***Official Political Discussion Thread***

RustyShackleford said:
p



If explain my positions numerous times, and still get greeted with implication that it is something else, when why should I want to go down that rabbit hole again? Huh?

If it is problematic for me to point out that a group that routinely fails to build the coalition needed to get anything done, let alone their policy agenda (yet still want to lecture about how to build coalitions to get things done) might have it a lil wrong, then cool, I'll be problematic.

If it is problematic to point out that there is a different way to look at identity and the power it has in politics, beyond the common framing centrist, leftist, conservatives and many liberals use. Then cool, I'll be problematic.

I'll happily be that.

So go ahead and point out how you feel liberal have it wrong, ascribe that to all liberals (paint with a wide brush after you take issue with me supposedly doing that), then drop that position at my feet if you want to.

But just know I am no mood to engage with that **** right now.

Some part of me wants to expand on my point in detail, but another part of me has the feeling it would be pointless.

So yeah, it is whatever to me.
Click to expand...
Your original post that I responded to stated that "everyone that bemoans identity politics," regardless of their politics or reasons, "can piss off." You said that "Most of these critics never want to engage with the subject in a productive manner" and then went on to call out "the people that claim they want to build a multiracial coalition to fight for the greater good, but feel that they only way to do so it embrace a form of politics that makes white people feel comfortable"—in other words, a[nother] clear shot at leftists.

Okay, cool. So I thought I would engage with the subject by responding to exactly what you posted, by pointing out that your generalization that leftists critique identity politics because they want to make white people feel comfortable does not capture why, as a leftist, I came to critique identity politics—which was for a reason basically in diametrical opposition to your generalization. On a directly related note, you also said that those critics "always frame" identity politics "as something negative that doesn't allow the truth to come through." I pointed out that this is exactly the case with respect to the issues confronting poor and working-class black folks, which, again, may have been a different critique than you were anticipating but which is also why I felt it was particularly important to voice it.

I was responding to your points about identity politics specifically, not ascribing to you what I think "all liberals" do or don't do or what your political positions are more generally. If you don't want to engage, that's cool, but I was also responding to you bemoaning a lack of engagement. Admittedly, my pointed response maybe wasn't the "productive manner" you alluded to, but then again your post opened by telling everyone who disagreed with you to piss off :lol:

All that said, I'm open to whatever kind of dialogue you or anyone else might feel is productive on these issues, because they have been one version of an ongoing source of disagreement in here and I think hashing them out is essential for thinking about how best to proceed politically. That said, if you or others don't want to engage, that's fine.

...

Moving away from our exchange and looking at the Klein article, the main takeaway is that the percentage of white Democrats who believe that "racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead" and that the "country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights as whites" has increased substantially over the last 25 and 10 years or so, respectively, while the percentage of white Republicans who believe these things has stayed basically the same or regressed. These trends are interpreted as a "real reason for hope" regarding "issues of racial justice."

To the extent that the shifts in attitudes described in the article reflect a shift away from explanations of inequality that hinge on notions of black pathology (which was the likely alternative), those shifts are, indeed, a good thing. But in my mind they are also a vast oversimplification and, really, an obfuscation of much more complex dynamics that produce and reproduce inequality in our society.

Racism itself doesn't explain phenomena like poverty, joblessness, police violence, incarceration, etc. These phenomena are produced by a political economy predicated on intense inequality and attempts by powerful interests to manage that inequality. This cannot be overemphasized. Does racism make black folks more likely to be on the losing end of these inequities? Of course. But it doesn't explain those phenomena themselves, nor does it explain each instance of black folks experiencing those adverse phenomena. It only accounts for, at most, the disparity between the rates at which these social outcomes happen to black folks vs. the rates at which they happen to white folks. And even this is a vast oversimplification, since the logic of capitalist social reproduction means that even if all racism were to magically disappear tomorrow, the vast majority of poor black folks would still be poor next year, ten years from now, and when they die.

These are at least some of the issues associated with the assumptions undergirding identity politics that have to do strictly with inequality as experienced by black folks. And that was the point I was raising in my initial response—identity politics fails in its diagnosis of the issues facing black folks themselves, to say nothing of whites or other groups.

