adailyriot:

soupsoup:

I spent a few hours down there tonight.

The crowd is diverse, not as predominately young as I perceived from afar. They’re well organized, they have places set up for medics, food, media, etc. The General Assembly hosts a wide variety of speakers, of all ages, gender, race and socio-economic background. The crowd listens intently to the GA speaker, on the people’s mic, and they do call-and-response so those further back in the crowd can hear the person who has been given the soapbox. This was a real honor to watch.

The folks down there are a lot more nuanced than how they’ve been portrayed. They’re not unsympathetic to the people who have to make a living working for some of the corporations that led to the financial crisis, in fact there are some who spoke at General Assembly tonight who work for or had worked for similar corporations. They’re pragmatic, they’re not anarchists. The whole process is surprisingly organized and democractic. They’re working towards coming up with realistic action items. These people aren’t waiting for someone to save them, they’re working towards how they can save themselves.

…. since when are the words anarchists and democratic separated? Ya’ll are thinking about democracy too much in the US governmental way. Every anarchist gathering I’ve been to have used consensus just as the folks of Occupy Wall Street are doing now. Just sayin.

weexist-weresist:

youarenotyou:

zedweiller:

youarenotyou:

zedweiller:

youarenotyou:

being able to take time off from work/school (especially for long periods like w/ occupy wall street), being able to get arrested without getting deported (which is what happens to non-citizens when they get arrested), not having disabilities that prevent you from being there,…

This is why the fucking privilege argument is not useful. How about “be cool and understanding if someone says they can’t make it” or “have a little context, comrade”? 
I’m not privileged; I just have it less worse than a lot of people. But I’m not running the show, ya dig? So sick of being told to unpack the goddamn knapsack.

/Marxist and sick of ID politics 

/Anarchist and sick of Marxists who think class is the only oppression

OK, fair enough - by “ID politics” I mean politics devoid of a class analysis. I get that my wording falls into a trope that’s out there, but srsly the original sentiment needs to go away - to tell someone “your ability to be politically active is a privilege” is to tarnish their activity with some kind of nebulous critique, a la “How DARE you do things others can’t do?”
That’s what’s really frustrating about the privilege critique -

1) I fully, 100% agree that white people, men, cisgendered folks, and other groups are advantaged in society, because that the ruling class needs to foment and maintain divisions and favoritism and prejudice against out-groups. 

2) AND the way that this idea is conveyed, via discussions about “privilege”, tends to overshadow or ignore class analysis. Worse, it tends to obscure or overlook the ways that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. hurt everybody (duh, not equally, and I say this to establish that a white person fighting racism is not about altruism, but about a common interest with all peoples in winning that struggle). 

I honestly have no idea what discussions of privilege you could possibly be talking about. Certainly none on my blog or any on my dash, cuz I think all we do is talk about class privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, able-d privilege, male privilege, and how they all intersect. 

Oppression doesn’t hurt “everybody” in the same way. That completely denies the existence of ruling classes, to say something like that. But I don’t really feel like arguing about Marxism today.

This is not a critique of Marxism at all nor a discussion on the subject. It is however a problem of ID politics.

ID politics =/= racial politics, sexual politics, etc. ID politics= tumblr sj crowd, simplistic analysis, usually separatist and faction-led pushes for change, too much simplistic dialogue on things like ‘privilege’ and the words we use to describe ourselves and not enough on critiques relating to the reproduction of ideology via the means of production and blahblahblah. cultural Marxism involves understanding race/class/gender/sexuality/etc as a whole. cultural Marxism is not interchangable with identity politics.

I honestly don’t understand why privilege is being brought up in this situation. Yes, not everyone can go to a protest, no one should make you feel bad for it, and I would even go as far to say that most protests are stupid so who gives a shit, but this division between ‘privileged’ and ‘non-privileged’ just seems to induce complacency and displace the burden of action from those deemed ‘non-privilege’ to those that are privileged. 

But more importantly, looking at social movements that have achieved things can help us realize that this privilege/not-priv dichotomy doesn’t translate very well into the real world if we drawing clear lines. Some of the least ‘privileged’ people have made the most significant strides or organized the most significant actions. See Dream Activists, black panther party, many many civil rights examples and groups, etc etc etc.

This is not about Marxism or anarchy at all….

mm hmm.

not that this needs adding to but why does it matter who a person is or what ‘privilege’ they have when they attend a protest, surely the whole point of a protest is that you go as an individual and you disappear into a mass under one banner of a particular political cause. That means that as an individual you are only responsible for yourself, you can only control your own attendance of the protest, you can’t do much about the fact that others might not be able to attend, and you can’t control what the general makeup of the crowd is (class/race/sex etc.) and really, unless you do something very extreme, you can’t alter a large protest like that as an individual, yet somehow it seems that there has to be someone (presumably an individual) to blame when someone wants to pick on a protest movement. Surely the only thing that can be wrong with a protest, is its politics or maaaaybe its efficacy.

I mean it’s the same argument with the slutwalk thing, people ascribing other values to a movement when the movement really only focuses on one issue which does not relate to anything other than women’s rights rather than any specific cultural values. But the ascription was that there were too many white people there, even though as far as I can tell, I and everyone else just turned up individually because they read about it on the internet and could not control who else attended or for what reasons they attended (people attended for personal individual reasons but under one cause). But an argument that has thankfully been widely refuted is a pseudo-relativistic criticism of slutwalk as somehow inherently ‘white’ or ‘alienating to pocs’, ridiculous cos sadly, misogyny is pretty universal.

Yeah anyway, just don’t see the point of this ‘privilege’ thing here. There is a difference between ‘protesting is a privilege’ (it’s a right) and ‘most people who go to protests are privileged in some way’. I don’t know why the two are being conflated? Somehow if you prove that something is done by someone with some kind of privilege then that act itself must be oppressive, even if that act is fighting inequality itself??