Cultural politics is a superstructural form of liberal politics designed to maintain capitalism by dividing the working classes by race, gender, generation, who you wanna get naked with, whatever.

Intersectionality

On intersectionality

Intersectionality is a clumsy metaphor conceptualized in an effort to describe how people can be discriminated against for multiple things simultaneously, in an effort to argue that discrimination laws should account for that.

It has nothing to do with what should be your main concern as a socialist, which is exploitation. Our concern is supposed to be the material needs of the masses, not the interpersonal implicit biases that may casually reside in our subconsciouses that we're either supposed to purge like some kind of sinful inclination, or nurse in favor of fetishized "marginalized groups," which is what most intersectionalists actually advocate for in practice.

Better to just ditch oppression ontology altogether and fight for workers.

Accusations of class reductionism

Liberation of women and minorities was already part of the socialist corpus of theory a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. If you read those dusty old books you'll see that it's something that was clearly taken into account. For instance, Lenin in his works talks not only about women but also about the national minorities in Russia.

So what the heck is so new about "intersectionality"? I see no new insight there. Instead, the way it functions is just to make race and gender as important as, or more important than, class. In addition, the theory has a clear influence from post-modernism which likes to play around with notions of identity. The end result seems to be, the-same-old-capitalism, but with more women CEOs, and "inclusive" of androgynous people and non-whites. So it's a sort of Benetton poster capitalism, a United Colours of Capitalism.

Whenever you push someone on this they literally never have an answer. The response is always something along the lines of describing intersectionality as simply the act of building a coalition that isn't comprised of only white men (the implication being that you want the coalition to be only white men, which would obviously be insufficient). The fact that coalition building has existed consistently for thousands of years is totally ignored. To repeat the example of the Old Left that these guys are so keen to denounce, that sort of multiracial, cross-gender support was a crucial part of their ideology -- you had Russian Slavs working closely with Latinos in Cuba and other parts of Latin America, those Cubans sending military aid to the Angolan blacks fighting European colonialism, with the Chinese on the other side of the world aiding revolutions across diverse Asian populations, all the while women were introduced to levels of equality that was often unmatched by the West.

There is nothing new about the theory of "intersectionality", it serves only as an ideological cudgel that the liberals and liberal-adjacents use to beat the left with.

On "class is an identity"

Identity requires identification to exist. Class is a material reality. It exists whether you identify with it or not and whether you're even aware it exists or not. If you don't own capital and you work with capital someone else owns and take home less than the full economic value of what you produce you're a proletarian. It doesn't matter if you never heard the world proletarian or even if you live in a society where the concept of class was never discovered and nobody knows what a proletarian or a class is. You're still a proletarian.

That's why we talk about "class consiousness" not "class identity". You can be aware or not aware of the class you're part of but what you identify as has no relevance on your class membership.

On "it's not my job to educate you"

First off, it's a cop-out that can and is abused when one is incapable of providing an argument. Second, lets say you did go educate yourself, and you still disagreed? There's no answer to that. It's just “keep educating yourself until you agree with me” -- it is an implicit appeal to some academic authority.

On the circle of grievance

Woke language is deeply imprecise, calling for repercussions and reparations and action and appreciation that has no substance. The call to act replaces the act, and allows a simulated politics defined not by power but by an endless verbal warfare without conclusion or resolution. With the battle never won, each new crisis precipitates greater demands on its participants, until at last there is nothing left but the endless war against this modern kingdom of the lie, an imagined and evil place put in opposition to the good and the beautiful.

The congregation admits its failures but are chastised for their false contrition and called upon to do more, to face repercussion, to see an impossible truth too mutable to ever discover. So soon as one revelation is reached the next, higher step takes its place, demanding more.

And on and on it goes, this circle of grievance that imagines itself an incline.

On anti-solidarity

If you want to call what Fred Hampton was engaged with identity politics be my guest. I respect his commitment to solidarity. Actually-existing, contemporary idpol, quite apart from the idealized version people jerk themselves off about, is inherently anti-solidaristic. It's a means for toxic people to scold others who didn't come out of the womb using correct pronouns. It's about siloing groups who compete in a zero-sum race for oppression cred meanwhile individuals are subsumed into each supposed monolithic identity irrespective of their differences. It's paying lip service to the struggles of others while being monomaniacally absorbed in your own concerns.

