I am more into Bookchin than I am into Marxism, but you all have to check out Adolph Reed's critiques of identity politics. Identitarians are BTFO, and he points out how the hypocritical identitarians capitulate to essentialism.
Quote from "The Limits of Anti-Racism":
"Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.
My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism."
"The essentialism cuts in odd ways in this saga. Sometimes race is real in a way that sex is not – you’re black only if you meet the biological criteria (whatever they’re supposed to be) for blackness. And sometimes, as in Talusan’s failure to distinguish gender from sex typing, gender is "real" in a way that race is not. "Doctors don’t announce our race or color when we are born; they announce our gender." I assume Talusan is referring to the stereotypical moment in the delivery room. Technically, though, the doctor announces the child’s sex type, not its culturally constructed gender roles. And when exactly does Talusan presume race is determined and by whom? I’m pretty sure that in most of the United States it’s still marked on one’s birth certificate. That’s not the delivery room, but it’s pretty damn close."
Boom
Jordan Williams
based
Luke Hernandez
Reed uses some very odd vocabulary at times that makes me think he's trying too hard to sound smart.
Wyatt Howard
He writes like an academic, yes. It's a bit tedious, but his work is rewarding to study as they have a lot of insight.
Nathaniel Anderson
That's some quote-worthy writing, alright.
On how "antiracists" converse with you plebs: I think this also applies to pomo "Marxists" who call theory their writing that doesn't model or predict anything.
On the goal of the "antiracists":
On how the "antiracists" fight:
On the question who benefits from "antiracism":
Andrew Long
I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't exist, because only white men could ever possibly criticize idpol.
Eli Garcia
I don't support identity politics but I will vote for FN. It has gotten out of hand, and I just don't feel safe anymore.
Wyatt Reyes
By the way I'm talking about islam not race.
Jackson Edwards
The Front Néolibéral, you mean?
Samuel Martinez
hi dore
Gabriel Sullivan
The new Adolph to counterbalance the idpol of the old Adolf
Bookchin's humanism is a form of essentialism too.
Xavier Brown
At that point you're really getting into a semantic argument about what we mean by "identity" or "essential". But I'll bite.
Bookchin's humanism is *universalist*. Identity politics are particularist.
Gabriel Clark
...
Juan Baker
It's not about semantics. Humanism requires a defined and positive human essence on condition which it can ascribe rights to those who bear it. His social/natural evolution model (traceable back to Kropotkin) does just this: there is a natural human essence that is corrupted by capitalism, let's get back to that more harmonious stage of yada yada.
Putting aside that a positive essence is non-universalizeable, which is a theoretical point, you can clearly look at how humanism fails at every corner in terms of actual praxis. Not just that it hinges on a benevolent state or international community to uphold the humanist principles, but people who adhere to it completely forget how humanism is historically conditioned on capitalism.
Jose Clark
You're not reasoning with dialectical naturalism. In doing so, we recognise the Historically rational role played in the opening of a realm of a potential *universal humanitas* in civilization:
"Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest, most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of social evolution. The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the exclusion of outsiders, was—juridically, at least—dissolved. It became the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced by a free society based on a shared common humanity. Potentially, it remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into the community—initially as a protected resident of a common territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil human activity." - social-ecology.org/wp/2002/09/harbinger-vol-3-no-1-the-communalist-project/
Michael Butler
This really sums it up quite well. The identity politics vanguard insist they are prioritizing these issues because they’re leftists and that there is something you don’t understand about leftism or you, too, would be tackling race and gender minutiae as the apex injustice — but there is no indication of that. It’s posturing. The enigma is why they insist on dominating leftist discussion.
Nathan Morgan
He also followed up
And this is true for all identity politics. It’s important to note that the IDPol true believers are fundamentally mistaken about the relationship of their struggle with class struggle. Without looking into the origins of this fracture in the broad left, it is clear that it serves the interests of the upper class. Is there any further reason required to dispense with it?
Nolan Moore
I had that very article in mind when I wrote what I did. Thanks for nothing.
