The problem of both intersectionalism and workerism

Happy international working women's day, everyone!

At this occasion, I want to pose a question that might be controversial: Does intersectionalism (so-called "identitarianism") and orthodox workerism in the both the syndicalist and marxist sense have the same underlying problems?

As intersectionalism perhaps correctly points out, the experiences and concrete social positions of a black woman and a white women are quite different, and this only gets more complicated when the two parties compared to each other get further away from each other, in terms of what identitarian traits they have in common. What sense is there in talking about a united women's struggle and oppression in a society, when there are women that are better of than some men? When the concrete situations of bourgeois and proletarian women barely overlap?

The same goes with being a worker. While they all share a common societal group and even function, the concrete power relations of the worker differ so much, that it makes little sense to talk about worker's stuggles as the uniting factor, when most political actors - even if they technically belong to the working class - care more about other concerns primarily? What we must learn to accept in the Left is that the worker is not just an agent of the workplace, the blank revolutionary slate that Marx liked to talk about, but also functions as private individual in society as a whole, and thus experineces a lot of things that has nothing to do with the workplace at all.

Now, the response from the professional academic Left as been to appeal to a certain kind of micronationalism, and pray for solidarity between groups that do not obviously have many interests in common, appealing to those most oppressed by the system, rather than trying to create a mass-movement everyone can relate to - a tendency that is rather backwards, since most oppressed classes of society indeed have a tendency to be rather reactionary in comparison to the more muh privileged classes (and 30 years of intersectionalist agitation has done nothing to change this).

The answer seems to me that both workerism and intersectionalism tends to appeal to arbitrary or contructed communities.
As the cities and the face-to-face assemblies in which citizens could discuss their concrete tangible issues and come to agreement and understanding with each other have been destroyed by statecraft and urbanization both, struggles and issues have been inconcrete, abstract, and for the most part, meaningless, since none of them individually describes or addresses the concrete situation of any one individual.

So when we talk about "opposing racism", "ending mysogyny" or "ending capitalism", we must understand that these things only make sense on a communal/municipal scale where the individual situations in relation to the concrete community at hand can be taken into account.

This is not to say that interest-groups cannot exist or that they aren't necessary. Only that they cannot in of themselves liberate anyone, and serve only to help as an auxillary mechanism to the actual communal assemblies as emancipatory institutions.

Thus we most transcend both the old left and the new left and embrace something new entirely, built from the elimination of the flaws of both.

This is one of the many reasons why Communalism is the future.(CIA nigger was ran over with an old renault)

Provably false. This talks about avarages, which means it aids black women who live in the upper class and oppose white women who live in dirt poor condition.

Marxism or "workerism" focus on concrete groups based on their position in society, not what their skin colour or nipple shape is which might or might not weakly corrolate with socioeconomic standing.

The amount of Bookchin/communalism shilling on Holla Forums has become insufferable. You have a cyclical to shill in and several more threads on the subjects, so go tend those tumors.

another "we need something entirely new" thread

This is not a thing. It's just some shit faggots made up to distract that their theory has no grounding in reality. Remember faggots, Marxism is science, and as such must conform to reality, not the other way around.

Yes, indeed, but let us not fall to the false assumption that the experience of black women in the "upperclasses" is the same as the white women of the same community.

In Rome, for example, even those plebians who rose to the very top of the Roman political world, did not "merge" into the patrician class, and still had many issues that made no sense in an economic sense to were still very real and tangible.


That is very true, but both of these things would inform your social position, just as your position within the workplace would.

So again, workerism does not address the concrete social issues of any one individual worker, it only addresses it in an abstract idealistic sense.

If you haven't noticed, emancipatory movements are not doing all to well as of now.
It is beyond question that we need something entirely new.
The question is what.

Except Marxism hasn't changed, even after the introduction of new experiments and new and more advanced anthropological data, that disproves some of it's more basic assumptions.

The fact that Marxism laid the ground-work for the modern totalitarian state and the subversion of worker's struggles is only a testament to how crude the theory was.

and that's fine.