Adolph Reed likes to quote Mao's aphorism that "politics is about uniting the many to defeat the few." From one perspective you can say that having a black panthers contributes to balkanizing the left, but Hampton's commitment to solidarity is evident and stands in stark contrast to toxic people who's only motivation seems to be to throw people out of the movement like latter day inquisitors. Hampton organized with the young patriots who prominently displayed the confederate flag as a symbol of their movement. He didn't call them nazi shitbirds who should just go join the kkk already.

I'm reminded of the movements for national liberation in Europe during the nineteenth century. I'm going to butcher this anecdote, but I think it's illustrative of the point I'm making. There was a reactionary Italian priest who was prominent in opposing the revolution of 1848 in Italy and the risorgimento more broadly. I forgot his name. After he made a name for himself across Europe for being a reactionary he visited America for some catholic PR or something. At a stop in Ohio (I believe) he was mobbed and chased out of town by the largely german immigrants of the area for his notorious politics. Many of these immigrants were refuges of the failed revolutions in Germany. They had no connection to Italian nationalism, but they saw their own struggles for liberation reflected in the experience of the Italians and stood in solidarity with them.

On lived experiences

The fundamental problem with appealing to lived experience rather than empirical data or analysis is that there is no real explanation of who is worth listening to. If lived experience is fundamental, then why not acknowledge and learn from the lived experience of a vitriolic white supremacist when he tells you about his victimisation at the hands of international Jewry? When there are competing and contradictory claims of victimhood then "lived experience" is less than worthless.

It's only effective on people who don't immediately recognize it for the appeal to anecdotal evidence that it really is. Don't expect people to actually summon up the logical rigor that would accompany a critique of the value of an anecdote.

The entire social justice "epistemology" is intentionally designed to bypass normal modes of argumentation and mutual criticism. All roads lead to a person being correct and authoritative based purely on their identitarian credentials. It's always been the game. It's the same game white supremacists are playing, they're just using slightly modified language, if not borrowing it outright.

And honestly I wish the overt, theoretically couched white supremacy would make a roaring comeback in the public discourse if only to provide people with the proper imprint and foil to the overt identitarianism of the Left. If you saw these appeals being made by a group that you are well conditioned to hate, you might actually recognize the pattern when it appears elsewhere.

That's the thing that is sorely missing from the discourse today: people recognizing the crucial distinctions in authority, in the authoritative weight of evidence inherent in all forms of debate or discussion. We're being conditioned not to question a certain kind of authority, and it's going to be pretty ugly.

On cultural appropriation

I like to imagine that I can see where most social justice concepts like this are coming from and respect them to some degree as having worthwhile concerns that sometimes get misused by idiots.

But I've tried over and over to read about the concerns associated with Cultural Appropriation and I just never come away with much respect for the concept, the best example is probably always going to be things like Native American headdresses, otherwise it runs into a fucking cavalcade of issues:

