Moved this here because I watched the rest of the video and he gets shitty at the end.

How do we get people like Norm to stop being credulous about flawed science and fucking bigotry.

His larger point with the video is more interesting but it gets lost in anti-trans shit at the end

  • Lurker123 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    It is this inversion of the sentiment “Anything but class” into its polar opposite “Nothing but class”. How is it that people come to this conclusion, wherein the only thing they believe we should be struggling against is the Marxian class divide? To me, it would seem, by focusing strictly on class, you homogenize a large swath of society and, as such, dilute, erase, or otherwise ignore the struggles of the diverse demographic makeup of the proletariat. How is it that you can convince people deep in the margins of the proletariat that your movement can uplift them, if you can’t even articulate, as a result of having done zero analysis of these group’s various struggles, the ways in which society will be improved that resonate with their struggle?

    On this part in particular, you’ve lost me. It seems like, precisely due to the universalist nature of the class struggle, that it is the most comprehensible to the many as to how it would benefit a person and society, irrespective of any other particular concerns/struggles of such a person.

    For example, suppose our broad class based solution is the nationalization of various industries (e.g., healthcare, housing, and telecommunications). If a person is struggling with rent, living in a slum, struggling to save to buy a place, or just unhappy with paying rent, it seems to me that such a person will see how this movement will improve their life and society even without an articulation of a struggle particular to that person. So too if the person has had any interaction with the American healthcare system or paid a phone bill (with respect to the other examples).

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      Except we live in a highly propagandized society, one where the medical and psychological needs specific to trans people are wildly depressed and rapidly eroding. Where the medical care of black people and women is full of racism and misogyny that leads to poor health outcomes. Where neurodivergence is under diagnosed or misdiagnosed by neurotypical doctors and psychologists. There is also the question of Native Americans, and how we must reconcile their past so they can have a prosperous future.

      Would a person living in a slum intersecting with any of these identities be better served by better economic conditions? Obviously. Except that doesn’t address the social conditions that they live in. Which, I should point out are part of their material conditions.

      The material external environment in which humans live, including the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base of human society, objective social relations, and other externalities and systems which affect human life and human society.

      Changing the economic relations doesn’t make society suddenly not racist, misogynist, homophonic, or transphobic. Something is to be done with the social relations as well. As Marx puts it in Critique of the Gotha Programme:

      What we have to deal with here [in analyzing the programme of the workers’ party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes.

      The transitional period where we are moving away from capitalist society and twords a socialist society will entail the restructuring and dismantlement of bourgeois law, and that will require using the power of the state to implement justice reforms for these marginalized groups.

      In 1918, hot on the heels of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks put forward reforms to the rights of women, spearheaded by women in the Bolshevik party. Russian feminists largely influenced all manor of reforms that impacted the lives and conditions of the women living within its borders.

      All you have presented me is a rising economic tide, which even bourgeois liberal society could accomplish. In what feels like over night women in the Soviet Union earned more rights and privileges and equal status in the workforce then they did in the decades before the revolution.

      If we can not articulate what is to be gained trough revolutionary action by our comrades on the margins of society, then what hope is there for revolution? Why should they take the risk if there is no clear program in place to ensure their safety and equal status in society? This is why intersectionality maters. This is why we should be focusing on identity coupled with class.