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It's easier to lay the blame at the feet of "identity liberalism" than it is to blame economic liberalism, because one is something that matters to people without power wishing to feel like valid human beings in society, while the other matters to people with huge amounts of power who don't want to be at risk of having to share it.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:27
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Confounding Factor posted:These are distractions from the underlying problems: class. Elevating issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc above class does nothing but serve the interests of capital, as we have seen. Thus why liberals who prioritize those issues are reactionary, since capital wants to divide or unite us on its whim. Protip no they aren't.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:34
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Sorry folks, getting rid of racism and sexism is pie in the sky daydreaming, now let me tell you about the communist utopia I have planned.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:37
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Neurolimal posted:Then those problems are tackled by the whole, and not ignored. Neurolimal posted:You can ignore Identity Politics I was going to type something up about "actually the issue is that those problems are frequently ignored by people who have a pretty useless definition of "no war but class war" but I think you illustrated that point quite well tbh.
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Dec 3, 2016 22:20
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Neurolimal posted:If you ignore that my prior posts established that when I speak of Identity Politics I refer specifically to a certain mindset that is toxic towards leftist allies, sure. I wonder if anyone might feel that is an apt description of people who go to great lengths to minimise the importance of anything that they do not consider to be a purely economic issue.
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Dec 3, 2016 22:41
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Bip Roberts posted:Why are you against both? Can two things not be focused on at once? I mean personally I would suggest that the two things can easily be made one thing and that a pretty major obstacle to that is a bunch of annoying people saying "oh no that's not important we shouldn't be talking about that because it's not what I think of as class warfare"
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Dec 3, 2016 23:02
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deep web creep posted:The frustration is that we can't talk about economic justice or class struggle without... well, what you can see going on in the thread right now. I mean you certainly can if you don't feel the need to preface it with "enough about that stupid minority crap what we really need to talk about is how great communism is!"
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Dec 3, 2016 23:18
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deep web creep posted:Honestly, though, is anyone doing that here? Maybe I am mistaken or too easily projecting my opinions on to other people but I haven't seen anyone disagree that the issues of identity politics aren't a vital component of economic and social justice. The overwhelming trend in the discussion, as tends to be the case, is that people who oppose idpol as a valid political position come at it from a position of contempt. They may throw in a "well of course we need to care about x y z minority issues" but the desire always to reframe the discussion with economics in a position of overwhelming primacy. Which frankly I find difficult to credit as the position of someone who is genuinely interested in the concerns raised by proponents of idpol. Idpol exists because the things it talks about simply are not discussed elsewhere satisfactorily, if you want an economic leftist platform to be accepted by idpol proponents you need to entirely assimilate idpol into it. You need to approach it from a perspective of proper understanding in both areas and without the desire to keep saying "idpol is bad because it distracts from the importance of economics" because that is completely incorrect. Idpol is important because it affirms the importance of things that economics do not cover. If you want to unify both you must serve both, and because idpol is not primarily economic, it does not really interfere with an economic leftist position. The argument that it "distracts" people is fallacious because it blames idpol for creating other class divisions rather than understanding that it exists in response to those divisions. Idpol as distinct from economic leftism stems from a failure to address non economic class divisions under a purely economic model. Complaining about idpol will obviously not make those divisions dissolve and it is wrong to suggest that they are superficial or that they will be resolved by addressing economic inequality, or that they are not, in some cases, instrumental in preventing the effective unification of economic classes. Someone seeking to create a unified economic class to fight together must incorporate a massive amount of idpol thought because it is a tool for understanding division among what should, by rights, be a class unified in their economic concerns, but because of the things that idpol tries to understand and fight, are currently separated, because as idpol seeks to explain, often different parts of the same economic class are agents of oppression of other parts of said class as surely as Captial is.
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Dec 3, 2016 23:36
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Cugel the Clever posted:What thread have you been reading? We've stated again and again that we can fight for the two goals simultaneously, hell, that we even need to do so as they go hand in hand, only to be told by you, Five, and stone cold that we are secretly conspiring against the movement toward social justice. You're projecting. I don't follow Brainiac Five's argument so I don't know whether I agree with them or not, and I don't see a reason to exclude white gay people, though of course that doesn't mean they're going to be afforded primacy either.
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Dec 4, 2016 01:54
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Barbe Rouge posted:I can't believe somebody paid actual money to let the world know about your terrible opinions on wallpaper. I don't have opinions on wallpaper except that I prefer paint.
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Dec 4, 2016 02:18
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Confounding Factor posted:He's like some kind of dictator, "you are the wrong stripe of liberal, so you are a brainless loving idiot who should die". Instead of saying "Hey liberals maybe you should consider x, y z" but it comes across in such a hostile, condescending manner that nobody is going to be persuaded by it. That's an incredibly silly notion. Also liberals and socialists really aren't likely to get on especially well because their ideas are fairly opposing.
