• 1 Post
  • 125 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 28th, 2023

help-circle

  • Problem I have with calling this a feudal arrangement is a lot of serfs actually had family rights to their land/means of production under land tenure agreements. It’s more the notion of private ownership of land and production that has led to these private technology increasingly mediating more of our lives. I’ve seen the concept of technofeudalism used in good ways but the overall thing is capitalism and they are more elements of feudal type arrangement within that.




  • On paper I don’t know what those things really mean, “reform, tolerance, open-mindedness.” They sound like good things but are contingent, open-mindedness to what, tolerance to what, reform to what? They function as euphemisms for something I’m supposed to imply on my own. I don’t really have a use for this kind of thing.


  • banneryear1868@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    woke could be taken back by left for its original purpose

    I remember before the right adopted it as well, and I don’t think it’s worth saving at this point, it’s just a euphemism anyway. I like the religious connotation of “waking up” though. It describes this phenomenon of capital appropriating and mediating our discourse and approaches to managing the problems it’s caused. It’s a great way to ensure that notions of addressing disparities don’t threaten the bottom line through redistributive approaches that were so popular in the past. Reducing this to individual action and workplace etiquette has a pacifying effect, sometimes very intentionally. The worst thing to me is the economic relation this takes place under, corporations outsource and procure DEI services through consultants funded through private equity, rather than run it through their own employees. Even if the intention is completely positive this exerts a controlling influence under the coercive context of employment where there are inherent hierarchies and power dynamics. It’s also the fact this relation will influence the content of what is procured to that which ultimately benefits capital.

    Just thinking of how the Bud Light thing went, nobody talked about how the only reason the company started hiring queer people was a result of union job actions and boycotts from gay bars. The corporation engaged in marketing and appropriated the virtues those people fought for, the right freaked out over the company being “woke,” liberals and well meaning people rushed to defend the corporation and correctly insult the right for their reaction, then the company retracted in some symbolic way leaving their hands empty. Invoking the history and what it took to get these human rights and discrimination laws passed is something that threatens all the interested entities here, and when you understand that you have something real to guide you rather than being subject to the whims of corporate marketing strategies.



  • banneryear1868@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology)

    This is confusing, you seem to be using colloquial definitions of liberal with political ones interchangeably, but in the context of the political right denouncing liberal political projects as “woke” suggests you mean political liberals in the US.

    When I see liberal parties in other countries, namely Europe, they are classed as center-right. Here in Canada they’re a little more spread out but economic right for sure. For just a quick example, I support strong affirmative action, but for political liberals that has become watered down to “equality of opportunity” and disparity frameworks.


  • Liberal ≠ liberalism. I’ve had to explain this so many damn times in this thread it’s beginning to make me nutty.

    It’s because you’re using liberal as in, “wow that was a really liberal amount of gravy,” synonymously with liberal as in, “a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.”


  • That’s liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don’t have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It’s like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.

    I don’t think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they’re invoked to address. We’ve seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.



  • There’s also a conflict of interest that informs these notions, namely that “equality,” especially in the economic sense, the one that was invoked by MLK Jr and popular in the Civil Rights era, represents a threat to economic arrangements. Those same arrangements, like employers who purchase services from the diversity industry, inform the type of content that will be most marketable for diversity consultants. A company isn’t going to invoke notions of these things that would impact their bottom line. That’s why disparity frameworks are the most readily adopted by capital, because the arrangement of individuals in the system doesn’t alter or threaten the position of capital. The inverse example of this notion of equity would be, “everyone should struggle for a decent job and quality of life equally.” You can even bring this framework to the Antebellum south where, “if we had more black slave owners…”

    So I always raise this “yes, and” approach to this subject matter, because it’s in the history of this racial order where the more radical and satisfying answers to it are.


  • He never stereotyped whites as a distinct singular identity that I can recall, it was always about their relation to maintaining inequality. One of his most impactful actions was convincing white and black unions to strike together, and that the fight for jobs and equality was one poor whites and blacks needed to share. In “The Other America” he constantly references poor white populations who share in the struggle.

    MLK Jr never divided people by race like this, he thought that was one of the Three Evils plaguing American society.





  • Liberalism is individualist above all in my mind. What advances your personal freedom is the best thing for everyone. Neoliberalism is a post-Keynesian consensus that believes this is most achievable through equal opportunity in the free market.

    I also like Phil Ochs definition of liberal from the 60s, "ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally.