V. Illych L. posted:

no its not

blackness exists and is problematic on a purely superstructural level. it is what people experience it as; this is what constitutes blackness. this is why you laugh at people who insist on paper-bag tests, why you talk about "white-passing" black people etc. the experience of blackness as a reflection of varying social standards and mores, and how these respond to the individual in question. barack obama is unquestionably black, but that means something genuinely different in his case (so the statement "you are black and hence more likely to be gunned down by police" is a contingent statement, whereas the statement "you are a wage-earner and thus have conflicting interests with your employer" is not). there's a radical difference, because race is fundamentally superstructural and defined by culture, whereas the means of production are not

note that this is all speaking about blackness as identity and social construct - if you start talking about biological race then it's a different can of worms, but i am not a race realist and am discounting that

on the contrary, the proletarian has a technical definition independent of the experience of being or seeing proletarians. of course, there's an identity there as well, but it is also something that exists in a way where you can say to a proletarian "no, you are wrong about this fundamental part of being a proletarian"

i would also note that top athletes and artists etc are a bit of a special category and i hesitate to call them properly proletarian in this sense since they're not simply selling their exchangable labour-power, but the point stands wrt a google software developer or whatever

V. Illych L. posted:

your insistence on not engaging with the substance of my corbyn anecdote is pretty frustrating

for the secont part: see my previous post

for the last part: now we can have a conversation. this is good! there's a tangible point of disagreement. i think we could've started from there, after my initial definition of what i was talking about.

in short: i believe that the theory has evolved from the foundational document, but that one can still see the assumptions they make in that document. i am not familiar with the combahee river collective beyond the manifesto, so i'm not going to commit to any particulars there, but the politics of the manifesto is still based on the same fundamenally experiental form of politics. this is not unreasonable from an avant-garde political and ideological collective, and it's in traditional feminist practice to do so. the issue is not that this sort of analysis is necessarily untrue and cannot produce fruitful results, it is that taken as a mass ideology it produces a number of unfortunate, but predictable consequences. it is not reasonable to expect that the CRC should anticipate entire minority identities being mobilised towards reactionary ends, for instance. they try to expand the scope of their experiental politics by taking on more dimensions of experience, which is a legitimately clever maneuver, but it still suffers from the fundamental problem of communication and subsequent objectification of others that you'll inevitably end up with.

if you look at a lot of online discourse (such as what fisher's discussing in the vampire's castle - not going to vouch for all that's written in that text, since i haven't read it for years, but he's talking about something real), it's based on vigorously controlling certain types of behaviour, in particular language and affect. this only makes sense as a political activity from a basically behavioristic view of other people - i.e. you cannot really talk to people about stuff, you can only reward or punish. if you punish perceived transgressions vigilantly enough, eventually those transgressions will stop and you'll have fixed society. the only people you can meaningfully discuss anything with are the people with comparable experiential backgrounds, in practice people who already agree with you to some extent - anyone with a simliar experiential background who disagrees can be assumed to either be acting in bad faith or to be misinformed (to an extent, this is necessary; the candace owens of the world do genuinely exist). such behaviorism doesn't make sense to me unless you have a fairly solid philosophical underpinning to allow you to do this, and i argue that identitarianism (in its standpoint theory+translation problem form) is such an underpinning.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

its weird how this only became an issue once mods started handing more than sixxers for it maybe if they go back to that the problem will go away!

Flavius Aetass posted:

I'm the one who has made it a point not to allow excessive toxicity.

Flavius Aetass posted:

I mean, if the problem is that you don't like me probing Larry et al for calling people retards I can really only say you can gently caress off too and continue to do it.

apropos to nothing posted:

lemme just say how absurd it is that larry is repeatedly punished for typing the word when flavius himself and others itt have since posted the word with no punishment. if the word is legit so bad that it is punishable to say it, then why is putting it in quotations or typing it but to explain it ok? like if somebody put the infamous racial slur that shall not be named into quotation marks they would be punished or if they copied the infamous [INSERT RACIAL SLUR HERE]stomper58 post, they would be punished for it. which, on these forums anyway, is also absurd imo because you create an environment where its literally impossible to use a word even to describe why the word is bad and so it creates language which is as confusing as this sentence. but if the word is really so bad, then why is the mod posting it to say "he keeps posting THE WORD THAT IS ILLEGAL TO POST" this is the thing that is always so insane to me about this website which is just arbitrary rules and moderation that are very clearly designed to further forums grudges or more likely fail rear end discord grudges.

