What is a social construct and why is it so important?

It's a social construct because racism doesn't actually exist.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism

Not really. As you said there are real material advantages to adhering to the construct, and the allure of those advantages helps reproduce it. You don't have to believe in "honor" in order to benefit from it.

Of course it exists, on an ideological level which then filters down into how people are treated materially. Holla Forums is a clear example of people holding spooky ideological beliefs which then changes their behavior and motivations towards other people IRL (or at least on the internet).

So races not real but racism is real.

Okay.

The notion of race is the social construct here. Racism is the social system that depends on the social construct. This is the way that the superstructure can affect the base. Race is part of the superstructure, but it leads people to treat each other differently, shaping the relations of production. A pure example of this is seen in the film 12 Years a Slave. The film's protagonist was a free man. He had never been a slave in his life, but because of racism, he was seen as an appropriate target for kidnapping and selling as a slave. And once he became a slave, racism kept anyone from being suspicious that any law or social custom had been violated to make him so. This is of course in addition to the perpetuation of slavery being the result of race as a social construct. That is a much more common, though less "pure" instance of a social construct in the superstructure shaping the base.

To sum up, yes a social construct can affect society such that it results in material oppression.

Here enters something related to, but different from a social construct - myth. A social construct, like honor, is some object or quality or substance that is fictional but serves a social purpose. A myth is a dynamic or pattern or process that is fictional. The reason people attack peasants instead of the social construct is because of the myth of self-determination. In Western society, this is perhaps the most important myth. It is the idea that an individual ultimately has control over their own life, rather than the fact that their life is shaped by forces beyond their control. There are two fundamental lies behind this myth.

The first lie is that within the social and economic system, that an individual has the power to accomplish anything if they take proper action. Children are commonly taught this lie: "You can be anything when you grow up if you work hard at it." Adults are told this lie as well, but more subtly. Adults are taught that hard work, prudence with money, cleverness, etc. will grant them a path to wealth. In reality, there are two paths to wealth in the current system: taking the surplus value of others' labor, and obtaining wealth by producing information with your labor (due to the ease of replicating information).

The second lie is that human beings are rational, well-informed actors within this system. This is absurd on its face. If humans had the knowledge and/or reason required to succeed in the economy, then business schools would not exist. There are a great many things that humans don't inherently know about social and economic systems that must be learned. Believing the contrary is essential to the myth of self-determination. Even if the peasants did have all the material power in the world to control their lives, they could not use it if they were not aware of it.

Ultimately, the myth of self-determination functions to shift blame from the structure of society to the individuals who get the worst of it. It also serves the function of congratulating people who were lucky enough to end up in a better situation.

Nonsense. Racism exists. It's simply an attitude of bias along racial lines. What does not exist is race.

Yes. In the same way that, say, ghosts are not real, but people's belief in ghosts is real. Ghosts as material things can do nothing because they do not exist. Ghosts as elements of people's perception can affect the world, because they are a component of a material thing - the person who believes in them.

Yes, but I was keeping it simple to illustrate the point. If society collectively stops believing in honor, then the social system falls apart. A "perfect" social construct that is beneficial to everyone could survive under these circumstances. A social construct that selectively benefits people or does harm to people will come under attack, because when the people who do not benefit realize it is a fakery, they will see no good reason for themselves being excluded from the benefits.

This is too crazy for me now.

Apparently, races aren't real, but racism, a concept, actually exists.

I think what he meant was, races as a concept is racist?

And racism is an actual social construct, it doesn't exist.

Not inherently. Racism is an attitude (ideological condition) that requires the social construct of race.

Beliefs actually exist, in that they are part of people's ideological conditions and can affect the world.

If beliefs are real, then everything is real, including races, genders and other identity politics.

Yes. There's a difference between things that exist materially and things that exist ideologically though.

Ideology doesn't fucking exist.

Goddamn, holy shit, I can't believe we are supposed to be materialist here.

Ideology does exist. Dualism, i.e. thinking that minds are separate from reality is what's not materialist.

I'd like to see where you picked that up from.

Ok, whatever you say, ideological man.

Observation. The caveat is that it has to be information that people want.

into the trash it goes

The whole definition of a social construct not being real is so fucking stupid. Even when you are purely materialistic, millenias of social conditioning will leave a genetic imprint on you. And genetics are quite real, are they not?

