#class reductionism

thoroughly enjoyed this analysis of the failures of modern “white feminist” horror. i really loved her point towards the end about how these stories rarely if ever, include or show the perspectives of lower income women of color and their relationships to the horror of motherhood as working class nor show any effect it has on the children who are demonized by the narrative like they asked to be here lol.

You are on a boat, miles off the coast. It isn’t a superyacht, by any means. Big enough to take a family or two fishing for a day, comfortably. Over your lifetime, you held down normal jobs, got a few promotions, and managed to save a bit of money for retirement. You aren’t rich, certainly. You would consider yourself middle class, but comfortably enough that you managed to spend a bit of money on something you enjoy after working in your field for a couple of decades and managing your income responsibly.

Even so, as you were pulling out of the harbor that morning, right at the crack of dawn, driving by the section of the harbor where the really big yachts were parked left a foul taste in your mouth. As comfortable as you are, you knew the truth, that the people who owned those boats, over there, will make your entire yearly salary, as handsome as it may be, every single second. And while they do it by doing nothing except posting on twitter from their yachts all day. You, as someone who has spent decades of their life chained to the desk, watching the days pass you by from a boardroom window, intrinsically understood the unfairness that those boats represented.

But, as you turned the corner out of the harbor and drove off into the open sea, as the sun peaked over the horizon, you determined that you were not going to spend the day frustrated, so you put those thoughts aside to enjoy the peace and tranquility of the day you had worked tediously to achieve. You were not going to let capitalism steal your enjoyment of this day, like it had so many others, already.

And you had been successful. You and your buddy had spent the day leisurely enjoying the sunshine, trawling some of your favorite fishing spots with your deep sea rods, discussing life, the universe, and the nature of things. You felt good talking about things with this friend because you both recognized that the economic state of things was concerning. You both felt a mutual disgust of the ultra-wealthy and the burden that they place on the rest of society to support their lifestyles. You drank, you snacked, life was good for a few hours. You had even caught a couple of fish, though you both agreed that wasn't really the point of the excursion. It was just nice to be on the water.

The position of the sun, combined with higher winds, stronger waves developing, and some ominous looking dark clouds gathering in the sky indicated that it was best not to push your luck. Your stomachs agree that it is time to head back and throw some fresh fish on the barbeque. You pull in the fishing lines and start up the three large engines mounted on the stern. As the propellers kick up a large boil behind your boat, you begin gaining speed, leaving a decent wake behind you.

A moment later, you encounter something you did not expect. There was an orange lifeboat, an inflatable dinghy. It looked to be sized for about a dozen people, but it was carrying at least twice as many people. Struggling under the weight of far too many people, half of the boat was already submerged. There were three people paddling, desperately. They didn’t appear to have an engine. More concerning, only a couple of people had lifejackets.

At this point, you find yourself faced with a decision. Knowing that you were still a couple of miles from shore and the weather was deteriorating, you knew that it was becoming unsafe to be on the water. The people on the boat begin yelling, waving their arms at you, pleading for help.

Taking account of the situation, you have working navigational equipment and a satellite phone with a signal. You have a dozen spare lifejackets stored under the deck for visitors and half a dozen paddles there in case of an emergency. You have a couple of electric air pumps sitting around for filling up fun shaped pool floaties for lounging. You have pots and pans in the kitchen that could be used to bail water out of a sinking craft. You have large ropes that you use at the dock to secure your vessel that could probably tow another boat if you had to. You could also probably fit about a dozen people on your boat before it started to get a bit crowded.

You are reminded of the feeling you had that morning as you drove past the superyachts. With all this in mind, your decision is made. Your voice echoes out of the speaker as you say to the people in the boat “the reason that we are both out here on our shitty little boats is billionaires. We must work together to overthrow them. We are all in the same boat. Join your labor union”

Feeling satisfied, having put that progressive message out into the world, you turn up the throttle. As you drive past the struggling lifeboat, your wake rocks the other boat, causing it to flip. You go home, eat some fish, drink some beer, feeling grateful that you were able to spend some time outdoors.

I expect a good portion of my readers will recognize the approach taken above as class reductionism, which I will describe as the tendency that baby leftists, especially ones who hold relative social privilege due to their whiteness, cisness, or maleness, often have to recognize every problem as solely originating from class based oppression. The people who do this may have anywhere between a passive understanding of class from consuming media made by class conscious creators to a deep and thorough understanding of Marxist theory and can talk for hours about the relationship between the superstructure and its base for hours (without letting you get a word in). What they have in common, however, is a strong urge to view every problem only through the lens of class based oppression.

Now, don't get me wrong, class based analysis is extremely valuable, and Marx’s contribution to the field of anti-capitalist economics is fundamental to my own understanding. However, its limitation is that it describes only economic relations, whereas capitalism is only one of the oppressive hierarchies which permeates every aspect of our society. A more realistic framework would be something like what bell hooks described as the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because if one only analyzes oppression upon the axis of class, their analysis would fail to account for oppression that occurs as a result of imperialism, white supremacy, or patriarchy, or combinations of all of them. Intersections, as Kimberle Crenshaw described them in the early 1980s.