  • It obscures oppression that comes from a clearly economic direction by implying that ultimately this is a cultural issue (this is especially the case with food, think about how you hear about rich white people making money off Chinese food and displacing small 'authentic' businesses, the problem is that the same rich white people can just as easily gone into the burger business and destroyed mom-and-pop burger businesses in the exact same manner, the cultural element is completely secondary at best to harsh economics at work here. It would also suggest that it's somehow less of a problem if the giant, destructive conglomerate wrecking the little guy Chinese food stalls was owned by a genuine Chinese person.)
  • In doing so it creates the perception of rigid divisions between cultures that are ridiculously problematic and ahistorical, with the end result being crass essentialism that suggests that things like Rock and Roll are essentially black or Sushi is essentially Japanese which ends up denying the complex influences and ways that culture changes and adapts over time to instead create a narrative of an unchanging culture that is somehow owned by people of certain ethnic groups. I think this is utterly toxic in the grand scheme of things and encourages people to resort to the worst kind of petty nationalism.
  • It encourages a fetishization of some cultural elements and symbols that often runs hopelessly counter to what the original intent was, this is most obvious with the notorious high school Qipao incident, where the dress absolutely was not created to be some carefully respected piece of Chinese culture you could only wear after taking a ten year course learning the intricacies of Mandarin philosophy and living half your life in Fujian monastery, it was just good looking fashionable dress that originated among young women in Shanghai, to make this something worth getting mad about it had to be infused out of nowhere with this BS history of unique importance that meant non-Chinese people should think twice before wearing it, which is such a bad state of affairs if you want people to be more open about interacting with other's cultures.
  • It encourages the whole 'racial spokesperson' phenomenon that has been discussed by people like Reed before of some members of minority group A designating themselves the spokespeople of the entire group without any real way of determining who the hell elected them to do such a thing, these people tend to end up being members of the educated bourgeoisie within such groupings and often help obscure wider class consciousness in favor of identitarian groupings centered around things like ethnicity since doing so is better for their interests.
  • By discouraging people from outside the in-group from interacting with other cultures it just encourages a more insular, nationalistic and exclusionary outlook on their end too, in decades past for example black american culture was often degraded as beneath sophisticated white people, even if they aren't interacting with it in the most respectful or correct way I think its much better that they are exposing themselves to a culture that doesn't 100% reflect themselves, doing so might help in even a small when it comes to building solidarity and empathy, otherwise people will feel as though they are constantly on the defensive for simply interacting with basic forms of culture from outside their familiar zone and might not do so at all.
  • It can hold up certain elements of culture as being beyond critical evaluation or criticism even though there's no actual good reason for this in such a way that might just promulgate questionable practices and mindsets. I guess this is the Atheist in me talking but I'm very leery of a lot of the rhetoric about some cultural elements being intrinsically worthy of respect simply because people can be extremely attached to it, its the same logic that's used to defend a lot of really questionable religious sensibilities, and indeed sometimes the anger over cultural appropriation seems to revolve around not enough intrinsic respect for religious symbols used by marginalized people. I don't go out of my way to say 'fuck you, I'm wiping my ass with the Koran' or something, and like I said I can understand best the concerns about cultural appropriation for honorific things like Native American headdresses, but overall I've seen enough negative things that come from the concept that religious feelings are sacrosanct and beyond reproach that I'm not willing to accept this as a good enough reason.

On classism

My issue with classism as a term is that it shifts what I think should be relentlessly interrogated as a structural issue on to the plane of affect, and it tells you that the problem here is interpersonal bigotry, that the problem is that elites are not nice to the poor. And the way I want to think of it is that exploitation doesn't require any kind of affective investment in prejudice. I don't want to care about class as an identity. It's an exploitative relationship. I don't want elites to be nice to the poor. I want no elites and no poverty. And the problem to me is that that interpersonal bigotry framework is tacitly one that I think a term like 'classism' smuggles in. There may be some people who use it and may have a really robust structural understanding, but my concern is that primarily we live in a world where everyone is ultimately, prevailingly liberal and thinks about anything like that in those terms.

On "prejudice plus power"

I’m not convinced that racism = prejudice + power is the right way to be thinking about the concept, but even if it is I’ve always been annoyed at how the liberals have interpreted it.

My point of contention is on how “power” is defined. The libs seem to think “power” means “the sum of all relative social, economic, and political power structures between whites and non-whites,” which is a unique conception of power to say the least. The boss has power over the employees. The professor has power over the students. The armed gunman in your deli has a very literal and physical power over the cowering patrons. Even in the realm of the purely social, people frequently have power over others. For example, a blue-check twitterista has obvious power to ruin someone’s social life and career by using her followers as a weapon to cancel them.

However, for some reason none of those forms of power count. Racism for some reason can only exist when the sum total of all power relations in the world are tilted, at the most abstract level, towards a specific race. And I mean “the world” too, I’ve seen people argue that there’s no such thing as anti-White racism in SA because White people on a global scale have power over Black people.

Let’s imagine for a second that we could wave a magic wand and correct the total balance of power to true equality. Would the fact that Black people suddenly have fair representation in Congress and the same economic outlook as White people somehow change the power dynamic between a Machete-wielding Black Hebrew Israelite and the victims of his rampage? No! It’s ridiculous to say that the BHI’s possession of power in this situation is completely dependent on Representative Malemba being sworn into office, or on the number of Black Billionaires in America, but this is exactly what wokies seem to believe.

