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Urban v's the Commentariat

frogwoman said:
i can't ever see israel attacking iran

maybe i'm naive but they've been talking about it for decades, i can't see it frankly i think it's something that gets wheeled out to keep the far-right elements of israeli society and ruling class happy. i don't think it'll ever happen.
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Given the territorial imperatives if the eretz yisroel crowd, I'm not as sure as you are.
 
DaveCinzano said:
Intersectionalista crisis of confidence:

http://theroguefeminist.tumblr.com/...re-white-dont-call-yourself-an-intersectional
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Some of those themes appear in this piece by Lola Okolosie in the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-feminist-movement-fails-women-black-minority

Within the media, and indeed the movement, there has been much celebration of our feminist resurgence. Yet our success is being marred by infighting. White, middle-class and young women are often seen as the ones spearheading this new wave of activity. Their high-profile campaigns – to have women on banknotes, challenge online misogyny and banish Page 3, for example – though necessary and praiseworthy, do not reflect the most pressing needs of the majority of women, black and minority-ethnic women included. The problem is not that these campaigns exist, but that they are given a focus and attention that overshadows other work feminists are engaged with.
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That's something I've definitely noticed. It always irked me to hear people use the jargon of intersectionalism as if that alone qualifies them to speak on behalf of the oppressed masses, and that their every utterance is endorsed by all people experiencing oppression everywhere (which convenently affords an individual the luxury of being able to dismiss anyone who disagrees or dissents as being against those people just as someone who attacks a fringe far-left party might be accused of being anti working class) but then go on to focus their activities on purifying the etiquette of certain spaces.

I've always thought that if this intersectional left really did speak to the everday concerns of people (such as Lola's mother in this article) it wouldn't be so heavily concentrated towards what's being said in the media, or on certain sections of the internet discourse, it would have other expressions and focuses. That it does seem to concentrate so heavily on the priorities of very nice and sincere "white middle-class uni educated girls" Lola mentions is that the social base of a lot of this is within the university system, that's where people encounter this terminology and these writers and from there it slowly filters down though the Guardian and the internet etc to a small section of wider society (that reads the guardian, is internet literate etc) but it's fairly restricted to those who have the cultural capital to be part of that discourse in the first place, people who were in the position to go to uni and participate. Those who are culturally and economically excluded from that, who don't have the cultural capital to participate really effectively in those movements, are excluded. This comes up in that Dublin Review of Books critique of Laurie Penny. It barely needs pointing out that of course this includes vast numbers of black women who despite their multitude of intersecting oppresions are just as marginalised and apathetic about these politics movements as anyone else. To her credit Lola does mention this:

Though women who live in the "real world" – ie outside academia – may not bandy the word intersectionality, it nevertheless speaks to our lives within it. This is not to deny that power can be invested in language and that for some the term is perhaps alienating. It would be great if we had a word already in existence that conveys the complex and complicated nature of oppression. We do not. The language that we currently use serves to compartmentalise inequalities. It won't do. I am less interested in whether feminists choose to use the word or replace it with (no less academic) phrases such as multiple oppressions. What is of greater concern is how we work to empower women whose lives are impacted by a number of inequalities.
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I agree with this. The language is alienating to a great many people and it does lend itself to compartmentalising inequalities, the very heirachy of opppresions/top trumps stuff that supposedly it's against. Wether that's a language problem or a deeper problem I don't know. But the point is that whilst it might be alienating to people outside, to those inside who do have the elite education that sort of language isn't alienating at all, infact the jargon's part of the appeal I think. Within the sub-cultures themselves this sort of language is used to identify who's part of the in-group, it's a little identifier and there's nothing new about that Marxists pioneered this sort of stuff, but every in-group has it's own little language games, etiquette and jargon

And then there's something about this that that sounds awfully close to "we can speak on behalf of you because we've got a proper education" in exactly the same way university educated Marxists would presume to speak for The Class. Just as (some) Marxists have their own jargon, employing this jargon then gives them right to speak on behalf of the transformative historical agent. Then there's this:

Critically, black feminism is championing a more nuanced understanding of how oppression and privilege operate. We, all of us, must understand that at the level of the individual, we can at differing points occupy positions of privilege. I am a black woman from a working-class background. I also have qualifications from elite universities that mean I am able to access a career, friendships and a lifestyle my 18-year-old self would never have imagined. When and where I experience privilege or oppression changes from day to day, hour to hour.
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I'm not sure I agree with this perspective. I think it actually contradicts something that was earlier in the article said about structural analysis, and it's in danger of doing two things which I've always disliked when it comes to intersectional identity politics - 1)having a structural analysis is firmly subjective and based on the level of individual experience (Mark Fisher mentioned individualising in his Vampire Castle thing but I'd noticed it before, it's appeal often lies in the fact that by doing this you can accuse anyone who disagrees with your conclusions with negating/invalidating the experiences of The Oppressed) and then 2)reducing things down to a binary choice between privilege and oppression, but not in the absolute and measurable way that the term privilege traditionally meant but subjectively, and centred on the individual, and whatever oppressions happen to be intersecting at that time for that one person - so you can be privileged in one space, oppressed in another, it's all quite slippery for a structural analysis. It's about the individual within certain spaces and I don't think it does look at how wider society functions very much at all.
 
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to be fair marxism has no fewer problems with jargon that doesnt relate to the rest of the world. "dialectics" for example, "the negation of the negation" etc

someone in the sp once tried, and failed to explain this to me :D
 
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