So what is wrong with Identity Politics?

What is wrong with Identity politics?
It shifts the debate from economics and pits workers one against another.
When you consider yourself first and foremost a Women/Jew/gay/White/Black whatever, this leave few room for class consciousness.

BACK TO POL YOU RACIST SCUM!

Identity politics forgets that the "identity" that actually dictates your ability to engage in society is your class, your relation to production - not your genitals or skin colour. See: Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

However, leftypol likes to forget that genitals and skin colour do still affect people's lives on an individual basis, and these identities do impact people's ability to engage in society. See: ghettos.

Samefag, you know there's an article in Bunkermag looking at the alienation within a Tupac rap song right? You do realize, samefag, that we do fight for people of all genital and colors, right? Thomas Sankara and all that?

We fight for equality here at leftypol. What we don't buy into is oppression olympics, or the idea of "patriarchy". We will fight for the gays, we will fight for purple, yellow and magenta peoples. But we all suffer equally under capitalism, and capitalism is the engine of oppression.

Pic related. Fuck off and stop samefagging now that you have your replies.

We all suffer under capitalism, but we do not all suffer equally. Im not interested in an "oppression olympics" either, but to say that every person suffers equally is plainly false. And no one group universally suffers more than the other, but general trends exist and are worth consideration. An able bodied, European, male proletarian likely (not certainly) has a better quality of life than a one-legged Pakistani female proletarian, for example.

Identity politics are the tool that ruling classes have used throughout the ages to divide their vastly more numerous exploited subjects and remove the power that they have when organized collectively.

Nothing.

The entire basis of ghettos is that it is profitable for them to exist. De facto segregation means real estate developers do not have to sell their property at lower prices to compete.

A class is an identity.

Ghettos aren't profitable because they lower the standard of living.

Fuck off. Stop posting the same bait over and over again jackass.

Marx wasn't a white male. He was Jewish.

wew

It's not a straw man if it's exactly what they believe.

Note that it doesn't mention lolberts.

Identity politics is the expression and active agency of a neoliberal political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.

An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. Within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.

It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.

Ironically, identity politics seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.” (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and domestic anticommunism.)

This sort of thing only deepens my suspicions about identity politics’ status within the comfort zone of neoliberalism’s discourses of “reform.” More to the point, I suspect as well that this vitriol towards Marxist radicalism is rooted partly in the conviction that a left politics based on class analysis and one focused on racial injustice are Manichean alternatives.

lol, that's why it's a strawman

Proletariat is an identity though.

Identities are reified social categories from which we should emerge, not within which we should be compelled to remain.

Also, it becomes increasingly clear that the only thing idpol accomplishes at best is the coalescence around particular consumer cultures.

So you want to emerge as an asexual mudskin?

Features about you are not necessarily your identity. That's the whole point. People don't consider their being able to roll their tongue, or whether their earlobes are joined at their jawline, or whether they prefer chicken or beef, to be their identity. Race, sexuality, and gender are just statements of biology or preference. They don't need to be anything more.

I'm a white heterosexual male, but my identity is as a member of the working class. The goal is for everyone's identity to be simply "human being", by abolishing even the class identity through abolishing the material reality of class in society.

He wants to be his own person not the property of an identity group forced on him by neoliberal scum and pasty faced opportunists.

papa unruhe said it was bad

bump lol

Fuck you

Wouldn't it be a lot easier if people who liked writing about idpol goes to their own board?

looks like ive busted your trusts pal

We already told you to fuck off buddy. Find your own board to talk about this garbage.

t. socialist pro ruse-velt

What do they believe then?

It's an obvious distraction for the lumpenproles. At one point Hilldog said "Will busting up the porkies give transgendered people more rights or end racism??? No!"

this nigga gets it

So what, we spend our time examining every single life on this earth to give them an oppression rating?

Holla Forums believes that abolishing capitalism is simply the only thing you can do to end all of this suffering, just like Stokely Carmichael said. Changing someone's attitude about racism or sexism is not going to stop them. Take away their power to oppress (capitalism) and you take away the oppression outright.

Goddamn fucking idpol'ers man, just cannot grasp this shit.

