Good post.
Nobody should be telling minorities that they're dividing the left. As if not standing for bigotry is more divisive than being a bigot in the first place.
I can't believe we're having this struggle session now involving 3 year old accounts?
How did they keep quiet this long and what made them lose this ability?
i know, im kinda wilding
earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
If I had to guess (not for you specifically, but hexbear in general), it would be tone indicators. The last big struggle session that I can think of was whether we should use tone indicators to accomodate neurodivergent people. It actually makes sense to use them in an online forum like this, even for neurotypical people because nuance is lost when one is just reading text straight up. However, I saw a lot of pushback on this sort of thing from users that would normally be all about the "hexbear party line" (so to speak) of things like vegan solidarity, trans solidarity and respecting pronouns, etc. And it's the same line of argumentation that people who were against meat content warnings were using ("what's the big deal?" etc.). So yeah perhaps that's the next frontier.
i already have to badger people to do spoiler tags and nsfw tags properly for trauma related content, that is gonna take ages to catch on
i do usually use emojis as a tone indicator a lot of times though 🤔 thats probably not very reliable for a lot of neurodivergent people but maybe some emojis could be made to ease adoption, would have to inform people on hover texts
i already have to badger people to do spoiler tags and nsfw tags properly for trauma related content, that is gonna take ages to catch on
You've (correctly) told me to add spoiler tags and NSFW tags on my own posts, and while inconvenient at first, I would not want it any other way because that's better for other people.
I think it boiled down to some people being mildly inconvenienced and being asked to modify their behavior for the sake of other people.
Fair-weather comrades until that moment.
I love that song. I can't help it. Even with its contextual political baggage.
To summarize, it was at the ideological front of the idea of the public mental hospital system being a bad thing (and yes in many ways it was) but that lead to the Reagan-era abolishment of pretty much the entire thing which drove so many people out of that system that many of them became permanently homeless and untreated of numerous mental illnesses... lingering on the streets for decades, some to the present day if they haven't died already.
I had always taken the lyrics to be about a loss of innocence that comes with working in the California entertainment industry. It's all glamorous from the outside but within the residents have become deranged and exploitative.
"You can check out any time you like but you can never leave... until you can, then you can never check back in. Tough shit. Have fun being homeless."
Wtf I didn't interpret it that way at all lmao, I thought it was a funny joke about California having nice weather or something which made you not want to leave
I'm too innocent
I still love the song but the lyrics were directly about being "tricked" into a public mental health institution, the kind that ceased to exist for the most part after Reagan's "reforms."
That seems like a stretch. I highly doubt public mental health facilities have ever been synonymous with intoxicating opulence.
I highly doubt public mental health facilities have ever been synonymous with intoxicating opulence.
They weren't, but they still existed for those in dire need of a place to stay and access to medication.
They don't have to be "opulent" to be that and closing pretty much all of them left every single person kicked out of them on the street, many of them permanently. That's a little worse than "not opulent."
Kicking a lot of mentally ill people out onto the streets was an atrocity, no argument from me there.
I'm arguing that Hotel California being about mental hospitals doesn't make sense. There are so many lines that run counter to that interpretation:
There she stood in the doorway
The . . . intake nurse?
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted/She got the Mercedes Benz
Even if the staff can afford some luxuries, it doesn't seem like something they'd discuss with a patient.
They livin' it up at the Hotel California
Said nobody about an inpatient mental health facility ever
Mirrors on the ceiling/The pink champagne on ice
A hazard and contraband that would be immediately removed
And the part that might work,
You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave
really only half works. The "never leave" part works, sure, it was involuntary hospitalization, but how can you explain "check out any time you like?" Letting patients fake a check-out just seems like torture.
I always thought it was about drug addiction, specifically in the music industry, which lines up a bit more with the things you pointed out imo. And I heard that checking out was a euphemism for suicide.
I'm not 100% certain on my take, but some of your attempts to shoot it down are kind of Reddit-tier pedantic. "They livin' it up" can definitely be sarcastic or even medicated altered states of being, for example.
