Nationalism For The Oppressed?

Mike S., this is a very interesting topic, and I'm glad you brought it up.

As a white person (or at least one who is perceived to be white - I'm actually half-Indian), I understand why many social justice advocates are averse to the idea of telling black people how to fight the racial oppression that affects them. It tends to deny them the agency they have. I mean, I'm transgender, and I don't like it when some cisgender people tell me that I should worry more about, say, right-wing transphobes than radical feminists like Cathy Brennan. So I understand how anti-racist people of color feel.

However, calling black nationalism or black supremacy (or any group supremacy for that matter) a means of fighting oppression is absurd. When you're just fighting to get to the top, you're no longer fighting oppression; you're just trying to keep others down for your benefit. It's not "self-determination" in the slightest.

I understand why people of color would want to organize by themselves, and that makes sense politically for their anti-racist goals. However, self-organization and self-determination don't imply separatism, and I fail to see how it ever could. Nationalism never has and never will be anti-statist.

On a final note, I think the phrase "check your privilege" has been greatly misused, thanks to cesspools like Tumblr. At the core, it's just a call for empathy with and understanding of underprivileged people and their experiences of being marginalized. Yet it seems to be used all too often as a butchered version of standpoint epistemology that is used solely for shutting people up. Fortunately, not all social justice advocates are Tumblr idiots, and most social-justice-oriented anarchists I know wouldn't even bother to consider black nationalism as anarchistic.

here's a huge thread that deals with this and related issues: http://libcom.org/forums/theory/why-are-identity-politics-race-sexualitysex-treated-differently-so-many-anarchists

Well, speaking as a white male here, I certainly think that folks who are most affected by a particular oppression should be given the first opportunity to speak about and to suggest changes (in organisations, in society, in relationships) that could alleviate it. I also don't think any anarchist should have objections to the self-organisation of oppressed people - either in separate organisations or within wider, class-struggle organisations.

However, that also doesn't mean that 'check your privilege' hasn't been taken to a level of parody at points (I'm speaking here from experience in the US activist scene). However, most anarchists of an oppressed background I've spoken to have a much more nuanced understanding of privilege than that of Tumblr-style privilege politics.

Nor are oppressed groups homogenous in their thoughts and critiques. Some feminists writings, for example, are fantastic. Others aren't. And there's nothing wrong with criticising theories that conflict with basic anarchist principals like the class struggle or opposition to the state.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQCVf7AnXNY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YGjuRYEguI

I'm making the most of my privilege/rubbing it in your face by having a mophead though I have bad genes... chickens and roosting come to mind On no account try to cover up your baldness by wearing a sports cap, people will think you're being deceitful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA0qhhIxrQY

I think that really it is essentially something that is used primarily in North America. You are also starting to come across it a little in England, which is probably much to do with them having a common language. It isn't something that I have come across in central Europe (where I live now), or the Middle East (where I used to live). Personally I have never heard the phrase 'check your privilege' used.

I don't think that it is a useful theory nor do I think it helps to explain very much. I don't think it is any accident that it is something that comes out of academia in North America, which is probably the country with one of the lowest levels of class struggle in the 'western' world.

Ironically, even when looking at this idea in its own terms on a global scale, people educated in universities are quite clearly 'privileged' in the sense of the real meaning of the world, and many people across the world would see being born in the US (whether you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight) as a distinct privilege, so in the terms of its own theory what you effectively have in the most privileged sector of the most privileged country in the world lecturing people about how hard done by they are.

Devrim

I'll just have to agree to disagree with you there since my experiences are way different. I tend to hang around feminist blogs, and I almost never see "check your privilege" used in that way. Unfortunately, I definitely have also seen it outside of Tumblr, and the fact that you've actually had to deal with it in real life just makes me shake me head.

Personally, I think it makes much more sense to just speak of "body-policing" rather than "teethism", "thin privilege", and so on because "body-policing" is a much more broad term that better summarizes what is wrong with judging people by certain body attributes.

I think the pointing of bringing up these body privileges, though, is not to say that they are as bad as racism, sexism, etc. (and I hope that not many people actually think otherwise) but rather to say that they are systemic problems that result in real marginalization of certain groups. I mean, clearly something like body-policing isn't nearly as much of a problem as, say, racist violence against black people, but I think the former still deserves some attention.

In South Africa during apartheid the most heroic opponents of the regime were very privileged white ladies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sash These, mostly elderly women...

In same way, Kropotkin and Bakunin used their aristocratic status against their oppressors. If Kropotkin had been a serf we would never have heard of him. So this notion of 'check your privilege' is nonsense.

don't be sorry! it's fine to have another thread on this, just thought people might want to read or skim that other thread if they want to hear some more opinions and views on this topic.

i know the original question isn't what you're asking, but the conversation did drift in that direction.

That's quite a statement, Highlander.

One concern with I have about racial (and other forms of) separatism is that is seems to turn the negative identity of the oppressed group into a positive identity of the 'community' or 'nation'. Class politics has been doing for ages too. I think it's a terrible mistake and inherently self limiting. The problem is not that one racial group happens to be oppressed by another, it's that race itself exists as a structure of oppression. Trying to turn it into a liberatory identity seems to me to miss the point. To put it into a very simple formula you're not racially oppressed because you're black, you're black because you're racially oppressed. The same goes for class or whatever else one cares to mention.

