It's also tricky -- especially in online spaces -- to present what you're saying as a good-faith criticism and not a dismissal.
Class issues cause and perpetuate identity issues, and you can't acknowledge one and not the other. You can't call out police brutality without recognizing that it is disproportionately racist just like you can't acknowledge institutional racism and think more black billionaires will solve the issue
Actually sweaty being able to compromise with Republicans is what intersectionality is all about
I'd also add, class is the only leverage all these groups share.
Class is what unites these groups, and how can they wield power to address the unique ways in which they are oppressed.
No one group can hope to defeat any of this by themselves. Their only chance is together, and the main way they can do that is to organize around denying their labor to capitalists on behalf of each other.
Race is structural, not just ideological, capitalism operates differently because of race.
Take the cheap labor provided by borders, the large surplus class created by mass criminalization, the close ties between the arms industry and prison labor.
One doesn't scaffold the other, they grow tangled together, supported by each others weight like two roses planted too close together.
Methods of analysis are tools. Use whatever tools seem useful. Don't be the schmuck that thinks all you need is a hammer for everything.
Honest take:
Aren't class issues and identity politics practically the same thing?
Is this is what the meme is insinuating? Forgive me for I am a stupid leftist.
I mean me being trans and being discriminated against on that isn't inherently about class, but identity. And that discrimination should be fought against, regardless of my class, even tho being part of a group that is discriminated against probably correlates somewhat with class.
Capital sure does love to weaponize trans identity to try to turn people into reactionary shitheads and kill solidarity. I can see that much.
Fuck that. Solidarity forever.
There is enough hate my heart for the bourgeoise and LGBTQ+ phobes!
Solidarity forever.
yep, class is the core of identity politics, class is the primary contradiction that we have to pull at to unify the people around the rest of the struggle, which will lead to new “ages” of human history and year zero events
the people telling you “identity politics are bad” are reactionaries who haven’t completely made their way through the pipeline to revolutionary worldviews
Isn't "year zero" like a Khmer rouge thing? I get the meaning, but maybe not a good term.
Vampire Maoism, a newly emerging pan-ultra ideology, an ideology which has subverted the entire castle through a guerrilla war waged by (now postdoctoral) Jason Unruhe stans, demands the Western leftists integrate intersectionality and the rest of “postmodernism” back into the their worldviews, so long as we continue to develop and make materialist transformations to the idealist theory with materialist dialectics
yes, all of those people who shrieked at you about how the bad new theory was completely incompatible with their great old theory were right at the time but have been transformed into reactionaries now
this is a pattern that will repeat forever
Both leftists and rightists don't know what intersectionality means it seems.
What's on that T-shirt the class reductionist dog is wearing?
Remember a couple months ago when people were trying to tell us Krystal Ball was our new queen?
Sure hope no one fell for that shit.
She has good opinions on Twitter but to willingly host a daily show with someone as odious as Saagar Enjeti is incredibly sus
Immaterial or material conditions, hmm wonder which one is more important. Why not both? :bear:
I agree that intersectionality is broadly underutilized as a unifying analytical concept on the left. The left cannot move forward but through recognizing that Black/poor/lesbian women have worlds more to contend with than white Bernie Bros who just want gibs. But what you were saying about material conditions belies this somewhat.
Caitlyn Jenner as a very wealthy and preeminent figure will still face stigma unfortunately, but this stigma will not as a rule result in her being put out on the street or disowned by her social network or forced to endanger herself for the basic necessities of living.
And you’re right on the point about Hillary, and it applies all the same. But I think we really are talking about class in that instance, as social climbing really relates to social reproduction, another Marxian concept.
Class is reproduced from one generation to the next. But it’s not something that is ever really reflected on an epigenetic or genotypic level, unlike sex or neuropsychology. It is the machinations of the production process at the base & the cascade of resulting social relations involved that legitimize and prop up a strictly disciplinary socioeconomic hierarchy.
I agree with most of what you said. Not trying to call out all the “sickos”, but experience cannot but inform individual decision making & worldview to the extent where intersubjectivity becomes increasingly difficult. It can be unavoidable to turn inward. The relating and reflecting of personal/shared trauma is undervalued and often stigmatized in our culture, this aversion becomes psychopathy in my opinion.
Additionally, I want to say we can look and understand those “machinations of the production process”, such as the historical phenomenon of bringing bonded labor from the Slave Coast or India or elsewhere within an empire to undermine the domestic price of labor and stoke sociocultual/“racial” tension within underclasses of another place. And when we do we can see that the burdens & the bloodshed caused by these race & gender & national identity issues are almost always carried by those underclasses.
For instance, Trinidad & Tobago have an almost equal divide between East Indian descended & Afro-Caribbean populations. The racial and cultural hierarchy plays out much as you’d expect, but it’s all reflected through the prism of British Imperial history & the ways that labor was exploited in the past. That’s what’s fucked up!
Class & its nefarious stranglehold on gender works the same way in South Korea, one of the most ethnically/culturally homogeneous countries on the planet, as it does in Papua New Guinea and America. Women have it the toughest.
America only has the added benefit/curse of observing how these historical social/cultural/gender/economic divides get heated up in the modern crucible of internationally liberalized capital flows.
Racism is a real material condition, it has existed for aeons and needs to be eradicated if we ever want to achieve communism
I probably oversimplified, but this was meant to mock radlibs and class reductionists, who often stick to caring about immaterial / material conditions. Im very aware they are intertwined.
