Thought Experiment on Intersectionality

I've been thinking about the damage that has been done by intersectionality. Every single debate, argument or point to be made has been boiled down into a wedge issue of wedge issues. This becomes extremely divisive and seems, I think, to shoehorn us into a corner.

So that go me thinking, when you ingest poison sometimes the best treatment is to ingest another poison that makes you throw it up. What if we can double down on intersectionality but, instead of establishing that any given issue is to be divided among every other wedge issue, we establish that "all roads lead to communism" rather than "communism leads to all these other things".

If you look back to the mid-later 1800's this is what the revolutionaries of eastern Europe and Russia did. Once all the wedge issues were established they spun it around so that all concerned were forced to educate themselves on just what communism is and just how the current system was designed to their detriment.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=G9PyFR3Dr8I
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-system-s-neatest-trick
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

But that's the thing, they don't. Liberals, by definition, want social progress not to go what they would call "too far". In every modern non-communist revolution (real revolution, not just guerrilla takeovers or color-coded bullshit), the moderates half-shit-their-pants and half-sell-out and kill the revolution by shafting the nominal radicals. These things we call wedge issues are, to us, of little to no importance right now and would be solved by a socialist up-ending of society anyway, which is the real goal; to liberals, solving these only these wedge issues is the goal. You can't make a bridge between a liberal "50% of CEOs should be female" to a communist "CEOs should be hanged".

And I'm not sure about this tactic of mid-later 1800s that you speak of. As far as I know, the issues back then were nations and self-determination, feminism, democracy other decidedly non-wedge issues.

Elaborate?

As for my two cents, no, doubling down on intersectionality is a bad idea. An easy way to digest roughly my argument would be this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=G9PyFR3Dr8I
We can't outright reject social issues as entirely unimportant, because they often aren't and previous Marxists gained favour in communities specifically by helping out on these things. This does not mean, however, that we have to swallow all of the ideology that often comes along with activist groups. For example, police brutality is shit. You could easily imagine Marxists assisting oppressed black communities by helping them to defend against the police, and that would persuade them to see us as allies, maybe even as a good alternative. Same goes for LGBT issues; Marxists ultimately want equality for everybody, and the only major division we make is along class lines. Why should gay and trans people be oppressed for being gay and trans? We can help in important causes without, for example. giving ourselves over to liberal queer theory about a vague heterosexual patriarchy.

The toward which we can lead these groups is materialism. We can coherently explain that the root of societal oppression stems from capitalism, which sees everything, including people, only in terms of profit. If someone is trying to benefit from private prison systems, you will probably see a rise in arrests in poor neighbourhoods. If the burden of paying for trans people becomes too inconvenient, their health services will become "cosmetic". The point of this is of course that the degree of self or community-determination is dependent on their convenience within the system of capitalist exploitation.

Basically, we don't need to tell Social Justice types that they were right; we need to tell them that their theory is in fact wrong and that we have a common enemy.

Thats not what I was saying. The donkeys and donkey-lites all focus on wedge issues and only wedge issues at this point. Who knows, maybe that will never change but as it is right now all it results in is infighting and getting away from the point.


I think more effort needs to be expended to get them to see that "this wedge issue you care about will only get fix under communism"


Yea I get what your saying with not being able to get them to say "all ceo's should be hanged: But, I mean I guess it would be slightly deceitful but do they NEED to be shouting that to help us? ALl we need to do is get them to see that communism is "the magic potion for all their ails"

They have demonstrated, I think by now, that the blight of the moderate is, and always will be, fence sitters who wind up sabotaging any attempts to affect real change. The end result would benefit them greatly, but they will never join us if they knew that the only way to proceed is to completely dismantle the entire society and replace it with what actually works… So what if there were a way to get them on board with us without acknowledging that at first?

