Why You Should Not Be An Intersectional Feminist

The Wikipedia description of the concept of intersectionality begins as follows:

Intersectionality (or intersectional theory) is a term first coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It is the study of what Crenshaw contends are overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. These identities that can intersect include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, and physical illness as well as other forms of identity.  These aspects of identity are not “unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather…reciprocally constructing phenomena.”  The theory proposes that we think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all of the other elements in order to fully understand one's identity.

On the face of it, this is not an unsound concept.  So what is so wrong with intersectional feminism that you should not be one?  The devil is, as he so often is, in the details.

An an insightful article critiquing of intersectional feminism, author Helen Pluckrose describes the philosophical and ideological shift that took place as intersectionality became the party line in organized feminism.  And, by extent, the state religion of all first world nations.

Liberal feminist aims gradually shifted from the position: 

“Everyone deserves human rights and equality, and feminism focuses on achieving them for women.” 

to 

“Individuals and groups of all sexes, races, religions and sexualities have their own truths, norms and values. All truths, cultural norms and moral values are equal. Those of white, Western, heterosexual men have unfairly dominated in the past so now they and all their ideas must be set aside for marginalized groups.” 

Liberal feminism had shifted from the universality of equal human rights to identity politics. No longer were ideas valued on their merit but on the identity of the speaker and this was multifaceted, incorporating sex, gender identity, race, religion, sexuality and physical ability. The value of an identity in social justice terms is dependent on its degree of marginalization, and these stack up and vie for primacy. This is where liberal feminism went so badly wrong. When postcolonial guilt fought with feminism, feminism lost. When it fought with LGBT rights, they lost too.

Pluckrose details how cherry picked postmodern philosophy enabled the jettisoning of universal liberal and egalitarian values as underpinning feminist theory and replacing it with moral and epistemological relativism.  I detail elsewhere both the strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism, and how it has, on balance, been a negative thing for leftism.   Long story short, postmodernism asserts that metaphysics and epistemology - the nature of reality and the nature of man's means of knowing reality were, to a considerable degree, socially constructed and subjective.  At the very least, it rejected the idea that there are singular overarching "metanarratives" applicable to all people at all times.  Claims to objective reality were to be broken down or "deconstructed" to reveal that their foundations are little more than self serving biases.  Implicit in this was a cultural relativism that urged people to not be so judgemental of other cultures, even if those cultures appeared on the surface to be less advanced and prosperous than our own.

This is not so, so bad.  But it can be problematic if carried to a natural, logical extreme.  If cultures and morality are truly culturally subjective, than on what grounds could it be asserted that cultures that stressed racial and gender egalitarianism are truly preferable to racist or patriarchal cultures?  How could claims that universalistic liberalism was a western social construct that could be shown to implicitly favor white males be reconciled with racial and gender equality being values belonging exclusively to western liberalism?

If such questions were posed, they were no doubt deemed taboo.  The claims of critical race theory and feminist theory seemed strangely immune to postmodern deconstruction, and tended to be treated as if they were eternal truths binding on all people at all times.  Metanarratives, for lack of a better word.  It was just implicitly assumed that theories built around marginalized identities were infallible.  Best not to say anything, though.  It's not wise to point out the cherry-picking when the people doing it could make or break your academic career.

Thus began the move into intersectionality that Helen Pluckrose describes above.

Add Peggy McIntosh's knapsack of privilege dogma that was adopted into the women's studies canon in the late 1980s, and the prejudice plus power encyclical that also became canonical, and the foundations for the most toxic regressive left theory since Lenin were set.

Intersectional feminism in any kind of practice inevitably becomes a complete trainwreck.

People are all inevitably placed on several abacuses of privilege vs. marginalization:

• Male vs. Female
• White vs. P.O.C (person of color)
• Heterosexual vs. LGBTQ
• Cisgender vs. Transgender
• Thin vs. Fat
• Able bodied vs. Disabled
• Christian vs. Atheist vs. Non Christian vs. Muslim

With identities falling to the left being considered privileged compared to identities on the right.  The tendency in intersectional feminism is to assume that incontestable moral and intellectual authority is conferred by the possession of marginalized identities.  Those with fewer marginalized identities are generally expected to shut up and feel guilty about their privilege.  At the very least, they are not to challenge people with more marginalized identities on anything.  Those with more marginalized identities are implicitly expected to resent their more privileged counterparts, and are given full license via the prejudice plus power rationalization to abuse them as much as they want.  

No intersectional feminist will admit to the above paragraph, but that is the observable truth of it in action.  The problems have become so glaring that even that even Everyday Feminism - the spiritual successor to Pravda if there ever was one, has speculated that its ideological structure lends itself to abuse.  Not that intersectional feminists would deal with such an accusation directly, mind you.  If you are more privileged than they, they would simply point this out and, as far as they're concerned, this would shut down the argument.  

An exaggerated example to illustrate the way this works in practice: In a disagreement over math, wherein a white male asserted that 2+2=4 and a queer woman of color asserted that 2+2=5, typical intersectional feminist sophistry would not take the form of coming out and saying that the answer was five.  Instead, they'd point out that the math textbooks of the past were written by white males, and thus the queer woman of color experienced oppression while being taught, most likely by a teacher who was white, cis and straight, that 2 and 2 made 4.  Claims made under a marginalized person's experience of oppression in intersectional feminism can only be compared to outright divine revelation and command in fundamentalist religion in terms of being absolute in all conceivable ways: moral, metaphysical, epistemological and otherwise.  These claims supercede any and everything else and to contest them is evil with a capital E, beyond even heresy or treason.