apropos to nothing posted:

lemme just say how absurd it is that larry is repeatedly punished for typing the word when flavius himself and others itt have since posted the word with no punishment. if the word is legit so bad that it is punishable to say it, then why is putting it in quotations or typing it but to explain it ok? like if somebody put the infamous racial slur that shall not be named into quotation marks they would be punished or if they copied the infamous [INSERT RACIAL SLUR HERE]stomper58 post, they would be punished for it. which, on these forums anyway, is also absurd imo because you create an environment where its literally impossible to use a word even to describe why the word is bad and so it creates language which is as confusing as this sentence. but if the word is really so bad, then why is the mod posting it to say "he keeps posting THE WORD THAT IS ILLEGAL TO POST" this is the thing that is always so insane to me about this website which is just arbitrary rules and moderation that are very clearly designed to further forums grudges or more likely fail rear end discord grudges.

Dustcat posted:

ohhh he's using the word! look! he's using it right now! why can't i use the word?!!?!

just look at larry's posting history in this thread, it's funny because he's actually got a few substantive posts in there that contribute to the discussion, but then he can't help but fly into a frothing rage whenever someone posts something he disagrees with, and that ends up being the majority of his posts and he keeps getting probated for posting the word he posts when he goes full berserk lol

Yossarian-22 posted:

some plague rats posted:

It's good you remembered to add lol at the end so we all know you're actually cool and not mad

Ferrinus posted:

but "you are black and hence more likely to be gunned down by police" is also still true in obama's case. it was obviously true before he became president, and even after he became president it manifested in the way he was treated by his opposition, the special attention the secret service now had to pay to white supremacist terrorism in specific, etc. the antagonism between black people and the police is as constitutive of american capitalism as the antagonism between employee and employer (which, to be clear, is also varied and negotiable; it might be attenuated or nonexistent in a worker's co-op, and as indigi writes plays out very differently for a janitor and a football player)

basically, you can't call race purely superstructural when race is so important to both the rate of exploitation and the maintenance of the reserve army of labor. and indeed you can tell people they are wrong about race, even if they're of the race you're talking about while you're not; for instance, a black person who claims that race biologically rather than socially real, or that there's no special antagonism between police and black people in the states, is wrong. where i live there's a particularly slimy black public figure who's like, actually, airbnb and the gig economy are good because they've allowed hard-working black people to succeed and thrive, even though the numbers point in the exact opposite direction

quote:

i don't mean to dismiss your corbyn example, so feel free to explain it in more depth, but i thought i'd answered what you said: he probably took the right "line" (racism is real, but only we can stop it) but was either unwilling or unable to make good on that line through further actions or policy positions (specific identity of hostile MPs, direct criticism of israel being functional political suicide, whatever) and lost. do you think corbyn lost specifically because of his willingness to cotton to identitarianism, such that if he were more of an orthodox marxist he could've weathered the storm of the entire media telling lies about him? that was not my impression.

quote:

i actually think the CRC does anticipate and answer minority identities being mobilized towards reactionary ends. for instance they bring up and explicitly reject the idea of forming a separatist movement, and instead commit to struggling "with" (rather than "against") male comrades, even those who engage in misogyny. the tendency you go on to describe - prejudging people as good or bad and rewarding or punishing them accordingly, the fundamental impossibility of transformation of either personal character or social context, fundamentally unbridgeable gulfs between different identity groups, etc - these are just common philosophical assumptions of progressive and conservative liberals alike and have no special relationship to identity politics or "identitarianism" as a concept. it's just the same poo poo as the race mixing = communism counterprotesters against the civil rights movement

Dustcat posted:

ohhh he's using the word! look! he's using it right now! why can't i use the word?!!?!

just look at larry's posting history in this thread, it's funny because he's actually got a few substantive posts in there that contribute to the discussion, but then he can't help but fly into a frothing rage whenever someone posts something he disagrees with, and that ends up being the majority of his posts and he keeps getting probated for posting the word he posts when he goes full berserk lol