When baby leftists give into the temptation to reduce all of the other oppressive hierarchies permeating our society down to merely a function of economic class, they are choosing to close their eyes and remain ignorant to the struggles that people face as a result of oppression based off of the other oppressive hierarchies. This happens because the only type of oppression that these people experience, generally, is class based. In other words, it is a result of their privilege. They do not experience, firsthand, the subjugation that happens as a direct result of white supremacy, of patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, ableism or imperialism, so they are not inclined to notice it. In fact, noticing that there are other problems besides class would require actually working to address those other problems, too.

However, that is a lot of work. You’re telling me that I have to stop my boat, save these other people, with my resources? I just want to cruise back to shore and enjoy my fresh tuna and drink a beer. I’m not those ultra-wealthy guys with the superyachts who made those people feel like they needed to risk their lives to cross the sea so that they could not suffer even more brutal oppression. I dont have all that much extra, and yet you still expect me to give my lifejackets to those people in that boat? To donate my money to that mutual aid fundraiser of that Black mother facing homelessness or that trans woman who cant afford her transition? To let some of those people into my space, while towing the raft all the way back to shore?

Yes. Yes, I do.

We need more people taking direct action on behalf of the most marginalized in our society, those most at risk. We need support in the form of direct mutual aid. Lives depend on it. Your ideological approach should reflect this.

this article also appears on my substack and patreon for free. Your support is appreciated. Transitioning is expensive

I tend to tune out when they start on all their typically male-centered war obsessed history they use as a reason to litterally fucking scream at you, dehumanize you and mislabel you a “liberal” because you point out that not everyone who isn’t a communist is necessarily a fascist. Words have meaning… is capitalism feeding into it and ajacent? Sure. As an anarchist, do I think red fascists exist and are just as fucking annoying as tech bro libertarians?

Fuck yeah. I’m so fucking tired of white male “leftists” who think USSR history is the only thing they need to know in this world to platform themselves screaming over you with all the violence, hostility, and sexist entitled fucking narcissist energy they can muster.

So start a vanguard and shoot some Nazis or each other when you flee. Leave me the fuck out of all your unabashed hatred and bloodthirst.

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You’re not about justice, you’re about power (only for yourselves) and revenge.

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Depth and humanity in these conversations is not “weakness” “liberalism” or whatever tired name you want to throw at anyone who disagrees with you.

If you think war is the only answer then go fucking log off and start one you dumbass tankie. As long as you stay the fuck away from oppressing me and mine (which I often doubt) we were not enemies. Go take out the shared foes and stop harassing leftist women to soothe your broken egos.

Violent men are violent men are violent men.

because i’m blocking op, allow me to elaborate

there ARE women who make music without sex, nudity, and “showing skin and shaking ass”. i am one of them. do you know how much money i make from my music? $50/month, if i’m lucky.

i’ll be fair. i make soundtrack/ambient music. it’s not exactly an approachable art form and i’m relatively new on the scene

i also know other female artists—singer-songwriters, folk singers, alt pop—who make maybe $200/month off music in a good period. we could solve these disparities with something like ubi that allows anyone to make the art they love and are actually passionate about, but i’m preaching to the choir here, so…

it’s fascinating that this particular version of “class analysis” only ever concerns women and their displays of sexuality. this person doesn’t acknowledge the modern example of a man in music using their sexuality that i brought up—Justin Bieber—and instead defaults to the 60+ year old outrage machine around Elvis which has today amounted to nothing

there is no modern outrage machine around JB, at least not like there was back in 2012… when he was popular with young women…

this is about shaming women for publicly expressing their sexuality. if you all ACTUALLY cared about women in music not “showing skin and shaking ass”, you would put in more effort to support artists who are struggling to make their modest music go anywhere. so many women in music sell sex because it gets butts in seats at concerts. or just because they are sexual beings and they want to make art that reflects that

additionally, there are women in pop who don’t do this. i can think of several off the top of my head, but the first 3–Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift—all have one thing in common. they’re “cringe” artists. at least, according to the critics. young women enjoy them, just like they enjoy the work of Sabrina Carpenter who “shows skin and shakes ass”.

so you can pretend this is about the class war all you like. but this is really about the secondary definition of the word, isn’t it?

While Marxist and leftist scholars have sometimes produced interesting analyses of genocides, the amateur goofballs on this site have a tendency to try to reduce everything done to class and the profit motive. While the genocides of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Circassians were very much motivated by profit (at least to some degree), many others were not — such as the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, or Cambodian Genocide.

Still, class reductionism is far more palatable than the Soviet Union's official analysis of the Holocaust, which went:

To be clear, these are internal issues in these countries and Westerners sticking our noses in will just make things worse--opponents of SSM (for example) will claim this is a color revolution, and worse, you may actually be contributing to a color revolution--but these flaws serve as reminders that our own revolution, when we eventually have it, will not be a panacea.

Perhaps in some way it will be easier to fight these ills in a communist society--the Soviet Union was the first state on Earth to legalize abortion, after all. But even if that's the case, one must remember that the entire reason we're resorting to revolution in the first place is that nothing in the world will change that you don't actively fight to change.

And besides, let us not forget the words of Lenin: