I overuse quotation marks
All I know is I avoided ML spaces for years cause a lot of the ones I knew IRL would say things about “IDPOL” and be some of the most racist and sexist people alive. It literally sounds like the same shit conservatives say.
There was this one guy who said that the only reason this one theorists was popular was because the theorist was Black. And was complaining about IDPOL like a White person in the comment section of Facebook bitching about wokeness.
I understand that, I can’t help but think they only want some people in their movement. I never felt welcome in any ML space, only in small caucuses of people.
You’re in one now
Yea there’s a reason I chose hexbear and decided to delete my lemmygrad account. The reason I don’t step into too much. Because I know I am not welcome here and I am trespassing into the territory of hard-working, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, and pious men but I have to exist somewhere, whole world is owned by these people.
the territory of hard-working, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, and pious men
if you’re describing hexbear that is not an accurate description of our demographics
No really hexbear but internet and world in general
i made lemmygrad account first and got banned within a day or two, been here ever since
Color revolutions are invented by Western governments, and they tend to use minorities as an incubator for those. Also turns out it’s really hard to do a color revolution if the minorities somewhere actually like the government and are taken care of…
In fact creating a consensus government that includes all voices is the surest way to prevent sedition and color revolution.
I think there’s confusion between 1) the real, material events of people experiencing gender dysphoria, systemic racism, sexism, etc, and 2) the capitalist hijacking of these concepts to further its own interests. People see #2 and conflate it with #1 and assume they are one and the same.
Prolewiki has a succinct description of this in relation to the reactionary CPGB-ML party:
A 70-page pamphlet written by Ranjeet Brar, Edward Renyard, and Joti Brar titled Identity politics and the transgender trend: where is LGBT ideology taking us? confuses the LGBT struggle with the liberal appropriation of that struggle. The pamphlet claims that “it is not gender that alienates men from women, it is our social relations”, completely oblivious to the fact that gender is a historical social construct, and that the existence of trans people even precedes the use of the term. Overall, this approach is a form of right-opportunism that has repackaged bourgeois political lines as being of a Marxist character, fundamentally distorting the party line away from a materially-based analysis of gender.
These are people who in essence, only see “leftist” policy in the sense of
They don’t actually want a better world, they just want a bigger cut of the spoils
This is basically why unionism is not the same as socialism. Unions are good, but the overlap only goes so far.
Essentially yes, they’re less concerned about stopping genocide in places like Congo where minerals for most electronics are mined and instead just want an EV, the miners getting basic rights is an after thought to creation of their toys
It’s like calling food liberal because of middle class, hipster farmers markets and organic grocery stores.
Internet leftists are invented by western capitalism
That’s it exactly.
The incentives of social media companies like Twitter is to get people using the platform, to scoop up as many billion minutes of human attention as possible.
They figured out years ago that the best way to do this is outrage.
Social media platforms with likes, replies and shares are the perfect place to have opinionated mob battles, and they are addictive.
It stands to reason that as millions or billions of people get addicted to these places, opinionated mob battles become a bigger factor.
As I get older I start to think that the capitalist internet is a place to drain your energy to prevent you from organisin in real life. But saying log off doesn’t address the issue that everyone is trapped online and real life opportunities for organisation are impacted by internet based isolation.
It’s not as simple as logging off unless its purely for individual peace but the class war can’t be fought on the internet either.
I think at the root it is the dominant capitalist culture replicating capitalist mentality.
We are in an era of extreme cognitive dissonance where capitalism has subsumed even anti-capitalist aesthetics and someone can live their whole life sincerely thinking they are anti-capitalist but the whole time be actively working to replicate capitalism.
There are hundreds of millions of people who benefit from capitalism and will have a much more challenging life when a revolution happens, even though they are not in the ruling class or have any real power. Imperialism still benefits everyone in the imperial core greatly, but many people want to think they are “not a part of the problem,” or even that they are “doing the real work,” so that they can avoid having to actually make any sacrifices for the betterment of society.
Adopting a “progressive,” position and aesthetic but always choosing to do things which have no strategic or tactical purpose in accomplishing the alleged goal. Actively demonizing the correct and evidenced based things while not focusing much on the most pressing material concerns.
Often they learn about things like COINTELPRO and the red scare and beyond, seeing how capitalism has in fact wielded ideas like feminism, anti-racism, LGTBQ+ pride and so on as a bludgeon against revolutionary forces (relative to their conditions) to undermine movements.
