Jacobin: intersectionality is shitting Marxism up by playing class down

You don't think you're mischaracterizing people who are saying things socialists have said since the 19th century? This isn't some degeneration of "my perfect baby Marx's theory by liberals". It has been recognized for over a century that people will act against their real material interests out of a DELUSION about material reality. This delusion has just as much power as the reality over people's actions, because it is a false consciousness.

When people act against their interests out of racism, it has consistently been in a period where the racism becomes justified by material arguments. People believe blacks are inferior, violent, that they will destroy society, rape women, kill innocents etc.

This fear of a racial apocalypse is what causes people to act contrary to their interests, to fight changes to the economic system (which, in socialist models, almost always include a universal component disregarding race) because they have a fear of a potential backslide into barbarism.

This same bullshit caused people to disregard female education, disregard their autonomy and status in society because of the belief either that they were different and would break the social fabric if given any significant power over it, or that by giving them power they'd simply be irrational in other ways which would destroy the family and therefore destroy society.

All of these delusions still exist, and they are impediments to a true class consciousness. You have to face them, you can't keep saying that they don't exist, that racism isn't based on delusions people have about material reality which impede them from accepting socialist critique. Go tell the MAGAs right now about the good word of Marx, that all of their social ills have to do with class relations, and they'll tell you that you are a cuck who is going to destroy western civilization by giving it over to niggers.

Wew lad, back to reading.

I mean liberals getting pissed a Jacobin over this. DSA is not leftist by any means and Jacobin is borderline.

lol. A lot of angry people in the replies.

lol how do you extrapolate that from what he said?

I don't know how many times you need to be told that Jacobin = DSA to realize that your statement doesn't make sense

Jacobin is a handful of DSA members. DSA is an organization that encompasses people with varying ideologies. It's a social club. The majority of DSA are idpol liberals.

It's funny because the person who said all that is black and female and getting called a fucking white male.

I get it. It's like with the prison-industrial complex. Instead of ending for-profit prisons, the militarization of the police, and the war on drugs, we need "fairer" justice.
That will really improve the lives of people in disadvantaged communities!

nice meme yo.
Meme started by Trotskyists who were bleeding out members who were not into culty brocialists organizations.

Repeating it won't make that true. Many of the same people run both, and the direction of DSA national is heavily informed by Jacobin

trips of truth. peak liberalism is the greatest cancer of all.

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Pretending a social club that has need for a "left caucus" is anything but a liberal hangout is delusional, no matter how many times you repeat it.

"Hah, I knew they were all fucking liberals"
"Well I knew they weren't REALLY DSA"

I think it might be time to admit you just don't like irl organizing

Study dialectical naturalism

I'm happy that leftists can finally admit the employment discrimination of PoC isn't driven by racism, but by the fact that non-whites are less efficient in their work.

Since when do interests -which follow as much from the material as an argument about why guns should be banned follows from the rocks on the moon- precede the ideology that defines them?

Slavery isn't the problem. The problem is that the slave owners are racist!

t. Liberal

Misusing my own quotes back at me isn't as pithy as you think it is, especially when it's referencing something I haven't "repeated". In any case, you can't just assert that DSA "is a social club" and a "liberal hangout" and use that as an argument.

Some people would rather the revolution from their bedroom. Only they truly understand the labor movement and the material conditions of the proletariat.
Any organization that meets in real life and is actually growing must mean that they're all liberals who will kill Rosa Luxemburg 2.0.

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Jacobin was an incredibly big part of crafting new DSA and shaping their current membership. Meme-ing about DSA from a couple years ago is pointless and childish.

That's an objective fact. They aren't a party. Their meetings are glorified hang outs.

Still not seeing that argument

Agreed. The real cadre of revolution is Holla Forums. DSA are all DemSoc cucks.

Explain yourself anarkids.

Their new membership is just as embarrassing. Just look at their regional DSA twitter accounts. Look at that faggot "Larry Website".

Definitely DSA must take the structure of maoist cadres from the 70s. We know how well isolated scattered small cults do to improve the material conditions of the proletariat.

Keep believing what you want to believe. DSA is a meme and is an active detriment to the left because it is soaking up any vaguely leftist energy into a ship without a rudder.

Did he even say anything idpol or are we just shifting the discussion for no reason?

So it seems.

twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/843965588280107009

Lol just admit you were never going to do anything irl anyway

Why does everyone just assume that when we talk about class we're talking about white men?

This is such a ridiculous strawman.

Your membership fees that pay for pizza parties are really going to change things.

We need to spam that quote from the last Muke vid on idpol.

