Awesome.
To think that so many people still can’t see that!
Not a meme, but I was reminded of yours when I read this:
“The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been historically, white chauvinism,” Ignatiev wrote. “White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.” He argued that it would be impossible to build true solidarity among the working class without addressing the question of race, because white workers could always be placated by whatever privileges, however meaningless, management dangled in front of them. The only way to change this was for white working-class people to reject whiteness altogether. “In the struggle for socialism,” Ignatiev wrote, white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor.”
Many scholars have cited Ignatiev’s letter as one of the first articulations of the modern idea of “white privilege.” But Ignatiev’s version differs from the one we often use today. In his conception, white privilege wasn’t an accounting tool used to compile inequalities; it was a shunt hammered into the minds of the white working class to make its members side with their masters instead of rising up with their black comrades. White privilege was a deceptive tactic wielded by bosses—a way of tricking exploited workers into believing that they were “white.”. . .
He was bewildered by the rise of a style of identity politics that reified the fictions of race and, through its fixation on diversity in élite spaces, abandoned the working class.
Sauce:
Okay,
Remember the Nyan Cat meme:
Yeah, the channel that uploaded that is now a worker’s collective uploading pro-socialist programmes.
https://www.youtube.com/c/MEANSTV/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid
Who knew the revolution would run on pop-tarts?
2020 continues its on-brand bullshit with this obit for the author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years… dammit, why…
whoa. I was woefully ignorant of this scholar and will take some time to read his work.
thanks for the mention of someone whose passing would have otherwise passed me.
may he RIP.
Thank you for taking the time, and I know a lot of us are busier these days because the pandemic has made everything harder.
I have learned much from Graeber’s work. His words are not dry.
I hear his humanity in his lines.
I regret only that I never got to thank the man in person for his contribution to human understanding.
He died too soon. Very 2020.
