1y ago

on dividing the left

poor leftists talk about poverty, labor aristocrats get uncomfortable and insist that sociological classes aren't materialist. "all that matters is that we're working class - we're all in this together"
black leftists talk about racism, whites get uncomfortable and insist that they're not personally part of the problem. "we mustn't allow the bourgeois to divide the proletariat along racial lines - we're all in this together"
female leftists talk about patriarchy, men get uncomfortable and insist that it hurts them too. "this men vs women stuff is reductive anyway - we're all in this together"
third world leftists talk about imperialism, americoids get uncomfortable and insist that red white and blue lives matter too. "what happened to the international working class - we're all in this together"

you don't have to invite yourself to every form and experience of oppression. anyone with a baby's consciousness of intersectionality ought to be capable of admitting when they have privilege

113 comments

Good post.
Nobody should be telling minorities that they're dividing the left. As if not standing for bigotry is more divisive than being a bigot in the first place.
- If you don't
  for me, then you ain't Black!

People really do need to learn when to shut up
- I can't believe we're having this struggle session now involving 3 year old accounts?
  How did they keep quiet this long and what made them lose this ability?
  
  i know, im kinda wilding
  earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
  
  A lot of these people have been saying the same things for years, if they weren't being transphobic or making jokes about pumpkin spice lattes the mods just let them be and so did the user base
  
  Is this the same struggle season regarding the kkkrakkkers in the thread about not being able to be racist against whites, or is this a different - if thematically similar- struggle session?

Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, "No investigation no right to speak", has been ridiculed as "narrow empiricism", to this day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. There are many people who "the moment they alight from the official carriage" make a hullabaloo, spout opinions, criticize this and condemn that; but, in fact, ten out of ten of them will meet with failure. For such views or criticisms, which are not based on thorough investigation, are nothing but ignorant twaddle. Countless times our Party suffered at the hands of these "imperial envoys", who rushed here, there and everywhere. Stalin rightly says "theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice". And he rightly adds that "practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory". Nobody should be labeled a "narrow empiricist" except the "practical man" who gropes in the dark and lacks perspective and foresight.
I may be misunderstanding this
quotation, but I think it aligns with your post. One who holds class/ethnic/racial/gender/cis/etc privilege and doesn't have the empathy and curiosity to investigate how that privilege effects their material circumstances makes a poor communist.

the patriarchy do be hurting men too though

It's "all struggles matter" and it sucks.

Merely mentioning the word bourgeois(ie) makes so many people in the first world cringe, including the ones who proclaim to be left. I don't understand why it is so hard to admit your privileges, wild how decades of liberal propoganda even made basic descriptive words unappealing and cringeworthy.
- "Eugh you are so stuck in time an unappealing to the common people"
  I am both of those but not because I use the correct terminology
- I think it's because in America, anyone with a decent 9-5 job has money in the stock market through a 401k, is pursuing home ownership, and probably wants to start a business or has a business owner of some kind in the family (even if it's sketchy grifting BS). The line for what counts as bourgeois is so skewed here, I think a lot of American workers aren't sure which side of the line they're on. Of course, this is all by design

Join a party. This is a message board.
- Except that I've seen the same exact shit in irl orgs, pushing out marginalized comrades. Just because this is the internet, doesn't mean you're exempt from examining your privledge and holding solidarity with marginalized people by shutting the fuck up and listening.
- Message boards have standards. This is a shitposting site.