Just look at him cry like a fucking child when some people who are in the DSA asked him to be a little bit more professional seeing as he is a major face of the organization. His twitter feed, like the official DSA chapter twitters, is nothing but memes and advertising for fast food. Which is really all the DSA will ever amount to - a meme.

Reminder that Americans need to be purged by nuclear fire since they are devoid of any revolutionary potential and obsessed with idpol.

What do you belong to? The only organization that has been able to decipher the dialectics correctly?

DSA is engaged with and working in tandem with every worthwhile socialist organization in the US anyway. So your tantrum is just that, a tantrum; and your own org probably disagrees with you.

He's definitely a Trot kiddie who thinks that the truly radical position is to engage in electoral politics, but HIS super special way. Ground work and local activism is pointless, you have to run socialist candidates in our electoral system which is way less liberal than other bougie electoral politics because the word "socialist" is in the party name.

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proper quote, done properly

I would gulag this guy, but that would be rude to the rest of the gulag. Wall out of mercy for everyone involved.

So which part of that do you disagree with? Or are you just being contentious for its own sake?

Is class an identity? Does class struggle not encompass racism/sexism/etc? Seriously, help me out here and point out where exactly your contention is.

While class consciousness is a very real question, there's still the fact than base affects superstructure infinitely more than the opposite. Argue all day with an auditorium of Trumpettes, and you might convert a handful; if these Trumpettes find their dying mothers' Medicaid cut, all of them will be converted.

There seems to be this tendency, I don't know if it's modern liberalism, but I can tell it's absolutely epidemic among SJWs, this strange inversion in causality, a belief that treating the symptom cures the disease or drawing on the map changes the terrain. Institute hiring quotas and get people to stop saying "nigger" and presto, racism over! It's utterly uneffective as a tool of social change, of course, but it makes them feel good about themselves without impacting their personal comfort.

That's what the Trots and Communist Party have in common.

I'd pay to see RWDS cave this guy's face in.

That's not exactly a revelation.

Love to make a difference at my local DSA chapter. We were able to distribute kombucha to the homeless youth of Brooklyn last month!

that near get tho

it's a shit quote whether I agree with it or not, it's not explanatory, it doesn't capture any complexity in a metaphor, it simply says that something isn't proper.

Here's another great quote: it is proper to wash your hands, you are not washing your hands properly if you do it with bleech.

Yes, in the sense that people identify themselves by it.

If hitherto all history has been the history of class struggle, then I guess it does according to the prophet himself. Still, this is word-thinking which you can't really have a discussion about, it's a marxist obsession intended to keep the circle round.

Are you saying that we should fight false consciousness with a false conciousness? If we sacrifice resources and time for building any kind consciousness, then why the fuck would we choose ones that have no material basis?

Class is a condition not an identity

I can identify as a rich person, but that doesn't change my material conditions.

You meant person of wealth, right?

Check your prole-privilege, sinner!

Lest we forget, socjus is pretty much old idpol purposefully remade into COINTELPRO.

White is a colour not an identity. English is the term for people living in England not an identity. Manchester city is a football club not an identity. Punk is a style of music not an identity.

Every identity is something that is identified with, you can't identify with identity itself. There is no special status for class that grants exception in this, you just don't like it being called an identity because you give identity pejorative meaning.

But you can define yourself by the economical classification you belong to, it's irrelevant if you actually are what you identify with for it to be identification in principle.

Lmao should have just warned everyone you were a liberal before letting people waste their time on this shit

White is a color and an ideological construct of race with no basis in material reality. Class is also an ideological construct, but does have a basis in material reality.

It's irrelevant whether or not you recognize your class, your material conditions are an objective reality. Calling yourself American is an identity, there is no objective America, just lines drawn on a map. Class and identity are not compatible.

You're misconstruing what I'm saying, you focus on the mechanisms of oppression but you have to admit when there is an unforseen barrier to attacking it and adjust your theory.

Racism and sexism and all of the isms are based on material beliefs, based in inequalities within society. You can tell them "blah blah it's material relations" but a racist sees that black people commit more crimes, that they are poor, that they have different phenotype expressions etc. and that they have been that way for a long time and they rationalize that they are inferior and could destroy civ or whatever (I'm trying to be quick because I'm a little busy, so try to give me some slack and read between the lines).

That is a material analysis, whether you think it is accurate or not, whether you agree or not. You need to either address that, or categorize a set of these people as enemies, because until you change that disparity or VERY CONVINCINGLY prove that it is a bad analysis of the data they will not listen to any bullshit you tell them about class relations. They'll tell you, again, that you are a leftist cuck trying to destroy civilization. You can say they are idealists, that this is superstructure nonsense, that they need to address class relations, but YOU are ignoring their material analysis just on the basis that you are so convinced by yours that you deny what they are talking about is real.