The white male would then be chided and told to check his privilege for arguing with the queer woman of color on the matter in the first place.  His insistence that 2 and 2 made 4 would, most likely with some canned formulaic copy-pasta response, be attributed to an unwillingness to relinquish privilege, because "when you are privileged, equality feels like oppression."  Expect lots of reference to "angry white dudes" or the like, often some witty portmanteau: "mansplaining" or "whitesplaining", and some likewise clever and satirical misspelling of  "dewd" or "wypepo."  These kinds of vacuous signalling are, for whatever reason, prized in intersectional feminist circles.  

They've also made an artform of other kinds of disingenuous and deceptive argumentation.  Expect lots of bulverism - short and vague responses that imply that you've crossed some unseen line placing you beyond the pale of reason, morality or respect.  "Wow!  Just Wow!" is the ur-copy-pasta here.  Greenwalding - intentionally taking parts of opponent's statements out of context and making them say something very different than what they were intended to say, is also common.  As are more common logical and referential fallacies including slippery slopes and moving goalposts.  True Scotsmen are unheard of among intersectional feminists.  Two wrongs making a right is the basis of much of its "prejudice plus power" moral system. 

Showing that you "get it" is of paramount importance.  Dogpiling on nay-sayers is one of the very, very few actions that privileged sympathizers (that for reasons I can't fathom, are vast in number) can be almost assured of approval of from their more marginalized superiors.  Appeals to authority come with the territory here, with the "experience of marginalized people" and the theoretical dogmas underlying this kind of thinking being considered infallible.  Emotional reasoning is rampant - a marginalized person being "triggered" is considered oppressive, no matter the intent behind the action that caused said triggering.  Bootleg videos of SJW meltdowns, of the kind so often captured at Milo Yiannopoulos lectures, are a result of this.  

Catastrophization underlies the dogma of the "microaggression", where even the most innocuous actions or gestures on part of the privileged are taken as indicative of privilege and oppression, and therefore just grounds to trigger a marginalized person.  The privileged, of course, are completely responsible, regardless of intent, and cannot argue for reasons outlined above.

The ends always justify the means with intersectional feminists.  As with Lenin and his historical idea of "Kto Kovo" - "Who, whom?" actions are judged not on the basis of whether they are right or wrong, but by who benefits and who suffers as a result of them. There is no recourse or appeal for the "privileged."  

Another Leninist trait is vanguardism.  Intersectional feminists make bold statements on behalf of entire demographics of people.  Are they really speaking for all blacks or all women, or are they speaking for the women's studies department or the black studies department?  They represent themselves and their ideologies, not all people who share their demographics, whatever they may tell you.

Suffice it to say, this is hardly a recipe for mental health or satisfactory relationships.  I do not think it out of the question that there is a disproportionate prevalence of cluster B personality disorders within intersectional feminist ranks.  Like fascism, fundamentalism and Stalinism, intersectional feminism is a completely closed and completely authoritarian system.  This has been shown, with such examples as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Shock Experiment, to bring about blind obedience to authority regardless of who is getting hurt, and can even attract outrightly sadistic personalities.  As Nazi and Stalinist examples demonstrate, absolute power combined with a legitimizing ideology is the formula for atrocity.

Of course, intersectional feminists are guilty of nothing on the scale of the holocaust or the holodomor.  But honestly, the only thing holding them back at this point is not having absolute power.  But they are given carte-blanche in most media and academic environments.  This should be troubling for everyone.  No idea should be above criticism.  Sacred cows walk the road into regressive darkness.

Not all intersectional feminists are malignant psychopathic nutjobs.  Many, if not most are well meaning people who genuinely want to give voice to the downtrodden.  The problem is not that every intersectional feminist is a bad person.  The problem is that intersectional feminism as a belief system is both tightly closed and - quite ironically - extremely hierarchical.  And this does attract antisocial people.  Many too deal with psychological problems stemming from abuse, bad upbringings or a general lack of self esteem that they find easy to project onto other people or society as a whole via intersectional feminist rationalizations, as opposed to the challenging work of seeking therapy and healing via challenging themselves.  

Beware of psychologizing people, however, unless you have good cause to do so - you've observed clearly bizarre behavior or, as they do surprisingly frequently, the intersectional feminist just comes right out and tells you they have issues.  I see this in blog posts and magazine articles quite consistently.  Or you are a trained psychologist.  Keep poor mental health as a possible explanatory factor for truly unhinged behavior in the back of your mind, as opposed to it being a go-to response that you can use to easily and conveniently handwave claims you disagree with.  

It also bears mention that economic inequality is regarded as being of lesser importance to intersectional feminism, and class is treated as race, gender and so on are: as an identity.  This is a distortion of the nature of economic class as a vector of identity.  Class is attributable to relations of production, not an immutable genetic trait.  Another problem with intersectional feminism is that in attributing privilege to genetic factors such as race, gender or sexual orientation, the real halls of power: big business and big government, escape scrutiny.  Perhaps that is why media and academia likes intersectional feminism as much as it does.  And libertarians have no less reason to balk at intersectional feminists than Marxists do.  The smallest and most marginalized minority of them all is the individual, who turns out to be completely invisible in intersectional feminist praxis.

If at all possible, do not deal with intersectional feminists unless they show you that they are at least open to other points of view.  Especially steer clear of them if they demonstrate abusive or manipulative behaviors.  Do not allow yourself to become subject to their authority.  A common intersectional feminist strategy is to assume positions of influence and authority in organizations and use them to impose their will.  Stop them if you can, or leave organizations wherein this happens, if you can.

And for the love of God, do NOT let them convince you that they are within their rights to control, manipulate or abuse you in any way simply because they have more marginalized identities than you, and because guilt by association and collective responsibility, you owe this to them.  You don't.  Let me make that crystal clear.  You don't owe it to anyone to be a doormat.

