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Atrocious Joe posted:Wtf does Woke Capital even mean. I'm sorry I used it but I refuse to edit that post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwvAgDCOdU4
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Apr 25, 2021 22:07
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your "woke" companies are very clearly trying to have their cake and eat it by celebrating the performance of race, thus helping to even further bolster it as a concept to the extent that they have a coherent ideology on this it's very clearly interested in diversity, not in homogenising the working classes. most of what it does to homogenise is basically unintended stuff like making languages de-facto redundant and increasingly monopolising cultural expression to a commercial, american standard. a corporation tweeting #blacklivesmatter is not trying to abolish race lol
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Apr 25, 2021 22:08
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https://twitter.com/amazon/status/1384712751138975746?s=20 https://twitter.com/josheidelson/status/1245827832816664576?s=20 there's also the contradiction in the liberal leadership of these corporations are often openly racist internally while pushing slogans out to the public
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Apr 25, 2021 22:12
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there's a post i saw in TG ages ago that was like, a nerd writing excitedly about how playing dungeons and dragons had helped him to understand and settle his thoughts on race, and specifically to square the fact that there were smart black people out there with black people being less intelligent in general, because they've just got a -2 INT modifier! an 18 becomes a 16 and a 10 becomes an 8, that's how it works! thank you, gary gygax! anyway this is the actual function of companies posting black lives matter on their instagrams
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Apr 25, 2021 22:12
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what was funny to me is seeing actual reactionaries just sink to their knees in despair because disney was posting black squares on social media during the george floyd uprising because, oh no, all the corporations are woke now, whiteness is going to be abolished by the end of the fall. don't you realize that disney's on your side?!
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Apr 25, 2021 22:14
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Ferrinus posted:i don't think it can, or will, or wants to, solve 20th century racism. anti blackness has been the fulcrum of white supremacy (this is a paraphrase of some writer whose name i don't recall) for basically as long as there's been an america and it's not going away whether or not there are black CEOs. in fact black CEOs help us make sure that the greater part of the black population continues to suffer poverty and police terror - see? if they really deserved not to be shot at random, they would've started their own company like X did i understand your take, but you don't think anti-blackness will and has taken on new characteristics? it's not the same clear distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed, as you noted. a liberal will point to the legal distinctions, the media representation, statues torn down, and say 'see this is solved' and they will be wrong, but the manifestation will be different even as the causes remain the same if there is an cent of profit to be squeezed from dissolving society as it was, it will be done. it is entirely possible to shift the category of the Other arbitrarily since none of the justifications actually matter. this is the true source of the shifting nature of whiteness, why those on the outside can be folded in without a trace
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Apr 25, 2021 22:29
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Ferrinus posted:what was funny to me is seeing actual reactionaries just sink to their knees in despair because disney was posting black squares on social media during the george floyd uprising because, oh no, all the corporations are woke now, whiteness is going to be abolished by the end of the fall. don't you realize that disney's on your side?! if you think the structure is immutable, someone has to suffer. moloch must be appeased. so if you stare at the cracks in your sidewalks and count how many people you know who die of fentanyl, you might rightly think you are bound for the furnace see i think you share a mistake with them here, disney was never on their side, but it catering to them was a sign that the victims were not going to be them. now that they are less favored because their streams are polluted and their brains are rotted, because they are unnecessary to the rape of the earth, they will sent screaming into the belly once the last bit of copper has been pulled out if only mickey mouse loved them again they would be saved
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Apr 25, 2021 22:41
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Brain Candy posted:i understand your take, but you don't think anti-blackness will and has taken on new characteristics? it's not the same clear distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed, as you noted. a liberal will point to the legal distinctions, the media representation, statues torn down, and say 'see this is solved' and they will be wrong, but the manifestation will be different even as the causes remain the same the problem is that while there is a cent of profit to be squeezed from reducing racism, there is also a cent or profit to be squeezed from not simply keeping but magnifying racism. the liberals are caught in a contradiction; they have to pretend to oppose white supremacy but they can't actually oppose it because it keeps them fed. so while anti-blackness certainly takes on new characteristics it won't and can't go away while capitalism persists
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Apr 25, 2021 23:03