On "taking responsibility for privilege"

Ironically the biggest problem with identity politics is that it doesn’t actually go far enough — to take ‘responsibility for privilege’ and ‘lean out’ is not a call to action, but a call to inaction. It means men should have no role in dismantling patriarchy, but should instead perform meaningless penance and performatively praise women in the abstract.

Materialist feminists, like Christine Delphi and Shulamith Firestone, understand that patriarchy is tied to family structure, reproduction, and social institutions like marriage, and that there are concrete measures one can take toward changing these forms. Measures which do not require language policing, or generic denunciations, but which require instead a broad movement with a vision of a transformed social totality, with liberation for all.

On "giving the land back"

Due to the dispossession/powerlessness the demands for an indigenous ethno-state are obviously not real, not material, they are nothing more than empty, impotent moralising; which in the radlib cosmology makes them the highest and most noble of claims – pure, moral and untainted by earthly bonds or details.

Politics as religious transcendence, aestheticised and stripped of practical effect – and utterly useless, except as a kind of self-flagellation you impose on others.

It's taking Marx's "the point is not to interpret, but to change the world" and saying: "nonono, you were right the first time". It's Hegel's revenge.

You can't redistribute wealth on STOLEN land.

Why not? Why should I care about the bourgeois moralist legality of property claims, in a theoretical world where land isn't private property? Why should I care if it's "stolen"? It's there, it exists, we're gonna use it for the benefit of society, no your opinion doesn't matter.

In a completely planned and materialist economy, there would be no need for title, deeds or any of the legal machinery of real estate. You'd simply have 'land', as one resource among many, as part of the process of economic calculation. The 'ancestry' of that land, the 'local history' or the 'rights and claims' to that land -- all such sentimentally would be stripped from it, leaving only the observable chemical and physical properties of the land, which would be the sole determinants of its social utility.

Race

On racism

I'm honestly a bit overwhelmed by just how intense liberal/identitarian logic has taken over the whole ideological sphere in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I'm reminded on a visceral level that radlibs (people who think of themselves as leftists) are not just dummies making logical mistakes, they are aggressively fanatical in their ideology. Problem is that it's a completely reactionary ideology.

The defining principle of liberalism, including radical liberalism, when it comes to the subject of race and racism, is that racism is autonomous, i.e. it has no antecedant causes. It just springs from nature of its own accord. Hence Ta-Nehisi Coates likening it to an earthquake. It is literally impossible to believe that and be a Marxist, because the whole point of Marxism is historical materialism, and the whole point of materialism is that originary causes must be located in material processes. If you treat racism as autonomous, you are an idealist.

It is not just that class analysis is absent from the conversation, it is actively suppressed, because capitalism (if it even is a problem at all) is merely a component of the real issue: racism (or "white supremacy"). Anyone who tries to locate the problem in class is distracting from that.

This is also obviously why the corporations and brands are so on board with it: it's not a threat to them. If anything, it increases their cultural capital and in turn, their actual capital. Radical action only happens on the level of symbols. You can't do anything about the material forces that are actually responsible for police brutality (spoiler: it isn't racism), but hey, you can paint "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a road or change the name of a square. Take that, prison-industrial complex! And any of the attempts at formulating an actual material demand are almost funny in how stupid and not thought out they are ("defund the police").

But here's the real issue: not only is it not an anti-capitalist project, if you think racism is autonomous and "like an earthquake", then it is inevitable. It can't be defeated. As wokies always say, "ending capitalism won't end racism" - notice they never follow it up with a suggestion of what would end racism. If the end of capitalism and the entire history of class oppression won't bring the end of racism, what possibly could?

Therefore, it is not an anti-racist project either. If anything, it is just a kind of quasi ethno-nationalism. They may not be calling for a black ethno-nation-state, but is there any doubt they wouldn't be if that was realistically on the table? (Note the fetishisation of Africa in recent years). They are, however, calling for their own carved-out space within the existing class system: reparations, representation, tokenism, the explicit calls for white people to transfer their wealth to black people etc. They've bizarrely come full circle to a "separate but equal" model of racial harmony.

In the risk of being misread: despite it being a quasi black-ethononationalist movement, when I say "they" I'm not even referring to black people; I'm referring to liberals, black or otherwise (though who mostly happen to be white), who have merely appointed themselves the role of spokeperson for all african americans. Dissident blacks? Well ... they're just not really black (see: politically black).