Fucking well put

no more half measures walter

Great point. I am personally struggling with this a lot both in my work with less privileged people and privileged coworkers.
I am in a country that has a strong nation building discourse around perceived equality and "sameness" and therefore there tends to be a lot of hostility towards anyone who tries to raise the question of very clear differences in privilege and be taken seriously.
My relatives got very angry at me over the summer when they told me how a person they know has had flooding in their home and as I knew that the person in question is very very wealthy and has several homes I said "Shame, but they will be ok." This resulted in these two yelling at me about how unempathetic I am and how they feel like they can't talk about their life struggles at all with me (both are petty bourge). I am myself poor, neurodivergent, fat & a woman.
I replied to them that I would not have been ok had this happened to me and got asked if I am bitter. I am not, these are just the material conditions we have. Technically all involved in this discussion were workers.
Someone once described all this to me with an example of a reality tv show that didn't manage to "work" in my country the same way as it did in a place like the UK. Here when you sit a rich person and a poor person on the same couch talking about what their everyday lives are like, you will only get sameness related discourse where the rich person is both allowed and socially encouraged to see their inability to heat their hot tub as often as befofe as the same as the poor person not being able to afford food.
This results in a society where extremely privileged people are allowed to have takes on things like poverty, race, gender as equals and fully diminishes the hardships experienced in the margins. And this is at least partially a result of a social democratic model of society where a lot of focus has been put to gender equality and equality of the workers. But only for the majority.
What this does to disabled folks and people who can never work, to people who are outside the scope of being able to do wage work and the way this legitimizes the outrage when calling out privilege is a thing I am trying to figure out.
In my real life work I am trying to raise the class consciousness of privileged people around me by raising the point of all of us being workers and our interests being aligned, but within this cultural framework I feel like this often ends up reinforcing the sameness myth and hiding the clear implications of privilege. So not entirely sure how to get the labor aristrocat to both understand our interest being aligned yet different.
Not entirely sure what my concluding point here even is, but just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely important conversation.
The outrage that pointing this out tends to result in seems like a sort of fragility, one person even admitted to me once that me reminding them of their privilege makes them feel guilty for the things they have. Which I think isn't a bad thing as long as this doesn't turn into hostility towards the margins, but to an understanding of what privilege is.
- thank you so much for sharing all that, it feels really good to be understood on this stuff

there is no western left
- Where’s anywhere anything left left?
  
  ...Not the west? There are plenty of leftists in Africa, South America, and Asia.
  
  not in semantics ... for sure...
  
  Why do they call it the left??? When you of in the right wing of out hot left the wing??

It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing" when it would be so easy to just say "chauvinists" or something for the second group, which 99% of the time will be the corresponding majority members but isn't essentializing and has some resilience against Candace Owen types.
- It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing"
  I don't think anything is being framed that way here. It's just written in casual language. I think we can recognize when a person from a marginalized group is a reactionary like Candace Owens.
  The problem with just saying "chauvinists" is that no one on hexbear or in the DSA thinks the word applies to them. The point of the post is that all white people, all men, etc., are exposed to privilege brainworms from cradle to grave, and we're not necessarily aware of the brainworms we have absorbed, so when someone criticizes us we should shut the fuck up and listen and reflect, because it's not a far-fetched criticism. Getting defensive and shouting people down because we're sure we're not chauvinists is what's actually divisive.
  ...I keep neurotically editing the wording of this comment because I got stuck in some kind of obsessive loop, I'm going for a walk.
  
  Loops are rough, I can sort of see how this would be a hazard for that with all the meta language.
  Personally I guess I just get irritated by things that are written like they are a PSA but need to rely on charitable interpretation to make sense. The problem with not saying chauvinists is that, if we see things in purely identitarian terms like the original post does at face value, then when we are confronted by situations where the roles are reversed (and yes, this is a minority of situations, but perhaps more common than one might think), like a white, male leftist arguing against the chauvinism of a Candace Owen type, the lines of thinking here short-circuit. Simple deference is fine for casual relations but it's not nearly as useful in grand proclamations because, if we actually accepted the proclamation, then we've kneecapped ourselves in a way similar to "progressive" liberals observably have, that latter case being the main reason Owens types have a career to start with. We cannot look only at what the speaker is but also at what they are saying.