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Ferrinus posted:the problem is that while there is a cent of profit to be squeezed from reducing racism, there is also a cent or profit to be squeezed from not simply keeping but magnifying racism. the liberals are caught in a contradiction; they have to pretend to oppose white supremacy but they can't actually oppose it because it keeps them fed. so while anti-blackness certainly takes on new characteristics it won't and can't go away while capitalism persists Ok this makes sense, I was responding to these tweets you shared earlier. Samantha Pritchard seems to be making a different argument than you. Ferrinus posted:
Pritchard seems to be arguing that capitalism will annihilate racial and national barriers in the working class, which I don't think is very likely. I think it's what Marx expected in some of his writings, but it's not what has happened. I do think the "woke" capitalists may overplay their hand by raising expectations of oppressed groups beyond what capitalism can actually deliver, but that's not what she describes here. I think direct attacks on "woke" capitalists for embracing reforms in the capitalist system is the wrong tactic. However, I don't think those reforms we see now (which amount to pushes for more racial diversity among the bourgeoise and those who manage capital, as well as content creators) are necessarily creating dangerous contradictions for capitalism.
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Apr 25, 2021 23:25
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Atrocious Joe posted:Ok this makes sense, I was responding to these tweets you shared earlier. Samantha Pritchard seems to be making a different argument than you. i don't think i'm saying anything different from what she's saying? her point is not that capitalism will annihilate racial barriers, but that there is a tendency within capitalism to do this ("all that is solid melts into air"), but opposing and probably more powerful tendencies to specifically avoid this and ingrain racism further. this is what she means by "free capital" vs "caste capital" although i don't think those are really technical terms from the marxist perspective my takeaway is that because ending white supremacy is a check that capitalism fundamentally cannot cash, but keeps trying to write, organizing against race oppression specific is actually an extremely good idea, because there are ideological cracks in which to insert the wedge and ultimately white supremacy and capitalism can only be ended as one unit
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Apr 25, 2021 23:41
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from up the tweet threadquote:It's not just "idpol"--racial caste actually produces materially disparate experiences among the proletariat depending on the caste positions they occupy. We can't just wish it away by saying it doesn't matter--that's idealism. That's "idpol" in the sense of IDealistic politics She's definitely arguing that capitalism will destroy those differences between races, like the racial wealth gap, and allow a post-racial revolutionary proletariat to emerge. I don't think that's possible, and shows the need for a multi-national struggle now.
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Apr 26, 2021 00:13
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I mostly posting to figure out why I thought Pritchard's take was wrong, rather than arguing with any posters here.
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Apr 26, 2021 00:15
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having diversified representation in the ruling class currently threatens no one in the ruling class which is why it's allowed to exist and as it turns out, that's where idpol libs draw the line vis a vis racial and economic justice
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Apr 26, 2021 00:32
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Atrocious Joe posted:from up the tweet thread right after your bolding, pritchard writes that we need to eradicate the material reality of caste as part of the project of class consciousness. it's a call to do a certain kind of organizing. capitalists won't actually do it for us, because the anti-caste capitalists are never going to overcome the pro-caste capitalists. however, even liberal identity politics helps us to do this, because it expresses a contradiction in capitalism that we can use to grow the movement it's textbook marxism that the capitalism creates the one class capable of destroying it: the proletariat. that tweet thread just touches on the connection of identity politics to this process of class formation
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Apr 26, 2021 00:39
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https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1305718231747813377?s=20 https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1305897855626878976?s=20 https://twitter.com/thucydiplease/status/1305947090455945216?s=20 I'm including the Fang tweets for context, I'm not really defending him. Sam's saying we need to side with the "anti-caste" capitalists to crush the "caste capitalists" and enable the creation of a truly revolutionary proletariat. Eradicating the material reality of caste necessitates what is essentially a dismantling of racism under capitalism. There's enough wiggle room in the thread to maybe read it as just the struggle against caste is needed, but I don't think that's what she means. She talks about eradicating the material reality of caste, not eradicating racist and backward views through shared struggle. I don't really think these pro- and anti- caste factions exist in the capitalist class. Bosses that earnestly promote a "diverse" workplace in hiring are quick to promote ethnic divisions when a union drive starts up. Finance capital, which ultimately calls the shots for most industries at this point, is happy to promote (ineffective) internal diversity drives while bankrolling fascists in Latin America. If workers and peasants were able to unite against imperialism in the 20th century, I'm think differently racialized workers can unit for socialism in the 21st.
