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:
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Communism is incompatible with any coercive or oppressive system, for it is defined as the absence of those things.
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If we want to achieve communism and defeat oppressive systems we need working-class solidarity
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The working class includes BIPOC, Women, Disabled people and LGBT people
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Working class solidarity means having solidarity with all of these people and uniting our struggles together.
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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.
"we need to stop focusing on the stuggles of [insert oppressed identity here] and get back to ye olde class only politics."
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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/
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