Sebastian Rodriguez
Enjoyable read, but the article on Dolezal and the (rhetorically) equating of transracial and transgender identity is fairly shite.
Lucas Allen
kek
Luke Hernandez
It's really not. SJWs can't argue against it without falling back on essentialism qua descent.
Logan Diaz
This comment is literally the hand waving Reed critiques in the article on anti‐racism used to defend the essentialist view on race Reed critiques in the article on Dolezal
I’m having a hard time discerning whether or not that was essential
Brandon Kelly
it is, because I see a lot of people falling into the trap of calling "transgender issues", identitarian issues, when it's really not. People with dysphoria do not experience identity crises moreso than they experience, well, dysphoria. Because this particular problem has been so politicised, any notion of the actual psychollgical/medical side of it gets ignored all too easily. t. medstudent
Jason King
This is addressed in the article when Reed talks about what others called the “compulsion” to transition.
That is, how do you know people who feel they are a different race do not feel dysphoric?
Cameron Campbell
Because there is no medical basis for such a notion.
Daniel Ross
cont. Honestly, I feel like this constitutes a failure on the medical community's part in communicating about these issues. There's a reason why it's not called Gender Identity Disorder anymore, now it's Gender Dysphoria. There is now dispute on whether to call it Sex Dysphoria (which I prefer much more).
Jaxson James
Once there was no known medical basis for that subset of transgender identity involving men and women feeling like women and men.
Regardless, I see no objective reason that Dolezal’s feelings of “transraciality” are less valid than genderqueer identity &c.
Eli Young
Also, this criticism is levied as well at those who would condemn the dismissal of MTF and FTM trans people without dysphoria as reactionary, and there is no objective difference between them and Dolezal that I can see.
Ayden Watson
see
Personally, I think people identifying with [opposite gender] without experiencing dysphoria are fairly idiotic, considering the historical social performative origins of gender, and do nothing more than hold up some form of binary. My concern was never with those who identified with a social form of gender, as clarified in my second post.
Even with social definitions of gender and race, an argument could be made that there is a historical and socially experienced element of race that is categorially different from gender (I know, Reed adresses this). But that opens a whole other can of worms I don't feel like going into right now.
William Lee
What is the point of bringing something up he addresses if it’s just rehashing the argument?
From his perspective, race and gender are social constructs and he is criticizing specifically the race essentialism that he recognizes as the masked (how many of these identitarians have the consistence to not decry race and gender as social constructs?) underpinning of the ‘race problem’ that has begun to dominate leftist discussion.
As a leftist, he (rightly, IMO) sees a focus on race as basically palliative. Read the comments on that article and his critics are all guilty of what he addresses in the article – insisting on a focus on race and that it is fundamental to class. And yet, who can say that a discussion of identity has ever done anything for class struggle? And who can deny that class struggle has done nothing for downtrodden groups of all stripes?
From a comment: This is what he is criticizing. And yet, the same comment leads with:
This is the fundamental contradiction of identity politics in leftism: no leftist has the guts to deny that race and gender are social constructs and that their ills are symptoms of capitalism; and yet they absolutely insist on treating the symptoms before (and ultimately in stead of) the disease.
Levi Gonzalez
I don't disagree with anything in your post. My contention was that there is an actual medical disorder that people suffer from, which isn't socially constructed, and it is rash to equate this with identitarian bullshit the current left is so prone to. That's it.
Evan Powell
What you said originally is that he wrong to compare transracial and transgender identities, but he doesn’t do that to the effect of “equating [a medical disorder] with identitarian bullshit”. The article is merely pointing out the hypocrisy of those who recognize that gender is a social construct and simultaneously conflate gender and sex in an attempt to discredit Dolezel because they are compelled to defend their insistence on the prioritization of race.
Jack Wilson
You are correct, I should have made myself clearer from the get-go, I apologise.
Jaxon Stewart
Seriously though, if gender and race are spooks and because of that someone can be transgender, then why can't someone be transracial as well?
Jason Gray
Because the entire edifice of theory all of this is based on is nonsensical.
