Intersectionality

 I have major issues with modern Intersectionality, some of which is expressed here

A understated problem of Intersectionality is that Intersectionality causes people to focus less on their main identity (BIPOC, LGBTQ, woman) because they have to focus on multiple identifies along with it (like poc Transgender woman instead like poc woman , Transgender woman or poc)  . So Intersectionality waters down idpol 

Intersectionality is contrary to Marxism, because Intersectionality is contrary to historical-dialectical materialism (historical-dialectical materialism is a core tenant of Marxism) 

Intersectionality is a metaphor that is clumsily conceptualized in an attempt to describe how people can be discriminated against for various things at one time, in an attempt to argue that discrimination laws should account for this.

It has zero to do with what should be our main concern as a Socialist, which is exploitation. 

Our concern ideally should really be the material needs of the masses, not the interpersonal implicit biases that could informally live within our subconsciouses that we are either tasked with purging like some sort of sinful inclination, or nurse in the interest of fetishized "marginalized groups," which is what the majority of intersectionalists actually advocate for basically.

Better to just downplay or even ditch this intersectionality oppression ontology altogether and instead fight for the workers (at least in theory or pragmatically).

The liberation of women and minorities was already part of the socialist corpus of theory over a hundred and more years ago. If you read those dusty old books you will find that it is something which was clearly accounted for. For example, Vladimir Lenin in his works wrote not only about women but also he wrote about national minorities who were in Russia.

So what in the world is so new about "intersectionality"? I find no new insight there. 

I instead find, the way intersectionality functions is merely to make race and gender as important as, if not more important than, class. Furthermore, the theory has a obvious influence from post-modernism which enjoys to playing around with the notions of identity. 

The final result being, the-same-old-capitalism, but now with more women CEOs, and "inclusive" of people who are androgynous and non-white. So it's a type of Benetton poster capitalism, a United Colours of Capitalism.  As a radical/socialist feminist. I echo Germaine Greer's comment on a company introducing quotas for women in the board room: "equality for what? Equality for women to be as craven, as sociopathic and as pig-headed as some men? What equality is that?"

Whenever you push someone on this point they literally do not have an answer. Their response is always something like describing intersectionality as just the act of building a coalition that isn't comprised only of white men (which implies that you want the coalition to be only made up of white men, which would obviously not be sufficient). 

The truth is that coalition building has existed consistently for many thousand years is fully ignored. To echo the Old Left ‘s example that these guys are so intent to denounce, that kind of multiracial, cross-gender support was a critical part of their ideology 

Like there was Russian Slavs who worked closely with Latinos in Cuba and in other parts of Latin America, these Cubans sent military aid to the Angolan blacks who were fighting against European colonialism, with the Chinese fighting on the other side of the world aiding in revolutions across diverse Asian populations, at the same time that women were introduced to more equality that was oftentimes not matched by the West.

There is nothing state of the art or cutting edge about the theory of "intersectionality", it seeks only to be an ideological cudgel that the Liberal 2.0ers and Liberal 2.0er-adjacents use to beat the Left wing with.

However, Intersectionality does have some good elements to it, like when used in this context

Um, actually I do support (and am at one with) at least one particular intersectional group space: non binary climate change activists of color  (shhhhhh...don't tell anyone about this, it is our secret)  . I support Transgender pride

Intersectionality has become a sneaky substitute for the traditional left notion of solidarity developed in the process of ongoing collective struggle against the class enemy. Intersectionality is bad because it buries and negates class struggle. 

The Liberalism 2.0 inner party (journalists and academics) try to unite the outer parties (various base voters of different cultures and races-ethnicites) by re-framing the conflict as external to keep cohesion.

In project management people are trained and have a way to prevent scope creep, how do social movement prevent this scope creep while avoiding to be cast as hater.

Intersectionality claims that all the disparate groups have one common cause and one common enemy. 

While it may ostensibly unite them, it makes them very incapable of solving tensions among the groups, or addressing any cause that isn't the common enemy. That's how we get hot takes like "black-on-Asian crime is due to internalized white supremacy."

Though some say the opposite in that intersectionality leads to them creating a straightforward ranking system - the more "minority modifiers" they have, the more support they should get. There's no system beyond that.