On the other hand, listen with an open mind to claims intersectional feminists make regarding the realities of life for marginalized people.  They can be valuable repositories of knowledge regarding specific social issues.  Not uncommonly, they advocate for good reforms, if you can sort the moral absolutism and panic from the legitimate claims.  Resist the temptation to "whataboutery" in a vain effort to establish moral equivalency.  You will not convince them. Sometimes, agreeing with them, especially when warranted, can disarm them.  Sometimes.

I do not condemn intersectional feminism because, as a white dude, I get short shrift from it.  That is sufficient reason to condemn it, but that it not its greatest sin.  What is truly damning about intersectional feminism is its betrayal of the core values of racial and gender equality.  It turns all of our backs on the reasons we abandoned racism and sexism in the first place.  Because people are more than their genitals, their skin color or who they're sexually attracted to.  And people want to be, and deserve to be, evaluated on more than just those characteristics.  People told to "check their privilege" rightly feel objectified, reduced to bare biological characteristic, by the praxis of intersectional feminism.  

White people can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutual beneficial relationships with people of color.  Men can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutually beneficial relationships with women.  Straight people can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutually beneficial relationships with LGBTQ people.  Poor and working class people should have opportunities to benefit from a progressive movement centered around economic inequality and keeping money out of politics, and the opportunities to rise as high as their talents and efforts allow them.  These opportunities benefit everybody.  Guilt and shame for the marginalized together with resentment and self righteous entitlement for the marginalized benefit no one.  For a fleeting sense of self righteousness, the "marginalized" people who accept intersectional feminism's faustian bargain loose all of the above opportunities.

As I write this, the greatest threat to these opportunities comes not from the Ku Klux Klansman or the homophobic and puritanical fundamentalist preacher.  Rather, the greatest threat now comes from those who have usurped the mantle of the good causes that brought us to the brink of victory over the Klansman and the fundamentalist.  That victory begins to slip away.  We must snatch it back.

View the video on Samizdat Broadcasts!

Class vs Race Privilege

A question was recently put: Class privilege is real, white privilege isn't. Agree or disagree?

I think there's something to the idea of white privilege. But it's become this sweeping and reductionist idea that's been used to license shitty behavior.  Hate the white working class all you want, they have all the power because they’re white.  That makes it okay.  Upper middle class academic progressives can thereby scapegoat those stupid, unwashed rednecks for the collective historical sins of the white race. Beneath the very thin progressive veneer of this sentiment is downward punching snobbish regressivism at its ugliest.

Not that this makes racism among the white underclass okay.  It certainly doesn’t, for it erodes their capacity for solidarity with the black underclass that is so needed for both to get a better deal in the long run.  It also lends the legitimacy of “popular support” to regressive policy enacted against the black underclass by the elite.  So called "brocialists" should keep in mind that the black underclass does not have it easy, and that affirmative action and knapsacks of privilege have a funny and ironic way of being colorblind where the lower classes are concerned.  The black underclass has it worse, if anything.  So the white working class should take nothing that I say as a license to be racist towards blacks, so don’t be.  The white working class has a long history of class blindness, motivated in part by racial prejudice and in part by a US left that long ago traded in class for racial concerns and embraced neo-liberalism. This has repeatedly driven the white working class to support regressive right wing politics, as has been recently demonstrated in the US 2016 elections, and they've always ended up suffering for it. 

But for the varied segments of the underclasses to fight among each other over who has it worse is quite stupid, for reasons that should be obvious by now.  It is likewise misguided for the black underclass to despise whitey. This has been good for the black upper middle class that has arisen in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of neo-liberalism - the twin engines of the Democratic Party.  Better for them that the black underclass blame white rather than class privilege for their woes.  But this just puts them in a position oddly comparable to that of the Republican supporting white working class.  The real color of privilege is green, and this can only be challenged by white and black together.

Between class on the one hand and identity - race and gender - on the other, I do think class is the more fundamental of the two, though I don't think identity is completely irrelevant.  This is because it has been made relevant by an elite that has used race and identity as a means of dividing the underclass.  So the reality is that identity and class cannot be so easily extricated from one another.  The postmodern left likes to claim that racism/sexism is "prejudice plus power" and that powerless identities cannot oppress. But where does the power - that makes the prejudice of some groups more pernicious than others - come from?

Ownership of capital and the access to political power this inevitably entails. In short, class.

The problem with the postmodern academic left is not identity politics per-se, but how those politics have been co-opted and made to serve powerful interests. The academic postmodernist "left" refuses to see class for one simple reason: they're much higher up on the class totem pole than they'd like to admit. They're not Fortune 500 or Military Industrial Complex by any stretch of the imagination, but they do possess significant advantages over the working and middle classes. Namely that of supremely privileged access to media.

Their position can be compared to that of the clergy in a more religious era, such as that wherein Marx declared religion the opiate of the masses. They use institutions empowered by capital and backed by the state to spin the dominant cultural and social narratives. As we know from the theorists of the early Frankfurt school, Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and even from Marx himself, the ruling narrative of any era is the narrative of its ruling class. Or in this case, how its ruling class was NOT responsible for the historical atrocities brought to light by earlier generations of radicals.

Plus, you'll notice that the solutions to racial and gender inequality favored by these "leftists" always either empower capital - "fire him from his job!" - or the state - "sue for hate speech!"

As such, the SJWs - the new clergy of our secular era - are not radicals, but rather ego driven enforcers of a decidedly statist and capitalist status quo.

Sounds Regressive, but OK

"Sounds Liberal but OK" is a self described "radical leftist group" on Facebook that is based around "criticizing and mocking centrist (liberal) thought and concept through shitposting."  SLBOK has a link in its description to a "word bank" wherein its basic ideological precepts or links to them are outlined.