I don't see how he was being pendantic? He was just analyzing the song lyrics to point to another interpretation
I already gave the example of "livin' it up" being taken so directly and literally that there's a willing refusal to see the possible interpretations of the line as sarcasm regarding the conditions of the people mentioned, or as an altered state of consciousness from psych medications.
Or, he could be neurodivergent and tends to take things literally. Just because someone interprets something different than you (particularly something as subjective as song lyrics) doesn't mean you have to go straight to insults.
I had no such intention and I find it a stretch to see pedantic behavior as fundamentally neurodivergent.
Saying that saying someone is being pedantic is ableist but then giving a pass to what I said supposedly "not making sense" sounds selective to me, like you already had a chip on your shoulder about this.
This is becoming too heated for me to meaningfully continue it so I need to stop here. It's not worth it over song interpretation.
I'm sorry if I came off as aggressive, it wasn't intended that way. I myself have been accused of being pedantic about things because of my autistic perspective, but I can agree that being pedantic isn't inherently a neurodivergent thing, I was just trying to give a different perspective. I do have to disagree that saying someone is being "reddit-level pedantic" is comparable to someone saying something doesn't make sense, though.
I appreciate your reply here; I do think the argument about the song lyrics was getting overwhelming for me anyway. I looked up what even the band thought about their own song and the takes are contradictory and even seem to shift a little over time. "It's about dangerous women in weird times," "it's about drugs," and yes, one even suggested it was about a temporary but scary stay one of them had in a mental hospital often associated with the song even if it may not be a perfect fit.
I will reconsider how I phrase that in the future, because I myself don't like when I receive ableistic feedback to something I say, whether it's well intentioned but poorly worded, or just "you are mentally ill" accusations from wreckers and chuds, implying that neurodiversity means inherent badness and contemptible opinions.
I'm pissed off, but unsurprised. I've been seeing this same shit throughout the western white left since I became a leftist.
A lot of these people have been saying the same things for years, if they weren't being transphobic or making jokes about pumpkin spice lattes the mods just let them be and so did the user base
Is this the same struggle season regarding the kkkrakkkers in the thread about not being able to be racist against whites, or is this a different - if thematically similar- struggle session?
In the end, there is only one long struggle session, the neck back to which all the heads of the struggle session hydra can be traced: outdoor cats, cracker racism, veganism, you name it, they all trace back to the very same root, the struggle against posting.
Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, "No investigation no right to speak", has been ridiculed as "narrow empiricism", to this day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. There are many people who "the moment they alight from the official carriage" make a hullabaloo, spout opinions, criticize this and condemn that; but, in fact, ten out of ten of them will meet with failure. For such views or criticisms, which are not based on thorough investigation, are nothing but ignorant twaddle. Countless times our Party suffered at the hands of these "imperial envoys", who rushed here, there and everywhere. Stalin rightly says "theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice". And he rightly adds that "practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory". Nobody should be labeled a "narrow empiricist" except the "practical man" who gropes in the dark and lacks perspective and foresight.
I may be misunderstanding this
quotation, but I think it aligns with your post. One who holds class/ethnic/racial/gender/cis/etc privilege and doesn't have the empathy and curiosity to investigate how that privilege effects their material circumstances makes a poor communist."Patriarchy" is a funny way to say "Capitalism" so the concept can survive and that is just needs more women to be in positions of power to exploit it.
Sorry but that's a bad and extremely reductive take. There is absolutely a unique factor of oppression towards non-cis-men that
a) evolved historically
b) reproduces itself in our current economic system, but
c) isn't guaranteed to dissolve and could be perpetuated in a post-capitalist economic system and
d) could be eased even under capitalism and materially benefit those affectedIgnoring this factor of oppression results in a reductive analysis of the kind of "let's overthrow capitalism and everything will be great"
Yes - the liberation of women, trans people of all genders, non-binary people etc. necessitates an end of capitalist structures - but that alone won't solve the problem. So saying "patriarchy = capitalism" is reductive.