The same reasons as the right has been explaining. Prevents growth based on merit, and instead focuses on things that can't be changed or are fully a part of perspective.

Furthermore, it's constantly used to distract from class issues. It's also real autistic.

because you're myopic middle-class autists

why you post tumblr when *chan culture is into identity politics more.

It deny's the Individual.

*wrong flag

idpol puts a lot of emphasis on the individual, indiviual theory is about as idpol as it gets

By reducing the me towards an aspect of my body like for example my skin color or sex. That i now somehow am similiar among the people i share my aspect of or the idea of aspect. Identity politics is destroying the self and submitting to an abstract idea of what you are to be as yourself, being black, being a german, being a man or anything that reduced me to an indentity instead of an individual.

Its Collectivism united in some fixed idea of being a something, a perfect indentity wich all its members subscribe to! being a proud german or a proud women instead of being unique.

'' IPs start from a standpoint within the dominant system of spectres, and encourage us to identify with our position within systems of oppression (Gelderloos, 13). They require that “any person interested in radical transformation relinquish the ability to define her/ himself” (Jarach, 5). Instead, people are to dissolve themselves into the pre-existing social categories into which they are classified, both by the dominant system and by IPs. As Jarach argues, “they can’t conceive of the possibility that the elevation of any particular culturally constructed marker into a significant value-laden category could lead to oppression” (3). Indeed, they define the possibility out of existence: we really are our categories; to oppress is to oppress a category; to liberate is to liberate a category. And leadership of Experts is necessary, if the extensional set are to be reduced to the spectre.

From a Stirnerian point of view, instead of starting from a subject-position assigned by the regime of spectres and categories, anarchists should start from a standpoint of being a unique individual irreducible to any spectre or category (including those of uniqueness and individuality).''

I fully agree that only by removing capitalism can we remove the power to oppress. I fully agree that class is the only truly important social identity, in the final analysis.

That doesn't mean that talking about nuances to this oppression is pointless. And even if it is pointless, why is it so forbidden to discuss it? Don't give me the patronizing "muh confused working class getting sucked into idpol" because maybe if we actually did discuss and credit these issues, and actually illustrate how class underpins these other forms of identity, we'd actually win more to correct views.

I don't disagree. And contrary to what people think, I don't think any of us are opposed to discussing the problems that face different people in society due to capitalism. In bunkermag some dude wrote a good article about how Tupac was talking about capitalist alienation in one of his songs. This is good shit, because it links capitalism back to something that is 1) East to understand 2)popularly understood 3) oppression as it manifests itself for a subgroup.

What I don't think any of us agree with is just saying "lets stop racism by telling people not to be racist!". Or "lets stop sexism by stopping people from calling each other dude" and "muh gender pronouns!". That's what idpol is, addressing these oppressions not by what gives them power but by superficial bullshit.

No, the goal is for everyone's identity to be simply "myself."

/idpol/ is like advil. It's made to treat symptoms, but does not resolve the underlying problems.

A society in which there is a fair distribution of Men, Women, Blacks, Whites etc. in positions of power is still an oppressive society in which the people without power are coerced.

Rejecting /idpol/ does not necessarily mean that rejecting that racism and sexism exist, or taking a colorblind/genderblind approach to politics, but instead acknowledging that instead of fighting for "muh equal pay for equal work" or other capitalist /idpol/ memes of that sort, you instead fight for a restructuring of the system itself.

Of course there are demographic groups who have been more negatively affected by capitalism, but fighting for an egalitarian liberal capitalist society is a waste of time.

It is straw-manning; that isn't what the alt-right believes, not even close.
The alt-right is even less cohesive than the libertarians, so even fewer things are agreed upon in general.
And we both know that most advocates of socialism aren't in favor of it for the reasons specified.
The whole image is intellectually dishonest misinfo, typical of you soft-headed ideologues.

It said far right, not alt-right.
The alt-right is a jumbled ideological mess cobbled together from unrelated things with edge appeal.

What do you mean? Those reasons for socialism are pretty common attitudes towards wanting it. How it is enacted differentiates.