See above. Racism and sexism are a material analysis, but I'd contend they are wrong. I'd also claim that, even granting material biological differences in people, they are not significant enough to eclipse the utility of the socialist critique for creating a better society for more people. If you want to debate what is "better" in a sort of neoclassical "I'd subject myself to oppression for the betterment of the white race" then that is another kind of idealism that can't really be debated.

Race and sex are not material.

r/FC thread title: 'Jacobin is racist and reactionary'

Unless they believe identity is a material condition that creates society. You need to address this in some way or kill the fascists. Those are your options.

And this is not in contrast to socialist critique or class based critique, I fully support a socialist revolution by whatever means. These are all strategies to undermine capitalism. Addressing racism is a strategy, and if it become divorced of socialist critique then I would also say that it is revisionism and straying from a useful goal.

But if you claim that by redressing inequalities between the races in order to defeat racist materialism and expose people to the reality of class relations, that is a strategy for attacking capitalism. It is meant to undermine the racist analysis that cause people to deny their own material interests.

They believe they are. Just as a hypothetical, imagine you are in a full on fascist ethno-state and you are a communist. You believe fervently that the problems in society are due to class relations and the ordering of production, while a hundred fascists believe fervently that the problems in society are due to some racial underclass that exists in the nation-state. You have 20 socialists on your side, and maybe a hundred libs or something. You can either start a revolution and kill the fascists that stand in your way, or your parliamentary option is to advocate for socialism, and maybe also try to undermine the material analysis of the fascists by addressing the inequalities they use to support their belief in the inferiority of some race, and therefore expose the truth to them.

And the reason I brought up earlier that this isn't new is because this was at least a part of the socialist strategy in America since the 19th century. There were other elements to it that aren't as relevant today, but a certain struggle was to bring black people to a similar position materially within the capitalist system so that the poor white couldn't justify their racism with all of these beliefs about black behavior and biological composition.

end twitter

ps if you follow Jacobin on facebook you'll notice they tend to send more liberal articles out in waves and then send more leftist articles out after. They're playing a never ending bait and switch

I'd like you to explain how, I'm hoping it's something less rationalwiki101 than "class has an explicit definition and is therefor real, because explicit definitions have more to do with atoms and stuff like that"

There is no class, just a signifier that can be applied to confirming or not to the non-objective, non-material concept of ownership. There isn't anything really according to your line of logic, there's just words that we apply to certain things that by the nature of language itself can not be objective, for words do not refer to other words, or we would have to live in some bizarro universe in which human language itself is pure information.

Really, you people go further than ancaps in making ownership a thing that is as solidly material as a rock.

No, it can't, which is your point exactly. You call your better a material better and the better of others an idealist better, therefor setting the frame beyond the possibility of debate. It's begging the question, it really means "correct by definition".

I think I'm in agreement. I don't think there is an ultimate point of reason at the bottom of these value judgements. I'm no philosophical scholar, but on a sort of pedestrian level you could just say "is-ought gap", and on a higher level I've never heard a great answer to Agrippa's Trilemma.

Because of that I usually just try to discern if somebody has a similar basis to me but with a different analysis, or if their value basis is just completely different. If the latter, then you know, it's just kinda whatever maaaan.

Jacobin didn't say identity politics (which also has a specific connotation online), they said intersectionality, which is a theory wholly incompatible with Marxism. You are giving these liberals too much credit: they are ultimately postmodernists, and postmodernism cannot even begin to imagine ideas outside of its infinitely dense bubble of obscurantist nonsense. They do not believe in materialism or the actual problems that minorities deal with in the Western world; they think hurt feelings are oppressive and literally cause poverty, which is not a joke.

Fuck it, gulags are a necessity.

I'd like you to explain how, I'm hoping it's something less rationalwiki101 than "class has an explicit definition and is therefor real, because explicit definitions have more to do with atoms and stuff like that"
Whiteness is a social construct, it's not real. There is no line where whiteness ends and begins, just like all of race. They are made up identities. Class has a material basis, you either sell your labor as a commodity in order to buy your needs of subsistence, or you own capital and create wealth through it. It is based in real world material things, unlike race.

Just because social constructs are made up doesn't mean they aren't "real" in some way. Spooks are the true weapon of mass destruction.

The only wat to think that is to have no clue what either of them is.