And of course men suffer from patriarchal structures too - but it's qualitatively not the same as the explotation of their labour or the way non-cis men experience gender oppression.
This should also be expanded to include non-hetero men as well -- there's already enough literature on heteronormativity that I don't feel obligated to go into too much detail (and it is also very late so I don't want to), but it should be sufficient to say that heteronormativity and cisnormativity are major reinforcing factors for patriarchy, and that therefore homophobia and transphobia are inseparably linked to patriarchy. The oppressions experienced by cis gay men are certainly going to be different than those experienced by non-cis men, but there should still be a fair amount in common, and a large amount that cishet men do not experience.
Merely mentioning the word bourgeois(ie) makes so many people in the first world cringe, including the ones who proclaim to be left. I don't understand why it is so hard to admit your privileges, wild how decades of liberal propoganda even made basic descriptive words unappealing and cringeworthy.
"Eugh you are so stuck in time an unappealing to the common people"
I am both of those but not because I use the correct terminology
I think it's because in America, anyone with a decent 9-5 job has money in the stock market through a 401k, is pursuing home ownership, and probably wants to start a business or has a business owner of some kind in the family (even if it's sketchy grifting BS). The line for what counts as bourgeois is so skewed here, I think a lot of American workers aren't sure which side of the line they're on. Of course, this is all by design
Except that I've seen the same exact shit in irl orgs, pushing out marginalized comrades. Just because this is the internet, doesn't mean you're exempt from examining your privledge and holding solidarity with marginalized people by shutting the fuck up and listening.
Message boards have standards. This is a shitposting site.
Workers talk about losing their jobs, tech workers get uncomfortable and insist that the lost jobs were not real jobs unlike their jobs that may very well be next. "Maybe you shouldn't have gotten into the humanities where a decade later you might get replaced by new slop machines, which will totally not happen to my coding job ever ever ever. The slop machines are liberating and will revolutionize the world if you stop complaining about losing your not real job and wait long enough. We're all in this together."
Yeah, one of my critiques of LA/PMO conceptions of tech workers having different class interests or being a new class is that...well...their aristocracy isn't. It's extremely conditional and the Bourgoisie has an interest in removing it. It's all false consciousness boosted by a larger paycheck.
On the other hand dismissing the real poverty of the lower ranks of the working classes is also a real problem. Wealthy workers have a responsibility to contribute more to the left, not whine about how they're also poor struggling exploited proletarians
I have long maintained that tech workers are still workers and solidarity with workers is necessary for leftists.
Some tech workers make that very difficult at times if they decide their salary makes them superior to "underwater basket weavers" or the like.
By saying labor aristocracy is still just workers, and implying everyone is on the same boat?
youre being obtuse. the issue is saying "we're all workers" in order to dismiss peoples valid concerns and experiences. Obviously tech workers are still workers. their workers just privileged has hell, and they generally need to learn when to shut up and listen.
Is that the issue? Because when I consider myself in the same boat as poorly paid workers, it’s to support their — and my — rights, benefits and security.
Is that the issue?
yes
its nice you dont run into these people but they are everywhere.
It's a blurry line and I don't know where to draw it between people paid to do lower level tech tasks for tech corporations on one end and on the other highly paid and connected and privileged "code ninjas" or whatever the techbros call them this week.
Maybe differentiate between poverty and workers rights?
I’m in a good job and have no idea about living in poverty. Without my job and state support I would last some months, maybe a year. Long Covid could take me out easily. I am privileged by having a good job, but when head’s comes to tail I am in the same boat as any other workers.
Honestly I don’t really understand what OP is trying to say.
the main point is that leftists belonging to privileged groups are not immune to chauvinism, bigotry, and unexamined privileged thinking, and when someone criticizes them for it their response should be to shut the fuck up and listen instead of getting defensive or accusing them of dividing the left.
I didn't get the first point cuz labor aristrocracy by definition is not pretending to be on the left, nor talking to the poor proles, and a lot nor even considering themselves "a prole". Plus most have the oppprtunity to become petty burshwá.
