In light of the fact that some people have reported that people are being class reductionist on this site, I would like to say that class reductionism is reactionary and has nothing to do with Marxism or Anarchism.
The class vs identity debate is incredibly silly, and I hate that it keeps coming up amongst people. The fact is that there is no class vs idpol conflict. Heres why:
-
Communism is incompatible with any coercive or oppressive system, for it is defined as the absence of those things.
-
If we want to achieve communism and defeat oppressive systems we need working-class solidarity
-
The working class includes BIPOC, Women, Disabled people and LGBT people
-
Working class solidarity means having solidarity with all of these people and uniting our struggles together.
-
All of the major successful revolutionary movements understood this.
What happened to the class reductionists? Did they achieve anything? Did they get any advancements for the working class they claimed to represent? They did not, because in being reactionaries they cut off important allies, limited the scope of their struggles, and would sooner side with the bourgeoisie than with other oppressed groups.
So to conclude, intersectionality and trans liberation are good and necessary, and anyone who still believes in class reductionist ideas can fuck off. You are a nothing more than a crypto Strasserite and will wreck the movement if not dealt with properly.
In my view, you cannot have intersectionality without class. Liberal feminism is a great example of this. Its feminism that is only really for middle/upper class cis white women, and as such its divides women along class lines by excluding poor women. The only real feminists are communists, because they willing to resolve all the oppressions that women face.
with all of that said, the struggle does ultimately begin with class (but certainly does not end there, to be clear).
This is part of the purpose behind a cultural revolution, as theorized by Lenin and Mao and attempted in China. You can also see aspects of this with 90s and 00s Cuban government and activists' role in LGBT rights
oh noo, the libs picked up on class reductionist? they ruin everything.
generally the gist is 'idpol distracts from class which is the one true axis of oppression'
Even if they were correct in this observation it would be a revisionist line. There are many contradictions which are important to our struggles, one being primary does not eliminate the others.
"we need to stop focusing on the stuggles of [insert oppressed identity here] and get back to ye olde class only politics."
then you have a problem. because the foundation has to include everyone's basic struggles or it's a shitty porous, un-cured concrete that will shatter the moment it meets resistance.
You have to care about all of it or none of it is worth shit all. You can't build a foundation of solidarity over only white-cishet problems and expect it to support the struggles of minorities.
but at the same time the focus is on intersectionality & intersubjectivity and the solidarity that arises through recognizing working class division is itself along these same lines. gender and race & ethnicity & heteronormativity being primary ways that individuals are exploited & oppressed within the class structure from one generation to another.
politics of unbridgeable difference must be avoided, and these axes of oppression have to be analyzed from broader sociological vantages and societal concerns rather than only individual grievances. As Stokely Carmichael said:
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
So, we can't get into the habit of marketing individual wokeness expecting this alone to change the underlying material & structural divisions that function within and through specific backward norms & culturally inherited baggage. The only way to climb out of that pit is through recognition of that base exploitative system which forces us to recognize one another
Capitalism didn't spring up out of a vacuum, it's not some magically evil system that is making everyone "act bad". Capitalism was intentionally created by the powerful and wealthy as an attempt to continue justifying the existing power hierarchy.
Racism isn't bad because of capitalism. Racism is bad because it tries to justify an unjust hierarchy. Capitalism just happens to be the hierarchy that stands behind it now.
it's not enough to just be anti-capitalist and address the class struggle at that level. you have to face and crush all justifications for hierarchy lest capitalism just be replaced by another unjust system.
Capitalism is self-perpetuating because it reifies those ancient & unjust systems of racial & gender and ecological /geographic/socioeconomic disparities. Capitalism is only the industrializing & technological momentum of imperialism & colonialism. Many of the same families own massive wealth that were calling shots under Antebellum slave economies & even further back during the feudal period. Ultranationalistic & expansionist white Xtian supremacy is what global capitalism now protects.
I didn't say that "racism is bad because of capitalism". Nor would I. I only quoted Stokely who himself was a Pan-Africanist and BPP leader and was far more experienced on these things than I am. He makes the point that we can't hack everyone's brain and make them "good" or erase all of their evil cultural indoctrination & incorrect thoughts, because certain people are going to think what they think, but we can shout them down AND disempower them. But it's only through attacking & changing the legitimating regimes of authority that this can be curtailed in a place like the imperial core.
If enough people in society shift toward attacking the power structure, then the society is less able to reify all of these ancient backward habits and reactionary tendencies people acquire over their lives.
Slavery in the Colonial Americas was at the end of the day a conscious economic decision by planters & investors. White supremacist regimes of power & nonsense tropes and poisonous abusive thought processes were consciously forced & seeded among populations who otherwise would have "creolized" as happened in specific remote areas in the Americas.
The class structure reifies racial & gender "differences" and "ability" and cishet normativity, because those are primary axes of oppression that capitalism functions & exploits upon. As was true in imperial/colonial and feudal eras.
When we see the ways that imperialism & the labor-aristocracy functions within the US, we know that labor exploitation in the periphery will always set the working poor in overexploited Global South countries against one another in those same old ways.
I can agree with all your points, but the framing of capitalism as the one and only big-bad is what I have a problem with. people can be phobic/bigots outside the framework of capitalism. does capitalism exploited and perpetuate those bigotries? yes. but it didn't originate them.