If you think that's such a controversial proposition, I suggest you read Gramsci
if you seriously believe that changing the superstructure is completely useless, good luck trying to build any revolutionary movement and/or trying to protect your revolution from the forces of reaction

I think you're right I was getting a little away from the point, since I still agree that class is fundamental and that people do take intersectionality as something seperate from class analysis, that is clearly a very liberal ideology. I don't totally disagree with the Jacobin tweet or anything, but I've been thinking lately that it is idealist and somewhat more common on the left to look at a country like America and then look at Europe, and look at the relative success of class analysis in Europe (as an acceptable form of critique that at least led to sturdier and more robust socdem states) and the relatively conservative conditions of America, and seem to just be blind to the whole slavery and racial underclass thing as a component of that. I'm not even claiming it is the sole basis of the difference in development of the socialist movement in America vs. Europe, it is not, but I do think it is a bad idea to think it can be ignored. It is certainly a material condition, and there is an intellectual history in this country of trying to understand what role it plays in undermining class struggle. I can understand that there is a reaction in opposition of liberals who actually use it to oppose socialism, that is Capitalism's typical capacity for absorbing critique and re purposing it as another pillar to its dominance. I just don't want leftists to become idealists who live in 20th century Europe, imagining that the parading around of the huge black underclass isn't a factor in blocking class consciousness.

That is exactly what that means. That people believe that a thing is real does not make it so.

Then show it to us.

Hence the quotes: it may not be literally real, but that doesn't mean it has no real repercussions.

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Of course it shouldn't be ignored, but that sounds like more of a conservative/reactionary historical perspective than a left wing one, which is the golden rule of liberalism.

The reactions to this on twitter are very telling

Gas the twitter tankie left

who are you to decide what the interests of others are?

the paternalist elitism of some leftists never fails to amaze me

To say that it has repercussions is to incorrectly frame the causes and effects of the events around it. Race and racial oppression are symptomatic of material reality. They are not causes in themselves.

Furthermore, if you look at examples in history you will find that the concepts of various races disintegrate with incredible speed when the material forces that propigate them are shifted.

Yeah, I also remember Lenin preaching to the masses about the importance of tranny bathrooms.

Reminder that class is not a separate form of oppression like race and gender like liberals would have you believe, but that class is what lies at the intersections of racist and sexist behaviours.

Reminder that 'intersectionality' as liberals use it is a bastardization meant to convince people that their issues are all unique (they're not) and that they themselves are all unique (they're all literal nobodies and replaceable wage slaves) and that uniqueness is represented through the commodification of identity (I buy gay people things therefore I am gay) as opposed to labour identity (which has its roots in class)

I think this realization would actually be helpful for marxists even, it removes the ultimate frame of reference that can never be pleased and allows for an investigation into what you actually want and believe, instead of it being about what you are supposed to want and believe, because material.

Why are only things that have (which they don't really have, but which I will accept for the sake of brevity) clear, explicit definitions real, why is it a simple definition that makes the difference between real or not real? You simply assume this without any explanation. To see how illogical this is you only have to google "continuum fallacy" read an introduction to Wittgenstein or try to define the color yellow or the feeling of love.

Ownership and wealth are social constructs, I swear you people are the most radical capitalists there are, not even the head of goldman sachs would claim that wealth belongs on the periodic table.

wat

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how many chromosomes are you on, my dude?

apex jej

Material reality may cause people to believe that killing off blacks will bring back the Atlantean supermen or whatever, but that doesn't mean the spooks can't take on a life of their own.

Though they should obviously be shit on from a materialist perspective, not the post-reality that liberals are so fond of.

You know what? I want you to explain this for us. I really, really do.

There is no good intersectionality. It's a bunch of foucaultian geneological obscurantism.

A definition that applies to reality gives a concept a basis in reality. Without that it is just meaningless nonsense that post-structuralists like to use as fap lube.

Come on now. Could you get any more idealist?

No. Just no.

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Just because you're an idiot doesn't mean everyone is

Spooks are not self-perpetuating. They are either obliterated or fundamentally altered immediately after their material causes change. Race, gendurr, religion, nationality, and all that other happy horseshit have been substantially changed over the course of history. They are not fixed concepts at all. Don't be surprised if twenty years from now people are calling Chinese people "white."

How are property rights and ownership not a social construct, how could they objectively exist?

I say it again, you people are the most radical capitalist around.

You still have to explain to me how "basis in reality" means that a concept has a simple definition, I would also like to hear how you came to the conclusion that words gain their meaning from other words.

I see you ignored my mentioning of the continuum fallacy. Can you explain to me how it is not a fallacy?

You could be one by believing that human language itself is some of sort pure information that only refers to itself. In that case, you should be having this discussion with Erik Verlinde instead of me.

Never underestimate a person's ability to believe stupid shit.

Property relations and social relations of production are not one in the same.