You can't blame Marx for making incomplete social theories. Darwin certainly didn't get evolution down either.

Provide evidence for this. As far as I've seen, people have kept doing research into Marxist economics and expanded the theory. You can't just ignore the past century of development and say it hasn't changed.

Okay, now we know you're a fucking retard that doesn't even know what Marx wrote. Kill yourself.

Remember when "intersectionalism" meant "hey, remember that people are not just their identities, they're a sum of their unique experiences" and not "hey, people don't have just one identity to flaunt for oppression points, they have multiple and you can add them up"?

And I'm sure your "workerism" strawman has a problem, but here in reality nobody cares about workers' identities or experienes. We simply point out they have a common interest in overthrowing capitalism, nothing less, nothing more.

I am not talking about Marxist economics, rather I am talking about his anthropology, historcaphy and thus his socioloical assumptions -

For example, the industrial proletariat never proved to be quite the revolutionary class, that Marx had thought it to be. Neither, upon better examination of the material, was the French revolution motivate primarily by class-interests, as most bourgeoisie was indeed monarchists at the time, even if the bourgeoisie ended up being the main beneficiaries of the revolution.

Indeed, the lesson of both the French and the Spanish revolution seems to be that the revolutionary potential does not lie in an established and organized class, but at the decline and disorganization of a class, in both cases here mostly consisting of impoverished agrarian workers, who had either only recently become proletarian or had become long-term unemployed - or "lumpenproletarer".

Indeed, perhaps we do, and perhaps we are all hurt by our inherent transphobia, but in terms of dealing with these issues in a tangible way, that can organize a mass-movement, simply pointing that out is useless.

"workerism" is organizing primarily around worker-struggles, beliving this to be emancipatory or even applicable to most in-of-itself.

Twenty posts tops and you turned your own board thread into a toilet for two days. It was all the sort of nonsense shit most normal people could ignore.

You must really be livid.

And you are saying that no Marxist theorist has acknowledged this? Even so, Marx wasn't trying to predict the future and he was right in describing worker relations. Intersectionality, on the other hand, is pseudo-scientific bullshit that doesn't reflect the real world.

Things lime hatred of women, racism, etc need to be recognized as symptoms and causes of capitalism and exploitation, but ending them is a part of the bigger goal of ending class, and shouldn't be the end goal. It's simple, really. Like, could the revolution have happened in the 19th century if they had just dismissed the issue of slavery as 'idpol'? But at the same time ending slavery didn't stop workers exploitation. Catch my drift?

why is m i s o g y n y replaced with hatred of women

Indeed, but is that struggle truly the final and most important one, in comparison to the communal and democratic one?
What about those without work?
What happens when the interests of labourers go against the interests of humanity as a collective, ad we have recently seen with labour-unions supporting the XL pipeline?

The classic workers struggle is simply both too narrow and too abstract for any emancipatory movement.

This is why leftypol can't have nice things

It was an accident apparently. It happens

Good thread, mods can go fuck off. We have way worse people here that post way more bullshit. People just get triggered by having different defintions of workerism.

While I am a Communalist to and so I agree with most that you have written I must disagree with putting being a worker into the same category as being a woman, gay or whatever. Being a worker is no choice, it cant be abolished by changing culture/superstructure. All the abolishment of identity categories like gender, sexual orientation, racism ect will never change your social and economic role as a worker.
(Yes, your genetical sex wont change but that identity can still become irrelevant outside of medical stuff)

Pitting communalism as fundamentally oposed to Marxism(As in the science/category of ideologies, Marx himself ofc disagrees with communalist ideas) is stupid. While you are right that a worker is never only a worker and doesnt want to be seen only as such, proclaiming that status to be irrelevant because there are other interest groups that cover up his role as a worker is wrong.

I am not sure that you wanted to imply all that, so dont get mad if we dont actually disagree. I think that using identity and role as different categories can be very helpful as it distinguishes between the selfunderstanding and social task people have.