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Apr 26, 2021 01:03
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revolutionary Russia and China were multiethnic states with material differences between groups within the proletariat (and peasants in China especially) and managed to unify them without first eradicating the wealth inequality. it seems like a particularly 21st century American/Anglo way of analyzing the situation
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Apr 26, 2021 01:05
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Lviv has a poo poo load of nazis so I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner https://twitter.com/arieshapira1/status/884747826382725120
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Apr 26, 2021 01:09
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Atrocious Joe posted:https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1305718231747813377?s=20 she writes "working to our advantage in the long run". "wokeness" is good; capitalists are not. in attempting to be "woke", or more precisely in attempting to be antiracist, (some) capitalists only fertilize ground for movement growth. they aren't, themselves, doing this with some kind of master plan in mind because all capitalists can actually do is respond to immediate market incentives. this is a particular case of the general principle that capitalism creates the conditions for its own downfall revolutionary states of the past century were generally forged out of multiethnic coalitions devoted to the overthrow of racist, colonial oppression - not to just getting higher wages or abolishing the value form in the abstract or something. it's not just a question of differently racialized workers uniting, but of differently racialized workers uniting against racialization
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Apr 26, 2021 01:19
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Ferrinus you're right but you're misreading what Samantha wrote. https://twitter.com/thucydiplease/status/1306284375785365504?s=20 She thinks the bourgeoisie can be properly diversified. Or at least did at the time. Either of us could easily win or lose this argument by tweeting at her for clarification, but I refuse to post elsewhere.
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Apr 26, 2021 01:24
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i mean, is she wrong that the bourgeoisie can be, or indeed are becoming, diversified? it IS verifiably true that the boardrooms and court benches and so on are featuring fewer white, male faces over time. as we've seen, this has nothing to do with the racial makeup of, for instance, prisons; thanks to sheer population math, little stops you from making 12.2% of the US ruling class black while keeping 34% of the us prison population black obviously it'd be a waste of time and energy for socialists to campaign on diversifying the ruling class. this doesn't mean that identity politics isn't good (in the sense that the CRC used it) or at bare minimum useful (in even the most pejorative sense that racists deploy the term in)
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Apr 26, 2021 01:32
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It seems like one could draw an analogy to the American Civil War, where two (arguably) fundamentally capitalist factions went to war over whether free labor or slave labor was better, and Marx himself supported the free labor faction- I'd argue not just because it's more conducive to future revolutionary activity but because slavery was worse than wage labor, bad as it was. Of course the big question is how much """woke capital""" (God I hate that term) is actually devoted to an actual step forward in human freedom in the way the abolition of slavery was.
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Apr 26, 2021 01:35
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Ferrinus posted:depends on what you mean by caste. they really do want the percentage of CEOs who are black to match the percentage of homeless people who are black, or at least most of them do. what they don't realize is that this is impossible
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Apr 26, 2021 01:39
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Ferrinus posted:i mean, is she wrong that the bourgeoisie can be, or indeed are becoming, diversified? it IS verifiably true that the boardrooms and court benches and so on are featuring fewer white, male faces over time. as we've seen, this has nothing to do with the racial makeup of, for instance, prisons; thanks to sheer population math, little stops you from making 12.2% of the US ruling class black while keeping 34% of the us prison population black i guess in theory it could have, but that's not where the original base comes from. maybe progressive reforms to intentionally redistribute wealth to broaden capitalism help toward that, but lack of active state intervention and wealth accumulation will always lead to the haves becoming the have mores
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Apr 26, 2021 01:40
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Bill de Blasio's closest advisor and wife was a member of the CRC. Which doesn't invalidate their work, but is hilarious.