Furthermore, the idea that wealth is a social construct is retarded, because money is not wealth. Reality is not some contrived Austrian "economic" metaphor, physical resources like land have objective value.

And don't forget biology, whales used to be fish, so biology is also a spook to bust, to begin with banning the theory of evolution from classrooms.

yes, and this why we should fight stupidity with stupdity xDDDDDD

This.

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Oh sure, people will always believe stupid shit, but the stupid shit they believe in will change given their circumstances.

Yeah that follows. Dipshit.

I really do wonder what you mean with "social construct", other than non-marxist category. Property is a concept created by society, it's not a material thing like a rock or tree, how then, is not socially constructed?

You're using the term objective like objectivists do i.e ideology disguised as realz.

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Just think about, in the 19th century the Irish weren't white, so whiteness is a spook. In the 19th century, whales were fish, that category also changed, like whiteness did. If a changing category means that a spook is present, then we should do away with science and find the sect whose categories have changed the least in all of history, there the spooks will have the least power over us.

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We should point out that the obsession with identity politics assumes almost a kind of "white man's burden" style of racism (not to mention it exists mainly so self-centered, usually bourgeois idiots can try to take power)

It is technically socially constructed, but you are falsely implying that this means they are arbitrary when they stem directly from material circumstances.

It would be pointless, see

Well I think you could at least get somewhere by pointing out their racism

You'd think so, but a lot of them have already internalized white guilt.

Property is a material relationship that is socially enforced. The relationship between an individual and his property is a material reality, but the mechanism by which he owns that property is a social agreement.

However he is using the term he is right.

You are just retreating into saussurian semiotics bullshit now. The definition of "fish" is clear and describes things that exist in reality, no matter what the etymology of the word is. "White" does not describe anything, and it never has.

lol wtf

maybe Gulag's wasn't a mistake?

elaborate

Sometimes when I want to hurt myself I read MovieBob's twitter feed

My point was that as postmodernists, they think that they are inherently right and everyone else is inherently wrong, regardless of context.

These hipster subhumans are status quo apologists, nothing more. They would let half of the human population burn to death if it meant more iPhones.

nooooooo don't do it user it's not worth it call a suicide hotline instead

You just described the problem with all activism in America.

When you use the geneological method employed in intersectionality you always find what you are looking for. If you think that having a particular skin color gives you power, then it will tell you that is the case. If you want to find that economic class determines your position in society you will find that as well. If you want to be a member of an oppressed minority, it will give you options to choose from. If you want to feel guilty for oppressing others, then it will deliver in spades.

What it will never do under any circumstances is to give you a clear understanding of the nature of problems that are experienced by society. Problems are all all a part of the amorphous cloud of power dynamics. As such, you will never find something that you can actually work to fix. It is obscurantism in philosophical form.

Are there social constructs that don't stem from material circumstances, isn't the point of marxist materialism that everything does?

Religion does, ideology does, music does..

You wouldn't have to twist and turn yourself like this if you didn't have this need to claim words, even when you can no longer deny that while you feel the pejorative connotation doesn't apply, the concept itself does.

What does this mean in any material sense then, that property is that which is within ones control, that I lose ownership as soon as something slips from my hands and that I acquire it when I hold it, does it mean that I have an effect on it or that I'm the sole person that has an effect on it, do I own the whole universe because it is all within my gravitational pull?

He's trying to gather some authoritative terms for his own ideology to make it seem scientific.

I'm not retreating, quite the opposite, i'm taking the conclusions of your logic to a point where you retreat.

The definition of fish is not clear at all, there is no closing definition of "fish" that is without exception. White describes something just as much a fish does, if it didn't, it would be entirely unclear what is meant with it and wouldn't therefor be no more a word than "fdsdggdftt", a news report stating "white police man shoots black teen" would make people as confused as if it stated "tipolkaslol police man shoots guriadian teen".

Since we're really beating around the bush here, I'm going to ask you directly to substantiate your theory that words gain their meaning from other words instead of from use (if they gain their meaning from definitions, then where do those definitions come from?), that Wittgenstein and the entire field of linguistics are wrong, that the continuum fallacy is not a fallacy, that words like white, love and friend are meaningless and that existence of something is depended on it having a simple unambiguous definition.

If you are really convincing, you can even avoid fines by telling the policeman that you didn't drove through the red light because "light" and "red" have no definitions, and that you could therefor not have done so.

After that, you may pick up your nobel prize.

It's a bit ironic because the reaction of people pretending to be radical to that one tweet sort of proves the point. The mission to divide people with individualist identity politics has clearly succeeded when people get mad at something so harmless.