Intersectionality says that types of oppression like sexism and racism have a multiplying effect which results in a unique and even more extreme type of oppression. 

The only framework that is used to relate to the different types of oppression is an immaterial hierarchy of social dominance. 

Standpoint theory makes things exponentially worse since it presumes that only people who are experiencing discrimination can understand it. 

Therefore to undo systems of oppression they have to listen to the most oppressed people, even if it is just the 0.5 percent. However, who is the most oppressed is an unresolved question within Intersectionality 

So originally Intersectionality was specifically used to describe the experience of African American women, whose experience of racism during the 1980s was different from African American men, and whose experience of misogyny was different than white women’s experience of misogyny . Through “adding those experiences together” it was clear it didn’t make sense to accurately describe their experiences.

The word intersectionality originally was used by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her discussion of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a black woman who alleged that she had been discriminated against as a black person AND as a woman. 

Absurdly the court rejected her claim, saying that the plaintiff needed to choose whether she alleged discrimination on the basis of gender or of race, but not both. Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to cover these instances of multiple and overlapping oppressions. 

As a legal theory it hasn’t gained a whole lot of traction. But in the worlds of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex intersectionality has become a pervasive buzzword.

For instance, African American men face racism by wrongly being considered “thuggish” or “bad workers,” and white women experience misogyny by wrongly being considered “weak” or “domestic,” , yet nobody considered African American women “thuggish” and they weren’t given the relevant “benefit” of benevolent sexism to be considered “above” or “too delicate for” working and therefore better served as homemakers.

Instead, African American women were wrongly seen as too sexual, too emotional, but also angry and strong (which are actually good traits). 

These contradictions between how blackness in the “prototypical” male was seen and femaleness in the “prototypical” white made it so that just adding black and female together wouldn’t show the full picture.

The common enemy is and should be capitalism, even if they don't recognize it as such. 

Intersectionality was originally in line with Marxist beliefs, but it was ripped away from it over time and the ideology was co-opted by Liberal 2.0ers.

Maybe a mix of class reductionism + intersectionality can salvage this deluded modern form of Intersectionality

By the fruits you shall know them.

Diversity might have some advantages, but cohesion is not one of those advantages.

All politics boil down to out-group versus. in-group and through this grouping lense, the in-group are the oppressed (like, perception rules all, you just got to appear marginalized to be counted as the in-group).

There is a lot of power plays by various groups and individuals to vie for the highest positions and because of their foundations, this is about being the biggest victim. Some people call this the ‘oppression olympics’ , and it is easy to see why.

The fracturing become very obvious when harm is done to an internal group and it can't be blamed on the outgroup. Like if African Americans attack Asians, or when poorer BIPOC harass white women, etc.

Naturally the opposition tries its darnest to use these contradictions to split the enemy's base. Liberal 2.0ers attempt to combat this by keeping a cover on internal infighting by giving them a common enemy in the white majority.

This chases a lot of white people completely into reactionary politics (like the Right Wing)

Nobody likes to be blamed for things that they didn't do, but everyone has their own scapegoat. (even white American Liberal 2.0ers and men to a lesser degree). 

Even when the collective identity is taken into account,  they clearly pin a lot of things on these groups that other ('their own') groups do just as much or more.

It is why you see absurd claims that the two sex categories we have are some European invention, as if the majority of the world, save some minor cultures, haven't done the same division since forever.

But 'whiteness' (whites themselves being the creator and original carriers of this ‘sin’) serves as a metaphorical ‘evil force’ in the Liberalism 2.0 and to some extent Leftist worldview and so everything seen as bad must originate from it. It's like Christians seeing the hand of Satan in every misfortune (“foosball is of the devil Bobby”).

Disruption of the ossification of the human. 

Intersectionality is at least now, basically another word for idpol. The purpose of idpol is to divide everyone. It does more harm than good, it changes nothing, and idpol makes the Left completely impotent, because the ideology of idpol says you have to do it all the time to the exclusion of all other values.

The fact that large corporations are now pushing this is very suspect to say the least.

With traditional idpol you can just have various blocs that act discretely. But at the very least there's coherence. 