We've had plenty of protests but from my experience the majority of the people there werent really revolutionaries, they were more just there for the thrill of "being a rebel". Those people amount to dead weight ih the long run, and history shows that the largest cooperation you will expect to find in any revolution is 15% of the population maximum, usually less, But that "dead weight in the long run" that they are gave us massive crowds helps get the message out and gets more people interested in taking action.

The abolitionist movement in eastern Europe (mostly estonia, poland and south western Russia, between 1830ish and the 1880;s had some very interesting tactics. They started off with ia sort of quasi-intersectional rabble rousing. It was mostly wealthy students who were becoming acquainted with communistic ideology and, I cant remember all their names but, a man named Hermann Eduard Von Holst really did some great work.

It is almost fucking impossible to find any real information on him, his wikipedia page is severely lacking and everything else on the web about him is just a copy of the wiki page. But I managed to find some old books and journals written between 1870 and 1920 (he was an author and wrote a couple interesting books on american politics at the time).

Anyway, so Eduard Hermann Von Holst was born into wealth in Estonia, his father died but left him enough money to get an education and he started being a little shit raiser when he was in his teens.

Its a shame there is so little information on him, from those old journals I was able to find at the library he was probably THE single most important person as far as spreading communism and abolitionist ideologies throughout eastern Europe. If it weren't for him the tsars would still control Russia. he wrote a 100 page pamphlet on the importants of killing nicholas II lol, its in baltic german though and I've never found a translation

Anyway, what he did was he went from town to town finding the most hardassed revolutionaries and then organized them to find the most outcast group in a town, and teach them about communism but focusing on intersectional issues, so that when that small group went out into town square and said "hey we dont like the way we are being treated" the authorities beat the crap out of them and then von holst and his merry band of agitators ran through the town to other groups with intersectional wedge issues.

Going about it this way theystarted dozens of local coups and most of them were successful.

t. BLAIRITE GANG

Our society has changed a lot since the days of the tsars. Read Cristopher Lasch the culture of narcissism. We live in a world full of atomized people who are kept in a state of enforced helplessness. You get assigned a stereotyped label and told to take up your place in line, you can't say no and sometimes that can be suphocating. Corporations have learned to use identity politics to further atomize people and make them easier to control. IMO that's one of my main problems with leftism, sometimes it amounts to reducing people to sociological theories and depriving them of individuality.

The problem is that we don't deprive people of individuality enough. The point where all these identity politics start causing a mess is with people who start to become overly attached to their individualistic expressions of the identity, rather than approaching politics properly collectively and seeing themselves as part of collectivities.

Take for example the amusing shouting match between a DS-A member and a group of autists, concerning people with disabilities. In this case a subset of the people with disabilities were upset with a perceived sleight against them, that they forgot their place in the whole movement.

Those individualistic expressions are nothing more than cliches, most gay people don't want to parade in glitter all day. It has to do with the way our society encourages narcissism and hedonistic values as a form of control. It's easier to control people who see themselves as perpetual victims with no independent existence beyond their identity. We should tap into the desire for community and being part of something bigger. People who feel lonely and alienated already have a lot in common.

A kindly reminder from Uncle Ted.
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-system-s-neatest-trick

Intersectionality comes from a misreading of Althusser via Foucault (and Foucault's Amerikan followers).

It's like this: we understand capitalism needs to reproduce itself through the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and culture; nothing is outside of this system. So, peoples who are marginalized or "shamed" are only on the margins of society because they do not reproduce capital in a way that's useful. So for instance, fat people are shamed since their poor health makes them unproductive at work, Muslim women are shamed since they shun western consumerist beauty standards, and so on.

The problem is the lack of political organizing. Muslims, the obese, etc. are not organized *as classes* but as *individuals*. There is no political struggle here, just individuals looking for more narcissistic supply in a culture that's become increasingly fragmented and based on hyper-egoism. "Don't tell me what to wear/eat/act/name my kid" - it's all about ME ME ME rather than a collective project.

criticising other people and 'shaming' them is no bad at all, but in fact necessary for having morals and a sense of identity. The system wants a world of contented egocentric consumers who are unable to think beyond their own pitiful lives

So from this they derive the notion that you can "resist" capitalism simply by asserting identity (provided that identity goes against what is perceived to be the logic of capital)?

