What is the problem with Jezebel/Slate privilege writing?
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Date: February 7th, 2014 8:22 PM Author: Transparent appetizing friendly grandma
it's an absurd strain of mutated postmodern pop-psychology gene-spliced into naked corporatist dreck.
it's horrible. it basically gelds leftism as a movement capable of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted by redefining the meaning of "affliction" to disregard economics.
you'd think that would be immediately seen as a bareassed ploy in a capitalist society such as ours, but actually, it is rarely called out on that basis.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975493) |
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Date: February 7th, 2014 8:45 PM Author: Transparent appetizing friendly grandma
okay. let's say i run an exploitative manure business. i hire guys to shovel shit for me into sacks and barrels, and then we sell them to feed stores. i'm a really abusive manager; i do drugs on the job, i whip people, i shoot my guys with paintballs, and i don't even pay very well.
you are a traditional leftist agitator. you hear these abuse stories from my employees, and it makes you really mad. "that manager is a real dick!" you exclaim. you focus on my behavior, and on the worker/management chasm, and your view of rights and obligations is framed in economic terms.
but you see, i am a bit ahead of the game. i know that leftist agitators are coming after me. so i transfer nominal control of my business to a board of directors, and i make sure that the new CEO is female. even better if she's a mexican immigrant or something. the shit-shovelers at my business are primarily white men.
as a leftist agitator from the old-school, this would not have bothered you. queen victoria was just as much of a capitalist bitch as anyone else, right? you had no sympathy for the coiffured matrons of the ruling classes, whether here or in latin america or wherever else. why the fuck would you? that would be SILLY relative to the plight of the workers.
but then modernity descends, and your fellow leftists begin to rephrase the whole game in terms of gender and race. my immigrant chick CEO is now a "minority" rather than a slavedriver. her story is one of "glass ceilings" rather than workers shoveling shit for her.
you can try and go against this narrative, and go on TV with her downtrodden employees complaining about their conditions, but you are ignored. and when you aren't ignored, you are attacked. why are you trying to drag down HER, of all people? are you mad that a MINORITY WOMAN is running the show? those whiny shit-heaver MEN should just have to GET OVER THEMSELVES and DEAL with it! grrrl power la raza squared!
even if you think these people are insane, you are still a man of the left who is not getting any sort of support from conservatives for your labor agitation. so you have little choice but to placate your purported allies.
so you back off. and then people like you also back off. and the old modes of leftism gradually wither, because your ability to critique power is now circumscribed by the "identities" of those IN power.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975597) |
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Date: February 7th, 2014 10:04 PM Author: Transparent appetizing friendly grandma
it's simplified and didactic, but let me put it into more general terms.
economic class is a category. it's a very "strong" category for a lot of purposes, which means we can look at class alone and make a whole lot of predictions about lifestyle and so forth.
gender and race are also categories, but they aren't as predictive in many ways. if i know someone's gender and the town where she lives, i can't readily use that information to predict where she lives WITHIN the town. but if i knew her class and NOT her gender, i could.
class is also a powerful category because it has very specific correlations with things like life expectancy. it's very easy to see in tangible terms why being lower-class is shittier than being upper-class.
this is not something that corporatists like to see, because the traditional method of redress for class struggle is to take money or power in some fashion from those who hold a lot of it, and send it down the chain.
so the problem over time has been to defuse or deflect class anger, to protect the interests of entrenched wealth and power, and to destroy the use of "class" as a rallying point.
this is more important over time as more americans slip from the middle classes INTO the lower classes. class rage is often prompted by these kinds of downshifts. poor born poor tend to just be poor, but people with resources who then BECOME poor are often quite enraged, and search for systemic responses.
to weaken the use of "class," you must replace it with something. preferably, several things. and those new categories should avoid invoking traditional class demands such as wealth redistribution.
gender/race are wonderful from that perspective. as categories, they actually ENCOURAGE members of the most economically-privileged classes to depict themselves as "victims", and to promote a sense of false allegiance across economic classes.
so for instance the book "lean in" was targeted to "women," even though it mostly just describes a bunch of kerfuffles that took place well within the very top end of the wealthiest classes.
this is like a billionaire show-stallion aficionado pretending to make common cause with a shoeless peasant laborer and his donkey because they are both "horsemen."