Btw why not call it individual politics or something so the id-pol people understand what's bad with it

As long as we're talking liberals: archive.is/G1mCT

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You don't need to delve into egoism. Remember that you are talking to people who believe that ownership is based on use. If you utilize a thing, then it is your property. Modes of production and other material factor limit what you are able to utilize, and as such deprive you of property. You can say that a thing is your property, but unless some physical force makes it so, then it is not.

Whatever he is trying to do his point is correct.

You are falling back on useless linguistics in a discussion about reality. What makes one category like "wealth" real and another category like "white" unreal? The former describes matter and energy in motion, and the latter describes nothing but an immaterial concept. "Fish" describes a material reality.

Linguistics describe nothing more than language, and, contrary to postmodernists' insistence, language is not how we experience reality. We are not empty vessels full of spooks. We are matter and energy in motion.

You are misunderstanding existence. Idealism will do that to you.

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I'll remember to never borrow my bike to a materialist marxist, thanks for the warning. Though I should have already been on watch when I heard that immaterial concepts like trust don't exist for you.

If wealth means land, gold, money and all it's other facets, and if those are real because they are made of atoms, then whites are just as real, for white people also consists of atoms. Even if I follow your rules, the inconsistency is still there. When I point to the water and say "look at that fish over there", I'm pointing at material reality, when I say then "look at that white fish that swims next to it", I'm also doing this, but when when a white man swims past, and I say "look at that white man", then I'm suddenly pointing at something immaterial?

Also, another unanswered question, if "white" is meaningless, then why isn't a news report saying "white police man shoots black teen" not as incomprehensible as a news report stating "iopugoli policeman shoots tupoakia teen?" It might be as incomprehensible to you alone, in which case the answer would be that you have a very strange deficit in your understanding of English that no other speakers have, is that the answer then?

Your probable response will now be that the concept of whiteness is immaterial, not the man (or person, or ego, or cluster of atoms from which the distinction of other clusters of atoms can only ever be arbitrary, this regress is infinite, you see), this is not incorrect, but every concept is, fishness is too, the map is not the territory (look up that phrase)

You are completely missing the point of my question, I'm not referring to Lacan and the like, I'm not arguing against material reality. I'm simply asking you to substantiate your claim that meaning follows from definition, and that something needs to have a clear and unambiguous definition to have meaning, and therefor, existence. You again refuse to do so, you simply call it materialist and therefor correct because matter and energy are in motion, and therefor everything you claim to follow from that fact.

I assume you are arguing in good faith and will therefor ask you for the last time to substantiate your claim that in order for a concept to have meaning, to exist, it must have a clear and unambiguous definition. I want you to explain to me why the continuum fallacy isn't a fallacy, why meaning does not follow from use, where definitions gain their meaning from, if not from use. I want you to explain why fish exist and whites do not, without simply calling one material and the other not, I want to know why one is material and why the other is not, and after that I'd like to know why something needs to be material to exist. I believe love exists, I believe the sublime exist, I believe the colors red, white and blue exist, I believe friendship exists… so do tell me where I'm wrong in considering those immaterial things real.

If someone more philosophically inclined than you can answer these questions, they are more than welcome too.

Your understanding of existence is some of the purest ideology I have ever encountered. You conclude that things exist (materialism), that your marxism is materialist and concluded from the existing things (nice is-ought, very material and objective) and that the existence of a concept therefor depends on how well it fits into your marxist ideology, for your ideology is materialist so it is true because things are real. This is why you never bothered to explain your claims about language, there is nothing to explain for someone to which right, true and real are his by their very meaning, you have made your language game impenetrable, and all I say appears like sound to the deaf, it is not just that it cannot be heard, but not even imagined.

Ironically, this isn't materialist at all, for what it states is that things are nothing more than your ideas.

This simply tells me you know nothing about Foucault. The geneological method is simply tracing history. There's nothing obscurantist about it. It is based on historical evidence and is falsifiable by simply presenting evidence to the contrary.

Do you seriously not get how property works, or are you just trying to pull gotcha shit?

Except that nothing real about any given person makes them white. If you ask an ichthyologist what makes something a fish, he can tell you in detail. Now tell me, what makes a person white?

You are still looking at this through a linguistic frame, completely missing the point. Concepts are all immaterial, but what they discribe–if they describe anything–may or may not be real. "Property" describes something real. Property is defined according to a material relationship to an individual. "White" does not describe anything real. There is no material quality of any individual that makes him white.

No concept exists, but concepts can describe things that do exist. They can define categories of real things which possess like qualities. "White" does not do that.

Because if that does not define existence, then "existence" is as meaningless a concept as "white."