They may think something like, “see, these things are bourgeois because the bourgeois use them against revolutionaries,” which is kind of the same trap anarchists fall into with “the state,” thinking that because the bourgeois wield the state against us, it can not be something we can take control of and utilize against the bourgeoisie at large.
In both instances it seems like a person’s desire to maintain some privileges in life is more of a priority than the good of the whole collective and so they continue to self sabotage by unconsciously replicating the system they benefit from, while creating a fantasy that they are the real revolutionaries and everyone else is holding back progress.
unconsciously replicating the system they benefit from, while creating a fantasy that they are the real revolutionaries and everyone else is holding back progress.
Oops gonna hurt some people feelings haha
This shit is pretty big among the left here in Brasil and this shit drives me crazy.
There’s this weird and reactionary perception that anything progressive that have been in some way incapsulated by western liberalism is automatically a western capitalism invention to divide the working class.
Then everything becomes “imported issues and talking points from the US”. It suddenly doesn’t matter that black people are sistematicaly killed by police everyday, it doesn’t matter that we are the coutry that kills the biggest number of trans people in the world, because then everything is identity politics and only their idealized proletariat matter, as if the proletariat are not also black and trans.
At the very least all the big ML content creators here like Jones Manoel, Ian Neves and Humberto Matos for example, makes sure to always push back against this narrative in some way, they might still use the term “identity politics” but doesn’t dissociate it from class struggle, and talks about the importance of these issues and topics.
Not long ago Humberto Matos made a video defending Érika Hilton, a trans woman in congress who was being attacked by right wingers trying to delegitimize and invalidate her. He used dialetical materialism to argue that she is indeed a woman and to educate people on mysoginy and the role of capitalism in the oppression of women. And you can guess what the comment section looked like, a bunch of TERFs, communist transphobes and right wingers.
I’ll take up the question of identity politics. It is a fraught term, maybe too poisoned to campaign against, but there are genuine theoretical critiques to make. The discussion about whether the term is practical, given the confused usage, is separate from the theoretical discussion about the term’s relation to the broader ideological struggle.
The meaning of identity politics shifts depending on which group invokes it. Its coining is generally attributed to the Combahee River Collective which, to my understanding, were Marxists and understood their own practical struggle as Marxists. They created their movement to fight against the specific material conditions faced by Black women, the understanding of which was consistently lacking in gender-only feminist movements. While not an expert on this group, I believe this is a perfectly correct thing to do, consistent with a dialectical understanding of class struggle.
On the other hand, the term has taken a life of its own, appropriated by reactions against it from the right and by certain trends from the left, some of these Marxist. These critiques, although varied, center on the disunity allegedly generated by identity politics. The right critique argues against the existence of class struggle, while the left critique argues against the perceived elevation of individual, subjective struggles above the class struggle, which to them appears as an attack against the foundations of Marxism. This latter viewpoint is what I see in online leftist discourse.
The problem I have with this left-critique of identity politics is that it nearly universally comes from privileged sections of the working class, particularly white men, but also from Western countries like the US and UK. It is a theoretical deficiency to conceive of the class struggle only abstractly, only along the direct line between worker and employer. Class society is universal, but its manifestations are particular. It is impossible to grasp class society in its totality if we refuse to understand each of its one-sided determinations on its own terms before relating it back to the totality; that is what it means to think dialectically. And in a country like the US, whose history is so intertwined with racial, gender, and other exploitation not explainable in pure proletarian terms, it is simply ignorant and undialectical to dismiss the insights of these unique perspectives on the whole dynamic of capital. It is as incorrect as supposing that value can be understood on its own, without understanding its determinations as money and commodities; supposing that surplus value can be understood without understanding its determinations as profit, rent, and interest; supposing that mode of production can be understood without understanding its historical determinations as feudalism, capitalism, etc.
This last point, on the emphasis of particular determinations of abstract categories, can be seen summarized by Marx in a footnote in Ch1 of Capital:
The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form, &c.
Having acknowledged the false critiques of identity politics, there is some valid critique of identity politics by Marxists which should be recognized. These critiques fall along a separate discourse which has arguably spanned thousands of years, as long as there has been philosophical discourse between materialism and idealism. It is about the existence of essence. Does the diversity of the world result from essential elements, like the idealists argue? Or does it result from a reconfiguration of identical matter, like the materialists argue? Essence is immutable and independent of material conditions; identical matter, on the other hand, takes on configurations entirely dependent on the existing conditions, which can change over time. Materialism is essentially the theory of the existence of history.