We can fight both. we must fight both. or the fight for all of it is lost.
you're right, even the drive against something like "Great Han chauvinism" was pointed out years after the revolution in PRC. And many places with "socialist" governments still deal with strict social homogeneity & regressive popular culture, and ethnocentrism.
social stigma & unnecessary pointless hatred of "out-groups" has to be inoculated against in many different ways. I don't think the mass media & cultural fight are hopeless, and I think it's made more effective when we build as a unified front together toward it
what I want most to avoid, even more than "Strasserism" (which was bad enough but I think was confined to its time and place), is "Beefsteak Nazis" who merely by the right-wing swing in Western governments decide to side with those reactionary powerful elements. We can't shirk addressing the legitimized systems & institutions of power either.
absolutely, All power must be critically pulled apart.
here's probably my best reference for what I'm talking about btw. https://redsails.org/on-identitarianism-a-defense-of-a-strawman/
People here have responded to me with at least quasi-class reductionist arguments when I suggest that people can be motivated by racism. For example, I might say that white suburbanites fight tooth and nail against expanding public transit because they don't want minorities walking around "their" neighborhood. A class reductionist might say no that's not the reason they don't want more public transport there are very real, materialist explanations for why they feel that way. Intersectionality is good and argues it can be both.
It's when someone tries to divorce the social dimension of class from the class struggle and advance some abstract economism in its place, usually employed in a subtle defense of white identitarianism
I second this comment.
But with the purges, I'm not going to ask any questions.
I will add that this includes the troops. I’m a veteran myself, and my experience in the military has shown me that is really is just working class people of all nations being bribed, coerced, duped into joining and fighting in an imperialist military. Of course, this depends on your job (SF, seals, rangers, etc fuck off) but most really are working people thinking that they will be better off and serve a higher purpose (which we do in a sense, but it is the wrong one) that we all search for. All of us as communists share that brotherhood, the military is a different one,albeit wrong, but that is what drove me towards being a dirty commie. And why so many vets kill themselves after they get out (besides guilt of any sort).
Go directly to Borger King, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
CIA, famous promoter of LGBT rights across the world
i support lgbt rights (being in fact lgbt). whats next, what other trait/fault will you assign to people who disagree with you
It is not politics' job to tackle racism or sexism. Ideas are immaterial concepts, and thus immortal. Politics is simply not equipped to fight ideas. Are racism, sexism, transphobia and the like important topics? Yes. However, despite what the always-online crowd is telling you, posting is not praxis. You don't change a damn thing by being outraged and memeing about it. You gotta actually do something. Asking people to focus their finite amount of political engagement on the fight against ideas instead of materially improving people's lives is counter-productive and a waste of everyone's time.
While the revolution will not happen without black, female and trans workers, it also won't happen without ~40% arch-conservative/outright fascist ideologues among us, either. Make no mistake, these people will not get the wall, and they won't suddenly see the light, either. They're not going anywhere. Focusing on class solidarity is the correct way if you understand that revolutions can be won with a dedicated minority, but can only be kept alive non-violently through legitimacy and a unifying cause.A rock band needs a guitar, a bass, a singer with a mic, etc. It is not reductionist to point out that, in order to make them stop, you don't have to turn off their instruments one by one, but instead could simply turn off the amp. It doesn't deny the existence of the different instruments. Similarly, the cacophony of oppression is much easier to deal with if we turn off the great amplifier -class- first. That is not reductionist, either, it's simply prioritizing the bigger evil. While it is critical to understand the intersectional oppression of, say, a black woman, it is just as critical to understand that something like racism is only minimally amplifying the sexism. A racist is not going to be any more racist towards a black woman than to a black man. That is not the same for the class struggle, which amplifies all the other forms of oppression manifold. By calling it reductionist, you already deny anyone the ability to point towards class as the great magnifier of all these minorities' struggles without fear of being labeled. This is a great disservice to the cause.
I suggest to be more careful and nuanced with your language, comrade.
Ideas are based on the material conditions in which they are originally thought of, created, etc. So many of the biases we have are through capitalist exploitation in order to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves, rather than the minority ruling class.
Sure, ideas are immortal in the sense that as long as someone carries the message, it will never die. We don’t have the ideas of those who lives hundreds or centuries ago.
It is not politics’ job to tackle racism or sexism. Ideas are immaterial concepts, and thus immortal. Politics is simply not equipped to fight ideas.
What does this even mean? Racism and Sexism are political topics, they cant be anything else
Ideas are dependent on material in that they depend on people being able to think of them, store them and understand them, if you remove those things then the idea is lost forever. Think about how knowledge is lost when books are burned.
However, despite what the always-online crowd is telling you, posting is not praxis. You don’t change a damn thing by being outraged and memeing about it. You gotta actually do something.
If it wasn't for online posting I would not have the political literacy to be able to have this conversation with you, that is how important this stuff can be.
While the revolution will not happen without black, female and trans workers, it also won’t happen without ~40% arch-conservative/outright fascist ideologues among us, either.
Right-wingers cannot be a part of the revolution unless you want a civil war after it is over. The differences are just too great.
While it is critical to understand the intersectional oppression of, say, a black woman, it is just as critical to understand that something like racism is only minimally amplifying the sexism. A racist is not going to be any more racist towards a black woman than to a black man.
Are you a black woman? If not can any black women or black people in this thread vouch for what this person is saying because I don't buy it.
That is not the same for the class struggle, which amplifies all the other forms of oppression manifold. By calling it reductionist, you already deny anyone the ability to point towards class as the great magnifier of all these minorities’ struggles without fear of being labeled. This is a great disservice to the cause.
My problem is with the class struggle - identity struggle dichotomy in the first place they are so interlinked with each other that it's really really ridiculous to make arguments for one over the other. Given this class reductionism is really just woke bigotry if you will.
Really? I'm here because a few years ago chapos were dunking on libs and getting righteously outraged. On. Line.