Which is not to say that positive self identity, owning the fact that one is in a given group defined by oppression and knowing that the oppression one faces is not about what's wrong with you, it's what's wrong with given social structures, isn't both good and useful. But that is a different thing to crude inversion of community building that multi-culturalists so love. There are reasons why politicians love talking about communities. They are a great way naturalising oppressive categories and making them sound all cuddly. It also ties into a discourse that blames problems 'in the community' for the results of oppression. This can get really pernicious, such as the way AIDS 'in the gay community' was talked about, and still is to a lesser extent.

I think communists ought to have a general method for analysing oppression (without forgetting the diversity within and between the categories of oppression). The logical implication of that is that we can't accept what people say about their or their 'community's' understanding of oppression just because they say it. That would be internally contradictory. Besides, it's not like any oppressed group speaks with one voice, much as the 'community leaders' would like to be that voice.

The figure of the middle class white male activist who helps everyone else out with their struggles as a obedient and supportive 'ally' (I hate that word) is, to me, grotesque and profoundly anti-political (not in the good sense). If the activist doesn't have an analysis of society which means that he doesn't see anti-racist/sexist/etc. struggle as part of his own liberation, he shouldn't be getting involved. Not acting sexist because of empathy and ethics is good, but not acting sexist because you understand that in the long run you understand you'd be screwing over your own struggles is political. Oppression are, in the big picture, mutually supportive, after all.

Sorry that lacked much structure.

Off course there is oppression. The language is problematic in that it actually inversts what privilege traditionally means. The culture is the culture of US academia.

I think that the roots of privilege theory are in the US Maoist Sojourner Truth Organisation. Then it was developed in US universities.

Devrim

Which is more heroic; to react directly to oppression and injustice, or to percieve it from afar and then make it your own. In apartheid South Africa there were worse punishments than Robben Island. If you belonged to the ruling elite and then turned against them you could expect the most vicious retribution. In most cases belonging to the ruling elite protected you from being 'disappeared' but this didn't extend to your black friends and loved ones. The security police made it their personal mission to destroy every single part of your life.

That's true (about privilege theory), but I think it's also important to note that the development it's undergone has made it nearly unrecognizable, and Noel Ignatiev said as much on a discussion on the Black Orchid Collective's blog about a year ago (I think). It's also important to note that people like Noel and Ted Allen were heavily influenced by W.E.B. DuBois in the development of the idea of white skin privilege. DuBois didn't coin the term, but the question of what material and psychological benefits white workers had over black workers that lead white workers to side with capital against black workers factored heavily into his work. I think you're also completely right that the current culture of privilege theory in the US stems from academia, an academia exceptionally distanced from the working class (even for academia). There are a lot of non-working class young people involved in social justice movements in the US - and even in radical milieus, there's a lot of non-working class people (by which I mean not a sociological "middle class" but generally the children of small and large capitalists), and even the strata of the working class that tend to fuel radical organizing tend to have most of their exposure to theory through academia.

I wouldn't characterize STO as Maoist - sure, it grew out of the New Left (which was heavily Maoist influenced), but, for instance, the How to Think course (the STO course on dialectics) was intended to nudge people in the direction of having a quite severe criticism of Mao - including having Marty Glaberman's Mao as Dialectician as part of the syllabus. I think it's more accurate to say that STO came out of the Maoist environment of the New Left in the late 60s/early 70s and was engaged in significant debates in that milieu, but had a significant break with Maoism through the heavy influence of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. I think that Johnson-Forest and operaismo ended up being greater influences by orders of magnitude on the STO, especially in its core ideas. Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution is a really excellent history of the STO (I think it's well worth people reading, even outside the US). I don't want to fall into the habit of "we like group X but don't like theoretician Y, so clearly X broke with Y"*, but I don't think it's accurate to call STO Maoist in the same sense it was Leninist.

However, I do think privilege theory as it now stands bears a heavy Maoist influence, as well as a heavy individualist strain and also a multiple systems theory out of control. I think that rather than trying to find root causes for "why do people who get grouped together as X systemically get treated badly in certain ways" within the capitalist system, privilege theory as it stands now implicitly creates yet another system to explain it, and then waves away at least half of the systemic portion with the emphasis on the individual.

For instance, the idea of patriarchy and capitalism as dual systems goes way back, and instead of trying to find the roots for patriarchal social relations out of the historical context which capitalism arose out of and the current needs of capitalism, a lot of people just theorized as if there were the same patriarchal system going back thousands of years. And then put forward that capitalism arose much later as a separate system that now functions alongside that. Gayle Rubin has a good argument against this in The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex. She puts forward the idea that every society has a sex/gender system as part of its social system, and that capitalism's is based on both the "historical and moral element" it inherited from earlier systems and its current needs. The sex/gender system is, of course, fully integrated into the capitalist system. The terminology is clunky, and as much as I'll argue that there isn't a patriarchy (we don't live in, say, an Abrahamic society), I will describe certain social relations within capitalism as patriarchal social relations.

To extend from that, I think the flaw of privilege theory as it is now is not that it finds systemic advantages/disadvantages where there are none, but that it doesn't trace the systemic advantages/disadvantages it finds to both the historical substrate capitalism was built on and the current needs of capitalism. In other words, the propagation of endless categories of privilege and endless privilege checklists is not the cause of the poor theoretical basis of current privilege theory, it's a symptom.

*This annoys me with CLR James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency - yes, their work is a continuation of the theoretical heritage of Lenin and Trotsky, but neither pretending that isn't true nor ditching their work because of that is a useful way to handle it.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I think this has been an impressive thread so far.