Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:51 pm
Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:37 pm
Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:20 pm

Race, in America, is class, IMO.
That's a little too reductionist, I think. There are numerous underprivileged and deprived classes. Race defines many of them. And by that we could talk about poor Scotch Irish in Appalachia or my French Canadian ancestors, both underprivileged groups who have been in N. America as long as Africans who were brought over as slaves and who have historically suffered discrimination, or even those rural yankees you live among.
No, it is pretty much race based. Poor whites in the US were systematically given rights denied to Blacks and Indigenous people.

The Scots-Irish were the last peoples from the Britain proper come here in any numbers, migrating principally in the 18th and 19th century. What is true is that slave trade was increasing rapidly at the same time the Scots-Irish began coming over here. But you know, 1619.

Time to reread Zinn.
I’ve read Zinn and seen him speak/met him. I even share his last name!

Anyway, that doesn’t mean that poor whites and blacks are of different classes, it means the ruling class tried to drive a wedge between the two in ways that are pretty obvious, since it is going on all around us and was a huge part of the Trumpnpresidency.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:16 pm
Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:51 pm
Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:37 pm

That's a little too reductionist, I think. There are numerous underprivileged and deprived classes. Race defines many of them. And by that we could talk about poor Scotch Irish in Appalachia or my French Canadian ancestors, both underprivileged groups who have been in N. America as long as Africans who were brought over as slaves and who have historically suffered discrimination, or even those rural yankees you live among.
No, it is pretty much race based. Poor whites in the US were systematically given rights denied to Blacks and Indigenous people.

The Scots-Irish were the last peoples from the Britain proper come here in any numbers, migrating principally in the 18th and 19th century. What is true is that slave trade was increasing rapidly at the same time the Scots-Irish began coming over here. But you know, 1619.

Time to reread Zinn.
We'll have to agree to disagree. The treatment of blacks in N. America is among the great injustices that define the United States. But, we could also include the genocide of Native Americans right up there.
I have not even begun to get started on that issue.
There's also been discrimination against brown and yellow people, not at the same levels of horror and impact.
Well, most of the brown people you are talking about are Mestizzos or outright Indios....and Asians in post-Civil War 19th century America? Brutal oppression.
There has also been systematic discrimination, de jure and de facto, against various white ethnic groups.
Against late 19th century and early 20th century immigrants such as Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish, etc? Sure, but they were not considered "white" until the 1960's.

So again, race is class in America.
I simply don't see why all other forms of discrimination need to be effaced to acknowledge discrimination against blacks in N. America.
Actually, it is pretty simple: if you are not white, you are discriminated against as a class. If you manage to pass for white, or can shake off your ethnic background, you suffer less discrimination.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:22 pm
Anyway, that doesn’t mean that poor whites and blacks are of different classes, it means the ruling class tried to drive a wedge between the two in ways that are pretty obvious, since it is going on all around us and was a huge part of the Trumpnpresidency.
They succeeded, by giving poor whites privileges in the 18th century, and then again following the failure of Reconstruction, creating two classes, and giving advantages to one of them which still persist today in our society. You know which one, of course.

To say that race is not class in America is to ignore the basic facts of our history.

In America, Race is Class.
Last edited by Malcolm on Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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A good summary of CRT:

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what- ... ck/2021/05

This is what uninformed people state about CRT, and these are all the talking points bandied about by conservatives:
"One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
This is what they wish to deny:
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

This is what Archie is worried about.
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)
All these people oppose Affirmative Action, one of the best policies for ending class disparities in our lifetime.

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
This is what people can't stand, that their very existence is owed to a racist set of social and economic conditions, even though they may not themselves possess racist beliefs. However, what I observe, is that the people who most offended by this idea often wind up becoming full blown racists. I have seen it happen.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:15 pm
Really? We read bits of the seminal people in school and the logic seemed to mostly reject the notion of class solidarity or even shared experiences based on class. Everything was based on personal narratives of oppression based on racial indentity, and -lots- of navel gazing based on said identities. It may just be how the stuff I read was curated. Can you recommend some CRT people who take class seriously?
Kimberle Crenshaw (she who coined the term "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did) springs to mind. Much of her work focuses specifically on race and gender, but she certainly includes a class analysis in her work. For example, from the 1989 paper in which she coined the term, here's her description of the problem:
Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside.

...