On anti-racism

In light of the recent rise in racial discourse, courtesy of the animal that stood on George Floyd's neck, and the resulting public fallout, there's been a substantial pushback on a perceived 'anti-racist' zeitgeist on this subreddit, which may well be gratifying in the company of fellow obsessive perma-online retards that already agree with you, but I've been trying to formulate a critique that would actually be digestible to normies that doesn't immediately set off the racism alarm in the heads, and I think the approach is to frame the critique in terms that while most in this sub would agree with, few would actively choose to utilise.

Basically, if there's one thing in this current political atmosphere no one wants to be accused of, it's racism.

Traditional anti-racism casts the racist working class as foolish, and ultimately incorrect; they misplace their anger and anti-establishment tendencies toward fellow members of their own class, crippling their own class's vehicle for the improvement of its conditions; in other words, they fuck themselves over by adopting a false consciousness, and are thus NEGATIVELY affected by fooling for a racist narrative.

Modern quasi-anti-racism portrays a completely opposing narrative; according to this narrative, because the white working class benefit from 'white supremacy', and 'white privilege', racism is no longer cast as a form of false consciousness. Instead, it is cast as a form of genuine, true, racial consciousness. The white working class's conditions are genuinely improved by systemic racism, and therefore racism is viewed as in the rational self interest of white people. This is all well and good if the only intention behind anti-racist movements is eliciting guilt in the white working class, but this does nothing in terms of generating a true and righteous perspective on racism, and conversely, actively perverts the most powerful aspect of traditional racism (that is that white people do NOT benefit from racism, but are rather fooled by and ultimately handicapped by it), and replaces it with a counter-productive narrative that encourages white people to view racism as legitimately in their self-interest, if only to then cause further division between the working class, and cast the ultimate mechanism of oppression to be internal, rather than external to, the working class.

Out of pure annoyance, many leftists here want to oppose an anti-racist narrative, but ignore the fact that modern intersectionalist 'anti-racists' actively promote a narrative premised on racial essentialism and race-based conflict. The most effective thing to do in my view, to get the sort of people this ideology attracts to reassess their views, is to fight it on their own terms, and call it out as the racism that it actually, genuinely is. It's anti-racism, stupid!

On racial essentialism in academia

Biological pseudoscience used to provide the legitimation mechanism for racism. When people refer to "race science" this is what they usually mean. Phrenology and blood quantum tests and so on. That's largely thrown out at this point, and biologists recognize that while genetic populations exist that you can use to gauge things like risk factors for diseases maybe, our racial categories are bullshit. Humans are overwhelmingly genetically similar across the globe.

Where racial essentialism has found its new legitimation mechanism is sociology. At some point in the last 30 years or so sociology went off the woke deep end, tracking patterns along populations and pairing it with social racialized populations and drawing broad conclusions about "what _ people are like."

Because it's not biology in the evolutionary sense the legitimation mechanism can protect itself by selectively (and inconsistently) claiming to be describing "culture" instead of race. But of course it still draws cultural lines around those old racial categories that are vestigial from old-fashioned race science used to structurally subjugate people into underclasses (like chattel slavery). The result is a new kind of race science that reifies pseudoscientific racial concepts while posing as a field that sheds light on the "truth" of culture.

I don't know if you noticed, but populist hard right types love this little shell game because they can claim to be defending their culture instead of a concept of racial purity. Spencer does this shit. But so do more mainstream nativist types like Wilders and Le Pen.

There are some vile little right-wingers that are pushing for a return of biological race science but I think they'll be marginal on the right long-term. The woke idiot essentialists of liberal academia's sociology and humanities departments have already handed the right the intellectual tools it needs to justify the abuse of otherized populations.

On slavery reparations

Think about the process that would be required to decide who is and isn’t black enough to get reparation payments. How would it work, step by step? What test do you use to decide who’s black enough? Do you build a state genealogical database, like the Nazis did? Do you have to prove that your ancestors were slaves to get reparations? Or do you just have to prove that some of your ancestors were classified as black by the racist standards of the time?

Or do you genetically test everyone who claims they’re eligible, and have an official set of SNP markers that denote “black” with an official cut-off point for the match percentage required? Remember that this is an arbitrary decision, and also that the anthropology academy has been taken over by cranks who think doing population genetics is fascist.