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975874) |
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Date: February 7th, 2014 10:31 PM Author: Transparent appetizing friendly grandma
i think you CAN have both "identity" and class struggles at the same time under certain conditions. icelanders seemed to do both. their women are very feisty, but the population is very economically "conscious," and became one of the only countries to tell foreign bankers to fuck right off (at least in part).
but their pre-existing substrate of shared identity was quite strong beforehand. they share a limited geographic area and most people are within four degrees of a cousin relation to most others.
in an area where more fissures "compete" for attention, those which win out in the media will probably have strong and immediate visual impact, and race/gender categories certainly fulfill that wish. and that's without getting into corporate ownership/ulterior media motives and so on.
people in the west generally don't like to be categorized as lower-class, either. a lot of shame attaches to that. category identifications are a point of pride, which is why i think the focus on identity will ultimately be a disaster for the left. what happens if/when "male whites" assert themselves as a category in the same manner as others? for now, they mostly get mocked, but if the political paradigm remains identity-focused, it seems inevitable.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975989) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 6:27 AM Author: irradiated office filthpig
Obviously, there is a lot of deflection going on in the public sphere and most of it has to do with the public learning that what we come to call a democracy is an illusion. Over time, people learn that there is nothing they can do, which is amplified by American narratives of individualism and bootstraps. As this happens, the public shifts the focus inward and away from the ruling class, focusing on internal issues (how do I change my thinking) and issues that are either seen within the locus of their control or issues that are trivial.
Writing on these issues completely understands this, often connecting it to concepts like false consciousness, hegemony, and ideology which neoMarxists and feminists equally love. Thus, "identity" and "class" struggles are not separated nor separatable. No one argues that to talk, e.g., of a black woman's struggle means to disregard political economy. Clickbait blogs simplify issues but that is the nature of clickbait blogs.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977213) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 6:54 AM Author: bistre internal respiration roommate
lol you are having a lot of trouble stepping outside the box of your nonsense language, aren't you? this is one reason i hate this sector of the academy: it's basically a meeting from dilbert or office space or fight club or whatever, buzzwords being thrown around like so much "synergy" and so many "action items" in a powerpoint hellscape festooned with thorny citation garlands.
so let's try making some actual sense.
- what is "structural struggle"? that's not actually what traditional leftists cared about, right? they cared about the distribution of resources and the distribution of the means of production. why should they care about "structural struggle" now?
- what is the structural determinism "argument"? what are its premises and what is its conclusion?
- what does it mean for "categories" to be "interlocked" and why should this matter? won't all categories be interlocked with these, general as they are? for example: height and attractiveness will both influence class. do i need to start complaining about askav's "tall privilege" and write a memo about ways in which he can be an "ally" to me?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977233) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 7:14 AM Author: bistre internal respiration roommate
but "how we think" isn't even really at issue! what the fuck? i mean, in a certain sense it is, but what we really care about is the fact that the guys who get the cigars also get the means of production and all the food and all the nice shit, right? and the workers don't get anything? that's class "struggle" or whatever, i thought. the fact that some ridiculous theory generalizes this to "signifying systems" is of no interest to the real leftist. it's as though i ordered food at a restaurant and the waiter said "even better, sir! food is one kind of physical thing, so here are all sorts of physical things for you to eat: plastics, pianos, planets, particles... furthermore, eating is a kind of input-output procedure. so is visual perception; so just by having you look at these things, i'm giving you a 'serious account' of sustenance." oh what a motherfucking scholar!
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977252) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 7:38 AM Author: salmon galvanic hairy legs
Ever think that maybe 'scholars' talk about things like consciousness, signifying systems, etc. so that they can make it relevant to their own lives when they go to dinner parties? Maybe because they don't know any poor people, they don't care? It would fit pretty well with Hemi's account.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeG4EMmqfag
I know you probably hate this guy, but I think his basic notion is right. I've seen both sides of it. I wonder if the cultural mores, concerns, and unity of the white elite drive academic production as well--after all, why accept for publication papers and books not addressed to concerns that have some purchase with the panel of elite referees for the submission?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977277) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 7:25 AM Author: salmon galvanic hairy legs
So, he would argue that 'how we think' is an important issue, but two things about that. First, as you note, it wasn't really what we were talking about. (But "left" intellectuals like to do that--introduce 'essential' concepts midstream. "We can't talk about x without talking about y!" [said 2 hours into the lecture]) Second, '''''''''''' talks about 'subjectivity', but that's a pretty tendentious way to talk about, say, class consciousness. I am pretty sure that even Marx doesn't agree with that, good Hegelian that he was. 'Subjectivity' is a more bedrock concept than class consciousness.