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Dec 4, 2016 03:04
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Brainiac Five posted:One way in which all LGBT people share a particular experience is what you might call a Panopticon-sense, the need to either perform straightness or straight-adjacent gayness/transness, or to directly rebel against that sense of being watched by performing. I won't say that every LGBT person enjoys the sense of being among "family", but I will say that it's an extremely common experience, to have that relief from being able to shed the mask and the act and finally feel like your face is your own. I'm not sure everyone has that same experience because economic power makes it much easier to find a welcoming environment (because it gives you more social access in general) and also lessens the material risk of rejection. In like, a very basic way perhaps but I wouldn't ascribe much commonality of experience to that in the same way I wouldn't ascribe much commonality of experience to someone who earns 100k a year and someone who earns 15k on the basis that they both have jobs. There's a pretty major discontinuity of experience inherent in that kind of power gap.
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Dec 4, 2016 07:30
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Brainiac Five posted:Economic power only makes it easier to find a welcoming environment in an abstract sense- your ability to access a gayborhood or attend a pride parade isn't linearly dependent on your income or wealth. It's arguably inversely correlated in the sense that the richer you get the more the LGBT people you know are ones who have internalized their performance completely. Technically, I guess? I'm bisexual so of course I have the option of completely passing which is another good way that there's a limited amount of similarity of experience under the LGBT umbrella. As a union to advance collectve interests it's great but I'm wary of complacency about how natural that alliance is, we do not all want or need the same things or have the same experiences, and obviously I can very much consider someone an enemy because of their economic class regardless of their sexuality. Like, my experience isn't the same as someone who is say, trans and destitute. Because it doesn't cause me a lot of distress to just hide all of the parts of me that might be objectionable to the people I have to interact with, and my preferences don't incur a material cost. I should support them on all counts because they're on the lovely end of a bunch of different kinds of oppression, but it'd be pretty dishonest to say I share their experience in any meaningful way.
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Dec 4, 2016 07:39
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Brainiac Five posted:Who the hell cares if it's "natural"? All class understandings are necessarily synthetic. It is fine to not care from where the solidarity comes as long as you have it, but believing that it stems from common experience when it doesn't runs the risk of assuming that people will naturally understand each others concerns when they don't, and might leave you wanting for support when you would expect it to come. Immediately, emotionally, I find it easier to feel class kinship with a poor LGBT person because they're poor than because they're LGBT, because everyone's hosed much the same by wealth inequality, but I probably don't have much of the same experience with them sexuality wise. Relying on a sense of commonality alone I think is insufficient. To the extent that you feel it that's great, but it's necessary to base your class consciousness on more than that, because there are things that won't just naturally come to you and to maintain an effective front people need to be willing to advocate for needs that they may not share. It's relying on feeling in common with people because of shared experience that leads to people excluding all classes but economic from their viewpoint. It's important to advocate also for those you don't share an experience with because for them, that experience may be more of their life than the things you want their support on in your life. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Dec 4, 2016 |
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Dec 4, 2016 08:11
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Brainiac Five posted:Well, dude, actually, Marxian class structures put 99% of the population into the proletariat. So there's by necessity a lot less commonality there. Which is another good argument against relying on common experience for collective support, yes.
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Dec 4, 2016 08:19
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Brainiac Five posted:But you're insisting that commonality is what generates "no war but the class war" stuff? As in, if you don't have common experience with people who undergo forms of oppression other than the very basic Marxist economic sense, it's easy to think "well that's the only thing wrong with my life and Marx does say that everything ultimately boils down to class warfare so I think the guy writing in 1850 was 100% right about today's society!" Which, obviously, presents a problem in, say, America, where a soon-to-be-majority of the population is also on the receiving end of racial oppression and the world in general where women are on the receiving end of oppression, and every other form of oppression that generally falls under identity politics. In order to get a unified majority, it's going to be necessary for people to rely on more than their sense of shared experience, race and gender and sexuality and all that are legitimate classes, as surely as economic class is, in the sense that they are the subjects of common oppression by the powerful, and that power is not purely economically distributed. If you shot everyone with money overnight you'd still have racism and sexism. The poor are oppressed by the rich, but the black are also oppressed by the white, the women by the men and the gay by the straight, or at least the societal norms centered around the empowered group in those cases. So, a purely economic answer won't do because you're not dealing with a purely economic problem. It's not enough to say you will fight for whoever you share a common experience with because that's not going to be enough people, and it leaves you very vulnerable, politically, to Trump style populism which enjoys playing on that division. It is, ultimately, necessary to also fight for people with whom you don't share a common experience in order that they will fight for you as well. It's not going to work to say that other classes don't exist, or to rely purely on common experience to define allies and enemies, instead people need to fight for other classes who deserve justice as much as they do. Essentially my quarrel with no war but class war people is that I think identity politics represents an improvement, or at least a needed expansion over Marx of societal injustice and that the left needs to adapt to and incorporate that rather than saying "no that's wrong just focus on economics" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Dec 4, 2016 |
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Dec 4, 2016 08:39
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Brainiac Five posted:If you think bigotry is eternal, you've already given up. I hope you get back on your feet, but right now you're just trying to drag others down into the muck of despair. The unlikeliihood of winning shouldn't really stop you fighting for something ethical.
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Dec 4, 2016 19:07
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Pharohman777 posted:I mean, it feels like I just stepped into the secret headquarters of the Something Awful Communist Party, and it is hilarious. That's UKMT and it's not secret.
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Dec 6, 2016 05:46
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