These shortcomings mirror themselves in the generally proposed solutions to "racial inequality." I have asked this a number of times in here: What does "racial inequality" mean, exactly, other than the disparity in social outcomes between blacks (and other people of color) and whites? And what does "racial justice" mean, exactly, other than the eradication of those disparities? I have not gotten any indication in here or in anything else that I've read within the context of identity politics discourse that these terms are understood to mean anything substantially different from this. So the best care scenario within this political vision is to eradicate all disparities that fall along lines of ascriptive identity (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). But this kind of politics doesn't eradicate the actual adverse phenomena themselves—on the contrary, it accepts them as a matter of course that we should concern ourselves with only to the extent that various forms of discrimination might make some people more likely to experience them.

Do I think that you agree with this vision, Rusty? No. But I'm trying to point out that this is the logical endgame of the identity politics framework: "Equal Opportunity Inequality." And I am sure that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the DNC donor class, probably most of the CBC, the people at the Ford Foundation, the talking heads at MSNBC, and many "black leaders"—all of whom are on board with identity politics—have exactly this kind of outcome in mind. In fact, most of these folks want nothing more than for police violence (and whatever else) to be seen as an issue of racism and not an issue of inequality, so that the solutions can be wearing Kente cloth and taking a knee, publicly testifying about the evils of white supremacy, and tinkering around with technocratic police policies to "increase diversity" and "reduce bias," instead of dealing with the downward distribution of power and resources.

If anyone else has other thoughts on any of this, though, I'm all ears.
 
red mpls said:
Your original post that I responded to stated that "everyone that bemoans identity politics," regardless of their politics or reasons, "can piss off." You said that "Most of these critics never want to engage with the subject in a productive manner" and then went on to call out "the people that claim they want to build a multiracial coalition to fight for the greater good, but feel that they only way to do so it embrace a form of politics that makes white people feel comfortable"—in other words, a[nother] clear shot at leftists.

Okay, cool. So I thought I would engage with the subject by responding to exactly what you posted, by pointing out that your generalization that leftists critique identity politics because they want to make white people feel comfortable does not capture why, as a leftist, I came to critique identity politics—which was for a reason basically in diametrical opposition to your generalization. On a directly related note, you also said that those critics "always frame" identity politics "as something negative that doesn't allow the truth to come through." I pointed out that this is exactly the case with respect to the issues confronting poor and working-class black folks, which, again, may have been a different critique than you were anticipating but which is also why I felt it was particularly important to voice it.

I was responding to your points about identity politics specifically, not ascribing to you what I think "all liberals" do or don't do or what your political positions are more generally. If you don't want to engage, that's cool, but I was also responding to you bemoaning a lack of engagement. Admittedly, my pointed response maybe wasn't the "productive manner" you alluded to, but then again your post opened by telling everyone who disagreed with you to piss off :lol:

All that said, I'm open to whatever kind of dialogue you or anyone else might feel is productive on these issues, because they have been one version of an ongoing source of disagreement in here and I think hashing them out is essential for thinking about how best to proceed politically. That said, if you or others don't want to engage, that's fine.

...

Moving away from our exchange and looking at the Klein article, the main takeaway is that the percentage of white Democrats who believe that "racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead" and that the "country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights as whites" has increased substantially over the last 25 and 10 years or so, respectively, while the percentage of white Republicans who believe these things has stayed basically the same or regressed. These trends are interpreted as a "real reason for hope" regarding "issues of racial justice."

To the extent that the shifts in attitudes described in the article reflect a shift away from explanations of inequality that hinge on notions of black pathology (which was the likely alternative), those shifts are, indeed, a good thing. But in my mind they are also a vast oversimplification and, really, an obfuscation of much more complex dynamics that produce and reproduce inequality in our society.

Racism itself doesn't explain phenomena like poverty, joblessness, police violence, incarceration, etc. These phenomena are produced by a political economy predicated on intense inequality and attempts by powerful interests to manage that inequality. This cannot be overemphasized. Does racism make black folks more likely to be on the losing end of these inequities? Of course. But it doesn't explain those phenomena themselves, nor does it explain each instance of black folks experiencing those adverse phenomena. It only accounts for, at most, the disparity between the rates at which these social outcomes happen to black folks vs. the rates at which they happen to white folks. And even this is a vast oversimplification, since the logic of capitalist social reproduction means that even if all racism were to magically disappear tomorrow, the vast majority of poor black folks would still be poor next year, ten years from now, and when they die.

