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„Woke Culture“ is a child of Neo-liberal capitalism


Arakan

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As I said earlier:

An ultra-hierarchical Society will always create a group of outcasts, those who don’t belong, those who are despised. Everywhere the same, feudal Europe in the Middle Ages, India, Japan, the Islamic empires. Nazi Germany. You name it. Just the groups who are ostracized change.

The US as a ultra-capitalist society where everything is competition, where people are divided into winners and losers, is an ultra-hierarchical society. And at the lowest end of this hierarchy are POC. The system itself is the problem. Racism is the tool. And it was, is and always will be the Elite to tell the masses who to hate. 
 

The only way to fight this is solidarity of all people. We are all human beings with the same intrinsic value when we are born. Women, men, transgender, straight, LGBT, no matter which ethnicity or „race“. Human beings. What I see in the Western world is one group against another. All the while the 1% have accumulated more wealth than the other 99% together (happened around 2011 in the US I think). 
 

One has to cry or laugh. 

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25 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I do not colonize anyone. English is not my first language and I use the words as best as possible. 
I give all of you a real world example which more or less was what triggered this thread. Then think about it. 
 

Not long ago a former professor of mine was promoted to the new Dekan of the mechanical engineering faculty. University is in Southern Germany. Because of that she gave an interview to the regional newspaper. And what an outrage this created. But first some background. 

The professor was born in Afghanistan in 1962. She was my professor around 2003/04, back in the hey days of the Afghanistan mission after 911. So it was a time of interesting discussions. She always said that for her personally and many women like her (i.e. those who wanted to get educated and be self-determined) the Soviet invasion and occupation was the best thing that happened to her. She was born into an average (read: very conservative) Tajik family, was already betroathed and due to be married of to some guy at the age of 17. Of course after the occupation everything changed, she could flee from her family to Kabul and started studying there in 1982, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. The Soviets very much promoted the education especially of women back in that time. In 1987 she came to Eastern Germany (GDR) for her phd. In 1999 she started teaching at my former university and was an active promoter of getting more girls into tech fields. All of this is well documented. 
 

Ok. What happened in the interview? She was asked the question about her initiatives to further increase the share of Girls in technical studies and where she thought further improvements must be done. She answered that she can only encourage every girl with technical interest to choose those studies but realistically, after 20 years of experience in this work, a certain upper limit will be reached (25-30% for mechanical engineering). You cannot force women or people in general to study something where they have no interest in. That’s also the reason why she is against generalized women quota in machinery or automotive companies. She said the reality is that the large majority of upper management positions in these companies (backbone of German economy) is occupied by people with engineering degrees (currently: 80%+). And if women want those positions in those companies they better study engineering. 

That was it. Nothing controversial but stating facts. 

And then the shitstorm happened (mostly on Facebook). This professor was attacked basically as a shill for male dominance. A supporter of the status quo, of patriarchy. She was accused of betraying the women‘s cause. And more and more. 

Eh. 
This seems rather lacking in nuance on how sexism even when there’s no 
People have this tendency to rest any disparity as only significantly the result from ingrained differences and ignore any socialization that could contribute to people’s preferences and choices.

Why are nurses mostly women? Well because women are natural caretakers. 
ignoring the fact male nurses used to be the norm: https://www.nursingtimes.net/news/research-and-innovation/focus-a-brief-history-of-men-in-nursing-06-03-2019/

Why are the vast majority of computer coders men? Well because men are naturally more logical.

Ignore how the majority used to be women https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

Why are most biology, architecture, and chemistry business majors now women?
Well because those fields which dealt with raw hard data, theory, and analysis of data, something, something womanly nature.

32 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

For example she argues that the political pet projects of the feminist left serves mainly well educated women - for example the push for a mandatory quota for women on the board of directors of public traded PLCs will only help women who are already part of a small elite. 

It should be noted This has been the go to brush off any attempt to combat any societal misogyny.Only rich, privileged women care about getting the vote, or sexual harassment laws, or equal pay laws, eliminating double-standards that preclude women from facing imprisonment for going braless and topples in public.

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10 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh. 
This seems rather lacking in nuance on how sexism even when there’s no 
People have this tendency to rest any disparity as only significantly the result from ingrained differences and ignore any socialization that could contribute to people’s preferences and choices.

This professor has been working to get more girls into tech fields for more than 20 years. The first semester share of Girls in mechanical engineering is currently 14%. For electrical engineering it’s 12%. Overall engineering increased from 19% in 1998 to 25% in 2019. All you gave was a buzz word. Intrinsic sexism. I guess this professor knows better than you. And you cannot force someone to study or work something against his or her will. 

 

 

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59 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

But the left still does in much of the west at least still does this? Whether putting more regulations to health insurance companies to stop from ignoring segments of the population due to higher risk or pushing things like universal healthcare the left is still doing this.