Or do you just go by a self-ID system, where anyone who’s willing to say they’re black can get some free money? The Dolezal option. Except if you apply for a black scholarship, you’ve got to spend years passing, whereas this is just a one-off process for free money, so why not give it a shot? Poor whites will apply en masse, egged on by YouTubers.

Remember that many people who don’t look black have significant African American ancestry, and many people who do look “black” will have no slave ancestors at all, so whatever system you pick, the media will be full of edge cases to whip up public anger.

Why don’t Native Americans deserve payments too? What about Chinese Americans whose greatgrandads worked to build the railways? Imagine the legislative process of trying to pass laws about how to racially classify every citizen. Imagine the overhead of administering the payments. The whole idea is unworkable culture war fodder.

Feminism and gender

On non-marxist feminism

The problem with feminism (and any other branch of idpol) is that it focuses on what is undoubtedly a real problem on an interpersonal level and expands it to be the entire basis of someone's political framework, which we all agree is a dead-end. Class is in the end the only salient category to organise around because the changes such organisation requests is material, rather than "stop individual people being prejudiced". The truth is there's no real way to stop all misogyny ever, so we need to focus instead on levelling the playing field on a material level.

On "non-binary"

I'm not terribly convinced that being nonbinary is a renunciation of identity or essentialism; rather, I think it's based on fundamental misunderstandings that reinforce both.

For example, let's say I see someone and state "he went into that building" to someone else upon being asked as to the person's location. I've gathered something from the appearance of the person in question, but have I assumed something about essence here? I don't believe that such a statement is in itself a judgment of the interior state of that person, a declaration about this person's identity, but instead how that person seemed to be conducting himself in accordance with the family of outward signs which I associate with "masculinity." Insofar as I might believe this person to have a masculine identity, this assumption is posterior to this associative process, not anterior, supposing there's ever any thought given to the inner life of the individual at all.

The assumptions behind "nonbinary" act to reinforce the systems of signs already associated with the masculine and feminine and tend to reduce masculinity and femininity to extreme expressions - to stereotypes - in order for nonbinary to be distinct from them, as something more than merely verbal. Less abstractly, to declare oneself as not having a masculine identity but being nonbinary, one already has to believe that "masculine identity" has some definite interior content which one can negate in the first place, and that to identify as a man requires that some form of this interior content belongs to one's sense of self as either a simple attribute, or an imagined self to which one must conform to be in possession of the identity (or, as is often the case, both). In addition, the rejected content is more than the use of pronouns but involves a range of stereotypes of behavior, thinking, appearance, etc. signifying the given gender. While these stereotypes preexisted "nonbinary," the implicit exclusion of alternative non-stereotypical qualities to a not-masculine or not-feminine gender category tends toward the narrowing of the gender identities to such stereotypes.

In other words, one implies that masculinity has some sort of essence internal to it through the declaration of not belonging to such an essence; nonbinary doesn't reject essentialism but subtly relies upon ideas of gender essentiality in order for it to have any meaning at all.

Culture

On the culture war

The conservative view here is that politics is downstream from culture, and the left is really good at "winning the culture." But I don't think this is actually how it works. My view is that economics is at the core and politics, culture, etc. is all downstream from that. The short history is that capital crushed the socialist movement and the trade unions in the 1970s and 1980s. If there is no longer any reason to divide the working class -- pitting different groups within it against each other -- because the working class has been defeated, then the ruling class can grant the political demands of oppressed (becoming previously-oppressed) social formations: women, people of color, LGBTs, etc.

Because why not? There is no objective reason, as far as the market economy is concerned, why it should not do this. Now, I want to stress that these political demands were/are legitimate. But that's the causal, materialist explanation for how economic liberalization creates social liberalization. But I think this creates "right-wing populism" and what you're describing here as a kind of psychosis:

I agree with the analysis that the conservative psychosis comes from the fact that, despite their electoral victories, the broader culture never leans in their direction.

Well, they're trapped in ideology, basically. Remember that before the economic liberalization of the second half of the 20th century, capitalist regimes divided the working class along many different lines, granting political and social benefits to certain groups within it: white men of a conventional Christian background basically. Factory shop floors were segregated with black workers assigned to lower-paying jobs. LGBTs could not be out at work, and if they were out they could not advance in the corporate world. Women were also segregated into jobs that did not pay as well as unionized factory jobs for men, although of course women worked in these places too.