With at least modern Liberalism 2.0 intersectionality, it's literally just too many variables to account for and the inevitable progressive stack that will rub people the wrong way. 

You cannot tell the majority of Hispanics that they have to be discreet and be defined by the concerns of Trans Latinx bodies

The average African American is not going to be silenced so that an immigrant Lesbian African American woman can speak over them. 

The Asian community is not going to accept racial affirmative action if it screws them over, and they aren't going to be defined by half black Asians because most Asians aren't half black.

Modern, Liberalism 2.0 Intersectionality is a warped take on the existing good ideal concept of solidarity, except that intersectionality only pays lip service to class struggle and that is an issue for me.

Primary politics in the US are poisoned because you have to cater everything to the least representative factions of the two major parties and the MSM, which includes genuine ethnonarcisists and flighty PMC attention seekers among the Democrats and the freaky televangelicals and race nationalists among Republicans.

The irony is that the Liberalism 2.0 and or Progressive stack basically imposed a hierarchical structure on occupy: the most marginalized are allowed to speak first and dominate the discussion. 

Then, possibly, if there's time left over, others who are less marginalized may speak. Albeit a structure with none of the benefits of hierarchies in the first place: clear accountability, clear points of communication during action or times of confusion, and better delegation of specific responsibilities or expertise

It's merely a limit of one's ability to know that their long term personal aims really align with the interests of a collective political front that is centered around a class politics. 

An obfuscation that breeds an intrinsic fear of 'collective' as an idea, they believe that everyone will just evolve into a yes man/woman cyborg or some b.s like that.

The intersectionalists fail to grasp that their schtick increases the individual to a level of supreme political being, and that their individual problems are supreme political problems. 

It's not surprising that such concepts were in largely created by and are now being taught by the petite bourgeoisie. Only more capitalist funhouse mirrors. 

And there are numerous examples of this, heightened diversity standards in the entertainment industry get rewarded by intersectional neo-leftists by way of classical capitalist consumption. They advocate for more women in STEM but without realizing that they are not advocating for an employment equity but instead are advocating for an even spread of capitalist exploitation to all peoples of all identities. 

They advocate for immigrants believing that they are morally righteous when unbeknownst to them, even if their lives are tangibly better off here, they just become the lowest of the proletariat.

There is some type of weird injustice here, neoliberals being like the cowboys of the capitalists, herding more and more naive and helpless and oppressed people (migrants, transgender women, non binary people and other marginalized people) in to the iron grasp of the claws of capitalism. Black Ariels become the victories of a rainbow variant of capitalism.

For getting what I am saying, I will reference Baudrillard and Debord. In a prism that this is a simulation or a side show. We have simulated activism and results. Is it any shock that social representation is among the biggest criticisms within these scenes? In this way they make equality into a commodity, and their brand of equality is only a simulation. A Black Ariel, as a metaphor, thus is a simulation of equality, transgender women in STEM also being a simulation of equality also

Baudrillard's argument would be that for the neoliberals this simulation of equality is hyperreal, more real than real, because they're entrenched deeply in the simulacra. Their leftism itself being a simulation of a leftist politics.

As for the chuds, their rhetoric always has been rooted in individualism, there isn't truly any need to touch on that. 

They make use of individualism essentially in much the same way, though individualism is impossible in a capitalist system, since there are too much economic forces that pressure an agent to get in line, to conform, and it is the owner of a big part of your life leaving you unable to develop a craft or skill (no matter what its economic ramification) to the extent that you would develop those sorts of things if you were not put in a position to need to fight for your economic survival.

Though I do see some positives in Intersectionality. Intersectionality shows how people shouldn’t be neatly categorized by only broad labels like race-ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex/gender, religion since a lot of people have unique intersects of identities/modifers thus making Intersectionality individualistic in a way since the more identities/modifers someone has the more unique and thus individualistic they are

Intersectionality shows how these unique mixes of identifies/modifers shows that there are even more diversity in the world due to these mixes of identifies/modifers which also makes it harder for haters to neatly define intersectional people to be bigoted toward since if they can’t neatly or broadly define them they can’t be bigoted toward them

This can help us transition to a post categorizing/labeling society where there will be no need for categorizing/labeling.