But there’s also much more talk of society’s homophobia, sexism, and racism.

Classism should not be the only thing that gets any air in the room.

 

Thats exactly it : Is Classim just one other thing the left is interested in among others, or is it their core belief?

IMO the social problem and social classes are the important part of being left. If you can say that I will fight more for a minority middle class man than a poor majority  man, than you relativize the importance of  helping the poor. In that sense the "woke" are a child of  capitalism which was the question of the threat.

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36 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

Thats exactly it : Is Classim just one other thing the left is interested in among others, or is it their core belief?

IMO the social problem and social classes are the important part of being left. If you can say that I will fight more for a minority middle class man than a poor majority  man, than you relativize the importance of  helping the poor. In that sense the "woke" are a child of  capitalism which was the question of the threat.

Exactly. A good example is LeBron James. A figurehead for BLM. Which is good because he has a lot of influence. But then when his own money was in danger (NBA China situation) he sided with China, against the suppressed people of Hong Kong and against the suppressed Uighur people. With that stance he lost all credibility in my eyes.

And the myth that the educated career women fight for all women when they demand a quota in top Management. Yes, those women exist (eg AOC in US) but they are the minority. Of course I can only speak about Germany in detail. Millions of women are basically exploited in retail and in the health sector. Those career women mostly don’t give a shit. Ursula von der Leyen the prime example. They demand for themselves, nothing more, but when it comes to regulation to get more full time jobs or to get more base wage for those women they oppose it.  

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I do find it interesting that the focus in very recent years has suddenly become on race and gender equality, and moved away from wealth equality? I'm rarely seeing those discussions any more, though I'm sure they happen. But after the occupy movement it's kind of odd that the wind has gone out of those sails completely and the battleground has moved into a more cultural one. Is the wealth inequality debate too hard to deal with? Is it unwinnable? 

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.amp.html

A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.

@Varysblackfyre321
Quote from the article which perfectly fits your dismissal of an Afghan Tajik woman who fought for her right to study. 


“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”

 

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7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I do find it interesting that the focus in very recent years has suddenly become on race and gender equality, and moved away from wealth equality? I'm rarely seeing those discussions any more, though I'm sure they happen. But after the occupy movement it's kind of odd that the wind has gone out of those sails completely and the battleground has moved into a more cultural one. Is the wealth inequality debate too hard to deal with? Is it unwinnable? 

Divide and conquer. Old tactic ;). Proven since at least 50 BC. 
While the plebs fight each other, the rich get richer (currently in the US: 1% hold more than 50% of wealth). And to make it smooth put in a bit of „woke“ virtue signaling (basically all cooperations nowadays). 
 

As I said: „woke culture“ is a child of neoliberal capitalism. As a socialist I hate to be associated.

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53 minutes ago, Arakan said:

This professor has been working to get more girls into tech fields for more than 20 years. The first semester share of Girls in mechanical engineering is currently 14%. For electrical engineering it’s 12%. Overall engineering increased from 19% in 1998 to 25% in 2019. All you gave was a buzz word. Intrinsic sexism. I guess this professor knows better than you. When will we accept that maybe, just maybe women in average have different interests than men in average. Is this even a hypothetical possibility? And you cannot force someone to study or work something against his or her will. 

 

 

Hmm to you’re question yes.  I don’t doubt there are trends that exist that differ between men and women. 
I’m just not especially ready to consign any particular trend to nature and act as though socialization can play no significant role in the adoption of said trend.

About 9% of nurses in the US currently are men. That’s just up from being 2 percent since the 70s. One could extrapolate this gender gap being due to nature—and ignore the fact before the 20th century male nurses where the norm.

About 25% of architects are women.

45% of people who study architecture are women.

 

49 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

Thats exactly it : Is Classim just one other thing the left is interested in among others, or is it their core belief?

IMO the social problem and social classes are the important part of being left. If you can say that I will fight more for a minority middle class man than a poor majority  man, than you relativize the importance of  helping the poor. In that sense the "woke" are a child of  capitalism which was the question of the threat.

Eh part. The alternative is a slippery slope towards actual nazbol territory.

Hey so long as guy says vaguely the right class talking points on occasion it’s okay he’s an actual fascist who’d strip women and minorities of much of their rights and whose reasons for mainly pushing for certain things stem from the desire to do just that. Class solidarity. The targets of his bigoted ire need accommodate him for the great class struggle because is the only thing that could possibly ever matter. That or national identity.

 

31 minutes ago, Arakan said:

And the myth that the educated career women fight for all women when they demand a quota in top Management.

it does give the impression of it being natural to see a woman in power. Which can help equalize the gender dynamics down the board to see they can be positions of power rather than just hope to marry one.
 