The word bank is a worthwhile read for the glimpse it offers of a lot of regressive left ideology in an almost perfectly distilled form.  Many of your favorite canards are there, along with typically vapid and weak definitions and defenses of these canards. But this one in particular is especially noteworthy, since it seems to be the basis of much of this group's - and the regressive left in general's outlook on relations between "marginalized" and "privileged" groups:

Just how long does one have to spend in the ivory tower in order to cultivate such absurdly reductionistic thinking?  Where does one even begin sorting this mess out?

Of course, whites can be racist towards PoC.  Of course there has been native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment during WW2, and institutionalized discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws that have targeted PoC.  None of this is good, of course, and it would be absurd to assume that mere legal equality would completely overcome the legacy of that in so short a time, relatively speaking. 

But the narrative quoted in the SLBOK word bank must necessarily leave out a good deal of history in order to maintain its integrity.  It begins to break down when you stop thinking of "white" people as a pale skinned monolith and start thinking of them the way the were often really thought of throughout history: in terms of their nations of origin.  

I make no apologies for the "whataboutism" I'm about to engage in here, because these questions work towards the undermining of the black-and-white (both literally and figuratively) narrative presented in the SLBOK word bank: but what about the Know-Nothing movement, and its attendant ideology of anti-Catholicism and anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment?  What about the fact that many Irish came to America as indentured servants: not the same as slavery, but hardly a position of power and privilege either.  What about African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade?  What about anti-German sentiment that naturally prevailed during the world wars?  What about anti-Polish sentiment?  These things aren't such concerns now, but there was a time, and it had real consequences.  Prejudice against these once despised groups played a real part in enabling mistreatment, discrimination and exploitation as sweat labor.  As bad as slavery?  Perhaps not, but slavery isn't practiced any more today either.  And what's to be gained by all of this competitive victimhood anyway?

The deeper point being that while racism against PoC has indeed been a historical ill in America, but hardly a monolithic one. Yet today's descendants of Irish immigrants (among others) are not demanding a de-facto carte-blanche to revisit ill will on the descendants of good, proper WASP Americans.  Whites in America are hardly a monolith, and were only ever treated as a homogenous block when it advantaged the elites to do so.  So called "radical leftists," of all people, should know this.  One wonders if it is because it is advantageous to elites today, particularly in academia and mass media, that so called "radical leftists" have now chosen to forget this?

But the problems with the SLBOK word bank's approach to intersectional politics don't end there.  

The entry on reverse racism seems to imply that "judging a man by the color of his skin" is not what is objectionable, but rather the historical and contemporary power to translate that prejudice into actual oppressive and discriminatory policy. This is a strange, and the more one thinks of it, troubling way of viewing racial politics.  For one thing, even if we did live in so monolithically white supremacist a society as the SBLOK word bank asserts we do, why hate the oppressor for the color of his skin rather than for the actual power the oppressor wields, above all, and the self serving rationalization of racial supremacy that is advanced to "justify" this abuse of power?  Not so long ago, most leftists acknowledged that the problem was racism, not white people.  What happened to this?  This relatively recent shift away from hating racism to hating whitey even in the mainstream center-leftist media (think The Guardian or the Huffington Post) should be raising red flags - literally and figuratively - for left leaning people.  This tumblrization of the left is among the most alarming political trends of our time, if for no other reason than that it lends credence to alt-right narratives and enables the far right to win bigly - to win so much they'll get tired of winning - if you catch my drift.

Why is prejudice based on skin color not so bad, nor are power differentials by themselves so bad, but the two together suddenly to become an uber-transcendent evil, against which all double standards and regressivism is justified?

And that all assumes that the SLBOK word bank's assertion that we live in so monolithically white supremacist a society even holds in the first place.  I would not consider it a mark of a white supremacist society that "blacks cannot be racist because prejudice plus power" be canonical dogma in the Universities and in most mainstream media discourse on racial politics.  I would not consider it the mark of a white supremacist society that to be credibly called a racist is among the most damaging allegations that could be made against someone.  If being demonstrably (or not) racist against PoC can result job loss, professional marginalization, ostracization and being the target of harassment or even violence, than I'd say it's a safe bet that we're not so monolithically white supremacist as most on the left would seem to think we are - especially since all of the above applies exclusively to white-on-black racism.

None of which is to say that we're black supremacist either.  That would be a patently ridiculous statement.  There is a soundness to the underlying logic of affirmative action - it's not reasonable to expect immediate recovery and equality for PoC from centuries of discrimination as a result of mere legislated equality of right.  Giving a hand up to those who've been unfairly treated in the past so that they may live their lives on more equal footing with those who've benefited from the unequal treatment in the past is a just and fair sentiment.  Of course, the historical reality is more complex and nuanced than that, but just the same, I'd say we live in a society that has shown itself committed to transcending white supremacy.  To a degree that looking the other way in the face of displays of hatred for whites by PoC is hardly unique to the radical left, but is actually quite mainstream.

It actually sounds quite liberal to me.  But OK.

Only it isn't OK.  It's actually a grave long term threat to both liberalism and radical leftism, and it would well behoove centrists and leftists alike to come to grips with PoC racism towards whites and start condemning it.

Not because PoC presently (or likely will in any foreseeable future) have the capacity to oppress whites in a manner comparable to the manner in which European colonialism resulted in the oppression of PoC.  But because two wrongs don't make a right, however incomparable the wrongs may be in terms of scale and harm done.  Yes, violence by PoC against whites do have "implications."  The implications for white families who lose a father and provider to PoC violence aren't appreciably different than the implications for PoC families who suffer a similar loss at the hands of a white person. Grief knows no color.  People are more than the abstract social categories to which they are ascribed, and those instances in which polities have lost sight have this have always been accompanied by mass bloodshed.