These are at least some of the issues associated with the assumptions undergirding identity politics that have to do strictly with inequality as experienced by black folks. And that was the point I was raising in my initial response—identity politics fails in its diagnosis of the issues facing black folks themselves, to say nothing of whites or other groups.

These shortcomings mirror themselves in the generally proposed solutions to "racial inequality." I have asked this a number of times in here: What does "racial inequality" mean, exactly, other than the disparity in social outcomes between blacks (and other people of color) and whites? And what does "racial justice" mean, exactly, other than the eradication of those disparities? I have not gotten any indication in here or in anything else that I've read within the context of identity politics discourse that these terms are understood to mean anything substantially different from this. So the best care scenario within this political vision is to eradicate all disparities that fall along lines of ascriptive identity (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). But this kind of politics doesn't eradicate the actual adverse phenomena themselves—on the contrary, it accepts them as a matter of course that we should concern ourselves with only to the extent that various forms of discrimination might make some people more likely to experience them.

Do I think that you agree with this vision, Rusty? No. But I'm trying to point out that this is the logical endgame of the identity politics framework: "Equal Opportunity Inequality." And I am sure that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the DNC donor class, probably most of the CBC, the people at the Ford Foundation, the talking heads at MSNBC, and many "black leaders"—all of whom are on board with identity politics—have exactly this kind of outcome in mind. In fact, most of these folks want nothing more than for police violence (and whatever else) to be seen as an issue of racism and not an issue of inequality, so that the solutions can be wearing Kente cloth and taking a knee, publicly testifying about the evils of white supremacy, and tinkering around with technocratic police policies to "increase diversity" and "reduce bias," instead of dealing with the downward distribution of power and resources.

If anyone else has other thoughts on any of this, though, I'm all ears.
Click to expand...
Nah. I'll pass

Someone else can engage. I because I feel it would be pointless if I do. Your post further convinces me on that.

I can feel that even if I spell out completely different vision of what I am talking about, and I know in a few weeks or months if I make another criticism of leftist, the arguments of others are gonna be put at my feet to answer for.

So yeah, why ****ing bother again.

-By the way, if you know Klein's work, you are selling him way short.
 
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Mark Antony said:
Mitch should just get the shroud type masks that cover your neck too.
Click to expand...

main-qimg-d6eafabcbe354233e4bed138a367cea6
 
Brahs, another article I feel you should read...

Beyond ‘White Fragility’
If you want to let freedom ring, hammer on economic injustice.
Jamelle Bouie
By Jamelle Bouie

Since it emerged seven years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement has produced a sea change in attitudes, politics and policy.

In 2016, 43 percent of Americans supported Black Lives Matter and its claims about the criminal justice system; now, it’s up to 67 percent, with 60 percent support among white Americans, compared with 40 percent four years ago. Whereas Democratic politicians once stumbled over the issue, now even Republicans are falling over themselves to say that “black lives matter.” And where the policy conversation was formerly focused on body cameras and chokehold bans, now mainstream outlets are debating and taking seriously calls to demilitarize and defund police departments or to abolish them outright.

But the Black Lives Matter platform isn’t just about criminal justice. From the start, activists have articulated a broad, inclusive vision for the entire country. This, in fact, has been true of each of the nation’s major movements for racial equality. Among black Americans and their Radical Republican allies, Reconstruction — which was still ongoing as of 150 years ago — was as much a fight to fundamentally reorder Southern economic life as it was a struggle for political inclusion. The struggle against Jim Crow, likewise, was also a struggle for economic equality and the transformation of society.

“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “A Testament of Hope”:
It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.
Click to expand...
Our society was built on the racial segmentation of personhood. Some people were full humans, guaranteed non-enslavement, secured from expropriation and given the protection of law, and some people — blacks, Natives and other nonwhites — were not. That unequal distribution of personhood was an economic reality as well. It shaped your access to employment and capital; determined whether you would be doomed to the margins of labor or given access to its elevated ranks; marked who might share in the bounty of capitalist production and who would most likely be cast out as disposable.

In our society, in other words, the fight for equal personhood can’t help but also be a struggle for economic justice. And what we see, past and present, is how that fight against the privileges and distinctions of race can also lay the foundations for a broader assault on the privileges and distinctions of class.