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I want to circle back to your claim that you believe in meritocracy.  I commend for your reading The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good by Michael Sandel.  While I do not agree with everything in the book, it persuasively argues that “merit” is the wrong judge of “worth”, but that over the past 60 or so years we have conflated the terms.  He argues that the origin of the term “meritocracy” was originally a satirical reflection on certain features of post-modern life, but got co-opted by Reagan/Thatcher politics.  And in fact, much of what we deem “merit” could better be described as “grace” or “luck.”  It’s an interesting (quasi-Calvinistic) trap - if we have a meritocracy as currently understood, then the logical inference is that people who are successful must be more worthy because their “merit” is greater.  This is true even if we were to have a utopia where “merit” actually always coincided with success because how society judges “merit” is always going to be subjective, and any attempt to objectivism it will come down to a measurable metric like...money.

I am not a socialist.  Far from it.  But I do think that an emphasis on merit is actually far afield from socialist principles.  Human worth should not be measured by “merit” as commonly understood. This is where my Christianity comes into play, but if I truly believe that all souls are equal under the sight of heaven, then “merit” should not be my driving force and instead I should look at the successful as recipients of grace who should do their best to share their grace so that more can participate.

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22 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Divide and conquer. Old tactic ;). Proven since at least 50 BC. 
While the plebs fight each other, the rich get richer (currently in the US: 1% hold more than 50% of wealth). And to make it smooth put in a bit of „woke“ virtue signaling (basically all cooperations nowadays). 
 

As I said: „woke culture“ is a child of neoliberal capitalism. As a socialist I hate to be associated.

Well I don’t know if it’s all some clever conspiracy by the 1% or it’s just that a bunch of factors have all come together, and turning conversations towards race and gender is just more emotive and simpler, so gets traction

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13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well I don’t know if it’s all some clever conspiracy by the 1% or it’s just that a bunch of factors have all come together, and turning conversations towards race and gender is just more emotive and simpler, so gets traction

Oh don’t misunderstand me. There is no concerted action of the „elite“. It’s just a valid strategy for individuals which then gets traction. See the marketing and PR of basically every global corporation nowadays. An example are also football clubs, eg Bayern Munich. Nice marketing on Instagram #saynotoracism all the while being best buddies with the Qataris. All those corporations work with similar PR agencies. It’s a useful and cheap deflection without targeting the core issues. 

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35 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I want to circle back to your claim that you believe in meritocracy.  I commend for your reading The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good by Michael Sandel.  While I do not agree with everything in the book, it persuasively argues that “merit” is the wrong judge of “worth”, but that over the past 60 or so years we have conflated the terms.  He argues that the origin of the term “meritocracy” was originally a satirical reflection on certain features of post-modern life, but got co-opted by Reagan/Thatcher politics.  And in fact, much of what we deem “merit” could better be described as “grace” or “luck.”  It’s an interesting (quasi-Calvinistic) trap - if we have a meritocracy as currently understood, then the logical inference is that people who are successful must be more worthy because their “merit” is greater.  This is true even if we were to have a utopia where “merit” actually always coincided with success because how society judges “merit” is always going to be subjective, and any attempt to objectivism it will come down to a measurable metric like...money.

I am not a socialist.  Far from it.  But I do think that an emphasis on merit is actually far afield from socialist principles.  Human worth should not be measured by “merit” as commonly understood. This is where my Christianity comes into play, but if I truly believe that all souls are equal under the sight of heaven, then “merit” should not be my driving force and instead I should look at the successful as recipients of grace who should do their best to share their grace so that more can participate.

Socialism never was against meritocracy. It belongs together. One community where the stronger support the weaker. But all work has intrinsic value, the farmer who plows the earth is in his/her own way as valuable as the engineer just in a different way. I consider Jesus as a socialist hero by the way. Problem is that with Protestantism especially Calvinism came predestination theory which in its extreme leads to a monstrosity like the prosperity gospel. What has that shit to do with the original teachings of Jesus?

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1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

it does give the impression of it being natural to see a woman in power. Which can help equalize the gender dynamics down the board to see they can be positions of power rather than just hope to marry one.

 

I happen to agree with you on this (but I do not think this is a leftist, anticapitalistic  position (which was the threat discussion) . But - being an old time feminist I often despair of the "progressive feminism" , I think Arakans example of shitstorming an afgan migrant woman who became an engeniering professor is a good example why  the morale-high-ground-modern feminism is sometimes weird and unhelpful.

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24 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Socialism never was against meritocracy. It belongs together. One community where the stronger support the weaker. But all work has intrinsic value, the farmer who plows the earth is in his/her own way as valuable as the engineer just in a different way. I consider Jesus as a socialist hero by the way. Problem is that with Protestantism especially Calvinism came predestination theory which in its extreme leads to a monstrosity like the prosperity gospel. What has that shit to do with the original teachings of Jesus?