You're right re: class struggle, of course. Sensible people talk about things in this way, Marx talked about things in this way, etc. But where you part company from '''''''''''''''' and from academia in general is when you say that "real leftists" don't talk as ''''''''''''''''' does. That's not true; that's pretty much how they talk these days. There are exceptions--so, some serious-minded left economists, historians, political scientists, statesmen/cabinet members, and analytic philosophers write sensible papers and books about class. But the rest of the left abandoned that project in the 70s. The 80s and beyond have been luxuriant nonsense of the kind ''''''''''''' is spouting. I like Hemi's account of its origins. Seems right to me.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977261) |
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Date: February 8th, 2014 6:47 AM Author: salmon galvanic hairy legs
That's one of the many absurdities of the "left," so-called. Sword-mo mentions that they "let the contradictions pile up." That seems about right. So on the one hand you have "intersectionality," which is basically the notion that we can study 'intersections' of oppression. (So, what is it like to be a woman vs. what is it like to be a black woman.) Yet, on the other hand, we have the nostrum that we "should not compare oppressions," (sometimes rendered as "do not compare -isms"). It seems to me like a debate about whether it matters that the angels on the pin are jitterbugging or doing the Charleston, but, point is, they can't even agree whether it's okay to discuss the very thing they nominally study.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977229) |
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Date: February 7th, 2014 10:14 PM Author: thriller milk corner
So you think post-modern critical theory was essentially co-opted by capitalists to distract well-educated liberals from advocating for meaningful social change?
EDIT:
I mean, to me, it seems pretty close to universally shittier to be a woman than a man. That disparity deserves some attention. So does racial injustice, for that matter. I think saying "Forget that other stuff, it's not as important as CLASS" is arbitrary.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975928) |
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Date: February 7th, 2014 10:23 PM Author: Transparent appetizing friendly grandma
parts of it. my limited reading of the frankfurt school and other earlier critical theory movements (proto-orientalism; that kind of thing) is that the initial stuff was actually quite elitist. adorno bashed the hell out of jazz and said that it castrated men because it channeled their subversive urges into a form that was harmless to the larger system.
their use of "identity" was secondary to class. and some of the orientalist/postcolonial writing was basically just a plea from third-world intellectuals for western intellectuals to pay attention to them.
this really began to swing around into a more modern form by the later 1970's. the failed "equal rights amendment" in the US and abortion/contraception battles helped refocus things into gender terms, and post-60's race-identity movements became more prominent within universities.
corporations can be quite good at identifying and taking advantage of those sorts of early trends, and that is what happened.
the traditional old left - having fractured itself, and debilitated by the final end of soviet communism - was not well-positioned to resist. though some tried.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24975955) |
Date: February 8th, 2014 7:31 AM Author: zombie-like tanning salon
the american left isn't THAT big to begin with... can it actually AFFORD in concrete polisci power/electoral terms to go mitosis on itself and split up into quarreling fragments?
also, if any given property "X" INTERSECTS with "class," isn't that only meaningful so far as the class status is concerned?
so if gender intersects with class, but a certain number of women are filthy fucking rich, that kind of overrides everything else, doesn't it? oh, but maybe their plutocrat husbands condescend to them sometimes after getting back to the manor. that vitiates the whole pre-identitarian model then; better focus on gender now!
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#24977269) |
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Date: January 15th, 2015 1:07 PM Author: laughsome meetinghouse
It's the same garbage arguments over and over that don't address the point.
Of course there are major disparities between how people treat a generic white guy vs generic black guy. Of course the same is true about men vs women.
The idea that this would offend and confuse white people who niggerthread is hilarious. "But CLASS" also makes no sense as a response
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2488966&forum_id=2#27122427) |
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