Class is a social construct

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Class is the relations of production, that is how people relate to each other materially in order to produce. There are workers who do the labor to produce. There are capitalists who own and control the private property and get to decide how production will happen as a result (and as a result of controlling the state as a class).

Contrast with rache/ethnicity which are categories based on superficial characteristics.
Contrast with morals, which are basically opinions and emotions.
Contrast with gender, which is a combination of a lot of things, but especially gender roles which are fucking obviously social constructs given how much they vary across history and cultures.

class IS a social construct dude. Just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it's not valid. Stop listening to dumbass tumblr and stirnir drones.

Spooks isn't a word for "any abstract thing that was socially constructed". A spook is anything that is vaguely defined and the significance of which varies from person to person. Class has a pretty well defined definition, and class based politics is something that works directly in people's interests. Some people actually do treat class as if it were an identity though, and those cases, class is indeed a spook. You're right to push back against dumb moralists pretending to be egoists, OP! Good job buddy!

Although you probably could have been a tad less confrontational in your phrasing here. You're setting yourself up to get a bunch of rude, unhelpful replies.

Spooks are more than that. They're abstract ideas to which people submit themselves. The key is that people serve the spooks instead of their own interests.

/thread

you're describing a very real problem in how Holla Forums talks about things which it calls "cultural issues," but you're arriving at an idiotic conclusion.

things such as race and gender, as anyone here will tell you, do not actually exist. what the pseudo-reactionary fucking IDIOTS on here abstract from this is that somehow, race and gender issues are insignificant in relation to "class struggle." i use quotes here because the majority of the illiterates here have no idea what these phrase means.

race, for example, does not exist, however ideology allows it an extremely real material force which causes extremely real material consequences. most of Holla Forums, because they never know what the fuck they're talking about, perverts this reality into some ridiculousness where any talk about racism is "idpol" which doesn't relate to class antagonism.

they draw some stupid distinction between "idpol" and class struggles as if the moment a black person complains of racist oppression they are "dividing the working class" or some absurd shit. the reality is that this division is a falsity; race and gender discrimination is first and foremost class discrimination, because class is not one particular form of oppression out of many, as intersectionality would like us to think, it is the material basis of our existence. this does not mean, and this is a fucking reminder to the innumerable ingrates on here who have obviously migrated from Holla Forums, that we should avoid discussion about race. it's actually the exact opposite: particularly in the US, racial dynamics are probably the most visible site of class struggle today. the children who take on "leftism" as a consumerist identity are obviously unaware of this.

basically, the majority of this shit imageboard's posters are know-nothings; don't take their opinions seriously. struggles against racism and sexism are not options outside of class politics, they are fundamental to it.

class isn't even set in stone

you may change your class but never your race

your race is set in stone

hail victory

This is more true than it used to be. Holla Forums used to just hold that issues of race and sex are secondary to capitalism, not that they don't exist. But yeah there are dipshits here who have taken this idea to where they think class is all that matters (even though class =/= capitalism). There are actual "class reductionists" here but I don't think they're near the majority of the board. Hell, redditors who tend to ignore capitalism in favor of identitarian issues are probably a bigger portion right now.

But nig class is a social construct.
Now throw yourself of a cliff.

How can you be so fucking stupid? Class is the role of people in society. You wouldn't call castes in india "spooks" because that is how their society functions and how power is enforced. Race gender whatever is just a trait of a person not the roles of a society.

this is exactly the sort of stupidity i'm criticizing. there is no issue "secondary" to capitalism, capitalist society is a totality within which particularities such as sexism and racism arise. the point isn't that these are "lesser" than the problem of capitalism, it's that capitalism as an antagonistic force is only visible through these sorts of things.

what this means is that we don't simply write off something like racism as secondary, like a reactionary, we instead view it as a material manifestation of the primary social antagonism, which it to say that it is a primary issue. there is nothing "below" class antagonism, every issue a la racism/sexism/etc. is instead the ways in which the unrepresentable contradiction shows itself. this means that they are granted absolute primacy for the communist movement. any downplaying of the deadly seriousness of racism should be ruthlessly criticized.

you are exactly that moron the user was talking about. "identitarian issues" are not separate from capitalism. identitarian politics on the other hand is useless in fighting capitalism and this is why it must be opposed.

hilarious

this
a prole is a prole no matter what they or anyone else or the society at large thinks about it.

this also
read your damn Stirners if you wanna use his words.