No but if you have a boat that keeps you afloat for a year and especially if you know it, you have a lot more room to manouver than someone like me whose boat would instantly sink. It gives you more space even before anything happens to you so the difference is there all the time.
It's like saying falling from a cliff has the same result regardless of how high it is. We are both on a cliff, but it's not the same one.
The thing about poverty is that there are no error margins on anything. It strips you of good choices and ends up forcing you to make expensive and oppressive choices in ways that is impossible to explain to someone who has never been poor, and that is how we are different.
I deny nothing of that.
I don’t know how much to differentiate. Do the working poor need the same help as those who can’t work? Probably not. My guess is they benefit more from adequate wages and job security than state support. Those are things that I want for myself, too, regardless how much I currently need it.
Do you then go around claiming that working poor and those who’re unable to work are not in the same boat?
Well I work with unemployed folks and while the stuggle is similar it is again a very different boat in terms of agency and how well it stays afloat. So yes, it's going to be a different boat even if it is a more similar one.
I suppose my point is that while all of these are workers, their conditions (level of privilege) is different and therefore while they are the same in one way they are different in others. Maybe if we look at it on a macrolevel we can focus on the sameness, but on a microlevel and in everyday power the differences dictate the lives of people in ways that can't be reduced to being in the same boat.
where does that leave @UlyssesT@hexbear.net's vague feel-good notion of solidarity?
I don't actually know.
The best I can do is say that some tech workers are still workers, but I'd have to find a line to draw between "just trying to survive" and "actively making the world worse for the sake of nerd rapture."
Great point. I am personally struggling with this a lot both in my work with less privileged people and privileged coworkers.
I am in a country that has a strong nation building discourse around perceived equality and "sameness" and therefore there tends to be a lot of hostility towards anyone who tries to raise the question of very clear differences in privilege and be taken seriously.
My relatives got very angry at me over the summer when they told me how a person they know has had flooding in their home and as I knew that the person in question is very very wealthy and has several homes I said "Shame, but they will be ok." This resulted in these two yelling at me about how unempathetic I am and how they feel like they can't talk about their life struggles at all with me (both are petty bourge). I am myself poor, neurodivergent, fat & a woman.
I replied to them that I would not have been ok had this happened to me and got asked if I am bitter. I am not, these are just the material conditions we have. Technically all involved in this discussion were workers.
Someone once described all this to me with an example of a reality tv show that didn't manage to "work" in my country the same way as it did in a place like the UK. Here when you sit a rich person and a poor person on the same couch talking about what their everyday lives are like, you will only get sameness related discourse where the rich person is both allowed and socially encouraged to see their inability to heat their hot tub as often as befofe as the same as the poor person not being able to afford food.
This results in a society where extremely privileged people are allowed to have takes on things like poverty, race, gender as equals and fully diminishes the hardships experienced in the margins. And this is at least partially a result of a social democratic model of society where a lot of focus has been put to gender equality and equality of the workers. But only for the majority.
What this does to disabled folks and people who can never work, to people who are outside the scope of being able to do wage work and the way this legitimizes the outrage when calling out privilege is a thing I am trying to figure out.
In my real life work I am trying to raise the class consciousness of privileged people around me by raising the point of all of us being workers and our interests being aligned, but within this cultural framework I feel like this often ends up reinforcing the sameness myth and hiding the clear implications of privilege. So not entirely sure how to get the labor aristrocat to both understand our interest being aligned yet different.
Not entirely sure what my concluding point here even is, but just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely important conversation.
The outrage that pointing this out tends to result in seems like a sort of fragility, one person even admitted to me once that me reminding them of their privilege makes them feel guilty for the things they have. Which I think isn't a bad thing as long as this doesn't turn into hostility towards the margins, but to an understanding of what privilege is.
It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing" when it would be so easy to just say "chauvinists" or something for the second group, which 99% of the time will be the corresponding majority members but isn't essentializing and has some resilience against Candace Owen types.
It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing"
I don't think anything is being framed that way here. It's just written in casual language. I think we can recognize when a person from a marginalized group is a reactionary like Candace Owens.