In much of feminist theory and, to some extent, in antiracist politics, this framework is reflected in the belief that sexism or racism can be meaningfully discussed without paying attention to the lives of those other than the race-, gender- or class-privileged. As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women.
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic pretty much wrote "Critical Race Theory: the Book", and while I confess I haven't read that book, I know that their work includes a class analysis as well.

More broadly, "Critical Race Theory" was a play on an earlier legal analytical method called "Critical Legal Studies," which was itself modeled on "Critical Theory," an expressly Marxist method of analysis, and especially on Gramsci's work. CLS introduced a leftist, class-based analysis to the legal academy, but its biggest proponents were white men, and CRT was, at least in part, a response to that. The response was not, however, to say "class is unimportant," it was to say, "these other things are important too."
On some level I think institutional/systemic racism it quite undeniable. I think that QQs post summed up pretty well the easily empirically verifiable aspects of that. The CRT stuff I was around was a lot mushier and theoretical.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff mutates into unrecognizability after time.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:24 pm
Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:16 pm
Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 6:51 pm

No, it is pretty much race based. Poor whites in the US were systematically given rights denied to Blacks and Indigenous people.

The Scots-Irish were the last peoples from the Britain proper come here in any numbers, migrating principally in the 18th and 19th century. What is true is that slave trade was increasing rapidly at the same time the Scots-Irish began coming over here. But you know, 1619.

Time to reread Zinn.
We'll have to agree to disagree. The treatment of blacks in N. America is among the great injustices that define the United States. But, we could also include the genocide of Native Americans right up there.
I have not even begun to get started on that issue.
There's also been discrimination against brown and yellow people, not at the same levels of horror and impact.
Well, most of the brown people you are talking about are Mestizzos or outright Indios....and Asians in post-Civil War 19th century America? Brutal oppression.
There has also been systematic discrimination, de jure and de facto, against various white ethnic groups.
Against late 19th century and early 20th century immigrants such as Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish, etc? Sure, but they were not considered "white" until the 1960's.

So again, race is class in America.
I simply don't see why all other forms of discrimination need to be effaced to acknowledge discrimination against blacks in N. America.
Actually, it is pretty simple: if you are not white, you are discriminated against as a class. If you manage to pass for white, or can shake off your ethnic background, you suffer less discrimination.
c'mon, man. keep backing up and you're going to end up agreeing with my characterization of the myriad problems, this nest of fear and loathing, we call the United States.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Genjo Conan wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:49 pm
Kimberle Crenshaw (she who coined the term "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did) springs to mind. Much of her work focuses specifically on race and gender, but she certainly includes a class analysis in her work. For example, from the 1989 paper in which she coined the term, here's her description of the problem:
And here is an article from 2017, where she fleshes out the falsity of post-racial America:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/race-to-bottom-crenshaw
Within the Obama-era bid to characterize America’s newly transformed social order as “post-racial,” a striking bit of legerdemain took hold. The term worked both to de-historicize race in American society and, perversely enough, to reframe the idea of racism as something that was very much the opposite of the lived experience of race in America. Under this inside-out account of our racial history, a post-racial America was, by definition, a racially egalitarian America, no longer measured by forward-looking assessments of how far we have come, but by congratulatory declarations that we have arrived.

In one sense, there’s nothing conceptually new about this. For two decades, an entire industry of lawyers, politicians, pundits, and foundations rallied around the banner of colorblindness in an effort to convince judges, policymakers, and voters that the project of racial reform was completed long ago.[2] Colorblindness fueled a host of right-wing projects throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, including Ward Connerly’s assault on both affirmative action and the collection of racial data,[3] along with efforts by others to attack the Voting Rights Act and Title VII. With the rhetoric of colorblindness thus conscripted as a justification of first resort for rolling back the gains of the civil rights revolution, moderates and liberals—together with the traditional civil rights establishment—regarded it with a good deal of justified suspicion. In his 2000 presidential run, for example, Al Gore likened the colorblind rhetoric of the nineties GOP to a “duck blind” offering cover to the forces of racial reaction.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:02 pm
c'mon, man. keep backing up and you're going to end up agreeing with my characterization of the myriad problems, this nest of fear and loathing, we call the United States.
At base, the problem in this country is mostly racism. JD forgets that the labor movement in its early days was largely an immigrant movement by people who were not considered white at all, apart from the Germans, who had tight control over the Socialist Party in this country, and dominated it, discriminating against Italians and so on. And then of course, there was the anti-semitism issue with Socialism as well, that is, it was regarded as a Jewish plot, until WWII made it unfashionable to openly hate Jews.

