#class reductionism

[bideogaymes]

thoroughly enjoyed this analysis of the failures of modern “white feminist” horror. i really loved her point towards the end about how these stories rarely if ever, include or show the perspectives of lower income women of color and their relationships to the horror of motherhood as working class nor show any effect it has on the children who are demonized by the narrative like they asked to be here lol.

mirrors how i felt watching Keeper (2025) in theaters, recently. it was so mid.

[chaos-ocd]

I wish tankie hostile communists would get fucked.

I tend to tune out when they start on all their typically male-centered war obsessed history they use as a reason to litterally fucking scream at you, dehumanize you and mislabel you a “liberal” because you point out that not everyone who isn’t a communist is necessarily a fascist. Words have meaning… is capitalism feeding into it and ajacent? Sure. As an anarchist, do I think red fascists exist and are just as fucking annoying as tech bro libertarians?

Fuck yeah. I’m so fucking tired of white male “leftists” who think USSR history is the only thing they need to know in this world to platform themselves screaming over you with all the violence, hostility, and sexist entitled fucking narcissist energy they can muster.

So start a vanguard and shoot some Nazis or each other when you flee. Leave me the fuck out of all your unabashed hatred and bloodthirst.

—

You’re not about justice, you’re about power (only for yourselves) and revenge.

—

Depth and humanity in these conversations is not “weakness” “liberalism” or whatever tired name you want to throw at anyone who disagrees with you.

If you think war is the only answer then go fucking log off and start one you dumbass tankie. As long as you stay the fuck away from oppressing me and mine (which I often doubt) we were not enemies. Go take out the shared foes and stop harassing leftist women to soothe your broken egos.

Violent men are violent men are violent men.

Decentering you is the best I can do as someone who wants genuine change. Your privilege to whine and cry about your right to kill others for a better world for yourselves alone is tiresome.

[justplainlovely]

because i’m blocking op, allow me to elaborate

there ARE women who make music without sex, nudity, and “showing skin and shaking ass”. i am one of them. do you know how much money i make from my music? $50/month, if i’m lucky.

i’ll be fair. i make soundtrack/ambient music. it’s not exactly an approachable art form and i’m relatively new on the scene

i also know other female artists—singer-songwriters, folk singers, alt pop—who make maybe $200/month off music in a good period. we could solve these disparities with something like ubi that allows anyone to make the art they love and are actually passionate about, but i’m preaching to the choir here, so…

it’s fascinating that this particular version of “class analysis” only ever concerns women and their displays of sexuality. this person doesn’t acknowledge the modern example of a man in music using their sexuality that i brought up—Justin Bieber—and instead defaults to the 60+ year old outrage machine around Elvis which has today amounted to nothing

there is no modern outrage machine around JB, at least not like there was back in 2012… when he was popular with young women…

this is about shaming women for publicly expressing their sexuality. if you all ACTUALLY cared about women in music not “showing skin and shaking ass”, you would put in more effort to support artists who are struggling to make their modest music go anywhere. so many women in music sell sex because it gets butts in seats at concerts. or just because they are sexual beings and they want to make art that reflects that

additionally, there are women in pop who don’t do this. i can think of several off the top of my head, but the first 3–Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift—all have one thing in common. they’re “cringe” artists. at least, according to the critics. young women enjoy them, just like they enjoy the work of Sabrina Carpenter who “shows skin and shakes ass”.

so you can pretend this is about the class war all you like. but this is really about the secondary definition of the word, isn’t it?

go enjoy some hildegard von bingen or something

[rhaenin-time]

The class reductionists who whine that you can't read the Dance as a story of misogyny and cultural assimilation because the poor smallfolk are all that matter (but only for the Dance not the Wot5K because the Targs are the only class oppressors), are often real-world western leftists/pseudo-leftists who think "class liberation" means getting to "fairly" share in the spoils of western imperialism while simultaneously telling western feminists that their problems mean nothing because they're "first world problems." They don't deserve to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, they're really loud both in fandom and real life.

[thomasthetankieengine]

While Marxist and leftist scholars have sometimes produced interesting analyses of genocides, the amateur goofballs on this site have a tendency to try to reduce everything done to class and the profit motive. While the genocides of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Circassians were very much motivated by profit (at least to some degree), many others were not — such as the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, or Cambodian Genocide.

Still, class reductionism is far more palatable than the Soviet Union's official analysis of the Holocaust, which went:

"Well actually, the Nazis weren't especially targeting Jews above Russians and if you dare to suggest that they were, you're a Zionist and we're going to make sure you die in a mysterious car 'accident.'"

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

Class reductionism is, at it's best, the idea that social inequity will magically go away all on its own after the revolution. (At its worst, it's fascism with healthcare.) This will not happen. On the theoretical side, we know that capitalism' secondary contradictions--racism, sexism, et al--were not invented by capitalism but inherited from prior modes of production--there's no reason to necesarilly believe they won't survive the end of capitalism just like they survived the end of feudalism. And on the material side of things, we can look at China, Vietnam, and Cuba--which are far superior to any Western state on the whole, just not universally so. Indeed, there are issues these states lag behind the West on--AFAIK, no socialist state has legalized gay marriage yet.

To be clear, these are internal issues in these countries and Westerners sticking our noses in will just make things worse--opponents of SSM (for example) will claim this is a color revolution, and worse, you may actually be contributing to a color revolution--but these flaws serve as reminders that our own revolution, when we eventually have it, will not be a panacea.

Perhaps in some way it will be easier to fight these ills in a communist society--the Soviet Union was the first state on Earth to legalize abortion, after all. But even if that's the case, one must remember that the entire reason we're resorting to revolution in the first place is that nothing in the world will change that you don't actively fight to change.

And besides, let us not forget the words of Lenin:

Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less "widely applicable" as a means of "drawing in" the masses. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the "common people"in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and intellectuals--do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the "economic" struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true.

[commiedervish]

[embodiedfutures]

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