Gabriel Rockhill has written extensively on the role of postmodern French Theory and Western Marxism in anticommunist attacks against Marxism and against Actually Existing Socialism. According to Rockhill, a central theme in these attacks is plurality and subjectivity, as opposed to the objectivity and systematization proposed by Marxist theory. It is precisely against the backdrop of these attacks that Rockhill criticizes identity politics, because it ideologically rhymes with the subjectivism of the postmodernists.
Here is one article by Rockhill which attempts to connect identity politics to postmodernism.
Excerpt from Rockhill article
Identity politics, like the multiculturalism affiliated with it, is a contemporary manifestation of the culturalism and essentialism that have long characterized bourgeois ideology. The latter seeks to naturalize social and economic relations that are the consequence of the material history of capitalism. Rather than recognizing, for instance, that racial, national, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other forms of identity are historical constructs that have varied over time and result from specific material forces, these are naturalized and treated as an unquestionable foundation for political constituencies. Such essentialism serves to obscure the material forces operative behind these identities, as well as the class struggles that have been waged around them. This has been particularly useful to the ruling class and its managers as they have been forced to react to the demands of decolonization and of materialist antiracist and antipatriarchal struggles. How better to respond than with an essentializing identity politics that proposes false solutions to very real problems because it never addresses the material basis of colonization, racism, and gender oppression?
The self-proclaimed anti-essentialist versions of identity politics operative in the work of theorists like Judith Butler do not fundamentally break with this ideology.36 In purporting to deconstruct some of these categories by revealing them as discursive constructs that individuals or groups of individuals can question, play with, and re-perform, theorists working within the idealist parameters of deconstruction never provide a materialist and dialectical analysis of the history of the capitalist social relations that have produced these categories as major sites of collective class struggle. They also do not engage in the deep history of actually existing socialism’s fight collectively to transform these relations. Instead, they tend to draw on deconstruction and a practically dehistoricized version of Foucauldian genealogy to think about gender and sexual relations discursively, and they are at best oriented toward a liberal pluralism in which class struggle is replaced by interest-group advocacy.
By contrast, the Marxist tradition—as Domenico Losurdo has demonstrated in his magisterial work Class Struggle—has a profound and rich history of understanding class struggle in the plural. This means that it includes battles over the relationship between genders, nations, races, and economic classes (and, we could add, sexualities). Since these categories have taken on very specific hierarchical forms under capitalism, the best elements of the Marxist heritage have sought to both understand their historical provenance and radically transform them. This can be seen in the longstanding struggle against the domestic slavery imposed upon women, as well as the battle to overcome the imperialist subordination of nations and their racialized peoples. This history has played itself out in fits and starts, of course, and there is still much work to be done, in part because certain strains of Marxism—such as that of the Second International—have been tainted by elements of bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, as scholars like Losurdo and others have demonstrated with remarkable erudition, the communists have been at the vanguard of these class struggles to overcome patriarchal domination, imperialist subordination, and racism by going to the very roots of these problems: capitalist social relations.
Identity politics, as it has developed in the leading imperialist countries and particularly the United States, has sought to bury this history in order to present itself as a radically new form of consciousness, as if communists had not so much as thought of the woman question or the national/racial question. Theorists of identity politics thus tend to assert arrogantly and benightedly that they are the first ones to address these issues, thereby overcoming an imagined economic determinism on the part of the so-called vulgar reductionist Marxists.37 Instead of recognizing these issues as sites of class struggle, moreover, they tend to use identity politics as a wedge against class politics. If they do make any gesture toward integrating class into their analysis, they generally reduce it to a question of personal identity, rather than a structural property relation. The solutions that they put forth therefore tend to be epiphenomenal, meaning that they focus on issues of representation and symbolism, rather than, for instance, overcoming the labor relations of domestic slavery and racialized superexploitation through a socialist transformation of the socioeconomic order. They are thereby i
I hit the character limit lol, but I need to
anyway for a bit
It’s because at the end of the day, underneath all these systems and theories and sciences, there’s a human being - uniquely situated in an impossibly complex environment - trying to make sense of it all.