The formerly-dominant groups are now in decline, at least in a relative sense, as capitalism restructures itself. This opens up an opportunity for right-wing populists to divert anger from this onto the signifers of these changes: the various social groups that provoke their resentment. But this doesn't actually do anything to reverse the changes because it's just focused on attacking the signifiers, as the right has no class or material analysis. And if anything, the reaction further binds these targeted groups to the ruling hegemony because the hegemony offers to protect them from the right-wing nationalist and/or populist backlash.

On the discourse

The whole premise of our liberal capitalist society is that problems get passed onto the discourse, our collective enlightenment project where an individual human voice can take a stand and speak truth to power. So where there are injustices in the world, the discourse, our speech, and our self-known moral values can step in to fill the gap. Its all premised on the idea that there is no real opposing class interest or necessity for material, structural changes to the pillars of our society i.e. production, that might require more than moral invocation. Liberal Capitalism: End of history. The system is as good as it gets, we just need brave voices to morally scold the right people into behaving right - which comes out as “critically examine their white privelige and amplify voices of color” or “stop doing ghetto hip hop culture” depending on where on the liberal spectrum you fall and what’s on trend in the spectacle this week. Whatever radical language borrowed from academia these moral invocations contain, whatever latent ethno-nationalist sentiments (“our spaces”) certain readers might balk at, these calls remains feeble, liberal and designed to maintain the status quo.

On nationalism

Nationality isn’t real, material conditions are. Nationality is self-referentially cultural —- one belongs to a nation because one perceives oneself or is perceived to belong there. But material conditions are objective: one is proletarian or bourgeoisie regardless of whether one believes oneself to be. There are clear conditions for being proletarian or bourgeoisie, whereas ethnicities or nationalities are neither sufficiently clear nor consistent. Being “working class” isn’t an identity, it’s a state of being. You can’t just choose not to be working class.

National identities are "real" to the extent they're believed in, sure, but these identities emerge from and are shaped by the underlying material forces at work: that of capitalist production and reproduction. National identities are also constantly in flux in bourgeois (i.e. capitalist) societies, and cosmopolitanism emerges as the predominant character of production everywhere in the world. This is because cosmopolitanism serves productive purposes, and because of capitalism's drive for growth and expansion is out of necessity. This is also why trying to combine reactionary traditionalism with capitalism is doomed to fail.

Imagined community

Nationality is an imagined community, it is not a real relationship in the same way class is. We naturally shouldn't tolerate ethnic discrimination, but it cannot form a sound basis for political action, because identity politics not only obsfucates class and inequality, but reinforces capitalism, and inevitably leads to genocide. Identity politics should therefore be opposed.

The traditions of a community are also mostly irrelevant. They're historically malleable, and constantly traded and negotiated between communities throughout history. Greek religion stole from the near East, Rome style from Greece, Catholicism stole from Rome, etc. Nothing is constant. What matters is people, how well they live. Culturalism is the domain of liberals.

On bourgeois individualism

It's simply one's inability to see that their long term personal goals actually align with the interests of a collective political front centered around a class politics. An obfuscation that breeds an intrinsic fear of 'collective' as a concept, they think everyone will just become a yes man robot or some garbage like that.

The intersectionalists fail to recognize that their politics heightens the individual to a level of supreme political actor, and that their issues as an individual are supreme political issues. It's no surprise these concepts were in large part created by and now taught by the petite bourgeoisie. Just more capitalist smoke and mirrors. And there are plenty of examples of this, increased diversity standards in entertainment gets rewarded by intersectional neo-leftists via classical capitalist consumption. They fight for more women in STEM without realizing they aren't fighting for an equity of employment but an even spread of capitalist exploitation to all peoples. They fight for immigrants believing they're morally righteous when in reality, even if their lives are demonstrably better here, they simply become the lowest of the proletariat.

There is some kind of weird evil here, neoliberals acting as the cowboys of the capitalists, herding more and more unassuming helpless and oppressed people (immigrants, trans, women, minorities etc.) in to the grasp of the capitalist's claws. Black Ariels become victories of a rainbow capitalism.

