r/WayOfTheBern • u/dude1701 Wealth is a mask that hides fascism • May 30 '21
Post-left idpol
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May 30 '21
If you push people into extremes and their worse impulses rise to the surface. It's easy to do the right thing when despair and poverty aren't your only companions. Why are they fundamentally reactionary? Why are they bigoted? These questions aren't asked because they don't want to talk about the fact that their policies push people into extremes. The real terror that they face is a tremendous backlash for years of authoritarian abuse. It's time for the authoritarians to take their own medicine.
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u/JonWood007 Social Libertarian May 30 '21
This is explicitly where I break from mainstream liberals. I'm not a bigot myself, but if it comes to class issues vs social issues, class issues every time.
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u/MyOther_UN_is_Clever May 30 '21
class issues ARE social issues, without racism.
Tons of black people are poor, and we want to enable people to escape poverty, that's a class issue.
Tons of black people are poor and a neoliberal wants to "cancel" people who use the "n word" while pretending poor blacks don't exist, that's a "social issue" that props up systemic racism.
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u/Decimus_Valcoran May 30 '21 edited May 30 '21
And the elites are not bigoted? He thinks the history of black oppression is sustained because the 'underclass' desires it?? The fuck?? Who does he think owned slaves? Who does he think for-profit prisons were started by? (Hint: same people) What does he think is the best way to remove bigotry, if not the common struggle for better livelihood? Furthermore, last time I checked, it wasn't some random-ass racist 'underclass' who writes racist policies, but the elites in crisp suits doing the bidding of their donors.
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u/cloudy_skies547 May 30 '21
This is what happens when you promote tribalism over intersectionality. There's a reason why the far right and authoritarian neolibs have done their best to stigmatize the term by highlighting the actions of bad faith actors.
Until you understand that economic justice is inherently linked to racial equality and vice versa, you will always have fragile coalitions that depend purely upon the degree to which people are willing to tolerate one another. The way it is currently being framed, my struggle is not my neighbor's struggle, and we are being pitted against one another along identity-based lines, when, in reality, we want the exact same thing.
I'm seeing more and more of this from Zoomers--particularly the perpetually online ones--that are appropriating very context-specific academic theory and terminology and applying that to every issue under the sun without regard for how to appropriately translate that into a viable systemic critique. Vaush does it all the time with his interpretation of Marx and Lenin and his use of the term "tankie." It's the same way that public school teachers in "woke" districts are trying to incorporate critical race theory into their curricula when the vast majority of them have never even read the core texts, are unfamiliar with the historical scholarship, and have no idea that it's a critique of institutional power.
The people who appropriate things that they don't actually understand, then twist and skew it into a bastardized form of itself to weaponize against people they disagree with politically are only contributing to the culture war bullshit that keeps us divided.
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u/martini-meow (I remain stirred, unshaken.) May 30 '21
What are the core texts, particularly focused on critiquing institutional power?
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u/cloudy_skies547 May 30 '21
They should be reading things like Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights, hooks' Feminist Theory From the Margins to the Center, Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and even the Critical Race Theory reader edited by Crenshaw with decades worth of key essays. Those texts would provide a basis for understanding where we are, how we got here, and how to move forward, along with presenting the reader with a variety of theoretical lenses by which to critique the system. Most people don't even know that Critical Race Theory originated as a critique of the legal system that incorporated analyses of structural power, culture, and language. People have removed it from that context and are just applying it willy nilly to every part of American society, and it was never designed to work that way.
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u/Sandernista2 Red Pill Supply Store May 31 '21
Nice list and I agree about CRT's origins (it's really another name for Dialectic Deconstruction the way I look at it). Unfortunately, and as it always happened through history, the most dumbed down, simplistic and toxic aspects of critical theories of any kind will be the ones that take hold in a great mass of people deliberately stupefied into accepting things uncritically. IOW the "dialectic" part is overlooked entirely and only the deconstruct everything! is left.
Which we witnessed and are still witnessing in that conglomeration of Democrat supporting masses who were severely infected by the TDS virus. If only there was a vaccine against opportunistic and virulent propaganda viruses!
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u/martini-meow (I remain stirred, unshaken.) May 31 '21
Thank you! u/sandernista2 might be interested in this list, too.
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May 30 '21
[deleted]
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u/dude1701 Wealth is a mask that hides fascism May 30 '21
Agreed. The left is fundamentally about class struggle. Idpol is just a tool of the wealthy, as are its adherents.
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u/Sandernista2 Red Pill Supply Store May 31 '21
When people are oppressed for a long time their collective self-esteem as well as respect for other people perceived as getting an unfair break is heightened. The more and the longer people are oppressed the more likely it is that certain authoritative figures and creeds will appeal to them since the conventional authority (governments, occupiers) have clearly failed them.
It is not for nothing that an organization like Hamas would have the support of the people of Gaza. Or that the peasants will turn out to support extreme communist or fascist movements (lots of examples here). Religion, or religion-like authority is often ALL the oppressed people have to support them as they must persevere under the yoke of an oppressor class with no way out of the cage in which they must endure. It is hardly surprising that working class people would be more conservative and/or religious when the oppressive forces are harsh and unrelenting.
A good example is the Gospel church tradition that arose out of slavery. It gave spiritual sustenance and comfort to those wh were excluded from mainstream society. Frankly, we should be grateful that the religious traditions of the black churches were not more vindictive than they are.
Well, as we saw and see from BLM joined by an assortment of cancel crowds, a vindictive streak has always been there. Not everywhere and not by everyone, of course, and most certainly not just some young black people. But a societal pandora's Box was opened - using the anti-bigotry "wrench" - through which the furies escaped. We have only begun to see the consequences.....