As soon as the Civil War came to a close, it was clear there could be no actual freedom for the formerly enslaved without a fundamental transformation of economic relations. “We must see that the freedman are established on the soil, and that they may become proprietors,” Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, wrote in March 1865. “The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces.” Likewise, said the Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens in September 1865, “The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost.” The foundations of their institutions, he continued, “must be broken up and re-laid, or all of our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.”

Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, would immediately undermine any means to this end, as he restored defeated Confederates to citizenship and gave them free rein to impose laws, like the Black Codes, which sought to reestablish the economic and social conditions of slavery. But Republicans in Congress were eventually able to wrest control of Reconstruction from the administration, and just as importantly, black Americans were actively taking steps to secure their political freedom against white reactionary opposition. Working through the Union Army, postwar Union Leagues and the Republican Party, freed and free blacks worked toward a common goal of political equality. And once they secured something like it, they set out to try as much as possible to affect that economic transformation.

“Public schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were established for the first time or received increased funding,” the historian Eric Foner wrote in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.” “South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants.”

For blacks and Radical Republicans, Reconstruction was an attempt to secure political rights for the sake transforming the entire society. And its end had as much to do with the reaction of property and capital owners as it did with racist violence. “The bargain of 1876,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America,”
was essentially an understanding by which the Federal Government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the South, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands.
Click to expand...
Out of that, he continued, “has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up.”

Du Bois was writing in the 1930s. A quarter-century later, black Americans in the South would launch a movement to unravel Jim Crow repression and economic exploitation. And as that movement progressed and notched victories against segregation, it became clear that the next step was to build a coalition against the privileges of class, since the two were inextricably tied together. The Memphis sanitation workers who asked Martin Luther King Jr. to support their strike in 1968 were black, set against a white power structure in the city. Their oppression as black Americans and subjugation as workers were tied together. Unraveling one could not be accomplished without unraveling the other.

All of this relates back to the relationship between race and capitalism. To end segregation — of housing, of schools, of workplaces — is to undo one of the major ways in which labor is exploited, caste established and the ideologies of racial hierarchy sustained. And that, in turn, opens possibilities for new avenues of advancement. The old labor slogan “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!” contains more than a little truth about the necessary conditions for economic justice. That this unity is fairly rare in American history is a testament to how often these movements have “either advocated, capitulated before, or otherwise failed to oppose racism at one or more critical junctures in their history,” as Robert L. Allen and Pamela P. Allen note in their 1974 study of racism and social reform movements.

Which brings us back to the present. The activists behind the Black Lives Matter movement have always connected its aims to working-class, egalitarian politics. The platform of the Movement for Black Lives, as it is formally known, includes demands for universal health care, affordable housing, living wage employment and access to education and public transportation. Given the extent to which class shapes black exposure to police violence — it is poor and working class black Americans who are most likely to live in neighborhoods marked by constant police surveillance — calls to defund and dismantle existing police departments are a class demand like any other.

But while the movement can’t help but be about practical concerns, the predominating discourse of belief and intention overshadows those stakes: too much concern with “white fragility” and not enough with wealth inequality. The challenge is to bridge the gap; to show new supporters that there’s far more work to do than changing the way we police; to channel their sympathy into a deeper understanding of the problem at hand.

To put a final point of emphasis on the potential of the moment, I’ll leave you with this. In a 1963 pamphlet called “The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook,” the activist and laborer James Boggs argued for the revolutionary potential of the black struggle for civil rights. “The strength of the Negro cause and its power to shake up the social structure of the nation,” Boggs wrote, “comes from the fact that in the Negro struggle all the questions of human rights and human relationships are posed.” That is because it is a struggle for equality “in production, in consumption, in the community, in the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transportation, in social activity, in government, and indeed in every sphere of American life.”
Click to expand...
 
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whywesteppin said:
tough call. we could get all the MAGAs to rock masks if they were allowed to wear these publicly.

to be clear, Coal Gang has ALWAYS worn masks and we don't see what the big deal is.


1593297097942.png
Click to expand...
I must say I have always marveled how days in the coal mine have the same effect to someone's skin tone as a Domicaina baseball player standing in the outfield for a few seasons.

:smokin
 
There is no point in engaging. When you get told that you’re adjacent to white supremacy for stuff like: being a Marxist, supporting Bernie Sanders and wanting his coalition to be larger, suggesting that corporate America wants to co opt the language of racial justice, and calling the coup in Bolivia a coup.

