"'Diversity' is a Ruling-Class Ideology | A Q&A with Christian Parenti
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ส.ค. 2024
- What is the relation between oligarchy, minoritarianism, and identity politics? Christian Parenti joins members of Class Unity to discuss his recent article, "Diversity is a Ruling Class Ideology".
Read the article in Compact Magazine: compactmag.com...
No War but Class War!
Raise class consciousness, comrades, not culture wars!
eh, what about all the lefty countries that had covid restrictions.. the natural immunity thing in Europe (many countries in there bub) is also a huge generalization and not accurate. Cuba (whose vaccine is homegrown was great) had vaccine restrictions.. Could keep going on but lockdowns during a pandemic isn't anti-left. Not saying it's all perfect and have had my reservations about dealing with in neo-lib USA but some weird takes with that in here at least with that. I even get why people dont vaxx with skepticism that's valid but didn't really like how it was framed (especially internationally that it was all nuts) - agree with shit otherwise
Well just because a country is "lefty" doesn't mean everything they are doing is correct. Though I disagree with Christian Parenti wrt his views on COVID, I still don't think that the left's being assimilated and taking on the wider liberal response to people's issues with COVID restrictions and vaccines, especially wrt the working class, was a good thing. The left needs to separate itself from liberals on a lot of issues, especially when it concerns class politics and class analysis. Liberals don't use class analysis at all and largely are oblivious to it, the left can't do this or it will become completely engulfed in a sort of liberal ruling-class position on all issues. I probably agree with you on the response of most western governments to COVID, but working in manufacturing plants, in unionized work places where the majority are blue-collar, average Joe/Jane working class people, many working people felt, and continue to feel, completely alienated from views espoused and defended by educated, urbane, often middle-class liberals. A lot of them identify liberals as "the left" and make no distinction between the left and liberalism. The just see the left as being Justine Trudeau (I live and work in Canada) or Joe Biden. A lot of them are then vulnerable to reactionary agitation and lies regarding culture war issues that pretends to care about their real and legitimate concerns regarding the COVID response, which liberals didn't really take into consideration and from my POV ignored. And working class people largely identify liberal talking points as left-wing elitism that essentially resents them as average people. I think this is a huge problem for the left, or at least the left that wants to push for a better world based on socialistic principles where the working class is liberated and maintains political class power that isn't constrained by the logic of ever accelerating capital accumulation. Liberalism doesn't have an answer to achieve that future, and it increasingly will alienate working people and so any possibility of achieving that future. That doesn't mean all positions liberals take is wrong or not desirable, but the left cant allow itself to be subsumed by liberal political values and default to liberal positions when it can offer alternative analysis, conclusions, and answers that empower and sympathize and empathize with working people as opposed to constantly trying to shame them from some position of assumed liberal, moral superiority, especially as material conditions in working people's lives worsen and the US empire becomes more challenging for the ruling class to maintain as a the singular super power on the world stage. Edit: to add to his, it is human to sympathize with those who were legitimately put at risk by COVID and it's potential damage, but it is also humane to take seriously the concerns of many working people about being locked down and having their lives being more controlled or their jobs and singular source of income potentially being lost and taken away from them.
At around 1:46:00 on, he seems to be invoking Larry Goodwin's concept of 'ideological patience' as indispensable for building mass movements. Thomas Frank also talks about it in a bit more depth here: th-cam.com/video/qxouFZLLMdA/w-d-xo.html
It's the only hope for working class solidarity and casts the kinds of 'ideological impatience' that condemns workers as we find them/as we are as the enemy of mass movements as such. Postmodernism is the avowed enemy of mass movements and the ideological product of neoliberalism.