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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”
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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”
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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”
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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
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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
earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
If I had to guess (not for you specifically, but hexbear in general), it would be tone indicators. The last big struggle session that I can think of was whether we should use tone indicators to accomodate neurodivergent people. It actually makes sense to use them in an online forum like this, even for neurotypical people because nuance is lost when one is just reading text straight up. However, I saw a lot of pushback on this sort of thing from users that would normally be all about the “hexbear party line” (so to speak) of things like vegan solidarity, trans solidarity and respecting pronouns, etc. And it’s the same line of argumentation that people who were against meat content warnings were using (“what’s the big deal?” etc.). So yeah perhaps that’s the next frontier.
i already have to badger people to do spoiler tags and nsfw tags properly for trauma related content, that is gonna take ages to catch on
i do usually use emojis as a tone indicator a lot of times though 🤔 thats probably not very reliable for a lot of neurodivergent people but maybe some emojis could be made to ease adoption, would have to inform people on hover texts
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Shush you’re never allowed to leave. I won’t let you.
what is this, a hotel in california?
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Huh, I had no idea, what’s the message of Hotel California?
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I’m pissed off, but unsurprised. I’ve been seeing this same shit throughout the western white left since I became a leftist.
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
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
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“Patriarchy” is a funny way to say “Capitalism” so the concept can survive and that is just needs more women to be in positions of power to exploit it.
Sorry but that’s a bad and extremely reductive take. There is absolutely a unique factor of oppression towards non-cis-men that
a) evolved historically
b) reproduces itself in our current economic system, but
c) isn’t guaranteed to dissolve and could be perpetuated in a post-capitalist economic system and
d) could be eased even under capitalism and materially benefit those affectedIgnoring this factor of oppression results in a reductive analysis of the kind of “let’s overthrow capitalism and everything will be great”
Yes - the liberation of women, trans people of all genders, non-binary people etc. necessitates an end of capitalist structures - but that alone won’t solve the problem. So saying “patriarchy = capitalism” is reductive.
And of course men suffer from patriarchal structures too - but it’s qualitatively not the same as the explotation of their labour or the way non-cis men experience gender oppression.
thank u for deploying the downbear, I’m so sick of being told to shut up and get back in line until after the revolution
This should also be expanded to include non-hetero men as well – there’s already enough literature on heteronormativity that I don’t feel obligated to go into too much detail (and it is also very late so I don’t want to), but it should be sufficient to say that heteronormativity and cisnormativity are major reinforcing factors for patriarchy, and that therefore homophobia and transphobia are inseparably linked to patriarchy. The oppressions experienced by cis gay men are certainly going to be different than those experienced by non-cis men, but there should still be a fair amount in common, and a large amount that cishet men do not experience.
It’s “all struggles matter” and it sucks.
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.
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
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Yeah, one of my critiques of LA/PMO conceptions of tech workers having different class interests or being a new class is that…well…their aristocracy isn’t. It’s extremely conditional and the Bourgoisie has an interest in removing it. It’s all false consciousness boosted by a larger paycheck.
On the other hand dismissing the real poverty of the lower ranks of the working classes is also a real problem. Wealthy workers have a responsibility to contribute more to the left, not whine about how they’re also poor struggling exploited proletarians
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I guess that makes you guilty of no 1 in the post
how?
By saying labor aristocracy is still just workers, and implying everyone is on the same boat?
youre being obtuse. the issue is saying “we’re all workers” in order to dismiss peoples valid concerns and experiences. Obviously tech workers are still workers. their workers just privileged has hell, and they generally need to learn when to shut up and listen.
Is that the issue? Because when I consider myself in the same boat as poorly paid workers, it’s to support their — and my — rights, benefits and security.
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Maybe differentiate between poverty and workers rights?
I’m in a good job and have no idea about living in poverty. Without my job and state support I would last some months, maybe a year. Long Covid could take me out easily. I am privileged by having a good job, but when head’s comes to tail I am in the same boat as any other workers.
Honestly I don’t really understand what OP is trying to say.
ur getting it
I used to argue with pmc urbanist types and the conversation always went something like:
me: “true it’s inconvenient to have to walk far to the subway station but if u build a new station here then property values will shoot up and hundreds of poor ppl will be evicted. idc about the tech workers”
them: “I hate gentrification discourse. you can’t just hold back progress for the sake of a minority of people. are you going to deliberately sabotage the city so that better off workers don’t want to live there?”
struggling against ppl like that can be a matter of life and death for the poor. any day of the week they’ll throw us under the bus for the sake of their own stratum’s restaurant selection. if we show solidarity to them they either won’t notice or shrug and find it completely natural bc it comports with their own priorities. but they will never support us in return unless they already see it as in their interest. that’s how the real world works. where does that leave @UlyssesT@hexbear.net’s vague feel-good notion of solidarity?
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Fucking well put
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.
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.
it’s not easy to write a tightly worded PSA about a sensitive topic with a lot of tricky nuances, and I think sometimes it’s more important to just get something posted promptly in the moment while the topic is getting attention in the community, and then let people hash things out in the comments, hopefully converging toward understanding through dialog. Also, I hope that on hexbear most of us are on each others’ wavelengths enough not to assume someone’s asking for “blind deference” to any group or person.
But yeah I agree it’s one of the big challenges in communication, that sometimes discourse moves faster than understanding. In the worst cases you get a spiral of compounding misunderstandings and personal slights until people hate each other lol, the gap widens faster than communication can bridge it. But imo that’s why it’s so important for people to be patient, read between the lines, and ask for clarification instead of lashing out defensively. Communication is like trying to force your brain through a straw.
And sure, while I agree that we should never offer anyone blind deference, we should offer a fair bit of deference to people from marginalized groups, because they can see things the privileged are often blind to. They are looking at privilege from the outside, and it’s always easier to understand something from the outside. And we should offer even more deference to leftists from marginalized groups, i.e., the people who voice complaints on hexbear dot net. A communist who’s been posting here for months and written a lot of great, thoughtful comments in this thread is especially unlikely to be asking for blind deference. Not saying it’s wrong to ask for clarification though, quite the opposite, as long as there’s patient dialog.
To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone here of holding any position such as demanding blind deference, just that taking these statements at face value has problems.
Admittedly, the website does have a problem with being radlib and there are some people who have demanded blind deference in the past [“it’s cool to objectify women if you’re a lesbian!” etc.], but I don’t think this user is one of them or that this particularly intersects with those grievances that I whine about.
no more half measures walter
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.
I’d rather a cis white male see me as a comrade than acknowledge the black struggle
this approach fails even on its own terms of trying to achieve a common revolution for everyone. all of those other “individual oppressions” are key sites of class struggle! you can’t leave them out and mutually agree that everyone will act like the only thing that matters is worker identity, at least without completely hobbling your efforts.
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.
it’s nice that you’re so trusting, but I’m not. you’re talking like they’re not the ones with a proven record of betraying. taibbi and most patsocs have already decided that publicly crucifying the trans is just going to have to be the price to be paid to gain popular support for their programs. us history is a nonstop parade of cases of labor militancy collapsing when its middle class support is bought off with concessions to split them away from labor. or black history my god, the number of times white socialists decided it was tactically expedient to keep blacks and immigrants out? this kind of thing is not all behind us. you have to be vigorous in militating for your own interests or else you’re just depending on whatever consideration you get ambiently from liberal society- which will not serve you well as material conditions continue to deteriorate.
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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??
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