Yes, which is exactly the issue I implicitly addressed: the idea is that Muslims, fat people, and so on "subvert" the logic of the system "just by existing" within it. Any kind of struggle in the political or economic realm is ignored in favour of "look at me and how DEFIANT I am!".

So how would someone combat this kind of thinking? It seems pretty dominant nowadays.

Organize them all as classes, not as "deviant" identities.

My problem with intersectionality is how it makes people feel at once like worthless victims and nazi war criminals awaiting trial, whatever way you look at it is an unrelentingly bleak worldview that makes you hate yourself and prevents you from forming authentic connections with people.

Your reasoning is kind of weird but the conclusion is interesting - rather than discarding things as "wedge issues" we must realize than in this individualistic society you are not gonna get people to agree with you on "the big project" (social revolution, DotP, socialism, communism) but they might on these little issues.

However, what liberals do when they take on the intersectional focus is disperse the problem without proposing a viable solution - liberals are not willing to fight to the end against any of the issues they themselves denounce. I believe the right line here has already been proposed by >>2353502:


Rather than the disorganized "net" or "graph" model you pictured, reality is perhaps better represented through Marx's base and superstructure model.


stop shilling this Holla Forums-tier crypto-fash fucktard, the fact he is against idpol doesn't mean we should collectively kiss his ass like we did with Stirner and other memes.

You know what sucks. When liberals call your views on class struggle problematic to your face when organizing. Idpol totally grips the subject

Class is an identity according to anarchopac tho.

Op here, been away on a 'trip'. The focus on wedge issues is an important one, whether or not one agrees with these issues in composition the fact remains that they have grown into an extremely large part of the political ecosystem.

Now that the conversation has gotten a bit interesting, albeit slow, I have to be honest.. I made this thread because I am part of a.. think tank, composed of members from America, Canada and Europe. The premise which we are currently operating on is:


And moreover, once the far right emerges as a threat it doesnt tend to merely ban/exile/kill leftists within its borders, it tries to hunt them down.

So the mood of this thinktank is, we need to secure definitive gains and we need to do it quickly, and so far we have reached a near consensus that the best way to do that is to accept that a significant part of the left will never be entirely on board with us but we need to drag them in as close as we can as quickly as we can.

And this is why I floated the idea of "doubling down on intersectionalism". So far it is the only answer that we have majority consensus of having any chance of working. It's a bit devious be we need to trick the useless donkeys into coming further to our side, they will realize it was the right thing to do eventually.

...

"MUH INDIVIDUALITY"
Go back to watching sargon

Individualism isn't bad.
Sargon is retarded, because he believes in the false dichotomy between individualism and collectivism.

...

Be careful when using the word individuality, comrade

under the current order, true individualism is impossible, as is true solidarity. You have the atomised individual in one side, and the crushing dead weight of mass culture on the other.

The mess going on in congress right now is a pretty good example of the need for ideas like this. The donkeys have shot themselves in the foot in such a way that we could swoop in and convince a lot of people who normally wouldnt fully agree with us that it is time they start getting serious or quit caring about anything because their current approach is failing abysmally.

Aren't we supposed to be politically incorrect or am I just going crazy?

The biggest problem there is that they make absolutely no mention of the fact that those congressmen were in the process of restricting Americans' (of all races and genders) access to healthcare. They were literally murdering people. And yet the only thing they cared about was muh women.

any thoughts on who might be a viable candidate to run against Trump in 2020? When it comes to intersectionality you run the risk of becoming to broad and bland for anyone to support but at the same time you need to get wide enough support to actually win an election.

Not everyone here is as big a faggot as you are.

...