Communalism is not entirely new at all and it can work perfectly together with many other leftist styles of organisation


There is to much Lenin shilling here, the occasional Communalism threads and the regular Communalists voicing their opinions is nothing in comparison to the utter dominanc of tankies and Leninists here.

...

You dont have to tbh

your dialectics game is breddy gudd and make good points.

What do you think about liberation through revolution? Answering intersectionalism through prole revolution, not before nor separately.

Not OP but revolution is obviously the only permanent solution.

Wow the mods banning for this post is way out of line. I don't necessarily agree with OP but it is clearly an argument in good faith.

As much as I hate OP, he shouldn't be banned.

I definitely have more Communalist theory to read but from my understanding, most Communalists understand that the state won't allow its power to be corroded peacefully. Eventually the powers of the state and the burgeoning municipal confederation will come to a head and revolutionary violence will erupt out of that.

If I'm wrong on this point, someone who's understands theory better than me can feel free to correct me.

That is correct most hold that view, although Bookchin never talked to much about revolution itself afaik(He said though that you should grab power if possible). There are some more reformist or anarchist minded communalists who think they can just continue building their confederation till capitalism goes away but thats not really important as they will choose the right side once the state cracks down.

what is Post-Marxism? "professional academic Left" is such a vague grouping. you have to be specific in who you are criticizing.


Every community identification is constructed. Not an argument against concepts of community.


Please. Capitalism is global.


Nigga, this is the worst word vomit I've seen here in a while.

Not OP
Not an argument, OP made an argument against ineffective antiimperialist larping und supporting capitalists that want to protectionism because it supposedly undermines capitalism. Capitalist structure is so covered by propaganda and the workingclass so devided that only face to face politics can create a movement based on shared experience.

Come on mods, this was a genuinely decently thought and argued post. I'm all for banning shitposts on sight, but this wasn't one. Down with this Yezhovshchina!

OP wasn't that bad a post, it's this ill-thought out shit:

that needs to fuck off.

complain here

No.
You are making distinctions based on what people believe. These distinctions are not as important as distinctions based on what people do.

just fyi, OP was unbanned a couple days ago


He doesn't deserve the banhammer either

Not quite.
A City, for example is not an arbirtarily constructed identity, but a real tangible community of individuals who have to coordinate their interests with each other on a face-to-face basis due to close geographical proximity. It is a community just as tangible and material as the worker-proprietor-relationship in the workplace.

That is my point. These struggles only make sense when they're real and tangible at the communal level.


Indeed. But Capitalism manifests itself in a thousand different ways. It has both given birth to Wahabism and gay-nationalism, and is the sources of many different kinds of oppressions, varying in exact form and degree depending on the concrete community at hand.

I am sorry for not responding earlier. I thought this thread got pruned.

You mention quite correctly that one is not made less a worker if the identity of a worker is abolished, but the other categories you mention also have concrete social functions, roles and expectations that come with them. Sure, being Hillary Clinton is not the same as being a working-class woman in any meaningful way, but working men and working women - and even bourgeoisie men and women - do have different social positions, that make the over emphasis on their shared status as workers simply be as arbirtary and as abstract as Hillary and Jane Worker's shared status as women.
That doesn't mean that worker-status does not matter. Of course it does. it is a mode of domination.
What it means, however, is that workerism - meaning that you base your struggle on the abstract community of workers - will not be sufficient to mount an emancipatory movement, nor will any struggle based on abstract, largely urbanite, communities.

The only way one can truly emancipate a population is through a struggle based on direct democracy, united in confederacies as to avoid parochalism, for these are based on concrete and tangible communities, that being face-to-face assemblies that are capable of managing exactly the very complex and real situations of every single individual in each of their own relevant social contexts.

I think it is best to organize dual power underneath the state, and wait until the state eventually has to agress against you or dismantle itself. I believe in the right of the people to defend themselves, but I do not believe that direct aggression against the state is conductive to anything.

However, I am not under the delusion that a nation-state and direct democracy can coexist forever, though.