I figured that was most of this forum. Even the people who are clearly minority comrades say this to me basically " all forms of oppression must be fought back against, now, but class is the primary mode of oppression"
If you don’t put class first I think you’re a rad lib no matter what you tell me.
Not putting class first is literally how you get this killer Mike landlord black capitalism shit. Yass kweening raytheon’s first female CEO, etc.
Don’t @ me with a bunch of words I don’t care if class isn’t the center of your framing you’re the same as some half nazi petty bourg fuckkl to me
The issue is that “class first” has a super broad meaning. There are people who say “class first” to mean that bourgeoisie identity politics are not liberation (ie Raytheon’s first female CEO). And there are people who say “class first” as a pretense to tell the uppity minorities to fuck off and stop “splitting the movement” over their issues.
This is the things that bugs me the most about class reduction as an idea. It is so specifically used against libs that It feels like a psyop to me.
Yea I mean im not advocating stupidpol like abandonment of other issues for sure
I figured as much. When I’m around libs I’ll push the class issue and just risk getting called a class reductionist if they’ve got intense brainworms. When I’m around comrades, I feel like the nuances and pitfalls are worth pointing out for lurkers. But I absolutely agree with you that someone celebrating the bourgeois-ification of a minority group is super sus radlib shit
A fair perspective so long as you recognize that all fighting all forms of oppression is still important.
That is what class first means. Fighting for healthcare helps every marginalized person at the same time for example. So by opposing a bourgeoisie interest you are doing the work of uniting thr workers of the world and all that.
Right, but I still think fighting racism and fascism head on is something that’s good praxis as well.
I think to put base and superstructure into a hierarchy is to ignore their dialectical nature.
It’s really that simple. But also, when I heard that a few years ago I thought it was nonsense jargon, so here’s an explanation for anyone reading who had that sentence slide right off their brain.
We’re obsessed with thinking of everything as hierarchical. Even in a group of two things or people, many of us find our brains trying to figure out which one is dominant over the other. The Marxist concepts of base and superstructure are often seen through this lens. The economic base is everything about a society that involves its people’s relationship to the means of production. The superstructure is everything else. Culture, politics, media, religion, etc. The relationship between these two parts of society is like this: One part shapes the other part, and in return the shaped part protects its shaper. So for example, the economic base of exploitation of people in the color in the US gave rise to the cultural construction of race as we know it, but that same construct protects the economic order of capitalist oppression via white supremacy.
So which is the shaper and which is the protector? Base or superstructure? The key insight relevant to this conversation is that both parts perform both functions. That’s the dialectical portion. So to run with the racial example, the economic conditions of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide in the US were themselves made possible by racial pseudoscience which arose to justify colonialism. The base and superstructure push and pull one another this way.
There may be people reading this who have a lot to say about me implying that base and superstructure perform both functions equally, but I specifically didn’t say that because it’s generally not true. But I do believe that balance has changed in the west since the time of Marx and Engels.
I think of these systems like a river. You have the water and you have the riverbed. They’re a dynamic system and if you want to redirect the river, it doesn’t make sense to move the water’s path without modifying the bed as well.
I know it. I intentionally don’t state which is which, but I really wish I had a better physical analogy. Until then, I’m gonna stick with the river.
i think an important distinction also is that the superstructure is the institutions of culture, politics, media, religion, education and family on the one hand, and the repressive legal state apparatus on the other.
the realm of ideology is generated by the institutions of the superstructure which reflects back on the superstructure as the superstructure reflects back on the base.
you might be interested in reading Althusser’s work on overdetermination as it pertains exactly to what you wrote, and explains the meaning of “the base determines the superstructure in the last instance”.
They need to be addressed together and, imo, not putting one before the other
I notice the other forms of oppression pop up as discussions THE MOMENT there is ANY progress, and it all instantly stalls out.
I swear it’s a CIA move.
Some of it is that some groups have a long history of being thrown under the bus as a sacrifice to make that progress sustainable. But the feds exacerbate this intensely.
There are people who are good at validating the concerns of marginalized groups while still rallying around class interests and doing coalition building. Feds tend to use them for target practice.
There are ways to have difficult discussions in a respectful and safe way which focuses on education and liberation. These patterns of discussion are coincidentally the polar opposite of how social media trains people to engage in arguments. The same social media whose monopoly status is protected by the feds in exchange for cheap mass surveillance and readily available sockpuppets for psyops.
Fictional example - as I don’t want to accuse real people of shit right now.
Cop City protests finally get some major media attention and coverage - 5 minutes in, someone starts talking about oil pipelines.
All the struggles are the same struggle, but knowing when it’s time to connect the dots, and when it’s time to push on a point are very important. Mostly it’s an in-person thing as online I can just scroll past.
