Lessons posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

Lessons posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

can we define what identity politics are here? are there non-bourgeois iterations of identity politics? when i think identity politics i automatically assume it's liberalism. is that incorrect?

like i just assume it to be the equivalent of fighting for the rights of gays in the military or something. i don't even think that causes a change in cultural perception of gays, it's more along the lines of how the civil rights movement gave blacks equal rights in the eyes of the law but their segregation rates and poverty levels remained identical to before that period. correct me if i'm wrong here.

this is wrong, not because of whatever baby finland is complaining about, but because society isn't divided up into "bourgeois liberalism" vs "authentic revolutionary struggle", that's a completely fallacious way of looking at the world. forget identity politics, in the sense you're talking about 95% of historical working class politics has been bourgeois liberalism.

ya i didn't mean to imply some kind of a false dichotomy here and be an arbiter of what's an "authentic revolutionary struggle" or whatever nonsense about marxist ideological purity. it was just a throw away comment asking for people to define what they meant when they talked about identity politics, what it is or what they're referring to by it. for me anyways, the term itself and when i see it used, carries a connotation of a movement coopted by capital and sold as a commodity of morality and being separated from issues of class/power disparity. not that the underlying issues are illegitimate or i'm dismissing them or anything like that

dunno i was just curious about the term, due to how it was being thrown around in the thread in a vague manner, serving as just an empty signifier

well i mean it's pretty trivial to find black or feminist groups that were socialists, unless you wanna be like "well the black panthers don't count as ID politics".

ok so a better question: what isn't identity politics then? if it ranges from goatstein posting rageface MRA comics, the KKK, to the black panthers, isn't that too vague to be meaningful in any respect? it's essentially an empty signifier for the subject to impart any meaning

tpaine posted:

to me identity politics is when you're such a boring person that you make your fetish, hobby, or religion the most important thing about you

and radical politics is when you have no fetish hobby or religion and make that the most important thing about you

Squalid posted:

Does class conflict qualify as a subset of Identity Politics? Or is that label only ever applied to Jocks vs Nerds synthetic/artificial identities and struggles?

I think Identity Politics is Trotskyism.

acephalousuniverse posted:

acknowledging the complexity of interactions btwn gender, race, sexuality, & class and the importance those changing interactions have on revolutionary struggle, dealt with in a serious and rigorous way grounded in actual history and actual critique

what does that mean though

Lessons posted:

what does that mean though

for example, if you think of a feminist critique of, say, women being unpaid for domestic work, which was a big issue for a lot of groups especially in the mid 20th century when most households were still single income, that would involve looking at the way that the shift from agrarian living, where having kids was in the family's interest due to having extra hands on the farm or whatev, to industrial-capitalist living, where proletarian women were basically providing future laborers for capitalists for free at great personal cost while remaining economically dependent on their husbands (and therefore their husbands' employers), then that would be to me a historically grounded critique which incorporates the perspectives and specific problems of women into class struggle.

compare that with "we need more women ceos on tv, and the big boobs in the manga i read make me uncomfortable, dont tell me these things arent important" etc. type of thing which is entirely rooted in shallow media criticism and consumer identity stuff

both of these things are arguably "identity politics," but big dummy idiots like to roll them together, sometimes they internalized hurf durf tumblr or whatever or for other reasons

babyfinland posted:

Squalid posted:

So have we established that identity politics are defined solely as something Those Fuckers we don't like believe? Anyone have something to add?

Squalid posted:

I love sports because nothing better demonstrates how quickly autochthonic identities can arise "interstitially" through the pores of existing society and begin actively aggregating social power within the new social body.

Up the Reds! Fuck the Greens!

holy shit you are a gay ass man

STFU Shakesville: Don't Even Go There With The Jewish Ancestors

stfushakesville:

Oh for God’s sake, Shakesville, do I really need to get into this, yes, I do.

OK, Melissa, guess what. You are not the first nor the fiftieth white woman (it’s always white women, I don’t know why, but I have some theories) to tell me that she’s sure that she has (always European) Jewish ancestors for no particular reason. If you start telling me about your emotional connection to Anne Frank and your high school production of “Fiddler”, you will have hit the trifecta of casual cultural appropriation. (Your friend’s Passover seder being totes fascinating, your ability to make great knaidlach, having dated a Jewish guy whose bubbe totally loved you, and a sense that you can bring peace to the Middle East if everyone will just listen to you and stop being mean to each other are other valid options).

I’d be nicer about this, except I’ve seen you rip people’s heads clean off their shoulders at the slightest hint of appropriation or unconscious privilege, and now you come out with this? Sorry. My culture is not available for you to have vague sad possessive feels about when it’s personally or politically convenient.

Now, about the politics: Thing is, this issue with Mormons baptizing Jews, especially Shoah victims, has been going on a long time, and there are issues, and there have been agreements, and some of those agreements were broken. And that pisses me right off.

But I have limited time for progressives who discovered this for the first time, and started wetting their pants over it solely because goddamn Mitt Romney was running for President. Anti-Semitism happens all the time, not just during presidential campaigns, and when some Republican politico says something, and if you aren’t interested then, I really don’t care that you’re interested when a Mormon is running for President on the Republican ticket and you hate his guts. This is not being an ally, this is exploiting the means at hand. And appropriation, did I mention the appropriation? Please, knock it the hell off.
8:50am
Shakespeare's Sistershakesfailshakesvillemelissa mcewan
Melissa as a Victim of Anti-Semitism
Melissa: ...Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, had been posthumously baptized by proxy in the Dominican Republic...
Princess R: As someone who fought to reclaim the Judaism my grandmother gave up to get out of Poland, that my mother denied and my grandmother only told me about when she was dying, I find this practice so reprehensible on so many levels. Consent, identity…and it does not escape me that Judaism is a matrilineal religion, which I can’t help but think feeds

because it's responsible for the atomized and prissy version of Newspeak we're getting lumbered with

HenryKrinkle posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

here is why identity politics suck

http://shakesville.tumblr.com/

because it's responsible for the atomized and prissy version of Newspeak we're getting lumbered with

yeah we've already distinguished tumblr slap fights as counter-productive and objectively stupid.

oh have we already had that part of the conversation in this conversation we've had about fifty times a year for going on five years

babyfinland posted:

HenryKrinkle posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

here is why identity politics suck

http://shakesville.tumblr.com/

because it's responsible for the atomized and prissy version of Newspeak we're getting lumbered with

yeah we've already distinguished tumblr slap fights as counter-productive and objectively stupid.

oh have we already had that part of the conversation in this conversation we've had about fifty times a year for going on five years

well this time it was pretty productive as we've finally been able to define identity politics as a thing, that exists. and that it is something.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

because it's responsible for the atomized and prissy version of Newspeak we're getting lumbered with

the worst is when people say "I just." and "I can't." and "I can't even."" trying to convey momentary dumbfoundedness through text which doesnt work because with text you can edit what you say and have to hit post before anyone "hears" anything. but its also cool because of how literally they're saying nothing at all when they do that