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poor leftists talk about poverty, labor aristocrats get uncomfortable and insist that sociological classes aren’t materialist. “all that matters is that we’re working class - we’re all in this together”
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black leftists talk about racism, whites get uncomfortable and insist that they’re not personally part of the problem. “we mustn’t allow the bourgeois to divide the proletariat along racial lines - we’re all in this together”
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female leftists talk about patriarchy, men get uncomfortable and insist that it hurts them too. “this men vs women stuff is reductive anyway - we’re all in this together”
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third world leftists talk about imperialism, americoids get uncomfortable and insist that red white and blue lives matter too. “what happened to the international working class - we’re all in this together”
you don’t have to invite yourself to every form and experience of oppression. anyone with a baby’s consciousness of intersectionality ought to be capable of admitting when they have privilege
It seems unhelpful to frame this as “minority do good thing, majority do bad thing” when it would be so easy to just say “chauvinists” or something for the second group, which 99% of the time will be the corresponding majority members but isn’t essentializing and has some resilience against Candace Owen types.
I don’t think anything is being framed that way here. It’s just written in casual language. I think we can recognize when a person from a marginalized group is a reactionary like Candace Owens.
The problem with just saying “chauvinists” is that no one on hexbear or in the DSA thinks the word applies to them. The point of the post is that all white people, all men, etc., are exposed to privilege brainworms from cradle to grave, and we’re not necessarily aware of the brainworms we have absorbed, so when someone criticizes us we should shut the fuck up and listen and reflect, because it’s not a far-fetched criticism. Getting defensive and shouting people down because we’re sure we’re not chauvinists is what’s actually divisive.
…I keep neurotically editing the wording of this comment because I got stuck in some kind of obsessive loop, I’m going for a walk.
Loops are rough, I can sort of see how this would be a hazard for that with all the meta language.
Personally I guess I just get irritated by things that are written like they are a PSA but need to rely on charitable interpretation to make sense. The problem with not saying chauvinists is that, if we see things in purely identitarian terms like the original post does at face value, then when we are confronted by situations where the roles are reversed (and yes, this is a minority of situations, but perhaps more common than one might think), like a white, male leftist arguing against the chauvinism of a Candace Owen type, the lines of thinking here short-circuit. Simple deference is fine for casual relations but it’s not nearly as useful in grand proclamations because, if we actually accepted the proclamation, then we’ve kneecapped ourselves in a way similar to “progressive” liberals observably have, that latter case being the main reason Owens types have a career to start with. We cannot look only at what the speaker is but also at what they are saying.
it’s not easy to write a tightly worded PSA about a sensitive topic with a lot of tricky nuances, and I think sometimes it’s more important to just get something posted promptly in the moment while the topic is getting attention in the community, and then let people hash things out in the comments, hopefully converging toward understanding through dialog. Also, I hope that on hexbear most of us are on each others’ wavelengths enough not to assume someone’s asking for “blind deference” to any group or person.
But yeah I agree it’s one of the big challenges in communication, that sometimes discourse moves faster than understanding. In the worst cases you get a spiral of compounding misunderstandings and personal slights until people hate each other lol, the gap widens faster than communication can bridge it. But imo that’s why it’s so important for people to be patient, read between the lines, and ask for clarification instead of lashing out defensively. Communication is like trying to force your brain through a straw.
And sure, while I agree that we should never offer anyone blind deference, we should offer a fair bit of deference to people from marginalized groups, because they can see things the privileged are often blind to. They are looking at privilege from the outside, and it’s always easier to understand something from the outside. And we should offer even more deference to leftists from marginalized groups, i.e., the people who voice complaints on hexbear dot net. A communist who’s been posting here for months and written a lot of great, thoughtful comments in this thread is especially unlikely to be asking for blind deference. Not saying it’s wrong to ask for clarification though, quite the opposite, as long as there’s patient dialog.
To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone here of holding any position such as demanding blind deference, just that taking these statements at face value has problems.
Admittedly, the website does have a problem with being radlib and there are some people who have demanded blind deference in the past [“it’s cool to objectify women if you’re a lesbian!” etc.], but I don’t think this user is one of them or that this particularly intersects with those grievances that I whine about.