and parliamentary democracy. I.e. this is very much a group based on 'radical' and in many cases explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-police politics. It's ridiculous to say these folks aren't aware of their "objectives". They are trapped in a cycle of poverty and oppression that is exacerbated by a mixture of neglect and outright hostility from the state and private capital, exacerbated by a media that is only interested in their plight when it can be used as poverty-porn for middle class liberals. Being angry at the "the system" is not confined to students on university campuses. Those are just the folks who, due to their privilege, you end up hearing about the most. A lot of people can't afford to decide that they're "exhausted" and don't feel like being angry any more. If you're a racialized person stuck in a poor community and you are concerned that your relatives or friends are going to either be murdered by gangs or beaten up by cops and thrown in jail then you can't just decide "gently caress it, I'll become a mainstream liberal and stop being so drat angry all the time." If you're working on minimum wage or are severly underemployed while trying to care for your family or build a future then you may find it isn't as easy to reconcile yourself with "the system" compared to if you're a young and upwardly mobile able bodied woman with a fresh degree in engineering who happens to be gay. So I reject the idea that there aren't clear left wing objectives or that contemporary society is generating very real and concrete grievances amongst the population. I think if anything the problem here is that the excesses of campus radicalism can end up discrediting the more substantive economic critiques of capitalism that we ought to be making. Also I think it has to be pointed out that she's writing in the McGill Daily, and only a couple years ago McGill students participated in an extremely effective strike that prevented their tuition fees from being jacked up (these protests are almost certainly what that student was referring to when she said some of her friends spent a night in jail). So even in the context of a university campus, the idea that the left never has concrete objectives is ludicrous. When students in Montreal were confronted with a perceived attack on their economic interests they proved more than capable of fighting for a concrete goal and actually managed to win despite a pretty harsh reaction from the Montreal police. The bottom line is that at its best leftwing radicalism is powerful because it actually offers to concretely improve people's lives. That's the great power of the left: that through solidarity you can give people the power to demand better wages and benefits, better representation for their community, a better life for themselves and their kids. When the left manages to focus itself on those goals it can still win significant victories.
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Dec 4, 2014 01:17
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tsa posted:It's kind of funny how 'political correctness gone mad' has evolved into something left wing activists use to hand-wave away any criticism. Because you are easy to dismiss.
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Dec 4, 2014 01:20
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Helsing posted:When the left manages to focus itself on those goals it can still win significant victories. I more and more suspect that the most significant issue amongst the modern left is really just a lack of effective strategy. There's a clear sort of discontent with what's going on (Piketty's book, I argue, would not have sold like hotcakes pre-2008), but there's no effective channel for people that is perceived as worthwhile. If one takes the Canadian example, we have the federal NDP, who, while certainly not the Conservatives, are not bringing up radical reforms or talking about the sort of deep-seated issues that are bothering people. Beyond that, there simply isn't anyone who looks like they can take and control state political power. Going along with this is an ingrained cynicism towards parliamentary politics, and while some cynicism towards representative democracy might be justified, it's still nevertheless the absolute best institution for controlling the levers of society that's available here and now. In the absence of any real (apparent) hope of controlling the levers of society, phatic or ritual actions tend to suffice instead: Tumblr wars, solidarity rallies, etc. (Not that I mean to disparage those sorts of things, but I feel that we tend to participate in a lot of them mostly to alleviate feelings of helplessness rather than with a long-term strategy of concrete change in mind.)
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Dec 4, 2014 02:48
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Personally, I think the left should continue to consume their own. Not only does it directly reduce their number, and intimidate others away from participating; but those who are victimized by this process, and survive, sometimes become powerful anti-left speakers.Effectronica posted:There is a negative aspect to it as well, however. For example, there's a number of people saying that if you're a man, you should avoid walking directly behind women or close to women so that you don't intimidate them. This is a funny sentiment, that people will cite as an example of "the absurdity of radical leftism", that a conservative can't help but be puzzled by. It's a "radical leftist" concept to be mindful around women? To recognize that they might be intimidated by the presence of a man? This is common sense conservatism.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:38
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