Because real white supremacy - the kind practiced in the pre-civil rights US, in apartheid era South Africa and Nazi Germany was terrible, and should not be trivialized in this manner.

Because it preserves the integrity of anti-racism as a political position.  You either think it's okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color or you don't.  If you think it's okay for some races to discriminate but not others, guess what?  You think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color.  And if you think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color, why should I listen to a word you say when you lecture me on why I shouldn't discriminate based on skin color?  Nothing sinks the credibility of a moral position faster or more thoroughly than this kind of arrogance and hypocrisy.  Just ask any washed up televangelist.

Power differentials between races and between people are vastly more complex than "whites have all the power and blacks none."  While certain overarching trends do hold when looked at from a big picture, macroeconomic perspective, context matters in individual cases.  Put your typical white dude in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson circa 1988, and who has the power in that situation?  Unless that white dude's name was Rocky Marciano circa the early 1950s, I'll tell you right now where my money's lying.  If allegations of racism on a college campus or in a human resources department threaten the livelihood of white but not PoC employees, who has the power in that circumstance?

Historically, it was asserted that the kulaks were a "privileged" class and that the Soviet Union, being a "socialist" society was incapable of being oppressive since oppression was defined as the means by which one class maintained an exploitative relation of production with another, which a socialist society was, by definition, incapable of. Violence carried out by the revolution against its class enemies was handwaved away in the familiar terms of being a "reaction" and "self defense" against power and privilege.  One wonders if SLBOK would regard the tens of millions murdered in the communist world as being less dead due to this line of rationalization?

Of course, there are many circumstances under which all other things being equal, being white would be an advantage, and that these are legitimate issues that should be tackled.  Point is, power differentials in the real world depend a great deal on specific context.  For all the criticisms of "class reductionism" prevalent in social media leftism, it is at least more solidly grounded in political and economic reality than identitarian reductionism is, though all forms of reductionism are inherently limited.

And all of this assumes that merely being lower on the totem pole of power and privilege automatically makes one morally superior in the first place.  This underlying implication that it does seems to be driving politics in increasingly caustic and decreasingly productive directions.  The popular term "oppression olympics" says a great deal about how this politics of competitive victimhood is playing out in actual practice.  But it does more damage than even pitting people against one another across racial or gender lines: it makes real social solidarity - the kind needed to win material benefits and political progress in a capitalist society - impossible.  Radical left groups like SLBOK, of all people, should know this.  It's why leftists began opposing racism in the first place - division of the white and black working classes constantly hampered organizing efforts.  The right's exploitation of white working class's attraction to reactionary politics is an ongoing frustration to the left to this day.  Their subsequent blindness to their own variations of the same divisive character thus becomes all the more frustrating and indefensible.

The sooner the left abandons privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" pseudo academic dogmas, the more effective and credible it will be.  One wonders if this is precisely why corporate backed center "left" parties, media and academic departments seem to like privilege theory as much as they do?

Racism is wrong no matter who does it.  This implies no less opposition to racism against PoC than privilege theory does, it merely prevents anti-racism from being itself a form of privilege for those PoC high enough up on the political and economic totem pole to actually make use of it. Or from being a tool used by academic and media elites at the behest of state and corporate power to promote scapegoating and resentment between the white and black underclasses, further undermining solidarity.  It actually brings anti-racism back into the philosophy of enlightenment humanism and universal human rights that was the source of its credibility in the first place.  Hopefully this can be done before said credibility is completely squandered.

That sounds liberal to me.  And that's quite OK.

The Leftist's Guide to Winning Elections

Can't it be 2008 again?  Or at least some time like that.  That is the question leftists all over the western world today must ask themselves.  Barack Obama was poised to become America's first black president in a landslide victory over John McCain.  And even where nominally conservative parties held office, such as in Canada and the UK, the overall mood was still quite progressive.  The Lehman Bro's meltdown had tanked the credibility of trickle down economics.  Stimulus was the word of the day.

For the social conservatives, things were worse.  Demolishing evangelical Christian dogmas was the favorite sport of the internet, as the works of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins had recently been international bestsellers.  Wall Street was soon to be occupied, and gay marriage destined for legalization.  Of course, there were successes on the right, such as the 2010 emergence of the Tea Party in red state America, David Cameron in the UK or Stephen Harper's conservative majority in Canada, but these just seemed more like a foil for the increasingly progressive and secular status quo.  Remember the debt ceiling fiasco?

Feminism, secularism and LGBT pride ruled the internet, and the old angry white males and the evangelicals were, it was agreed, a diminishing demographic eventually destined for the ash heap of history.  The mere suggestion of racism, misogyny or homophobia was more than sufficient to silence any message board, office or lecture hall into swift submission.  No crystal ball or deck of tarot cards in the halcyon early days of social media could have foreseen Brexit, meme magic, GamerGate or Donald Trump.

As I write this, Trump is poised to take the office of POTUS with a red house and senate.  Right wing, in some cases far right parties surge in the European polls.  Pepe the frog pops up all over social media, and tumblr SJWs with their trigger warnings and safe spaces are now the favorite punching bags of the very kinds of bloggers and YouTubers that not so long ago, it seemed, were trouncing evangelicals.  Even the last great standard bearer of 1st world progressivism, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, has come in for ridicule and criticism for his poetic praise of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

It didn't have to come to this.  And it doesn't have to stay this way.  It would be quite easy, in fact, for the progressive left to regain the high ground and get the wind back in its sails.  The easiest way to do this might be just to do nothing.  The instant, and I mean the very nanosecond they're sworn in, it will most likely be back to pet issues and fetish causes for the GOP.  Namely, corporate tax cuts, middle east power projection and regional hegemony, and efforts to curb abortion rights.  Not quite what the Cult of Kek had in mind, I'm sure, but did they really think they could challenge the ossified neo-cons of the US deep state that are, for all intents and purposes, there enthroned?  They wouldn't be the first to falter on that assumption.  Hope and change, anyone?