The internet enables for discussions, between people with no shared stakes, to argue ad nauseum, at unprecedented scale. If you and I lived in a shared village and I had the mastery of a useful craft, you’d be reluctant to exclude me from the community, but now that there’s so much surplus to shuffle around it’s a game of shifting the board, to be the most pleasant for every individual participant.
Everybody has their own set of books they believe in and I have accepted that I don’t have what it takes to figure all this stuff out. I feel like an animal trapped in a cage being forced to perform circus tricks, so that somebody tosses me a little food. They think that by making me perform a certain way I’m going to become a better person, but because they see that I see through the game I’m never going to be let out.
god damn that hit me like a truckI feel like an animal trapped in a cage being forced to perform circus tricks
Being Trans and not out be like
The capitalist class has developed their own individualist version of identity politics which is the dominant understanding of identity politics since they are the ruling class. Its either used cynically by minority social climbers or by white liberals to perform their educated nobility. Its never used to actually address the issues facing those minority communities.
Reactionary leftists can’t see the difference, think its entirely made up by liberals, and think that simply dropping those topics will make socialism popular.
We do need to distinguish oursevles from the liberal understanding of identity politics because people will tend to stop listening when they hear “As an X Y” from someone. This is difficult because any sort of terminology that gets popular on the left gets immediately co-opted by liberals. Thats how their brand of identity politics got formed. The solution is to patiently explain concrete policy goals to combat the systemic issues while avoiding any sort of sloganeering or buzzwords. Zorhan is the textbook example of how to do that messaging. Imagine how well he would’ve done if he kept saying “as an african-indian Muslim man”.
They just don’t want you to bother them for being racist/sexist/etc.
They’re bigots.
And there’s this idea in some circles that the working class must be embraced with all prejudices and imperfections, otherwise would be idealism. It’s like all workers were brute baboons unable to learn. Or like agitprot weren’t the very tool to educate the masses. Those guys also preach Marxist ideas in a crystalized state, without dialectics: almost like priests in a cult.
AND it doesn’t help that in the West diversity policies were commoditified and compartimentalized in individual success. Where having some Black and Trans CEOs in all sectors became the ideal to reach instead of eradicate racism and transphobia. There’s no class oriented policies. You won’t find a Franz Fanon or an Angela Davis in those places.
Some people are bigots and also would prefer a collectivised society. Doesn’t seem super complex to me.
Someone racist person correctly analysising that their material conditions are harmed by the interests of the ruling class and that they have a collective interest in controlling the means of production with their fellow workers isn’t going to suddenly start counting people they don’t see as equal as fellow workers.
You can look at the history of the union movement and bosses using racial divides to break strikes for examples of this playing out.
edit: for clarity, rationalisation takes over because identity politics promotes things they hate, therefore it is bad.
What’s the deal with some online ‘leftists’ calling identity politics and ‘woke’ a thing invented by western capitalism?
‘Woke’ is factually a thing invented by Western capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke – there’s no debate about that.
I don’t know about ‘identity politics’ but /u/quarrk said elsewhere in the thread it’s also a USA export.
Africa has its own racism but it’s absolutely nothing to do with the USA kind.
I remember a comedian talking about how stereotypes exist, we all know them, whether we agree with them a lot the whole audience knows that French people are snooty and eat garlic. And Americans are what…? Yell it out? And the audience yells “Loud”. Right and what else? “Ignorant.”
Everybody knows the USA is ignorant of the world. It is ALL black-white to them. They have no understanding of African racism or Nazi racism or Irish racism. Not only do they not understand how racism works - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/06/whoopi-goldberg-holocaust-remarks-were-born-of-ignorance-not-racism - they actively resist trying to understand it.
Meanwhile you’ve got 100s of 1000s of Tigrayans, Rohingya, Palestinians, dying for ethnic reasons, and no USA analysis of this.
The woke approach to race is so ignorant/oblivious to how racism actually functions in the world that we have an American publicly saying that Hitler was not racist to kill 6 million Jews. They can’t even register the spike on this chart as a thing –
But people all over the world are expected to flip out about African-Americans being shot by police (half of whom are the same ethnicity as them: African-American) because that’s The Spectacle. We have British footballers kneeling because an American was shot… do you really think they would do that for an African?