A Nigerian would be his tribal ethnicity like Igbo or Yoruba in Nigeria
A West African in the rest of Africa
A Black African in Europe
An African-American in the USA
and a nigger in Holla Forums

If everyone ignored race, morals, gender, etc., they would have no effect on the world, because they aren't real.

If everyone ignored class, some people would still "own" the MoP and steal a living through the exploitation of labor, while others would still have to sell their labor in order to gain access to the MoP.

I was kinda mad because I rewrote my post, otherwise I would have been first. There is so much good work coming out of the anti-identitarian left and I'm really disapointed Holla Forums isn't able to catch up. I suggest the Field's sisters book Racecraft, and also the black panther article in Jacobin's Catalyst periodical.

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That's bullshit. It's easily visible through the context of production.

The fuck are you talking about? Capitalism is not hard to represent to people. The point of these issues being secondary is that they are manifestations of capitalism and if you treat the symptom without curing the disease you won't solve the fundamental problem, which means what your fighting will continue or get diverted elsewhere.
Making racism the primary concern of communism and downplaying the seriousness of racism are not the only possibilities, you dense motherfucker.

Identitarian issues are separate from capitalism. They interact but they are not one. Racism, sexism, etc. predate capitalism by a long time. They are important issues but dealing with them is much less effective from within the context of capitalism because they exist in a symbiotic relationship, and capitalism actively creates new identities over which to have conflicts. The more effective strategy would be to do away with capitalism first, temporally. Sidenote: scheduling one thing ahead of another is not equivalent to putting one thing above another in importance, although that seems to be the implication here.

no, no it didn't.

Racism/sexism/etc., to the extent it can be discerned as functionally separate from class oppression, has been illegal since the 1960s. Anyone still bitching about it is a class collaborationist wrecker, and should be purged with extreme prejudice.

Now THIS is podracing!

Class is a social construct, and it's always inherited, never earned. You can't just give a middle-class person several billion dollars and expect they'll magically become "high-class". Do you think Bill Gates is allowed into the same clubs as the Bushes and Trumps?

Remember when anglos were the only white people on the planet? What happened, "race realists"?

>high-class you mean upper-class here
Weber out, this is a Marxist board

You had racial theories in the antiquity.

The funny thing is, when you mix up every race into a single person, the colors average out into a healthy tan. You get your typical American.

And literally all those people will dot the circle by "white" on their census forms.

This statement got me banned from Holla Forums. Lulz were had.

color me surprised: an anarchist hasn't read marx

please, tell me, what does "production" mean to you? does it possibly correspond to a fantastical image of people slaving away in factories or something?

my god, i more and more am convinced that there should be some kind of fucking entry exam to make sure there is the possibility of decent discussion on this shithole. the point of both marx AND hegel is that it is impossible to isolate the antagonism in one form, the form is always disrupted by an exception. alenka zupancic has the perfect formulation of this when she says "the Worker does not exist." the point is that there is not a central "thing" of capitalist exploitation, we only get it in perverted manifestations in things such as racism. there is no "class struggle" which we can point to, precisely because class struggle is constitutive of our very material existence.

working off what i mentioned above, to focus on racism is to focus on class struggle itself, because the two are inseparable.

you're wrong on two levels: first, racism as we now know it a direct product of capitalist colonialism; second, even if what you're saying is true, things such as racism and sexism take on a historically unique character under the global capitalist totality. racism, even if it existed pre-capitalism (it didn't), was incapable of reproducing itself in the way it does not under capitalism.

the communist movement is a complete fantasy in your own mind. you have literally no idea of what capitalism is. it is, and i'll continue to say this until you get the fucking point, the total horizon of our present existence. there is nothing which happens "after" capitalism in terms of our own present understanding. we don't "fix racism" after the abolishment of capitalism, because race as it presently exists is a direct product of economic relations. in the fantastical image of a post-capitalist society, race takes on an ENTIRELY different meaning,.

Are you saying that because something is illegal that it stops being a problem?
Bitching about what? Your antecedent for "it" isn't clear. Social issues in general are extremely messy. Just because solving them now might be intractable doesn't mean they don't exist.

Production is the activity of combining labour, raw materials, and means of production to create some product. In the context of capitalism, production entails commodity production (making things to exchange), usually through a system of private property and wage labor upheld by a state.

Instead of the above resources being put to use meeting people's needs, they're put to use to make whatever will sell on the market (commodity), and the character of the production process involves the theft of labor from the workers to enrich the capitalist class. This isn't a central "thing," but it's a direct manifestation of the capitalist mode of production, whereas identitarian issues are byproducts that are contextually useful to capitalism. They fluctuate without capitalism being hurt while the more direct manifestations are the process of capital itself.