Oh yes, let us all marvel at the linguistic philosopher as he wanks his thing-in-itself to how incomprehensible his imaginary constructs are to simple-minded plebians and spews his hot load of meaninglessness all over our hyper-reality. Please.

Materialism is really ultimately idealism… Seen it, taped it.

I may or may not have keked heartily at this, owing to the fact that all one observes is co-ocurrence and not causality

You're on the W-list now.

What did he mean by this?

That he takes principles elementary to Marxism (the belief that subjectivized discriminations are an emerging property of material conditions) to be in support of intersectionality theory (that exploitation of labor surplus towards market exchange, racism and sexism and so on are atomized phenomena that >intersect with one another).

Normal Person:"hey, maybe their writers alternate and they have some writers that are more left leaning than others"
You: "It's a Jacobin conspiracy"

Lenin is actually the perfect example of how to make progress on social issues. He gave Women equal status and legalized homosexuality and abortion in a deeply reactionary country before anywhere else.

How did he do this? By promising the people peace, land , and bread. He didn't self-righteously screech at them, he didn't hold muh privilege classes, he didn't hire diversity consultants. He appealed to their class interests and got into power.

This again, acts from the assumption that what gives a word meaning is definition or in this case a modern taxonomy, that this is what makes real. A theory you only have stated as such, without substantiation other than calling it simply calling material or addressing it's consequences. The man I'm referring to in the example is as real as the fish, so a taxonomy of the whites is unnecessary for the word have meaning, for others to be able to comprehend it.

I will again the question that you still haven't addressed to illustrate the fallaciousness of this being a requirement for meaning.

If "white" is meaningless, then why isn't a news report saying "white police man shoots black teen" not as incomprehensible as a news report stating "iopugoli policeman shoots tupoakia teen?"

Begging the question, see above.

None what I've been saying belongs to obscure post-modernism, it's much nearer to the analytical school.

Both the map and the territory are material.

If you are trying to school us on language theory and to say that "whiteness" has the same status as material things like the earth or a tree, you are falling into an extremely relativist and undefendable position. ( Which not even Wittgenstein advised).

As for the rest of your post, you have a very poor understanding of Marxist dialectics, and therefore make false equivalences.

A social relation, language and symbolic concepts are not material, This by no means makes them insignificant, but the Marxist historicist critique of philosophy is that those things do not arise in a vacuum, but out of real and material historical causes.

The object of ideology therefore can never be material but only the product of social imagination within the nexus of material conditions. (Marx says its false consciousness, Zizek says its a necessary condition to represent the symptom, but in the end it has the same status)

The Marxist critique therefore derives its strength from the de-naturalization and de-reification of such concepts which blur the social conflict embedded in such relations which obscures them.

The second problem is that you focus on the real/unreal relationship. Language and its created concepts are by no means unreal. Subjectively I can define something as beautiful , and it can be real in the set of my language coordinates, but this has no bearing on the "real" materiality of said object.

Atoms, Comets, stars , trees and any other kind of object do not need language or descriptive terms in order to exist, they are contingent and can and will exist in the past/future regardless of any human language correlate. Therefore an objects ontological status does not hinge on language or definitions for their "reality" status.

Not him, but no. It has to do with this concept en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-defined which you should understand if you have analytical influences. "White" is not well-defined. There isn't an objective criterion, independent of perception and subjective judgement, for determining whether someone is or is not "white," because whiteness lacks a basis in the material world. Your genes are material, sure, but any lines made to divide genotypes into discrete groups are arbitrary social constructs, and in most if not all practical applications, you never know the genes an individual has when you categorize him by race, but rather use, again, socially constructed heuristics.

The cultural phenomenon of race cannot exist absent social perception; the material phenomenon of being a human with a specific genome and gene expression necessarily exists absent any comprehension of it. This is why we say that material phenomena are fundamental.

"White" is not meaningless. It's very use implies meaning, in the pragmatic sense. But as a social construct, the meaning and cultural dynamics of "white" are not inherent, objective facts of nature, rather ideals formed by people under the influences of the objective facts of nature. Thus it has no transcendental, context-independent meaning and gaining the information that someone is "white" in itself confers no objective truths about the real world.

Liberals want to reform the proles without actually helping them materially. They are autistically devoted to the status quo and will require extermination.

That's not intersectionality. It's an example of solidarity, which is totally opposed to intersectionality.

...

This. Fuck me, it's like you have to be clinically retarded to join intersectionalist twitter

Seriously, this guy's understanding of Marx is on par with Tom Rockmore's.

You’re portraying race as purely descriptive when it isn’t for the vast majority of people. We can both agree on the color of the great majority of fish. Are albinos white? How many melanin molecules per gram of skin will make an Arab non‐white? Is it constant, or will a broad nose affect it? Can a nose job take him over the threshold?