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Apr 26, 2021 01:45
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note the difference: 1) the percentage of CEOs who are black equals the percentage of the population who are black (~13%) 2) the percentage of CEOs who are black equals the percentage of the homeless who are black (~40%) if you wanted to accomplish 2, you would have to either make black people overrepresented in the ruling class (i guess this is technically possible but would the rest really stand for it?) or actually reduce racial inequality in a material way such that homelessness doesn't fall more commonly and heavily on people of color (under capitalism? lmao)
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Apr 26, 2021 01:56
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StashAugustine posted:It seems like one could draw an analogy to the American Civil War, where two (arguably) fundamentally capitalist factions went to war over whether free labor or slave labor was better, and Marx himself supported the free labor faction- I'd argue not just because it's more conducive to future revolutionary activity but because slavery was worse than wage labor, bad as it was. Of course the big question is how much """woke capital""" (God I hate that term) is actually devoted to an actual step forward in human freedom in the way the abolition of slavery was. I would say that the abolishment of cattle slavery was still a fundamental shift in material conditions while I don’t see more diversified boardrooms making much of a difference. If you were talking about diversifying a central committee that would be another issue.
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Apr 26, 2021 02:19
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Ferrinus posted:if you wanted to accomplish 2, you would have to either make black people overrepresented in the ruling class (i guess this is technically possible but would the rest really stand for it?) or actually reduce racial inequality in a material way such that homelessness doesn't fall more commonly and heavily on people of color (under capitalism? lmao) absolutely. by providing better access to homelessness for whites
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Apr 26, 2021 02:36
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Truga posted:absolutely. by providing better access to homelessness for whites that would require taking legal and extralegal measures that fall more heavily on whites than blacks, which i don't think is an option under the current political economy regardless of intent
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Apr 26, 2021 03:09
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Where do people get the idea that there is a woke faction of the bourgeoisie? Does the microscopic improvement of women, openly gay, and poc representation in boardrooms or political office actually represent a movement?
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Apr 26, 2021 03:19
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addressing inadequate representation is far preferable and non-threatening than massive wealth redistribution to the ruling class, which is why you see so many lawn signs in affluent neighbourhoods with "In this house we believe..." lists of virtues that always seems to leave out economic inequality it's a combination of the changing of cultural values and also a sense of self-preservation yellowcar fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Apr 26, 2021 |
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Apr 26, 2021 03:27
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Lasting Damage posted:Where do people get the idea that there is a woke faction of the bourgeoisie? Does the microscopic improvement of women, openly gay, and poc representation in boardrooms or political office actually represent a movement? honestly i think even phrasing it as a "faction" is going too far (and if i have a problem with pritchard's thread it's the idea that there are conscious, organized elements of the bourgeoisie on either side of this issue). it's just true that the balance of material incentives leads some capitalists to try to cater to minorities (or to whites who want to cater to minorities) rather than repress them and that's a place to insert a crowbar
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Apr 26, 2021 03:33
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In Training posted:you're right there's no reason to learn about the history that built today's conditions I just have to know they're bad and can dismiss them out of hand, along with every union in the country that is forced to affiliate with them by dearth of alternatives. Thanks. Philip Foner has a pretty definitive 10-volume history of the US labor movement. That's what I'd point someone towards as a comprehensive text.
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Apr 26, 2021 03:49
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capitalism constantly has crisis and it seems to really like scapegoating them by handing the bigliest megaphones to the biggliest racists and genociders it can find
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Apr 26, 2021 03:52
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look how there was a tiny tinge swing of the hispanic vote toward trump and the woke mask started slippin' lmao nevermind the Decompression Centers rebranding
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Apr 26, 2021 03:53
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Prince Myshkin posted:Philip Foner has a pretty definitive 10-volume history of the US labor movement. That's what I'd point someone towards as a comprehensive text. neat, this seems like the perfect library read if they ever reopen.