No, because capitalism (as you say below) has produced these problems in their current form, meaning it can do so again. Meanwhile if you disrupt the class system or cycle of capital you alter the generalize commodity production.

Yes, capitalism shapes culture to a huge degree in order to benefit itself. Or, more accurately, culture changes itself in order to accommodate the material situation of the people. This isn't the same thing as producing that aspect of culture anew.
That doesn't make them not secondary to capitalism.
Self-replication is inherent to culture, not just racism.

That's a particularly useless definition. Not going to get you far in either understanding or changing the world.

Which would imply that by ending capitalism we would end racism, which relative to you would be a caricature of my position. Capitalism is not some keystone that once removed will cause the cultural context to instantaneously transform into something completely different. You are espousing some kind of supernatural view.

You absolute brainlet, lmao

They are spooks only if you buy into the Stirnerite egoist drivel. Mar never talked about ethnicities or gender not existing and like the nu-left. He merely said that class interest aligns with mans primary quality which is the production of value (i.e. work).

Talking about existence/non-existence of these things is the wrong way about it, they are ideological formations that have a value of their own.

Marx*

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Let's not go too far. Ridiculous as such a term typically is, if such a thing exists, the above would be "class reductionism". There is absolutely no reason racism and the like couldn't exist under socialism, if specific measures hadn't been taken against it. As, for instance, we exclude animals and rocks (not to mention children) from egalitarian participation in society, so to could we exclude blacks, women, Catholics, Italians, lowborn, etc. People are great at making and enforcing arbitrary or unfair distinctions.

I'm saying that once something is illegal, any further attempts to specifically attack it become impractical. Sexism done for sexist reasons is illegal, because it's a distinction the law can make under capitalism. Sexism done for capitalist reasons, however, remains legal, MUST remain legal, because there is no imagineable way one could allow the arbitrary oppressive power capitalism requires, while simultaneously eliminating the harm sexism can do when given that power. Making idpol illegal is the exact maximum of what can be done under capitalism.

Identitarianism, as a specific issue for leftists to contend with, can go no further. To imagine otherwise is an impossible fool's errand doomed to oscillate between madness and tyranny.

Leave it to the nazi to strut on the chessboard and shit all over it

I think your general point is alright, but I mostly disagree with your premise here that legality is the only means of enforcing behavior, which seems… arbitrarily specific. Can you elaborate on why this is your standard?

Because if a crime becomes so nebulous, so difficult to define or unambiguously prove, that it is impossible to write uniformly enforceable legislation against it, you are throwing 5000 years of civilization in the garbage and opening yourself up for infinite petty accusations and witch-hunts over wrongthink so unmentionable nobody is even allowed to ask what exactly they did wrong other than obtain the ire of a person or group in a position of authority.

But if you take that for granted, then why is it possible to go farther in dealing with the problem once capitalism is gone?

>can't abolish ethnicity because it's largely not a social construct
>can't abolish morality because it's largely not a social construct
>can't abolish gender because it's largely not a social construct
>can and should abolish class because it specifically is a social construct
Literally leftypol 101

Idpol can be split, broadly, into two forms:

did me a heckin think

So then to clarify you're talking about remnants of historical explicit idpol being reinforced by the structure of capitalism, e.g. the cycle of poverty keeping historically poor (black) communities poor.

Truth be told they're just using class as an excuse to unite all other peoples against capitalism, it's not a perfect plan.

That's it, it's not a perfect plan.

Race is an ideology that was created under capitalism. The way that previous societies dealt with and identified "others", foreigners, religious minorities, etc was very different than race.

Again I recommend the book Racecraft by the Field's sisters.

For the most part, yes. But what I'm mainly talking about is that political campaigns to change the way people think are by definition some combination of futile and dangerous. The very idea that abusing someone because it's in your material interest, is somehow morally superior to abusing them because of spooks (or worse, merely holding spooks that you never act on) is symptomatic of profoundly psychopathic ideology.

If it weren't idpol, it would invariably be something else provided by capitalists to sow division amongst the workers. And this mindset on the "left" of whining about something useless, while ignoring issues we can make a difference on, is what enables it.

Only peoples' actions should be the subject of political campaigns, never peoples' thoughts. Once idpol left the realm of the externally, objectively verifiable, it took the first step down the road to its own utter depravity.

Tiny brain: Ethnicity is a social construct, class is not
Galaxy brain: Both ethnicity and class are social constructs that can be changed or abolished

You must really enjoy getting savagely owned online

This.