If the progressives want to hasten the process of returning to the White House, and maybe taking back a senate seat or two and a few state governorships, however, here are a few suggestions I have for them:

• There are two kinds of people whom you call racist: real racists, who don't care all that much because you're just a worthless pinko commie to them, and people who aren't racist.  People who aren't racist will get tired of you calling them one sooner or later, so don't.
• The above is also true of people whom you call misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic or any other kind of phobic your lexicon might contain.
• This is especially true of you use any of the above to emotionally blackmail or kafkatrap people into accepting your views on broader political issues.  Or to demonstrate a presumed moral, cultural or intellectual superiority on your part.  Or use them to dodge or sidestep lines of argument that challenge your world view.  Try to refrain from doing these things.  If it would help, consider avoiding news sites and blogs that encourage this kind of behavior, such as Everyday Feminism, Jezebel or HuffPost Women (these being the worst offenders, but by no means the only ones).
• It is incumbent upon you to convince others of the merits of your political philosophy.  It is not incumbent upon others to accept your political philosophy or vote in a manner of your preference simply because you want or feel entitled to it.  This is true even if you have a college diploma, a vagina or dark skin.  There is nothing wrong with having any of those things, but they don't entitle you to other people's allegiance.  Even if those factors make you "marginalized" or you fear the results of an election not going your way. 
• Your political views, stances on social issues, education, marginalized identities or any combination thereof do not make you morally or intellectually superior to others.  I'd recommend you not act as though they do.
• Those same factors do not absolve you of the responsibility to prove as factual any claims you make if you wish to have your claims regarded as fact.  
• Those same factors do not entitle you to obstruct traffic, disrupt classroom, workplace or governmental activities, shut down meetings and speakers you disagree with and act like an asshole towards other people.  
• You'd be surprised at how many people privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" don't wash with.  A considerable number of people quite rightly view such sophistry as self serving rationalizations that smug douchebags use to license their own shitty behavior.  Your marginalized identities do not exempt you from being an asshole when that is, in fact, what you are being.
• People don't really care how many college professors or textbooks told you that any of the above is okay.  Credentializing an ideology and institutionalizing it in academia doesn't make said ideology infallible.  If it did, scientific racism would be true because the university of Berlin taught it as gospel circa 1935 or so.  Your own postmodern philosophies are, perhaps, truer than you'd like them to be in this regard.  In this case, your "knowledge" really is just self serving bias.

I could say more, and maybe even go into ideological and policy matters.  But I really don't think it's necessary.  It really comes down to not being an asshole.  Quite frequently, the advice you'd have been quick to give others regarding any kind of PC related issue, except applied to yourself.  That is the hard part, I realize.  But there's a reason the religious leaders of world history so stressed ideas like "doing unto others as you'd have others do unto you," and "removing first the log from thine own eye ..."  It's not because they believed in some fairy tale sky daddy, as I'm sure you've told yourself when you want to feel superior to churchgoing folks - you know, the ones you so smugly derided because they never practiced what they preached?  Yes, those ones.  It's because it really works.  It shows integrity and demonstrable commitment to your values.  People are drawn to that.  People respect that.  Try it.  I think you'd be glad of the results.

The Other Red Pill: Race to the Bottom

So why bring all of this up at all?  What good is Marxist materialism in the 21st century, decades after the collapse of the USSR?  Because it is desperately needed.  The previous two entries in the Other Red Pill series describe how the lack of understanding of class in a materialist context is causing terrible distortions in racial and sexual politics, as well as enabling the widespread acceptance of neo-liberal economics.  With no understanding of class rooted in economic relations, persistent inequality across racial and gender lines can only be explained by either an entrenched culture favoring one group over the other, or an appeal to innate biological differences between the unequal groups.

Suffice it to say, these explanations are not helping racial and gender relations any.  And it's only going to get worse.  Discussions between feminists and men's rights activists, or between Black Lives Matter supporters and the Alt-Right certainly do lack class.

This isn't to say that culture and identity don't matter.  They do.  But making these factors central puts the cart before the horse, so to speak.  If you've been following the Other Red Pill series since the beginning, you should know that the most fundamental relations that people engage in boil down to physical survival and sustenance, which is most certainly material and economic in its character.  Economic relations and forces of production are therefore the base of your society.  These activities, over time, end up shaping the politics, culture, dominant belief systems, personal relationships and so on.  These more cultural and personal matters are thus the superstructure upon which the base is constructed.

Racial prejudice, for example, is commonly seen in terms of being a moral failing or the result of ignorance.  And for white people, racism against people of color is seen today as being worse than that: it is actually an instrument of oppression.  Evidence cited for this later claim is the ongoing economic inequality between whites and black people, and the subsequent poverty and social problems that result.  Therefore white people must stop being racist if blacks are to achieve equality. This necessitates the existence of a class of educated sociologists in media and government to monitor and police the words and behaviors of whites to make sure they are not racist.  Suffice it to say, many white people are not happy about this.

These views are not entirely wrong, but are but a part of a much bigger picture.  Whence comes racism and resulting racial inequality?  All forms of extractive economics - systems that work by screwing over one segment of the population to benefit another, tend to have to rationalize this conduct in a way that makes it morally palatable to its beneficiaries, victims and onlookers.  If you were a Spanish Conquistador and you just waltzed into 15th century central and south American and just took their gold and bound the natives to the land in an incredibly exploitative system of forced labor, you might feel like a bit of a prick, right?

