Anti recesm
Here Adolph Reed critiques anti-racism and this exert from the piece jumped out to me:
"In the antiracist political project white supremacy/racism is—like “terrorism”—an amorphous, ideological abstraction whose specific content exists largely in the eyes of the beholder. Therefore, like antiterrorism, antiracism’s targets can be porous and entirely arbitrary; this means that, also like antiterrorism, the struggle can never be won."
And though from the title of this article alone, the nuanced talking point I quoted is going to descend into "people who are passionate about antiracism are neoliberals".
Which is the very culture war that the right-wing billionaires and PMCs are itching to push, and also the reason so many billionaires fund news joints like Fox and NYpost who pump out 'war on woke' articles at total production capacity.
When expressing compassion for peers, and ones close to our hearts it becomes a crime in the view of the Liberal 2.0 and thus you've got a very pronounced problem.
*The working classes are not really some socially homogenous group, they're fractured between white-dominated towns and small cities and multicultural cities. The moment you rally against people expressing social solidarity with the people they care about at what are commonly abhorrent views then you're alienating a significant portion of your base.
This division between town-cities/rural-urban, wholesome/woke is constantly being shoved down our throats in the US due to it perfectly dividing worker demographics in our modern non-proportional and local-community-seat voting system apparatus.
The reaction to idpol is to once again focus on class and state constantly how such things are being weaponized to cause division. One solution to this per say, is not to condemn every single person with a social conscience as this type of neoliberal spy or agitator opposed to the cause or at worst, be PC about doing so.
Such spaces for witch hunts that go after woke neoliberals tend to be recruiting grounds for economic goals of the rightoids and is also the reason that a lot of the content in said spaces seems like it was commissioned personally by Rupert Murdoch.
*This is pretty important, "the wokes" aren't only the coastal PMC, and their working-class coherts do have actual problems and issues that are not being addressed in the correct way
We can bring ourselves to understand that rural chud (R.W) ideology is lame-o and yet know there is still completely existing problems, but just as we bring up the other side of this cultural divide they lose their marbles for real. Personally, I believe that this is a variant of culture-war spite politics not that different to how radlibs feel on the subject of the "white trash".
Working class people are now for all intents and purposes the poor. They live their lives paycheck to paycheck. There was for a long time this lumpen group, yet it’s become bigger and will continue to get bigger
The poor don’t vote in huge amounts. In fact the more money you make the more it likely that you are to even vote. So the woke people aren’t some big majority in the urban working class themselves
Rich people are more than not likely to be the leaders of political activism.
But besides the fact of the rich PMC's being behind the "liberal 2.0" push or the rich petits bourgeois driving the "conservative" push, it's pretty much a given that on both sides there are working class people very much invested in either of these narratives.
I'd argue lots of poor people are at least somewhat woke if not more so, it has got to be for the Democrats to routinely get past 80 or even 90 percent of the vote in the urban areas, and I think it is basically dishonest to paint liberal 2.0s as exclusively rich while we give conservatives (who do in fact have a higher average income) a free pass.
A big part of those voters are lesser evilists and might not wholey sign off on everything the Democrats do or say. In a poll that was conducted in Minneapolis not long ago, on the abolition of police , it was more white people who voted for it than black people.
Lesser evilism is the cornerstone of the two party system. I mean, why would poor steelworkers in the Midwest cast their vote for the free market party if they don't consider it a lesser evil?
Lesser-evilism occurs in both political parties, and it does too coexist with aforementioned "true believers". And tbh, the fact of the matter is that the Democrats are more than capable of obtaining a high of a margin because they do in fact mention actual problems, even if they ultimately don't do anything to solve them, similarly to the way that Donald Trump's rhetoric won the midwest for him
Well, there isn’t really any other option to vote against free markets. Neoliberalism has been the accepted framework for the policy of the government since the 1970s when the post war era of Keynsianism ended
Unfortunately politics is a game of show, and until pretty recently people still believed that the Democrats were the party of unions, etc. What people say and how they say it is more meaningful than what they do. It's how Donald Trump gets away with ruling similar to an establishment Republican and yet still having "populists" support him
That big unions support the Democrats without much criticism or blue collar policy demands for labor shows me that these institutions were reformed under the neoliberal system to become more of an extra layer of HR for companies than being real militant labor movements. They have all but fled the card check.
The watered down unions still giving support to the Democrats gives the illusion off of "pro-worker" for some, the underlying nature of the 2-party system is the reason this is the cast. The point is both wokeness and right-populism are quite retarded, but underlying both of them are actual problems that the Democrats and their few leftist supporters needs to address in a class-first way. Acting like either of these groups of working class people are irredeemable PMC's or petit bourgeois will be a dead end and just sow more division.
Compassion for those close to us is pretty motte-and-bailey. If that entire woko-haram was that for all intents and purposes, noone would be against it
Saying to people that they're wrong, or even giving them evidence that proves they are wrong, usually only strengthens their beliefs. We should certainly be nice to people, meet them wherever they are, and ask them about why they believe what they believe instead of confronting them head on and telling them that they're wrong.
But we at the same time shouldn't forget that any of woko haram kind - with good ntentions or not - is carrying water for capitalism by it dividing ordinary people.
The urban rural animosity thing is a big big issue for left leaning politics.
Adolph Reed and that person who wrote the anti-anti-racism work from CUNY should collabarate, throw Walter Benn Michaels in that collaboration for good measure furthermore.
When Dr Ibram Kendi says that “capitalism is essentially racist and racism is essentially capitalist” I can't help he has no viable solution. He goes on about antiracist policies but wouldn’t those policies be useless if it’s still a capitalist economy? Does he desire for an entirely new kind of government?
I think that a more nuanced stance on the relations between class and race, definitely between the capitalist mode of production and racism, is Stuart Hall’s essay “Race and Societies Structured in Dominance”. He spends much time articulating the relationship that occurs between race and class in conversation with Karl Marx and various New Left authors.
Dr Ibram Kendi's socialism is not the type of socialism of socialisms past. Dr Kendi falls each time far too short of arriving at a genuinely radical (radical in a good way) politics and instead he recommends a hell of a lot of statist interventions which are fully compatible with capitalism/liberalism (like his Departments of Anti Racism)
On Dr Kendi's end, it would appear that developing Departments of targeted egalitarianism is the method to fight the horrors of contemporary capitalism. Such policies are decidedly not socialism (CLR James has a compelling work entitled "The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States which shows the limits of these type of conceptions). Furthermore it does absolutely nothing to make sure that there is no "underclass", it merely ensures that it contains a relatively equal proportion of people from all id groups.
It's somewhat disappointing each time to see support for this type of statist ideologues become so popular, but that's the sad state of our current political state
Dr Kendi is essentially proposing a kind of neoliberalism-preserving antiracism.
I also agree with this video from Jacobin "Antiracism Can’t Overcome Capitalism" by Professor Adoph Reed and WBM
Noel Ignatiev was critical of mere “anti-racism” efforts exactly due to the fact the those efforts “admit the natural existence of ‘races’ even while opposing social distinctions among them”.
Instead, his abolitionist path that we should take for making our world more loving was based off of the realization that “race itself is a product of social discrimination; so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail”.
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