A lot of what you are describing here is why leftism is dysfunctional in the west. Since leftism in the west isn't always a matter of material survival, western leftists use it to hyper-individualize themselves. Essentially they use leftist ideology to try to improve their class/conditions within a capitalist system without attempting to overthrow it. They also attack each other when one person does not see another's personal problems as "the one true leftist perspective."
A key factor is sometimes these criticisms are not coming from someone who is looking for solidarity, but supremacy. This is why people become defensive, because these accusations are not always launched with a cooperative perspective in mind, but a competitive mindset that is a result of western societal framing. Many of the examples cited can also be liberal perspectives quietly excusing capitalism. Basically saying "if it was only 'x' group that was removed from power, or put in charge, the current system would work.
- im going to be real with you, you have the line of a section of the left that marginalized ppl eventually learn to detect so that we can stay far away, like being able to smell rotten eggs at 10 parts per billion or whatever
  the idea of a person seeing themselves as a worker first-and-only (that is, of class reductionism) is something that makes the most sense to cishet white male etc workers. they have no other material interests, really, besides as workers and as consumers, so they're focused on that narrow conversation. for them it seems frustrating and "postmodern" for people to advance their interests on different fronts besides the simon-pure marxian vision of two great classes pitted against each other. actually they're doing what everyone is doing - representing their own interests - but they alone have this conviction that everyone else's interests are lesser. they have the strongest possible white fragility / male fragility / cisheteronormative / etc reaction of fearing that the oppressed are seeking, as you put it, "not... solidarity, but supremecy" and that we have a "competitive mindset"
  the strength of marxism is not in dogmatically subsuming minority interests to some ideal homogeneous collective for the sake of "solidarity," but in being able to identify that our interests are connected by our common class oppression. that means that, for example, I will advance my interests as a woman, without one iota of compromise to you - not sorry - but I can work on common goals with leftists who want the same thing I do, i.e. an end to class society
  my favorite marxism quote:
  What is right for the working class, cannot be wrong for the women. Being oppressed, devoid of rights and, in many instances, disregarded, it is not only their right, but their duty to defend themselves and to adopt any method that appears good to them, so that they may win an independent position. [...] Woman, in order to attain her aim more quickly, must look about for allies, and she naturally finds such allies in the proletarian movement. The class-conscious proletariat has long since commenced to storm the fortress of the state that is founded on class rule, which includes the rule of one sex over the other. - August Bebel
  
  As a black man, focusing on my individual oppression doesn't seem to be productive when speaking to the wider leftist community as we are all here to seek the liberation of wage slavery through the emancipation of labor ownership. I don't see the point in seeing your identity as a woman as forefront of your leftist beliefs in the same way I don't see my identity as a black man. I'd rather a cis white male see me as a comrade than acknowledge the black struggle in the US. The latter is what we just call the white liberal and only cares about my precieved status socially. Personally, I think the inability to put one's individualism aside for the sake of solidarity (not comprising beliefs but just not hyper focusing on them) is just a reductionist to the group you belong to, like a race or feminist reductionist. Only collectives with a strong centralized identity are able to have revolutions. A bunch of groups with a common goal that will betray each other the moment they think that others are antagonistic is called the Spanish Civil War.

These arguments only work when they're not being used to ignore the problems when they're also occurring among the left. Anyone that deploys them argument when it is occurring within the left just help to alienate and split away the affected group.

On the one hand capitlaism is the problem. So unless we fix thst the other problems aren't fixable. On the other hand almost any group to have real success organizing came from a special interest focus like that. So there are two wolves here both of them secretly liberals
- On the one hand capitlaism is the problem
  patriarchy predates capitalism by thousands of years and it will continue to exist after the revolution. unless we make a point to specifically struggle against it, male workers will for their narrow benefit naturally reproduce gendered division of labor under a socialist system and therefore sustain the material basis of sexism. this is just one area where a smothering insistence on "we're all in this together" actually disfavors a less privileged section of the proletariat.
  in other words, it's class reductionism
  On the other hand almost any group to have real success organizing came from a special interest focus like that
  this is definitely true yes, u are not fully a

I DO think that all these hurt individuals of the "oppressive class" as well as the oppressed
But yeah sometimes it's stfu time
- patriarchy is absolutely directly damaging to men and people growing up amab, it's maybe not the time or place to bring that up when someone is complaining about something specific.
  i'm not disputing that it does but i'm less clear on how white supremacy harms crackers other than the line about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
  
  about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
  this in itself is big imo
  perpetuates racism and their biggest working class perpetrators, and blinds poor whites into staying poor. lose-lose for everyone.
  