Remember, part of the reason Sanders lost the primary in 2016 is that he was not very clued into race. He was all about class too. He has since repaired that myopia.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:14 pm
Queequeg wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:02 pm
c'mon, man. keep backing up and you're going to end up agreeing with my characterization of the myriad problems, this nest of fear and loathing, we call the United States.
At base, the problem in this country is mostly racism. JD forgets that the labor movement in its early days was largely an immigrant movement by people who were not considered white at all, apart from the Germans, who had tight control over the Socialist Party in this country, and dominated it, discriminating against Italians and so on. And then of course, there was the anti-semitism issue with Socialism as well, that is, it was regarded as a Jewish plot, until WWII made it unfashionable to openly hate Jews.

Remember, part of the reason Sanders lost the primary in 2016 is that he was not very clued into race. He was all about class too. He has since repaired that myopia.
Race is inarguably the easiest basis of exclusion used in the US, historically and today. But reducing every economic problem we have to race, while it explains a lot and does have some analytical and rhetorical advantages, can also miss a lot. To a hammer everything looks like a nail, so to speak. But a screw is not a nail, even though you can drive a screw into a stud using a hammer with enough brute force. The screw works better when you use a screw gun, though.

Bernie didn't do well with black politicians and older blacks who were steeped in the experience of the civil rights movement. In 2016, Bernie appealed to younger blacks and latinos who also saw the economic class issues that weren't entirely race based.
Last edited by Queequeg on Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:26 pm
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:22 pm
Anyway, that doesn’t mean that poor whites and blacks are of different classes, it means the ruling class tried to drive a wedge between the two in ways that are pretty obvious, since it is going on all around us and was a huge part of the Trumpnpresidency.
They succeeded, by giving poor whites privileges in the 18th century, and then again following the failure of Reconstruction, creating two classes, and giving advantages to one of them which still persist today in our society. You know which one, of course.

To say that race is not class in America is to ignore the basic facts of our history.

In America, Race is Class.
Howard Zinn would never make a claim like that, in fact it’s somewhat contrary to the entire philosophy of A People’s History. Zinn was a socialist, and beyond the fact that he acknowledged the specific, deep seated racism in American history, I don’t see how you think his work has anything to do with this reductionist approach.

He wasn’t reductionist in the other direction either, unlike an old school Marxist or something of course. That is important for sure.

IIRC He goes into detail in fact about how the American ruling classes used racial animus as a weapon to keep any kind organization happening around shared interest with poor whites and well…any other group really.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:30 pm
Howard Zinn would never make a claim like that, in fact it’s somewhat contrary to the entire philosophy of A People’s History. Zinn was a socialist, and beyond the fact that he acknowledged the specific, deep seated racism in American history, I don’t see how you think his work has anything to do with this reductionist approach.
It may not be his point of view, but it is what I drew from his work.
IIRC He goes into detail in fact about how the American ruling classes used racial animus as a weapon to keep any kind organization happening around shared interest with poor whites and blacks.
But the point is, those divisions are now embedded and have stake holders. And while socialists might think that all race issues are solved with socialist solutions, that's a pipedream, from my perspective.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:39 pm
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:30 pm
Howard Zinn would never make a claim like that, in fact it’s somewhat contrary to the entire philosophy of A People’s History. Zinn was a socialist, and beyond the fact that he acknowledged the specific, deep seated racism in American history, I don’t see how you think his work has anything to do with this reductionist approach.
It may not be his point of view, but it is what I drew from his work.
IIRC He goes into detail in fact about how the American ruling classes used racial animus as a weapon to keep any kind organization happening around shared interest with poor whites and blacks.
But the point is, those divisions are now embedded and have stake holders. And while socialists might think that all race issues are solved with socialist solutions, that's a pipedream, from my perspective.
That’s so vague I wouldn’t even know what to respond to, I don’t know what you mean by ‘socialist solutions’. From my point of view oppression to use CRT parlance is driven mainly by economic relationships and their relationship to power, though it can certainly manifest in other ways.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:44 pmFrom my point of view oppression to use CRT parlance is driven mainly by economic relationships and their relationship to power, though it can certainly manifest in other ways.
I think this is too reductionist. I always have.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:06 pm
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:44 pmFrom my point of view oppression to use CRT parlance is driven mainly by economic relationships and their relationship to power, though it can certainly manifest in other ways.
I think this is too reductionist. I always have.
You just wrote ‘race is class’, which is too reductionist for me, it’s just a statement of the obvious fact that some people are oppressed worse than others, and that there are specific circumstances of racism, etc. that need addressing. Maybe some old school socialists would argue against that, but these days it’s standard.