Gender and sexuality issues… Communist countries are having a back-and-forth political battle. Communist countries empirically are not as woke as liberal Western countries. The Communist Party of China passed law to “resolutely reject abnormal aesthetics such as ‘girly men’” (Chinese source). North Korea isn’t woke. Vietnam has a pretty active political struggle: they in the past few years declared homosexuality ‘not an illness’, then also cancelled the Pride parade.
There are LGBT people everywhere but the equality struggle is in very different stages in different countries. From what I understand, it’s by far the furthest advanced in Western liberalism. Africa is a very big diverse place, but most places I am familiar with you would be beaten up for being gay.
Some fair points about the limits of identity politics and USA myopia, but are you repeating reactionary talking points? Western Liberalism is the best system for LGBT? China Bad? Our World in Data chart as a source? (Stephen Pinker is that you?) Repeated references to some Whoppi Goldberg statement from 4 years ago?
When you say something careless like “Africa has its own racism but it’s absolutely nothing to do with the USA kind” your portraying racism as something that spontaneously appears in a vacuum rather than something that is fostered actively as a useful exploitative system by capitalist imperialism. This is ahistorical, like saying poverty in Africa has nothing to do with the European kind, but in fact they’re very interrelated. It’s bad analysis to not consider systematic cause and effect.
Your post also spends a lot of time minimizing the plight of Black Americans and contains a number of distortions. For example your statement that “people all over the world are expected to flip out about African-Americans being shot by police (half of whom are the same ethnicity as them: African-American)” is just false. The majority of officers in US police shootings are white, followed by Hispanic officers, then Black officers coming in the teens. There’s a long history White supremacist composition of police forces. One in five black men will go to prison in the USA’s for profit prison industry.
We don’t gain ground for victims of racist violence in Palestine, Myanmar, or Ethiopia by ignoring state white supremacist violence in the imperial core.
Your points remind me of a lively conversation I once had with an African-American studies major and Business major back in college. I was an Anthropology major and we were discussing the various pros and cons of specializing within the study of a particular ethnicity (cons being that the level of theory is less universal, but the pro being that the level specificity allows one to concentrate on the devil in the details), when a Chinese national student who was a Business major (who was a friend/acquaintance of us both) joined in and jokingly lambasted us both for our academic preoccupations.
His argument stemmed around how even Americans sympathetic to the Chinese government still framed everything around an American-centric context, and that neither one of us would be able to escape that context within our own studies, and that at least the African-American studies person was able to admit to that reality.
Being blasted on both sides, I was taken back a bit, mostly because I am/was considered, amongst my American peers, to be extremely well informed and not to really take American actions into consideration until it is proven, but I took his point.
My point though, is simply that the privilege of being an American is that we don’t have to know about what is going on anywhere, ever, but you always have to know what is happening here. We are the center of the international capitalist world, and as long as we remain as such (which we will because we set up the systems that maintain international capitalism) the power of the hegemon is and remains with us, and even our sub-groups.
However, to say that ‘woke’ ideas about ethnicity, gender and identity are uniquely Western capitalist ideas is to demonstrate ignorance to the history of those ideas, which do not actually originate here, but come more out of the larger Western theoretical melting pot.
In particular, the same cauldron of ideas in France and Germany that generated Nazism also generated among the first real studies of ideas of gender and sexuality. However the subjects of these studies were more often going to associate you with socialists or communists. Much of Engels first works were centered around radical critiques of both gender roles and the concept of marriage. In that same way, early Boshevism was extremely accepting of differences in sexuality and ethnicity, and despite eventually bans under sexuality within the USSR, they understood and promoted the traditional ethnic identities, cultures and practices, well up until their dissolution. Hell, it is likely that Stalin was picked by Lenin specifically because of his handling of the formation of the Ukrainian SSR, when history would say that Ukraine barely existed as a polity prior to that point.
However, even they were hardly a monolith, with the GDR picking up where the scholars within the Weimar Republic left off, having a much more comprehensive theoretical database of sexualities and genders than anywhere else in the West until the turn of the 21st century.
And that said, there is much to be said about the colonial history of Christianity, and the slave trade in particular, that has had a radical influence on how all of these ideas are perceived, and how the need for strong national identities to resist these influences have created even further conservative communities.
Basically, it is difficult to discuss any of this accurately and complete depth, and differentiate between native practices and those influenced by colonial influence which is why it is a subject is worth discussing and worthy of critical evaluations.