Accusers of a straw man creating a straw man. Like poetry

every time

Jews are more muh privileged than whites tbh

*unleashes double idpol powers*

I fail to see how I created a straw man, please explain.
But sure, those are common _academic_ reasons for advocating socialism, but the average pleb just wants it because they want the state to redistribute money their way; they want the state to take care of them because they're too stupid to take care of themselves.
I feel like we're missing some key distinction here, otherwise you'd understand what I meant. Socialism vs some pseudo ""Socialism"" perhaps.

Whoops, poor reading on my part. That does make more sense now.

hercampus.com/school/nottingham/rise-pale-shaming

lolz

it's divisive
everyone is a worker, but not everyone is in a minority.
every worker revolution is beneficial to every minority.
no minority emancipation into imperialism is beneficial to the workers but only capitalists of that group.

identity politics is bourgeoise trash.

I know this is bait. But humour me. Three ways that women or POC are oppressed in the US or Europe today.

GO!

This is the most comprehensive description of why idpol is a disorienting factor against class struggle. So, the problem is not the fact that oppressed groups demand equality and freedom but it becomes one when the rights that they claim are to be realised in capitalist context.

proletariat is an identity and it's an extremely divisive one

The only people it's "divisive" to are crypto-reactionary brocialists.

hello SRS

You forgot to add a #KillAllMen, there.

Come on now, this is bait but in the reverse. I know we are all against identity politics here, but you've got to be a total retard not to realize that people here are oppressed in different ways. Perpetual inherited poverty for black folks, constant hate and discriminatory speech for Latino folks (ask my uncle about the Spanish speaking workers at his company and we they are somehow lazy, incompetent or should go back to where they came from) and constant denial of the existence of women's issues from peoples of all walks of life.

No matter how you cut it, oppression manifests itself in different ways. Intersectionality while largely useless makes a great point that different forms of oppression make for unique scenarios. We should recognize this as Marxists who can critique ourselves and our thought. However, I deny the ledditor feminists in the sense that while oppression exists for different people in different ways, it doesn't only manifest in their hand picked oppressed groups (being told you're constantly the problem as a white person is also a unique form of oppression).

First off, measuring oppression and merely saying you're more oppressed because you're a black woman (Beyoncé?) is a blanket statement that fails consistently. A white, proletarian single mother is much more oppressed than any middle class black person. Why? Because you're failing in looking at the one unfailing metric: relation to the means of production. The economic aspect.

So to sum up here user, yes racism, sexism and such and such are problems. This cannot be denied. We here at Holla Forums are socialists in the sense that we realize that the only meaningful change cannot be just banning people who use gender pronouns like the samefags from leddit. Capitalism will not fall merely because we tell racists that they're mean. We follow Stolely Carmichael's example and realize that taking the economic power away from those who would oppress removes any teeth they have, and thus any power they would wield over the oppressed. They wanna whine and scream at people for safe spaces and gender pronouns and think it helps. We want to remove the teeth from the oppressors.

Good post.

>>>/gulag/

Nice bump there, samefag.

???
forgot to sage, hostile user.

We'd tell you but that would be mansplaining.

That image proves nothing. (You) appears to based on cookies. It is trivial to samefag and avoid it if you have more than one device.

Why should it be good?

this

Stormweenie or lefty, you have to love their retarded behavior. You're a complete faggot to not see how tumblr is just bad.

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Bump

Cishet white dudes that recognized they're oppressed don't like being told they're less oppressed than another demographic for other reasons.

It doesn't pit workers against each other like the brocialists of Holla Forums believe, they just believe it does because checking their muh privilege makes them feel uncomfortable.

just fuck my shit up

You and I both know that's retarded.

I'm fine with intersectionality and looking at the system of oppression from multiple angles, but when people focus on patches and bandaids for the current system and outright shut down discussion of overthrowing the system itself I do think that isn't productive.

How about that it's a contradiction (tribalism and globalism)
James 1:8

I feel that discussing Idpol on your own terms with different people to raise class consciousness is good. However, many comrades has experienced too many times the derailment of threads from right-wing and left-wing idpol. For the most part, Holla Forums has developed a no tolerance policy as a result.

What does religion have to do with this?

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