Not if you had religion, and had God on your side and were saving the native's souls by converting them to the one true faith!  That made it okay, and that gold then becomes more guilt free.  It's easier to grow fat off plantation slave labor if you tell yourselves that your dark skinned slaves are less human than you are, and that you're really doing them a favor by having them work for you.   More compact cultures built around these kinds of rationalizations for the flagrant exploitation of whole categories of people more effectively work to ease guilty consciences.  So you tell yourselves whatever you have to: a shoehorned interpretation of the bible that refers to dark skinned people as the children of Cain and therefore cursed and deserving of mistreatment, or pseudoscience involving skull measurements and other racial characteristics to conveniently brand the slaves as an inferior race.

But the bottom line is always, well, the bottom line.

For a variety of reasons, not least of which being that the industrial mode of production made chattel slavery less competitive, though the plantation states losing the Civil War (for that reason) hastened the process, said chattel slavery fell out of use.  But the racist ideas it gave rise to (the superstructure) didn't go away because they still had a place in the underlying relations of production (base), even after slavery and later Jim Crow segregation were finally defeated: racial prejudice enabled the paying of lower wages to black workers (rationalized according to their "laziness"), dividing the working class and weakening the unions.  This resulted in all workers regardless of color doing less well as a result, though many even in the white working class were loathe to give up the ego stroking sense of supremacy over blacks that racism gave them.  As Lyndon Johnson put it:

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it: if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Due to their long period as slaves, and then as victims of legal discrimination, blacks and other minorities had far fewer opportunities than whites to accumulate capital and pass it on generation to generation.  And since capital is where wealth in a capitalist society really comes from, as I'm sure you've guessed, this compounds the problem.  Less capital means less cultural influence as well, not to mention politicians exploiting racial sentiment to keep their more economically populist rivals out of office.  So you can see now that culture ultimately flows from economy, though is also quite capable of having a life of its own that is slow to change, feeding back into the economic system incentives to keep the existing cultural system in place.

Ultimately, however, economy is the stronger of the two most of the time.  Racial prejudice gradually faded - it was removed from the core structure of the plantation economy by the abolition of slavery, and phased out politically over the next century when Jim Crow segregation was challenged by the civil rights movement.  I would not be the only one to notice, however, that when the man who's name is synonymous with the US civil rights movement - Martin Luther King Jr. began talking about inequality in terms of class and economics, even going as far as to plan a poor people's march on Washington for all races, that's when he got assassinated.

The FBI's notorious counter intelligence program may be (officially) shut down, but perhaps it's more the case that it has actually been institutionalized to an extent that it's no longer really needed.  Radicalism is perfectly fine and acceptable in the US and other western nations these days, as long as it's the right kind of "radicalism."  Provided that power is defined in terms of race and gender, media and academia that have become more rather than less corporate and beholden to corporate and advertising revenues are, in fact, quite supportive of "radicalism."

There's always space in mainstream media for cultural criticism, provided it stays cultural.  Major media conglomerates will give front page space to black nationalists who see racism everywhere.  But especially in the trailer courts and dilapidated rust belt suburban neighborhoods.  There's always room to criticize the ethnic composition of the cast of the latest Marvel superhero movie, or even the ethnic composition of the board of directors at Sony, Viacom or Time-Warner.  So long as there's no criticism of how powerful these institutions actually are outside of an identitarian context.  Firing troublemakers on the pretext of "racism" is actually a good way to keep the status quo the status quo, as a matter of fact.

But most of the time, things don't have to get so messy.  People who want to be "left" and fight oppression now have acceptable channels through which to do so: attack white people and their privilege, which all white people must have in equal measure, because ... because reasons.  And sometimes the reasons are valid.  The white man's racism is not to be condoned.  It's worked against the common interests of all of the have-nots for far too long now, as the LBJ quote above indicates.

To criticize the lower class white man for his racism when appropriate is one thing.  To charge the lower class white man as being a beneficiary in equal measure with all other white people in a system of power over which his lack of class gives him no control is quite another, and is itself an act of oppression geared towards preserving rather than undermining the real power structures.  He is made an acceptable scapegoat for the evils of an unacceptable system, despite his own very real powerlessness.  It is important that alt-leftists call this out in a manner that does not turn these tables on the poor black.  You've been red-pilled now, you should know where people's attention really needs to be focused.

One wonders if President Obama marvels in a manner comparable to President Johnson before him, over just how easy it is to pick the pockets of the lowest black man so long as he can look down on the best white man for his "racism."  Their loyalty to Obama at the polls tells the story.

But white people who rightly get annoyed by this - the white people who actually lack the power that the upper middle class sociologists define as a key ingredient to real racism - the white people who've never been that much closer to the top of the social hierarchy than blacks due to the fact that they've never owned anything more than their own labor power to sell in a country that's always been hostile to worker's rights - can then blame "the left" and its "cultural Marxism" for demonizing whites and their culture.  But the poor white must above all remember, it's the "left" and especially "Marxism" that he has to blame.  If there's anyone that both poor blacks and poor whites need to be steered clear from, it's that Marx guy.

I can't help but wonder if the souls of those dead conquistadors; the ones who were just doing God's work and the dead plantation owners who were just preserving the natural order of things aren't looking at the women's studies and black studies department theorists and shaking their heads with that mixture of admiration and shame that comes with the knowledge that you've finally been utterly and completely out-classed at your own game.

Whatever success they have from here, the SJWs have been utterly successful at what I firmly believe their true purpose was.  They've truly beaten the Ku Klux Klan at their own game.  We're to busy checking our privilege now to be the 99% any more.  And that's the important thing.

The Alt-left's most controversial issue: To Race Realist or not to Race Realist?

