(I am focusing on the U.S; but posts about other countries are nice.)
Feminism is a social movement that got popular in the previous century; it is a movement that promotes gender equality?
Racial egalitarianism also got popular in the previous century; people were fed up with racial discrimination.
I think egalitarian movements could have easily became popular during this time; egalitarianism promotes the idea that all humans are equal, which is what most civil rights movements focused on; so how did explicitly-stated egalitarian movements manage to not get popular?
They have been and are popular, but such movements are diametrically opposed to the current western world order (imperialist capitalism). There can be no equality under capitalism. The capitalist class, the people who own almost everything and control almost everything, provoke and inflame differences between working people, so that we spend time and energy fighting amongst each other for scraps instead of going after the causes and perpetrators of inequality.
The movements for worker’s rights, women’s rights, and racial civil rights, etc, were all egalitarian movements, and they included far more people than we’re taught today. The history we usually learn about those movements is highly sanitized to remove the revolutionary and class struggle character from those lessons. The capitalists can’t allow us workers to know that by organizing together we can have the egalitarian world some of us dream of.
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If you’re from the USA, you can check out the history of IWW, or more recently the revolutionary movements of the second half of the 20th century (AIM, Black Panthers, MOVE, Young lords, Weather underground, etc). To this day egalitarian sentiment persists in revolutionary movements (such as on ZADs like Standing Rock) but there is no large scale organizing like there was in that day because:
- anti-gun laws have been passed to disarm revolutionary movements (which as you could see has zero effect on white supremacists taking guns to slaughter unarmed people)
- these movements have faced severe repression under government programs like COINTELPRO ; many leaders remain jailed to this day (such as Mummia Abu Jamal or Leonard Peltier) while others have been outright assassinated under government orders (such as Fred Hampton or the MOVE organization which was bombed by the FBI destroying dozens of home to eradicate it)
If you’re from France, i would recommend doing some reading about early CGT history, or more recently about Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes, Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée, Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, Action Directe… Or even more recently Movement de l’Immigration et des banlieues or the ZAD movement. While not exactly an organized movement, autonomous forces are still present in France especially during major riot times (2005 suburbs riots against police abuse, 2006 student riots against CPE law, gilets jaunes).
Egalitarian movements are plenty popular, so the answer you’re looking for lies in the names.
To start with - let’s look at the Syllable count:
- Black Lives Matter: 4 syllables
- Feminism: 4 syllables
- Antifa: 3 syllables
- Anarcho Syndicalist Commism: I’m not counting that lot
- [ something ] Egalitarianism: 8+ syllables
So this isn’t catchy.
Next up, the Gender Egalitarian side was a title used for a lot of whataboutism. Once a movement’s associated with bad actors, it’ll have a hard time gaining traction, so we have the jimbo problem.
I guess it’s easier to rally around a specific facet of it with identifiable victims. Obviously progressive people agree with some form of the idea, even if it’s not how the messaging is done.
slave mentality taught from a young age, read Neitzsche