It’s especially galling when people take pot shots at your ideology without identifying their own. The most obnoxious person in any political discourse is a person who thinks they are above ideology and they reach their conclusions through pure reason. Everyone has an ideology and those who claim they don’t are the most ideological.

Now if you’re a progressive liberal and you don’t want to be lumped in with centrists, I understand. I have conflated those two groups before. But simply going off what some user say about me and more importantly the things I believe, it’s obvious that I am a stand in for every white, class reductionist they’ve ever met in real life. I’m not those people, I’m not looking to erase anyone’s identity, I don’t say glib **** like “there’s just the human race,” or “I don’t see color.”

I am always looking to build the best theory and praxis for liberation from every kind of oppression and exploitation that exists. That theory will be anti capitalist and I am weary of voices who say that you have to abandon or water down or suspend your anti capitalism in order to be an ally/have solidarity with black people in their struggles against white supremacy.

Until or unless I get booted out, I going to post my observations from an anti capitalist point of view and take in all the great humor and insights but I’m done entertaining accusations of white supremacy or sympathy for white supremacy due to my being anti capitalist. We live in a white supremacist settler colonial state, I am white and I’ll listen to any and all arguments that I could be motivated by implicit bias resulting from the fact that I am white. But I’m done entertaining the idea that anti capitalism makes me anti black or anti indigenous.
 
RustyShackleford said:
Nah. I'll pass

Someone else can engage. I because I feel it would be pointless if I do. Your post further convinces me on that.

I can feel that even if I spell out completely different vision of what I am talking about, and I know in a few weeks or months if I make another criticism of leftist, the arguments of others are gonna be you at my feet to answer for.

So yeah, why ****ing bother again.

-By the way, if you know Klein's work, you are selling him way short. Me nor him come close to arguing what you claim. But it is whatever.
Click to expand...
No, I don't know Klein's work. My post was a response to what was in that specific article and a response to the discourse of identity politics more broadly.

Like I said, though, my point wasn't that I think you agree with what I see as the political limitations inherent in the identity politics framework (I said this explicitly). My point was that I think you're defending a framework that is problematic and, quite frankly, doesn't reflect what I know to be your own political values and vision. (It seems the same could be said for Klein.) Not only that, you're making broad and inaccurate assumptions about and bashing anyone who dares to question that framework.

If you have some radically different interpretation of identity politics that you care to share, again, I'm all ears.

Just want to clarify where I'm coming from.
 
rexanglorum said:
There is no point in engaging. When you get told that you’re adjacent to white supremacy for stuff like: being a Marxist, supporting Bernie Sanders and wanting his coalition to be larger, suggesting that corporate America wants to co opt the language of racial justice, and calling the coup in Bolivia a coup.

It’s especially galling when people take pot shots at your ideology without identifying their own. The most obnoxious person in any political discourse is a person who thinks they are above ideology and they reach their conclusions through pure reason. Everyone has an ideology and those who claim they don’t are the most ideological.

Now if you’re a progressive liberal and you don’t want to be lumped in with centrists, I understand. I have conflated those two groups before. But simply going off what some user say about me and more importantly the things I believe, it’s obvious that I am a stand in for every white, class reductionist they’ve ever met in real life. I’m not those people, I’m not looking to erase anyone’s identity, I don’t say glib **** like “there’s just the human race,” or “I don’t see color.”

I am always looking to build the best theory and praxis for liberation from every kind of oppression and exploitation that exists. That theory will be anti capitalist and I am weary of voices who say that you have to abandon or water down or suspend your anti capitalism in order to be an ally/have solidarity with black people in their struggles against white supremacy.

Until or unless I get booted out, I going to post my observations from an anti capitalist point of view and take in all the great humor and insights but I’m done entertaining accusations of white supremacy or sympathy for white supremacy due to my being anti capitalist. We live in a white supremacist settler colonial state, I am white and I’ll listen to any and all arguments that I could be motivated by implicit bias resulting from the fact that I am white. But I’m done entertaining the idea that anti capitalism makes me anti black or anti indigenous.
Click to expand...
You are so full of ****, no one has come close to doing that to you. Especially not me.

I swear you have become a special combination of petulance, and white fragility in recent months

Taking issue with **** that people simply do not do.

Years I have engaged and explained my views, and for years I have been greeted with the arguments of the most ****ty centrist being put at my feet to somehow answer for. So god forbid I would want a break from that nonsense.

So ****ing spare me.
 
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