The alt-left is becoming less race realist, and veteran alt-left blogger Rabbit is not happy about it:

"The AltLeft seems to be attracting a new faction of people who want to be “neutral” on the issue of race. A lot of them are “left libertarian” gamergate types who are critical of third wave feminism but reject the AltRight because of racism. People like Sargon of Akkad and Shoe0nhead come to mind. They think any identity politics is bad and that people who defend white identity are just “the mirror image of SJWs ” In fact, this is becoming the dominant faction. They’re basically people who just think this social justice warrior craze has gone too far, and they want to turn the clock back to like 1995 when it was just slightly less prevalent. As I’ve stated a million times before, this will never work."

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, race realism refers to what was once called scientific racism: the belief that there are demonstrable genetic and biological differences between humans based on race, and that these differences are significant enough to influence individual and social outcomes.  This kind of thinking fell out of favor after WWII - the Nazis were major proponents of scientific racism, as we should all know.  Race realist theories were seen as mere pseudoscience and rationalizations for the ugliest episodes from the darker epochs in human history; from the European conquest of the Americas and the slave trade to fascism and the holocaust.

Despite this, "race realism" is far from dead, though it continues to be hounded by allegations of being mere pseudoscience and driven by ignorance and bigotry.  The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray argued that measurable differences in intelligence existed between the races, that these differences were largely, though not completely determined by heredity and that these differences had significant impact on economic and social outcomes.  The controversy was, for lack of a better term, a full-on shit storm.  Since then, the idea has been gaining adherents on the alt-right, of which the early alt-left was a part.

Rabbit's warning of what could happen should we fail to accept certain racial realities is dire:

When a city or a country becomes 70-80% non-white, it will most certainly not retain any “race neutrality” toward white people. Imagine being the white guy in an 80% black country who says “Guys, we’re all just one race, the human race. Here’s what I think we all should do about problem XYZ which would help everyone rather than focus on awarding reparations.”  They will basically just laugh and be like “Whitey, sit your ass down and shut up. We’re in charge now.” Only it won’t actually be you of course. It will be your children and their future that you sold out for nothing but a bit of virtue signaling. Do you want your kids to live in a city that looks like Baltimore or Detroit or the shitty parts of Oakland? Do you want them to go to a high school where they get taunted by mobs of low IQ mestizos, because the school is 95% Mexican? Have you ever felt while walking through a ghetto neighborhood late at night that you had nothing to worry about because this was a “race neutral” environment? In South Africa, whites are running for their lives. Perhaps that wouldn’t happen here, but at the very least don’t expect going to the movies to be a quiet and pleasant experience.

I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by saying this, but I think that the question of whether or not biological and genetic differences between the races exist is of lesser concern than social and cultural compatibility.

And where that is concerned, it turns out Rabbit just might have a point.

Robert D. Putnam (of Bowling Alone legendry) in a 2007 paper entitled E Pluribis Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐First Century, immigration and ethnic diversity does, at least in the short term, "reduces social solidarity and social capital.  New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, residents of all races tend to 'hunker down', trust (even within one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer."

The fear I have of the concept of race realism is the potential for abuse: "Science shows we have higher IQs on average, so the good jobs are ours!"  Are color bars; rationalized rent-seeking for whites - something we'd really like to go back to?  Higher IQs or no, America's historical treatment of its black population is not something to be proud of.

But over fifty years have passed since the passage of the 1964 civil rights act and Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream speech.  We are 7 years into our first black POTUS.  And racial peace and reconciliation are, if anything, further away now than they were in the days of the Rodney King riots or even the Watts riots.  Liberals blame right wing racism.  Conservatives blame the welfare state.  One look at so called "social justice" blogs on tumblr and elsewhere make it quite clear that "judging a man by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin" is resonating less and less with minority communities preoccupied with knapsacks of privilege and cultural appropriation.  Another quick glance at 4chan's politically incorrect forums and reddit forums point to growing numbers of whites who are losing their fear of being smeared "racist" and are unapologetic in their advocacy for racial in-group preference.

And then there's Europe, where years of mass immigration and failure to effectively assimilate migrant populations, culumnating with the dreadful mishandling of the refugee crisis and sloppy attempts at covering up a resulting rape crisis have brought previously marginal far right parties into the political mainstream.  Few places seem to not be dealing with a racial crisis or issue of some kind or another, although some fare better than others.  My home town of Calgary - indeed most of Canada as a whole seems to be relatively (and I must emphasize that term) free of racial tensions.  Which isn't to say that it's not there.  But in most people's day to day lives, multiculturalism and diversity are not working out too badly.  Individual mileage may vary, of course.

This level of cordiality is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, sadly.  Truth is, I rather liked Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream.  I still think it's a worthy vision.  But something just isn't working here.  Is it time to throw in the towel?

I can not and will not advocate racial supremacy nor for the forced segregation of the races in any way.  I cannot associate myself with any ideological rationalization for racial oppression and genocide.  And it is for precisely that reason that I have to wonder if forced diversity and multiculturalism really needs to be a hill that western political elites are hell bent on digging in their heels and dying on.  If a polity can make multiculturalism work, more power to them.  But this religious fanatic level of devotion to diversity that the hegemony of western liberalism has been doubling down on increasingly just seems silly and misguided to me.  You can't force people to like each other when they don't want to.  Keep trying, and something really, really ugly is going to happen somewhere sooner or later.

If people, even people of European descent or, dare I say, white skin, want to live in more culturally or even racially homogenous communities, who am I to tell them they can't?  Now, dramatically curtailing immigration will most certainly cause as many problems as it will solve, if indeed it will solve any, but that's a matter for another time.

It would well behoove the political and cultural elites of the western world to get off their high horses and listen to their populations when they say they're fed up with mass immigration and multiculturalism.  Keep trying to force a round peg into a square hole, and you'll just end up breaking the hole, the peg or the hammer.