Good post.

Nobody should be telling minorities that they’re dividing the left. As if not standing for bigotry is more divisive than being a bigot in the first place.

People really do need to learn when to shut up

Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, “No investigation no right to speak”, has been ridiculed as “narrow empiricism”, to this day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. There are many people who “the moment they alight from the official carriage” make a hullabaloo, spout opinions, criticize this and condemn that; but, in fact, ten out of ten of them will meet with failure. For such views or criticisms, which are not based on thorough investigation, are nothing but ignorant twaddle. Countless times our Party suffered at the hands of these “imperial envoys”, who rushed here, there and everywhere. Stalin rightly says “theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice”. And he rightly adds that “practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory”. Nobody should be labeled a “narrow empiricist” except the “practical man” who gropes in the dark and lacks perspective and foresight.

I may be misunderstanding this quotation, but I think it aligns with your post. One who holds class/ethnic/racial/gender/cis/etc privilege and doesn’t have the empathy and curiosity to investigate how that privilege effects their material circumstances makes a poor communist.

the patriarchy do be hurting men too though

Merely mentioning the word bourgeois(ie) makes so many people in the first world cringe, including the ones who proclaim to be left. I don’t understand why it is so hard to admit your privileges, wild how decades of liberal propoganda even made basic descriptive words unappealing and cringeworthy.

It’s “all struggles matter” and it sucks.

Join a party. This is a message board.

Workers talk about losing their jobs, tech workers get uncomfortable and insist that the lost jobs were not real jobs unlike their jobs that may very well be next. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten into the humanities where a decade later you might get replaced by new slop machines, which will totally not happen to my coding job ever ever ever. The slop machines are liberating and will revolutionize the world if you stop complaining about losing your not real job and wait long enough. We’re all in this together.”

Fucking well put

no more half measures walter

Great point. I am personally struggling with this a lot both in my work with less privileged people and privileged coworkers.

I am in a country that has a strong nation building discourse around perceived equality and “sameness” and therefore there tends to be a lot of hostility towards anyone who tries to raise the question of very clear differences in privilege and be taken seriously.

My relatives got very angry at me over the summer when they told me how a person they know has had flooding in their home and as I knew that the person in question is very very wealthy and has several homes I said “Shame, but they will be ok.” This resulted in these two yelling at me about how unempathetic I am and how they feel like they can’t talk about their life struggles at all with me (both are petty bourge). I am myself poor, neurodivergent, fat & a woman.

I replied to them that I would not have been ok had this happened to me and got asked if I am bitter. I am not, these are just the material conditions we have. Technically all involved in this discussion were workers.

Someone once described all this to me with an example of a reality tv show that didn’t manage to “work” in my country the same way as it did in a place like the UK. Here when you sit a rich person and a poor person on the same couch talking about what their everyday lives are like, you will only get sameness related discourse where the rich person is both allowed and socially encouraged to see their inability to heat their hot tub as often as befofe as the same as the poor person not being able to afford food.

This results in a society where extremely privileged people are allowed to have takes on things like poverty, race, gender as equals and fully diminishes the hardships experienced in the margins. And this is at least partially a result of a social democratic model of society where a lot of focus has been put to gender equality and equality of the workers. But only for the majority.

What this does to disabled folks and people who can never work, to people who are outside the scope of being able to do wage work and the way this legitimizes the outrage when calling out privilege is a thing I am trying to figure out.

In my real life work I am trying to raise the class consciousness of privileged people around me by raising the point of all of us being workers and our interests being aligned, but within this cultural framework I feel like this often ends up reinforcing the sameness myth and hiding the clear implications of privilege. So not entirely sure how to get the labor aristrocat to both understand our interest being aligned yet different.

Not entirely sure what my concluding point here even is, but just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely important conversation.

The outrage that pointing this out tends to result in seems like a sort of fragility, one person even admitted to me once that me reminding them of their privilege makes them feel guilty for the things they have. Which I think isn’t a bad thing as long as this doesn’t turn into hostility towards the margins, but to an understanding of what privilege is.

It seems unhelpful to frame this as “minority do good thing, majority do bad thing” when it would be so easy to just say “chauvinists” or something for the second group, which 99% of the time will be the corresponding majority members but isn’t essentializing and has some resilience against Candace Owen types.

A lot of what you are describing here is why leftism is dysfunctional in the west. Since leftism in the west isn’t always a matter of material survival, western leftists use it to hyper-individualize themselves. Essentially they use leftist ideology to try to improve their class/conditions within a capitalist system without attempting to overthrow it. They also attack each other when one person does not see another’s personal problems as “the one true leftist perspective.”

A key factor is sometimes these criticisms are not coming from someone who is looking for solidarity, but supremacy. This is why people become defensive, because these accusations are not always launched with a cooperative perspective in mind, but a competitive mindset that is a result of western societal framing. Many of the examples cited can also be liberal perspectives quietly excusing capitalism. Basically saying "if it was only ‘x’ group that was removed from power, or put in charge, the current system would work.

there is no western left

These arguments only work when they’re not being used to ignore the problems when they’re also occurring among the left. Anyone that deploys them argument when it is occurring within the left just help to alienate and split away the affected group.