Virtually everyone outside of rad-left is a fucking retard, unsurprisingly.

to clarify, what kind of ideology would you consider non-psychopatic? stirner's case is a case of man against machine, not man versus man.

Ideology that acts based on firmly-supported reality, rather than on possibly ill-founded suspicions. That recognizes both the human mind's capacity to ignore petty social complaints, and the human body's inability to ignore material ones.

I admire Stirner because he says a lot of the same things utilitarians do, but avoids the non-universalizable pitfalls typical of utilitarianism.

Class itself is not an identity. There is such a thing as class identity though — what "class" a person identify as — and it can actually obfuscate objective relations of production. Think of how most people in the West tend to describe themselves as "middle class" and never as "proletarians" anymore.

That being said, let's not stoop to the level of "anti-idpol" vulgar materialism. Similarly to how people have very little control over their position in the process of production, people don't "decide" to be seen as black by police or landlords. There is a distinction between racial identity — "I identify as black" — and social race — "that cop is more likely to shoot me because he sees me as a black person and there is very little I can do about it".

Rule of thumb: if you can choose to describe yourself as something, it's a subjective identity — and a spook indeed. If you can't and this is actually decided for you by social forces, it's an objective social relation — and it's not a spook, it's a description of the role you embody in wider society.

This is every milquetoast conservative's response to contemporary racial issues in the US.

In light of this stunning analysis of the post-Civil Rights Era, what praxis do you propose, that would be meaningfully distinct from the empowerment of labor as a whole against capital, and the ultimate abolition of capitalism?

You're moving the goalpost. This what about racism and sexism allegedly not existing anymore thanks to proper legislation, not about revolutionary praxis.

>Racism/sexism/etc., to the extent it can be discerned as functionally separate from class oppression, has been illegal since the 1960s.
If anybody's moving goalposts, it's you.

Again, if it only exists in a form legally and practically indistinguishable from capitalism, how can "activism" "against" it exist in any form distinct from activism against capitalism?

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The absolute state of Holla Forums

*triggered*

nice non sequitur

The board was easier take serious when conscience was either to ignore race or view it as a physical reality to overcome.
What happened to the Starlinists?

*the

*consensus
On phone

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The absolute state of Holla Forums

Chemicals can meld and their properties can change.
Yeah, hierarchy exists. Thanks for nothing.

When did I write this?

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Sorry, I didn't grow in a post racial utopia.
What culture is literally colour blind(no point debating intelligence or biology here)?
Did I say I was a capitalist or that the current class system is based on merit?

When you tried to straw man the poster who implied race, morals, gender, etc. don't trump class.

My point was that race is not a construct, why would I bring up class?
They way we react to racial difference is a construct.

*The

Maybe you did, without knowing it. Lots of cultures are colorblind, for instance, white nationalists would be derided as miscegenating subhumans by the racial standards prevalent throughout most of European history.
I believe there are biological differences between "races" (or, indeed, any groups that can be defined based on arbitrarily chosen aesthetic characteristics), but such differences are either politically irrelevant (sickle cell anemia, etc.) or are barely big enough to escape the bounds of statistical rounding error.
Fair enough

When I say literally, I mean literally. There is no post racial society either by the left or rights standards.

No, your point was to make the poster you replied to look wrong by relating spooks to gravity. You actually missed the point, he wasn't saying race doesn't exist, he was saying it's superficial when compared to class issues.

If the definition of modern "races" by the standards of today's most strident racists have been blended together at the level of entire continents (Europe, Africa, etc.), each covering thousands of equally spooky racial identities that racists of the past once fought impassioned wars of genocide over individual tribes and city states, can it really be that far off?

The amount effort you would need to expend to ignore the reality of race would make it all the more obvious. If it's so minor, then why "ignore" it?

What is the reality of race to be ignored?

I was talking about the act of looking at a person and seeing the physical difference. No culture I know of, is racially blind. Please cite an example?

According to your own post about the original comment; it's "superficial". Is colour a spook too?

That was my first post faggot. Now what is the reality of race to be ignored?

You don't put effort into not caring about race. Obsessing over race does require some effort though.

Do you notice if somebody is of Irish extraction? Italian? Dutch? What about the region their ancestors are from, Sicily? Rome? Florence? Is this information crucial to your deciding on your reactions when dealing with them?

Just admit it, you're already postracial by the standards of even 50 years ago.

The reason spooks are even a thing is because people are not rational. How would you avoid a person seeing another persons skin, and them then making assumptions based on their own anecdotal history(even in a "post racial society)?