Dustcat posted:

what do you think i'm mad at exactly

THS posted:

it can be difficult to stand out as tedious, usually being this boring causes someone to fade into the background. you have done an incredibly persistent job of turning white noise into a roar

some plague rats posted:

if you write a bunch of words and put lol at the end you're mad about something, I don't care enough about you to figure out the specifics

some plague rats posted:

if you write a bunch of words and put lol at the end you're mad about something, I don't care enough about you to figure out the specifics

Dustcat posted:

ohhh he's using the word! look! he's using it right now! why can't i use the word?!!?!

just look at larry's posting history in this thread, it's funny because he's actually got a few substantive posts in there that contribute to the discussion, but then he can't help but fly into a frothing rage whenever someone posts something he disagrees with, and that ends up being the majority of his posts and he keeps getting probated for posting the word he posts when he goes full berserk lol

Spergin Morlock posted:

this thread is regarded

apropos to nothing posted:

cool so you dont see any problem with other posters using the word, you just feel larry is the problem. seems to confirm that you and others dont really give a poo poo about the word and whether its offensive or not, you just dont like that poster. seems to confirm what i posted, thanks.

V. Illych L. posted:

right, but all that is incidental to blackness, which being an identity is constituted within the experience of black people - which you cannot interrogate. that's the basic point i'm getting at here. the basic, constituting principle of blackness as identity and thus as means of political mobilisation along identitarian lines, is created inside people's heads. this is not the case with one's relation to the means of production.


corbyn got hosed by brexit to a probably irretrievable degree. nevertheless, the antisemitism issue did material harm to his project and sapped a ton of energy and enthusiasm from people who had previously been very willing to go the extra mile; it could've been handled better simply by saying and staying firm on "no, this is wrong, there's no indication that the labour party is any more antisemitic than british society at large". they did not do this, in my view in large part because they genuinely did not conceive of the possibility of saying that british jewry could be collectively wrong about antisemitism in britain. this failure to insist on basic facts has to have some ideological explanation, either societally or in the party. in my opinion, it was both: anti-racism is conceived today almost entirely along the lines i've sketched out previously, meaning that any majority engagement has to be as an auxillary, or an "ally", because one cannot access the truths of being a racialised minority unless one belongs to one. a similar fracas emerged recently in my country; a comedian had done a sketch show where he played all the roles, and (rather misguidedly) thought he'd add a black character. to play this character, he donned a wig and copious amounts of tanning cream. this created a big debate on whether the show should be taken off air (it was a decade-old christmas special that i'm pretty sure everyone had forgotten before this) with, notably, a black students' group attacking some south-asian-descended people for saying they were cool with it, explicitly along the lines of this being experiential knowledge and these south-asian types not being privy to it.


"race mixing is communism" is also identity politics, but it's clear right-wing identity politics. in france, the "identitarian generation" were just banned for being effectively nazis. identitarianism is not a necessarily left-wing concept, which is why i've taken pains to call it left-identitarianism when talking about its left-wing form.

apropos to nothing posted:

cool so you dont see any problem with other posters using the word, you just feel larry is the problem. seems to confirm that you and others dont really give a poo poo about the word and whether its offensive or not, you just dont like that poster. seems to confirm what i posted, thanks.

V. Illych L. posted:

no, it's literally what i believe to be the correct take. the people you call liberal idealists are, as far as i can tell, actually correct on this part.

race is downstream to a bunch of objective stuff, but it's also constituted in the minds of people. as are, say, nations. a person from one nation has a whole raft of experiential signifiers and will get huffy if foreigners get involved in their politics or judge them from other standards, because there's a bunch of nuance which inevitably gets lost. this is what identity means - it's what you constitute yourself as. i belong to my nation and my city and to my political affiliation; these things exist inside my head until i perform them. they're of course shaped by my encounter with the outside world, but they're still me being me for me. when i go abroad i have the privileges and limitations of my nationality imposed on me. this is real, but my national identity is still a factor of people's minds. i have no particular objective beef with a russian border guard - he and i may have a whole raft of common interests - but he's still going to glare suspiciously at me as he tries to find something wrong with my visa because of basically made-up entities called nations.