The problem with just saying "chauvinists" is that no one on hexbear or in the DSA thinks the word applies to them. The point of the post is that all white people, all men, etc., are exposed to privilege brainworms from cradle to grave, and we're not necessarily aware of the brainworms we have absorbed, so when someone criticizes us we should shut the fuck up and listen and reflect, because it's not a far-fetched criticism. Getting defensive and shouting people down because we're sure we're not chauvinists is what's actually divisive.
...I keep neurotically editing the wording of this comment because I got stuck in some kind of obsessive loop, I'm going for a walk.
Loops are rough, I can sort of see how this would be a hazard for that with all the meta language.
Personally I guess I just get irritated by things that are written like they are a PSA but need to rely on charitable interpretation to make sense. The problem with not saying chauvinists is that, if we see things in purely identitarian terms like the original post does at face value, then when we are confronted by situations where the roles are reversed (and yes, this is a minority of situations, but perhaps more common than one might think), like a white, male leftist arguing against the chauvinism of a Candace Owen type, the lines of thinking here short-circuit. Simple deference is fine for casual relations but it's not nearly as useful in grand proclamations because, if we actually accepted the proclamation, then we've kneecapped ourselves in a way similar to "progressive" liberals observably have, that latter case being the main reason Owens types have a career to start with. We cannot look only at what the speaker is but also at what they are saying.
it's not easy to write a tightly worded PSA about a sensitive topic with a lot of tricky nuances, and I think sometimes it's more important to just get something posted promptly in the moment while the topic is getting attention in the community, and then let people hash things out in the comments, hopefully converging toward understanding through dialog. Also, I hope that on hexbear most of us are on each others' wavelengths enough not to assume someone's asking for "blind deference" to any group or person.
But yeah I agree it's one of the big challenges in communication, that sometimes discourse moves faster than understanding. In the worst cases you get a spiral of compounding misunderstandings and personal slights until people hate each other lol, the gap widens faster than communication can bridge it. But imo that's why it's so important for people to be patient, read between the lines, and ask for clarification instead of lashing out defensively. Communication is like trying to force your brain through a straw.
And sure, while I agree that we should never offer anyone blind deference, we should offer a fair bit of deference to people from marginalized groups, because they can see things the privileged are often blind to. They are looking at privilege from the outside, and it's always easier to understand something from the outside. And we should offer even more deference to leftists from marginalized groups, i.e., the people who voice complaints on hexbear dot net. A communist who's been posting here for months and written a lot of great, thoughtful comments in this thread is especially unlikely to be asking for blind deference. Not saying it's wrong to ask for clarification though, quite the opposite, as long as there's patient dialog.
To be clear, I'm not accusing anyone here of holding any position such as demanding blind deference, just that taking these statements at face value has problems.
Admittedly, the website does have a problem with being radlib and there are some people who have demanded blind deference in the past ["it's cool to objectify women if you're a lesbian!" etc.], but I don't think this user is one of them or that this particularly intersects with those grievances that I whine about.
A lot of what you are describing here is why leftism is dysfunctional in the west. Since leftism in the west isn't always a matter of material survival, western leftists use it to hyper-individualize themselves. Essentially they use leftist ideology to try to improve their class/conditions within a capitalist system without attempting to overthrow it. They also attack each other when one person does not see another's personal problems as "the one true leftist perspective."
A key factor is sometimes these criticisms are not coming from someone who is looking for solidarity, but supremacy. This is why people become defensive, because these accusations are not always launched with a cooperative perspective in mind, but a competitive mindset that is a result of western societal framing. Many of the examples cited can also be liberal perspectives quietly excusing capitalism. Basically saying "if it was only 'x' group that was removed from power, or put in charge, the current system would work.
...Not the west? There are plenty of leftists in Africa, South America, and Asia.
Why do they call it the left??? When you of in the right wing of out hot left the wing??
These arguments only work when they're not being used to ignore the problems when they're also occurring among the left. Anyone that deploys them argument when it is occurring within the left just help to alienate and split away the affected group.
If you don't 
for me, then you ain't Black!
