Before I launch off on a rant that few will read and fewer will read in good faith, I want to post this right up front because it is
hilarious:
Former President Trump's new social network might be in hot water before it even launches. Mastodon, a free social media framework, alleges that Truth
techcrunch.com
Methodical Management
Race and class dynamics are different. You're usually the first person to caution against using race and class analysis interchangeably.
White people and black people can, theoretically at least, live together with true peace, with true justice. Obviously, American and World History has shown white people failing miserably in actually making that a reality but it's possible to have a world of racial identities and peaceful coexistance (and eventually the sociological eradication of race as a concept would eventually follow, ideally).
By contrast, the proletariat and bourgeoisie literally cannot both exist and there also be a peaceful and just world. Either the two classes will fight or, the bourgeoisie will unleash part of the working class onto the other along lines of race, gender, nationality, religion etc.
So, IMO, you can't substitute race for class analysis even in service of making a point. IMO, race can be wound down as a sociological distinction, class cannot.
Now, I agree with you (and everyone else in this discussion) that every worker whose lot in life as been diminished by the machinations of capital, should choose the leftmost political option available to them. That fact that white workers have, far more often than any other racial category of workers, gravitated to culture war and therefore white supremacy and patriarchy in response to diminished material comfort and security, is tragic and it literally imperils every other worker and eventually life on this planet. I don't think anyone is happy to see downwardly mobile whites embracing reactionary politics.
The crux of this disagreement seems to be how much of this is material and how much of it is moral. IMO, it's like -Red- said, like violent crime. We don't want it but we can better defeat it by understanding its material role rather than throwing up our hands and saying that its due to bad morals. This doesn't mean that material explanations of bad behavior (and in this specific case of whites supporting the GOP, downright violent and genocidal behavior) are excuses for that behavior.
Your impulse to play peacemaker is well-intended, but you're both-siding this.
Red tried to shoe polish Rusty's position into "Many black people have adapted to evolving social and economic realities and have achieved great success, so I'm not gonna make excuses for the ones that went the opposite way," then attempted to distort my response into, "painting folks as irredeemable racists." Attempting to establish an equivalence between this and what Rusty and I have
actually said is to accept a biased, distorted framing.
Methodical Management
Methodical Management
Race and class dynamics are different. You're usually the first person to caution against using race and class analysis interchangeably.
You appear to have entirely missed my point in critiquing his substitution strategy by applying it to his own argument.
Similarly, who is “throwing up their hands” or faulting “morals” alone? To the extent that we cannot defeat that which we do not understand, it’s time to stop repeating the mistakes of those who have historically chosen to regard social inequality as primarily, if not exclusively, an economic problem and proponents of an unjust status quo as self-defeating, ignorant dupes who need only be reminded of the boot on their own neck to liberate those who could then assist them in vanquishing their mutual oppressor. Were that the right approach, it probably would’ve worked by now.
Most Americans simultaneously suffer and benefit from different sources of social inequality, which illustrates the interconnectedness of these issues, and a key component of their obduracy.
Either the two classes will fight or, the bourgeoisie will unleash part of the working class onto the other along lines of race, gender, nationality, religion etc.
Careful, this certainly reads as though you think every other form of inequality is but a tendril of the Capitalist leviathan.
While we can agree that exploitation and the hoarding of resources are inherently immoral, I think you’re leaving something out in this analysis.
I need not reiterate my skepticism about cishet White men casting their primary experience with injustice as the “ur-inequality” from which all other injustices are descended.
Proponents of class primacy are hardly alone in their ability to formulate an argument as to the uniqueness of their focal point.
It is possible - though increasingly unlikely - to ascend from one social class to another. Unlike in other societies, though, America’s “one drop rule” seeks to preclude the possibility of transcending or improving one’s racial status, hence the comparison to caste. (And race is not the only difference that has been conceptualized as a natural hierarchy.) Purely from an historical standpoint, men were oppressing women long before they were practicing usury.
It’s one thing to analyze the unique qualities of each form of oppression. It’s quite another to
rank them.
No one is denying the significance of class. Centering it serves less to unite than to exclude, by creating a hierarchy of hierarchies.
Your broader point, that no one designated as prey may safely coexist among predators, is not a predicament exclusive to economic class.
White people and black people can, theoretically at least, live together with true peace, with true justice.
It is not that varying racial groups
cannot amicably coexist, (though the categories as we know them were created as a boundary for moral/ethical consideration, to delineate between free and unfree, person and non-person, or person and
property), it is that it is
demonstrably unsafe to live among those who consider you and your kind subhuman. That is, if nothing else, a foundational theme of this continent’s history. There is no “true peace” or “true justice” in such a society - whatever its relative material parity.
So it is not entirely accurate to suggest that class, and only class, is the one difference that can
only be cured through its eradication. There are ideological differences that are inherently incompatible with our mutual coexistence as well, and these, too, must be laid low.
While you would rightly reject the farcical notion that inequality persists because we are too vindictive towards the 1%, preventing them for marshaling their considerable resources to ensure our planetary survival (to whatever extent they still remain terrestrially attached) we must likewise dismiss - without compromise - the insulting premise that inequality persists because progressives are
not nice enough to White people.
I don’t need tone policing on this issue.
Anger and skepticism in this situation are
fully justified, and not a matter of “reverse prejudice.” To hold someone accountable is not to consider them intrinsically “irredeemable.” For whom if not White people does racism serve? Our systems of inequality exist for the sake their beneficiaries. They exist to define and justify subordinate classes. There is, thus, a collective responsibility - and culpability - among those who reap these bloody harvests, even among those who oppose their own unwelcome receipt.
The idea that we can just “buy them off” fundamentally misunderstands the value of these systems to their beneficiaries, and the appeal of the “counter-offer.” As has often been observed: to those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
As we’ve seen time and time again, you cannot end racism by plying White people with the promise of jobs and infrastructure when White privilege is the nation’s longest running jobs and infrastructure program.
There are those who resent and reject the very premise and project of equality. Two generations ago, they decided that they’d rather close their public schools and fill their public pools than open them up to everyone.
THAT is what we’re up against.
As such, we cannot afford to 1) overstate the quality of life improvement conferred by the material benefits on offer or 2) underestimate the non-monetary value of status - which, not coincidentally, serves as one of the most common uses of wealth, as expressed even while meeting basic subsistence needs.
This is not just a material issue. It is social. It is psychological.
It must be treated as such.
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if you need a liberal to argue with
-Red-
RustyShackleford
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