this is not to say that ideology is separate from the objective factors of society; simply that it is meaningfully distinct from them. woke capital is not an ally because it believes in racial realism; it may be sincere in wanting equality between the races, but what we need is to abolish the race concept altogether.

namesake posted:

I understand the distinction between the objective class relationship and subjective social relationships like race but the supposedly stark divide between the two requires a gulf between the point of production and society in general which doesn't exist, they both constantly flow into the other. The worker is created and replenished in society so that they are able to sell their labour power to the capitalist and be used at the point of production, the conditions of creation and supply of that labour are just as important to capitalism as their use and exploitation in the workplace, once exhausted for the day the worker must return to society and undergo whatever rituals of society and consumption they are able to and need to to return to the workplace. The base of capitalist society - the expansion of capital - requires the constant provision of exploited labour, so the structuring of production of labour as a commodity is just as much part of the base as is the production of capital.

This means restricting travel, means banning certain people from certain work, means limiting education, means making sure certain kinds of people aren't expected to live certain ways so that they don't find ways of withdrawing their labour against the needs of the capitalist. The ways in which the working class is managed and controlled to continue to provide that labour in forms suitable for capitalist exploitation are numerous but undeniably include race. However because only the working class is disciplined in such a way there are examples of the ruling class who are openly exempt from such repression. You don't argue that Obama being less likely to be gunned down by police reveals to the socially constructed nature of race (at least not as a general point when trying to mobilise a crowd assembled on the basis of racial equality), you point out that he's immune because he is ruling class. His class gets him out of the framework which otherwise makes labour (and the labourer who provides it) generic and therefore replacable if not outright disposable. A worker dies? Hire another. The owner dies? Well that's going to cause some real poo poo isn't it? Class society structures itself to protect the ruling class and that's a force so powerful it overcomes racism so it's not about arguing the legitimacy of one over the over, it's a plain observation that one overpowers the other. This then cleaves the leftist from the liberal, those who want universal liberation for all from those who don't mind an underclass so long as it meets their idea of a moral composition.

Liberation struggles aren't a sort of second flank against capitalist society, good because they tackle oppression but not centred on exploitation so therefore not really Marxist. They are Marxist because they (can do, at least) deal with the realities of the structuring of labour and provision of labour power which is at the heart of the capitalist system as well. You can waste a lot of time trying to refute race and hope you can substitute class in afterwards or you inject the class perspective into the already working class struggle that is taking place.

Ferrinus posted:

it seems to me that flavius's enforcement against usage of the word "retarded" is in fact exactly what you'd like to see for the n-word, in that he is punishing people for using it as a pejorative but not for simply putting it in text for the point of reference, or for using it to describe the development of industry under conditions of imperialism, or whatever. it'd be pretty ironic if i turned out to be wrong here but i guess we'll find out together

Ferrinus posted:

the paragraph you've spun out here about the social construction of nationality applies equally well to wage-labor. when you roll out of bed in the morning, your job only exists in your head until you perform it. you perform it because people will get mad at you if you don't perform it, and punish you by e.g. denying you food and housing. your ability to perform it at all is mediated by the race, gender, and other traits that society imputes on you and, as well, will punish you for failing to perform correctly

if your race existed completely inside your skull, no one would be mad at rachel dolezal

V. Illych L. posted:

it's also enforced by others, because it also exists in others' skulls; one can imagine a society like ours but with no race concept, but one cannot imagine a society like ours without exploitation. the dolezal case is interesting, because i suspect transracialism is going to become more of a thing as time passes (e. re: "politically Black" etc), but let's not go there

now, though, it's getting incredibly late where i am, so i'm going to have to stop posting and, by law of forums battle, concede the field

apropos to nothing posted:

if so fair enough, but theres plenty of people who have used it as a joke/pejorative itt and not punished plus plenty of people who called the mods pedophiles and werent banned but others who were. again, if its consistent fair enough but its always the case that the consistency comes in the form of if the mods dont like you you will be punished.

apropos to nothing posted:

if so fair enough, but theres plenty of people who have used it as a joke/pejorative itt and not punished plus plenty of people who called the mods pedophiles and werent banned but others who were. again, if its consistent fair enough but its always the case that the consistency comes in the form of if the mods dont like you you will be punished.