In No Politics but Class Politics, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed show how an identity politics that obscures class politics and ignores economic inequality only makes the many miseries around us worse.
I haven’t read the paper the author is talking about in that section, but that sounds like the most pudding brained nonsense I’ve ever heard. That’s viewing capitalism as a frictionless, smooth concept that floats in a void. They’re saying it’s possible to neatly remove racism from capitalism? Yeah maybe in an alternate reality where the past 500 years didn’t happen, problem is we live on Earth where racism is baked into capitalism inherently. It’s already in there and it’s not getting dislodged without overthrowing the whole thing at the same time.
“Which is a more progressive goal — a world in which only thirteen per cent of black people (instead of twenty-four per cent) live below the poverty line or a world in which none of them do?” Eliminating disparities alone cannot make society more equal; it will simply make society unequal in a different way.
Ok, I think I kinda get where this person is coming from. For some reason they’re taking neoliberals seriously. It’s entertaining the very idea that the neoliberal agenda of eliminating racial disparity from capitalism is achievable and is thus a concept even worth considering for more than three seconds. Yeah except neoliberalism as a project is implicitly tied to warmongering and immiseration of the global south. It’s an ideology that western austerity and exploitation of poor nations will exist in perpetuity. Neoliberals claim there’s no racism baked into their absolutely goofy ideas because they’re convinced that African children working in a coltan mine is good for both western countries and the African children. They’re convinced this arrangement is somehow not racist because they’re not as vocally vulgar as western conservatives, but they still want cheap labor and seem to want that cheap labor contained to Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc.
There really needs to be a new standard for if a person still has racist wiring in their head. It should extend to their international sympathies. If a person’s racism kicks back into gear once you’re on another side of a national border, they shouldn’t be taken seriously or their claims considered. Consider how many liberals may vocally oppose domestic racism, and then all of that evaporates when they speak about Arabs, or where precious metals come from, or anything that happens in China. Apparently this Adolph Reed guy has some level of respect attached to his name?
In my experience, a lot of liberals ARE taking themselves seriously and are actually trying to create a capitalism where the bourgeois “looks like America”. Of course it won’t work the way they think it will, but a real attempt is being made
Just remembering there used to be a guy on the old sub who was absolutely obsessed with Adolph Reed and saying weird /r/stupidpol shit. I think he was the same guy who said that university students are the exploiters of their professors.
I haven’t read the paper the author is talking about in that section, but that sounds like the most pudding brained nonsense I’ve ever heard. That’s viewing capitalism as a frictionless, smooth concept that floats in a void. They’re saying it’s possible to neatly remove racism from capitalism? Yeah maybe in an alternate reality where the past 500 years didn’t happen, problem is we live on Earth where racism is baked into capitalism inherently. It’s already in there and it’s not getting dislodged without overthrowing the whole thing at the same time.
Ok, I think I kinda get where this person is coming from. For some reason they’re taking neoliberals seriously. It’s entertaining the very idea that the neoliberal agenda of eliminating racial disparity from capitalism is achievable and is thus a concept even worth considering for more than three seconds. Yeah except neoliberalism as a project is implicitly tied to warmongering and immiseration of the global south. It’s an ideology that western austerity and exploitation of poor nations will exist in perpetuity. Neoliberals claim there’s no racism baked into their absolutely goofy ideas because they’re convinced that African children working in a coltan mine is good for both western countries and the African children. They’re convinced this arrangement is somehow not racist because they’re not as vocally vulgar as western conservatives, but they still want cheap labor and seem to want that cheap labor contained to Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc.
There really needs to be a new standard for if a person still has racist wiring in their head. It should extend to their international sympathies. If a person’s racism kicks back into gear once you’re on another side of a national border, they shouldn’t be taken seriously or their claims considered. Consider how many liberals may vocally oppose domestic racism, and then all of that evaporates when they speak about Arabs, or where precious metals come from, or anything that happens in China. Apparently this Adolph Reed guy has some level of respect attached to his name?
In my experience, a lot of liberals ARE taking themselves seriously and are actually trying to create a capitalism where the bourgeois “looks like America”. Of course it won’t work the way they think it will, but a real attempt is being made
Just remembering there used to be a guy on the old sub who was absolutely obsessed with Adolph Reed and saying weird /r/stupidpol shit. I think he was the same guy who said that university students are the exploiters of their professors.