I notice when someone is black.

I would to stop seeing black skin.

Because it's not a very predictive criterion for judging people. When I see a black, or a hispanic, or an Asian, or an aborigine, it doesn't register as anything more significant than their hairstyle, or the cut of their shirt. Maybe if I haven't seen one in a while, I'll think "Gee, what an interesting person".

There are far more useful characteristics by which people can be evaluated, even at a glance.

Also didn't cobain rape a retarded girl and kill himself because he took this attribute? Not exactly great role models.

*It

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Yes, valuable on the personal level, but not as groups.
I'm not say it's good, but humans pick out patterns.

I notice the grass being green.

*On

I can reliably pick out the ancestry of a European, Asian, etc. by their facial morphology, and I find discussing their family an amusing passtime, but I don't form strong stereotypes based on this information.

Try and remember that your spooks need you, but you don't need them.

What if you were put in a situation were others did make judgments based on these things? Wouldn't it be rational to follow the majority?
For example, in an area with racial segregated gangs?

Sure, on a personal level, just like if I were stuck somewhere with vicious religious sectarianism. But on a political level, the imperative would be to dissolve racial identity, not further reify it.

Would you attempt to hide dispositional trends in one group, inorder to end racial identity and wouldn't that just cause more inequality?
Genuinely curious as to how you would achieve your goal of a post racial world.

What we've already been doing for the entire history of socialism: Point out that our common interests are far greater than our differences, that if we refuse to work together we'll continue to be the victims of those who do, that most of our squabbles are the product of outside provocation specifically to weaken all of us.

As someone familiar with fascism, I'm sure you can appreciate that camaraderie born side-by-side in the trenches is capable of overcoming many once-cherished hatreds.

If that's truly the case then why do your revolutions produce regimes that consistently eat their own before being declared not really your revolutions?

Neither fascism nor communism explicitly denies or accepts racial differences, though fascism doesn't obsess over a single utopian vision.
In a country that is already mixed I could different racial groups working together to overthrow the powerful, but I don't view it as ideal or something to strive for in and of itself.

*See

Nearly every major political reform of the last century was socialist in nature, whether that's the socdem reformism that begat the welfare democracies in every modern superpower, or certain ML state capitalist dictatorships that nonetheless quashed millennia-old sectarianisms and turned backward feudal fiefdoms into prosperous industrial economies.

There are many valid complaints to be made against socialism, "on the whole, it inflamed sectarian division" isn't one of them.

True enough, forced diversity is, at the ideological level, just as spooky as forced division or supremacism. My ideal world would be one facilitating the full expression of individual whims, to the extent they didn't interfere too much with other peoples', rather than one forcing opinions down everyone's throat "for their own good" at every possible opportunity.

class is a social construct that arises out of the capitalist relations of production and may be abolished

race is a biological reality that will always exist regardless of the relations of production and may never be abolished

therefore race is far more important than class

Why?

because it may not be abolished it always exist regardless of the relations of production

Communists believe race is merely a capitalist invention – this couldn't be more laughably wrong if you tried!

Jesus
I'll take, "what is a brainlet response to valid criticism" for 20 labor vouchers!

See >>2300024
You change your "race" as often as you change your shoes.

I think there are clearly biologically determined aspects of gender; to suggest otherwise is antiscientific.

So many words and you still haven't managed to prove your """biological reality"""".

"Race" is not another way of saying "genetics". It describes an obsolete mode of human classification that lacks scientific rigor. There is no strict definition for it, it varies culturally.

thanks for playing, brainlet

idk man I think I'll side with the anthropologists on this one

And how is taxonomy relevant to us? We're not saying melanin doesn't exist and not even Holla Forums is disingenuous enough to think a straw man like that will convince anyone. We just have no reason to care on a political board. It is not the basis of meaningful value judgments.
This is ignoring the fact that other, scientifically accepted classifications are not arbitrary and ill defined.

Oop, looks like one ChristCom post got deleted. What's wrong with the mods today?

Oh, you're just a burger with no knowledge of what he talks about. Nevermind, I won't scold an invalid.

Biological races do not exist―and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations.

what's up with americans and their race obsession
are they so dumb they can't understand race is a bullshit term that means nothing?

The same reason most Colonies turned Nations are.

Is Mexico the true embodiment of American greatness?

Ah hell no, leftypol has always gotten polyp teir triggered by talk of race and gender since I’ve been here with very little substantive push back. You guys really need to go to some place not run by Nazis.

MODS, CUT IT THE FUCK OUT