Again, I commend the book to you.  "Meritocracy" as commonly understood and used today in English is inconsistent with these thoughts and in fact exactly the sort of neo-liberal philosophy you purport to be arguing against.  

In some ways, Calvinism as understood in its perfect form is exactly consistent with the teachings of Jesus - that is, grace is conferred not earned (people are elect or not).  This was a reaction to the idea that grace could be bought or earned through good works (which circled back around to buying grace when you cut through it all).  Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels was not a socialist.  He was a radical who was ultimately unconcerned with the role of the state in spiritual life. 

ETA: I agree that the prosperity gospel is incredibly problematic.

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12 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

I happen to agree with you on this (but I do not think this is a leftist, anticapitalistic  position (which was the threat discussion) . But - being an old time feminist I often despair of the "progressive feminism" , I think Arakans example of shitstorming an afgan migrant woman who became an engeniering professor is a good example why  the morale-high-ground-modern feminism is sometimes weird and unhelpful.

Eh, the point she made would have sounded no more nuanced or right than the white men who’ve stated similarly reductionist things with regards to putting gendered trends of the sole result of natural ingrained differences.

 

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1 minute ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh, the point she made would have sounded no more nuanced or right than the white men who’ve stated similarly reductionist things with regards to putting gendered trends of the sole result of natural ingrained differences.

 

Very few people argue for a blank slate and very few people argue that behaviour is entirely based on 'ingrained natural differences'. The disagreement often comes down to how far on one side or the other you sit.

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59 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh part. The alternative is a slippery slope towards actual nazbol territory.

Hey so long as guy says vaguely the right class talking points on occasion it’s okay he’s an actual fascist who’d strip women and minorities of much of their rights and whose reasons for mainly pushing for certain things stem from the desire to do just that. Class solidarity. The targets of his bigoted ire need accommodate him for the great class struggle because is the only thing that could possibly ever matter. That or national identity.

That theoretical is unlikely to say the least. Marxism pretty much helped create what we call feminism. In a similar way, racial studies ("decolonial" studies here) alwas presented minorities as the most exploited workers of the capitalist structure, and the socialists originally helped defend and organize immigrants (as the most vulnerable group within the proletariat).

Point is, it's actually extremely rare for the far-right to delve into redistributive ideas, quite the opposite. Here in France, Le Pen briefly flirted with the idea and then quickly got rid of it (in a rather spectacular way too).
It's easy to see why. First the far-right bases its approach on "traditional" "family values" according to which the woman belongs at home raising the kids, so any progressive idea about gender roles will be rejected outright.
As far as socio-economics go, the far-right's approach is always hierarchical, and the racial/cultural/civilisational hierarchy it spreads is reflected in the capitalist pyramidal structure. Another way of saying it is that the far-right is all about legitimising inequality, certainly not reducing it. Any noise it makes about "justice" or "social justice" only seeks to reaffirm some form of hierarchy: to be clear, it often seeks to put the white worker above the immigrant worker, and in doing so reaffirms their status as workers, as instruments rather than agents.

On the other hand, it's actually quite common for identity politics to limit themselves to a single aspect of inequality while ignoring broader redistributive issues. In other words, there are forms of "liberalism" that do not question the socio-economic structure and even, to some extent, condone or validate it. It's no accident that European right-wing politicians regularly embrace some "liberal" ideas (like forms of affirmative action in France): they know the value of appearing progressive, they know that image and discourse often speak louder than actual actions.

2 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

In some ways, Calvinism as understood in its perfect form is exactly consistent with the teachings of Jesus - that is, grace is conferred not earned (people are elect or not).  This was a reaction to the idea that grace could be bought or earned through good works (which circled back around to buying grace when you cut through it all).  Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels was not a socialist.  He was a radical who was ultimately unconcerned with the role of the state in spiritual life. 

With all due respect, that's a lot of bullshit. I'd say every single one of these sentences is wrong or misleading.
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to defend (on any level) a wildly unequal society as "Christian."
I personally think it's slightly more accurate to call Jesus a communist than a socialist, as long as we define communism through philosophy, but that's really semantics. What's clear is that if we project our 21st century paradigms on Jesus, he comes out a leftist and anti-capitalist. I'm pretty sure I could run a political campaign as a democratic socialist using modernised quotes from the New Testament.

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6 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh, the point she made would have sounded no more nuanced or right than the white men who’ve stated similarly reductionist things with regards to putting gendered trends of the sole result of natural ingrained differences.

 

I think she fought the good fight her whole life and if she did not get a 100 % ideological pure  world view in the end but one born  of experience then it would have been nice and right  to listen first and then to reflect and then perhaps to respectful disagree . To shitstorm her  is so "progressive", so showing that one knows what is the morale right thing. this ideological fanatism is really unhelpful.

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