The mistake that most SJW make is that just because something was shaped by its environment over the course of history and pre-history it can be easily erased by just calling it "not real". I mean, a fucking lizard was in a way also shaped through its material environment over the course of evolution, so the behavior of lizards are also constructs?

"Race" seems to be a term that's based in folklore but that doesn't mean that biological differences between ethnicities are social constructs.

People have gotten rich writing books that people want to read, or writing software that people want to use. It's not particularly likely, but it happens.

Instinct isn't a social construct. Social constructs are illusions created by social beings that allow a social system to function.

So millenias of social conditioning can not become something equivalent to instinct? Then what's the difference between the instincts of a lizard that was shaped by evolution and an human instinct that was shaped by pre-historic social conditioning of cavemen? One is social, one is not? What's the point?

Just because it's a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What about fucking countries? Mountain lines - natural kind, boundary lines - social kind. They both limit your movement literally (to sneak across a boundary line is a subversion, you have to break through the world you inhabit as a human being in a society)

Oh yes, absolutely. That's called a fixed action pattern.

None.

Humans (and most animals) do not only function on instinct. Humans more than most animals operate on learned behaviors. Social constructs fall under this category.

And some people are making a bundle on patreon drawing porn – the point is it's not people's tastes that are creating that value.

The artist produces material for a market and the full value of that labor is realized when people pay for it. If we stick to the porn artist example, people subscribe for that material. It isn't the artist's tastes or the subscriber's tastes that create value – it's the artist working to produce a product for sale by subscription.

A writer who manages to produce a bestseller probably did so after writing a whole bunch of other things, most of which didn't sell well or even make it to publication. They wasted labor on those efforts but kept at it in order to realize a better return on future attempts (not that publishers don't take their cut and then some). So it isn't a matter of producing something people want to read – it's about the labor of creating it, and then either getting a return on that labor or not.

Pretty much this
A social construct is something that exists only through the behaviour of people

And this depends on whether or not people want it.

I don't disagree on that. However, some learned behaviours are brought upon an individual purely through nurture some other were genetically imprinted over millenias. Calling the latter a social construct fails on several levels since it is quite real.

For example, that men are more prone to physical aggression is not a social construct - it's inherent in their genetics due to more then 100k years of conditioning.

If it's genetically imprinted, it's not a learned behavior.

Doesn't undermine the fact it is labor that produces value, not anything subjective like taste. If you're not a good artist, or people don't like your material, then you either get better or produce something else. You meet effective demand then you get a return.

Besides that, what people want is socially constructed, getting back on topic, through advertising and ideology. Advertising was invented in order to convince people to purchase something and thus realize the value invested into it through its sale. Just because people were (to a greater or lesser degree) manipulated into wanting it doesn't mean that the value of the commodity is determined subjectively.

There is a definite material process of production which has its own costs and those costs must get a return and then some through sale on the market. Surplus value is the monetary return above the cost of production – labor, machinery, etc. – which is appropriated by the capitalist. If the capitalist doesn't produce something to meet market demand, then they're bankrupt – but in order to produce anything at all, in order to produce a profit, it must be produced with human labor. Everything else is built on top of that.

Are all social constructs oppressive or are some beneficial?

I don't disagree with what you're saying and none of it contradicts the fact that the only way to get rich currently without being a capitalist is to do labor that produces a result that can be easily copied and distributed.

But they originally started out as one - which was my point.

There is a point when a social construct transcendents into someone's nature.

A social construct is pretty self explanatory.
Social - society
Construct - created, made, constructed
Kind of like a spook, but more emphasis on how society interprets them, rather than the individual.

Not with an individual person, but social constructs can affect evolution, sure. Nobody's genes are going to be rewritten by a social construct though. All it can do is affect the rate at which certain traits reproduce in a population.

Is there something else that defines your very nature besides genetics (genuine question)? Before any sort of nurture sets in, of course.

But in any case, this makes 90% of the things people claim to be social constructs pretty real.

There is epigenetics, which blurs the line between nurture and nature. It's basically the set of biological conditions that affect how your genes are read, and it's in place before your zygote even forms. Egg and sperm cells exist in an environment that shapes their function via biochemistry. If you were to take the same genetic code and put it in a zygote under different conditions, the resulting human would have some different physical traits. Most of what epigenetics control is systemic and not obvious to the human eye though - stuff like metabolism.