Don't know what you mean by this. The word fish is immaterial, the concept is immaterial. A fish itself is real, its qualities are real (unless you don't believe your senses).

Not him, but I think this entire fish analogy is strange anyways. I don't think a "worker" has the same materiality as a tree or the earth. Men are real, but being classed as a worker is a social relationship between men. Fishness is biological, taxonomic. You identify a fish relative to other organisms. You identify a worker relative to other men. Since our context is speaking of race vs class, I don't see how blackness is any different. You can not identify blackness in a lab, sure, but neither can you identify workerness or fishness without context. Blackness can be identified as a sort of soft-caste or social class in American society with predictive and analytic power for understanding American history, and it is typically materially related to ethnic background. It is not permanent, but neither is being a worker or a fish.

I'm not that dude btw, but I'm just assuming that this whole debate over fishes and white people is less about relating whiteness to the earth and trees, and more about what is different between conceptualizing the social relation of being a worker vs being a minority or white in America. Personally, I do think class is far more predictive of the general qualities of your life as a social being in America, and I'd say anybody who doesn't is really not thinking about this very much, but I'm not convinced why race is hand-waved away as though it doesn't exist or hasn't been used as an ancillary defense of capitalism, empire, and even a core basis upon which entire ideologies and social orders were being constructed in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

agreed

agreed

I think I agree with the rest as well, but not sure if it has bearing on the whole "class vs race materiality" thing. I think we all agree that race is conceptual and immaterial, but the main dilemma is whether you can classify the material effects of racial categorization as a material social relation in the same way class is. And furthermore, is it useful to understand this as at all seperate from class? I think yes, because in America race has historically been used as a red herring for critique of social relations (both for libs and conservatives, which is why it needs to be identified and owned by the left in order to pair it with the socialist project), and people have literally died and endured worsening conditions for themselves because of a belief that preservation or promotion of the "white race" is more important to society than class. Without understanding scientific racialism, you would not even be able to understand important motivations of many major conflicts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. All of this arose out of the material conditions of having such and such population in such and such area with such and such capital goods, transferable technical knowledge, etc. totally in agreement, but that does not address why it may be important to use race as an analytic tool to understanding how modern social relations function, how ideology functions, and how to re-organize the social relations.

Basically, just to reiterate, I think we mostly agree on premises, but while Marxist theory exposed ideology for what it was, this knowledge doesn't translate to socialism. It only exposes many worlds are possible. I am under the impression the argument is about how race doesn't indicate any social relation but "worker" does, and the only thing I've heard so far is the circular claim that race isn't real because it is immaterial (ie, not real because not real), but somehow being a worker is absolutely real because people inhabit that social relationship? Can one really claim that your average American is unable to identify a black person, or even a foreigner, and that these categories are not either associated with predictable material differences or otherwise used as linchpins for ideology? And if so, is it not reasonable to say that these things need to both be deconstructed as concepts, but also attacked in reality in order to defeat capitalism? To expose them in theory and say it is done with seems like idealism to me.

Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative, addressed how racism in northern industry drew heavily upon the material contradiction between escaped or freed slaves looking for work and the white working class, in stark parallel to the issue surrounding immigrant labor today. "Red herring" is probably the best way to put it, as central to capitalist rule is fiddling the dials on these contradictions to pit groups with a fundamental identity of interest against each other. Similarly, the contradiction between poor, disenfranchised southern whites and the slaves effectively "outcompeting" them for agricultural jobs, by virtue of being legal property, produces something of a natural animosity. By feeding in cultural memes about racial superiority and the "naturalness" of slavery, this animosity can be exploited to where white poverty and its cultural fallout becomes the personal fault of slaves for their identity, and not the unjust material conditions that oppress both in common, although in different specific forms. The reverse is also seen in muh privilege theory, where black poverty is typecast as the result of a system meant to categorically muh privilege all whites at the expense of all nonwhtes, rather than disproportionate impacts of the same fundamental system, according to the specific form its contradictions take. See Zinn's Peoples' History of the United States for a wealth of such examples and analyses.
The major takeaway here, and the truly beautiful thing, is that all such race issues are reducible to their most fundamental, material constituents. Race theory "as an analytical tool" can thus never be as precise or predictive as a correct material analysis, one which does not implicitly assume a specific context in the form that the social construct of race takes, but rather rationalizes all such forms according to the objective conditions which give rise to them. Additionally, knowledge of these fundamental causes enables us to actually change the conditions themselves which create the systems, something sorely lacked by idealist pleas for "more tolerance" or "a dialogue."

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