For understanding this I turn to Baudrillard and Debord. In a sense this is a simulation or a spectacle. We have simulated activism and simulated results. Is it any wonder social representation is one of the biggest complaints in these circles? In this sense they turn equality in to a commodity, and their equality is merely a simulation. A Black Ariel, as a metaphor, then is a simulation of equality, women in STEM being a simulation of equality as well.

Baudrillard's argument would be that for the neoliberals this simulation of equality is hyperreal, more real than real, because they're entrenched deeply in the simulacra. Their leftism itself being a simulation of a leftist politics.

As for the right, their rhetoric has always been steeped in individualism, there isn't really any need to touch on this. They utilize individualism in essentially the same way, but individualism is an impossibility in a capitalist system, as there are too many economic forces that coerce an agent to fall in line, to conform, and it owns a majority of your life rendering you unable to develop a skill or a craft (regardless of its economic ramification) to the extent that you could were you not forced in to a fight for economic survival.

On hashtag activism

Liberals feel ashamed of their own intellectual and political apathy towards the real world yet lack the tools to effect any sort of change so they turn to the only medium they know and understand, a web of interactive spaces where they can feel like their voices are being heard loud and clear due to the availability of some limited feedback from like-minded people. In a sense it isn't even a self-centered attempt at capitalizing on the horrors of a faraway place, it's just a complete incapability to engage with reality, facilitated by the stagnant status quo that offers simple answers to difficult questions and hardly ever requires the general population to take part in the decision making process

On conceding to the right

It's baffling how liberals don't realize that by being so afraid of even talking about or being associated with some, basically neutral thing, be it a meme, a subculture, scene or social space online that the right has even so much as vaguely tried to associate itself with, they are literally ceding ground and surrendering said thing to the right. The right barely has to do any effort to take over something it seems, just make the vaguest gesture that said thing is their turf and culture war obsessed lefties immediately hand it over to them because they are obsessed with appearing pure and free of anything even vaguely "problematic".

On human rights

Human rights/God-given rights/natural rights are an intellectually vacuous idea, and borderline religious in its presentation despite being espoused by the nominally secular liberal tradition. What we call 'rights' are merely highly valued and legally privileged liberties granted by the state. Anything can become a right, or lose status as a right, if the collective nation or a sufficiently authoritarian government desire it. It's not that marxists think these 'rights' shouldn't be valued, we just oppose the idea that these rights exist outside the state and civilization.

On morality

When Chomsky critiques US foreign policy, he doesn't spend much time on the question of whether policy planners sincerely believe their own bullshit about human rights or building democracy, or if they are just totally cynical and self-serving. He looks at the objective outcome of their actions, and the broader systemic forces that empower people who make those kinds of decisions, regardless of their internal motivation. If anything he is more afraid of the true believers than the corrupt cynics.

We aren't St. Peter. We aren't here to judge what is truly in people's hearts. We are trying to build more effective social movements and empower poor and working class people. We need to look at what works and not waste too much time psychoanalyzing people and trying to answer unanswerable questions about what is going on in someone's head.

This also helps us make a stronger argument. If we can prove that a given policy is bad, even if the intention behind it is pure and good, we can construct better policies. If we have to prove that someone is acting in bad faith, we end up arguing over personalities. We will also, inevitably, be accused of acting in bad faith, and end up in a virtual circular firing squad.use it needs to wipe out our ability to speak and build up movements. We don't need to do that to win... and beware of they who claim that violence is always a solution. Throughout history, violence has poisoned a hell of a lot more movements than it's cured.

On antifascism

Antifascism has the advantage that it is not defined positively, so you don't have to do the work of articulating a political program, or what that might look like in the current period. It's defined negatively and it's defined against things that are self-evidently bad. And at the same time, those things that are bad are also understood in liberal terms; the fascists are hostile to diversity, they're repressive of minorities, they're racist and exclusionary -- all of which are true, but also misconstrue the historical purpose of fascism in the 20th century, which was an overriding hostility to the worker's movement.

This liberal framing helps explain its appeal: its absence of content, or a content that is given by a kind of easy liberalism which can be taken in from the contemporary status quo and without requiring anyone to make any effort to put forward a political vision of the future.

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Pub: 16 Jul 2021 19:11 UTC
Views: 124