False, language is a social construct.

Kill you're self.

That doesn't mean a construct has no value. Which is what liberals mean when they use the social construct of language to talk about social constructs. they always mean that they have no value.

Social constructs are like technology. They're neutral by themselves, whether they're beneficial or harmful depends on how humans interact with them. And just like how some technology tends to be beneficial, some tends to be harmful, and some tends to be neutral the same goes for social constructs.

Except technology dependent upon large scale social organisation like infrastructures.

Yes, but whether or not that social organization exploits people depends on the social system, not the technology. A road system could be maintained by laborers who control the surplus value of their labor, or it could be maintained by slaves.

wew

And to contruct it you need a masive amount of resources made in factory's, trucks that need to transport it wich are build by parts in a factory and metal out of mines and all of that. Social Organisation wich modern technology depends upon is the economy and without mass organisation of all the resources for production, destribution you can not have roads. And for the economy to function you need to change the population to production units who work along machines to keep the economy running. For the economy to function in the hyper productive standart wich are set by machines we still need to work constantly and be reduced to workers who must keep going to keep the economy up and running as we all depend on eachother. The slavery of work will persist under socialism or anarcho-syndaclism untill its fully automatic.

That's been true for a long time, probably since modern recording techniques and radio were invented. What's changed today is that an artist or programmer can easily and effectively utilize information infrastructures at very low cost in order to spread their work.

"Social construction" is one of those words that's been abused (by both liberals and conservatives) to the point of losing its initial meaning. I mean, your screen cap is a pretty good example: that sentence doesn't even make sense.

I'd say the most acceptable and overall correct popular definition of that term today is the following: a social construct is a human concept and/or institution that is understood as being mainly engineered by and dependent on context-sensitive social interactions as opposed to being universally, ahistorically set in stone.

Therefore, "deconstruction" is the process through which the constructed nature of a given concept and/or institution is made evident through critical inquiry.

Still, the original definition of the word was much more complex, nuanced and wide-reaching. The concept of "social construction" was mostly first laid out in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 "The Social Construction of Reality" (which I recommend reading by the way) and I think the following Wikipedia excerpt actually does it justice:

Social construction is the notion "that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each others' actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other."

Definitely not as sexy-sounding as the Huffington Post's or Breitbart's definition to a lot of people.

Work in itself is not slavery. Capitalist exploitation is not necessary for high technology. Most of the work done today is not useful and exists to prop up capitalism by giving the proles a source of income that they can use to consume. If we eliminated all the shit jobs, those people could take useful jobs and share the workload so that everybody had fewer hours to work per week.

I don't get whats so fucking difficult to grasp about this.

If we use the best examples of this liberal position, they are not saying this. They are saying social constructs can be changed because they are not an objective, eternal property of the world we live in, so therefore if they are shit, and are making some people lives shit then we should get rid of them.

because it constitutes a state

because they are not happy

That…isn't really that difficult a concept?

Any more than ghosts aren't real but ghost hunters are.

Not actually existing is misleading, it would be better to talk about immaterial things, products of the mind and so on. Or you can claim than toughts don't actually exist.

daily reminder 3rd wave feminism and rich white pretty western girls pretending like they are opressed while workers are struggling is the type of shit that ruins scientific marxism

language is a concept more than it is itself a physical, measurable entity. It affects people's behaviors because we all have a similar understanding of this concept and our behavior is in part regulated by it.

So yes language is a social construct. And in a sense, while it is not physically real (there is no physical object called language) it is a concept with real effects on human behavior. This is what a social construct is.

God isn't real but religion exists.
Magic isn't real but mysticism exists.
Spirits aren't real spiritualism exists.

It's not that hard.

Daily reminder Postmodernism sucks.

youtube.com/watch?v=iUUD0OILxWY

roooooooooo

*tips fedora*

Race and gender are social constructs, you fucking white male.

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m'triggers

read derrida

I fucking hate this "it's a social construct which means it's fake" meme. A social construct is a thing that is created due to social circumstances. That doesn't mean things like gender or race don't exist, it just means that these things were created by humans under certain social conditions and if these social conditions change then so can those constructs. It means it's not endowed by nature but created by society and therefore society can change it or get rid of it. But let's please get rid of this "it's a social construct so it isn't real" mentality.

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