  i'm not disputing that it does but i'm less clear on how white supremacy harms crackers other than the line about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
  That's the issue. All of sociology must be rooted in historical materialism. Doing that here, we can see the issue is to split the working class so that working whites do the job of the bourgeoisie for them-- they do not grasp class consciousness, opting instead to self-identify as an invented social concept ("white") -- a concept that is always defined as acceptable and aligned with the ruling class' material goals -- in order to split the working class and oppress other races, sexes, genders, etc avoiding revolution.
  I found this write up in People's World helpful here

Wtf you can get comments removed for being "too class reductionist" as a racial minority on this site? I guess my opinion as a black person that wants workers solidarity and because im not a black nationalists doesn't fit with the narratives of the mods here. Lame site. I'm out.
- I'd rather a cis white male see me as a comrade than acknowledge the black struggle
  ~~This you?~~
  EDIT: My bad.
  
  Yes, did you not read the rest? I'd rather a white socialist than a lip service white lib lol. Was this a gotcha? I'll just stick to my irl black armed self defense group (that also has white people in it) because this place is just too weird. I was recommended it as an alternative to reddit but it doesn't seem much different.
- I hope you stay around because I see your perspective, and I think if you wait and let hexbears have a struggle sesh then they will be able to see it too. Because as a cishet white guy, it was actually really important for me to get to the line that these other commenters keep repeating: that the place where workers feel the effects of of their economic exploitation is usually some social distinction like race/gender/ethnicity/expression. I also believe that capital and value are real and temporal, condensed laboring time of workers, and if I understand all of this correctly, a huge amount of the cultural and social capital, basically anything new, or persisting from slavery and indigenous dispossession and genocide, as well as everything in between (carcerial and police repression, extreme exploitation of demonized immigrants), is composed disproportionately of the value of the toil, extracted through extreme violence, of BIPoC around the world.
  OTOH, I don't relate to black comrades as a racialized social relation. We are all volunteers so the people who are working together are there because they got their ass out to work together to get something done, or aid in people's struggles, or plan and even just bullshit in off time.
  It seems like there is what leftist believe that certain positions on race "need to" or are "supposed to" be, because of the compound legacies of imperialism and colonialism and patriarchy, etc., especially with regards to whites like me, but those positions can end up flattening the lived experience of people into a collection of historical figures and facts, an object instead of a person. But what this disconnect is, what it is called for example, if it exists, idk if there's a name for it. So like so many problems, people disagree over things they don't have the language to understand yet.
  Anyway, I appreciate your comments, comrade. Thanks.
  
  Imma keep it real with it you man, the vibe I get from some people here is that none of us should be set free unless we're all in the house first. I know that's not the best way of saying it or even if it's true. If this comment is out of bounds go ahead and remove it, but I hope to stick around and learn.

if all we're doing is talking about stuff, and pushing back on other people who want us to talk about stuff differently, I don't know what we think we're gonna accomplish.
- If people are talking about mountains, and someone points out that "this grain of sand is also a rock", how often is that going to be anything other than a distraction from the conversation?
  Seriously, describing this as 'pushing back against talking differently' is almost as reductive as the Right's "you want to silence us because we disagree". Scale is important.
  
  A mountain usually isn't a rock [it is made up of many rocks, along with other matter] and, if the conversation is about mountains and not rocks, then the interjecting person is offering an absurd nonsequitur.
  The structure of an analogy like this should usually be that it remains the same on a formal level but changes out the specific content for something more familiar. If the formal structure is changed along with the specific content, you're just kind of saying words.
- Show us your brilliant takes then, SkibidiToiletFanAcct
- if your response to being told that you have an incorrect view is to counter that it's all just talk, u are not taking this seriously
- Sorry I'm a bit confused, is this supposed to be an example of Wittgenstein's language games?
  If so this is meta as heck.

A black professor of mine (really cool guy his class has us read Wretched of the Earth) told me why he doesn't go near communism anymore is because every time he tried to engage with marxists in america, they were these fucking morons.
It is actively alienating people we should be listening to and working with. I have no respect for the left here, they don't deserve it.

113 comments