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Apr 26, 2021 03:56
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Ferrinus posted:honestly i think even phrasing it as a "faction" is going too far (and if i have a problem with pritchard's thread it's the idea that there are conscious, organized elements of the bourgeoisie on either side of this issue). it's just true that the balance of material incentives leads some capitalists to try to cater to minorities (or to whites who want to cater to minorities) rather than repress them and that's a place to insert a crowbar Just seems like a way for people to avoid the fact that the only cure to the divisions within the proletariat is fight for one another in the class struggle.
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Apr 26, 2021 03:57
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comedyblissoption posted:look how there was a tiny tinge swing of the hispanic vote toward trump and the woke mask started slippin' lmao
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Apr 26, 2021 03:58
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i think it's more useful to view the 'factions' as different strategies to achieve the same goal (maintain kkkapitalist hegemony). neither can tolerate actual threats, but the 'woke capital' side is willing to absorb minor elements from its opposition to prevent meaningful change – your race and gender aren't a problem, as long as you behave. the trad side is opposed to identity differences on an ideological level, sees them as a threat to the natural order, etc. – this position is probably doomed in the longer term, or at least takes a lot more effort to maintain in developed economies. of course, both sides fully accept enlightenment-era racial taxonomy.
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Apr 26, 2021 04:22
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Lasting Damage posted:Not sure you can actually collaborate with something so ephemeral, or create an alliance with a vague group of the bourgeoisie with particular cultural preferences. And besides they don't seem to be too attached to any specific positions. They effortlessly turned on #metoo the second it was convenient. it's not really a question of "collaborate" or "alliance" (which pritchard's thread doesn't even gesture at either, i don't think). it's about how we interpret identity politics, even liberal identity politics. are they an enemy plot to be rejected or are they ultimately to our advantage? they are actually good, because they represent a naturally-enticing that promise capitalism cannot deliver on
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Apr 26, 2021 04:35
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https://twitter.com/thucydiplease/status/1305968456328646656?s=20 I'm just quoting the rest of the content of the tweets to not fill up the whole page like a psycho. I'm not trying to dunk on her, I think her statements here deep in that thread help expand upon what was posted from her earlier. If anything, I'm really going at that thread because I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the poster, and it's helping me figure out my own thoughts. She is arguing that the economic disparities between different races in the US can be eroded almost completely under capitalism. In fact, that this is a necessity for revolutionary consciousness to emerge. quote:Caste has functioned to keep subaltern castes out of the bourgeoisie, to keep them disproportionately in the reserve army of labor, to deprive them of private property Pritchard here is saying that the Left is tactically aligned with the "woke capitalists" in their goal to empower BIPOC capitalists and BIPOC workers. I have no idea how or why capitalists are going to empower workers without some sort of militant labor struggle which will probably require multi-national coalitions to succeed anyway. This argument makes much more sense if you assume she's saying that the ascension of BIPOC capitalists will coincide with greater immiseration of the whole working class and eventual exploitation of white workers at the same level as everyone else. I think she avoids that possibility out of fear she will be attacked for advocating stripping material gains from white workers. She already feels the need to explain why white people losing the relative benefits of whiteness is a good thing. And it is a good thing, but that feels sort of obvious. This is just an upbeat version accelerationism. It excuses socialists from doing anti-racist work among white people now because it believes it is futile. It's getting close to Maoism-Third Worldism, but instead of hoping the oppressed masses of the world break up the AmeriKKKan Settler Empire, the Woke Capitalists annihilate the problem whiteness for us. It excuses the existing socialist movement from building a multi-national working class in the US that can fight for itself. We need socialism to empower BIPOC workers to the level of white workers in the first place. There is a white supremacist pedo elite in charge of the US, and they aren't going to leave on their own. They'll lay the groundwork for their own demise, but workers have to actually push them out. I think "ID pol" is good when it's emerges from communities upset at the special oppressions they face. It's rarely expressed in a precise Marxist manner, but people being pissed off at the unfairness of the capitalist system is good. It is just a starting point, but it's a pretty good one.
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Apr 26, 2021 05:03
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