When I was involved in socialist orgs 15 or so years ago one of their campaigns was getting people off of death row - particularly because it is so baldly racist who ends up there. Frankly, they were talking about all the stuff that is front and center today wrt to the racist justice system, long before it was in the mainstream consciousness.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:27 pm
Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:06 pm
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:44 pmFrom my point of view oppression to use CRT parlance is driven mainly by economic relationships and their relationship to power, though it can certainly manifest in other ways.
I think this is too reductionist. I always have.
You just wrote ‘race is class’, which is too reductionist for me, it’s just a statement of the obvious fact that some people are oppressed worse than others…
Because of their skin type….that has nothing to do with economics, that has to do with pure bias. Now, you can try and explain away such prejudice as a function of class tensions, etc….but I think it is an insufficient explanation, particularly when the standard trope of older white leftists is to try and gloss racial issues as mere economic issues…hence CRT, etc.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Genjo Conan wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:49 pm "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did
It frustrates me that to this day, despite trying quite hard, I still don't really understand what it means.
More broadly, "Critical Race Theory" was a play on an earlier legal analytical method called "Critical Legal Studies," which was itself modeled on "Critical Theory," an expressly Marxist method of analysis, and especially on Gramsci's work. CLS introduced a leftist, class-based analysis to the legal academy, but its biggest proponents were white men, and CRT was, at least in part, a response to that. The response was not, however, to say "class is unimportant," it was to say, "these other things are important too."
I was never really a fan of critical legal studies and critical theory. I have no issue with the marxist roots - I personally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries. I just didn't like the way that they blindly imported ideas and terminology from the study of literature into the social sciences. It just made no sense to me. Different disciplines develop different tools for different tasks.

Most of the furore about CRT is purely manufactured. Few of those criticizing it can offer an adequate definition of it. But the proponents of the broad genre of critical theory have really not done themselves a favor by obfuscating some important basic ideas in a veil of opaque and self-referential terminology.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff mutates into unrecognizability after time.
Indeed
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 ampersonally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries.
Yes, by both his detractors and his admirers. The principle conceit of Marxism, is that it is “scientific.”

But even more than Marx, Engles is quite under appreciated, and arguably, is a more nuanced thinker.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 am
Most of the furore about CRT is purely manufactured. Few of those criticizing it can offer an adequate definition of it. But the proponents of the broad genre of critical theory have really not done themselves a favor by obfuscating some important basic ideas in a veil of opaque and self-referential terminology.
This is the Achilles heel,of the left in general.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:46 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:27 pm
Malcolm wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:06 pm

I think this is too reductionist. I always have.
You just wrote ‘race is class’, which is too reductionist for me, it’s just a statement of the obvious fact that some people are oppressed worse than others…
Because of their skin type….that has nothing to do with economics, that has to do with pure bias. Now, you can try and explain away such prejudice as a function of class tensions, etc….but I think it is an insufficient explanation, particularly when the standard trope of older white leftists is to try and gloss racial issues as mere economic issues…hence CRT, etc.
What do you mean it has nothing to do with economics? Have you ever looked at the comparative households incomes of white and black families? Of course the oppression of black people is economic, forty acres and a mule etc...it has always been like that. Does every bit of the oppression they experience come more from racial or class animus? That's a tough question but none of the socialists I hung out with would ever answer it the way you are saying they would, making this conversation a refutation of a straw man, which is pointless.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:13 am
PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 ampersonally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries.
Yes, by both his detractors and his admirers. The principle conceit of Marxism, is that it is “scientific.”

But even more than Marx, Engles is quite under appreciated, and arguably, is a more nuanced thinker.
Yes. It’s not scientific, by definition, since it’s not falsifiable. That said, the mode of production / means of production / superstructure analysis is consistently one of the most helpful ways to explain economic and political history.

About half of Capital was really written by Engels - at least heavily edited. And he had a better beard than Marx.
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