Good post.
Nobody should be telling minorities that they're dividing the left. As if not standing for bigotry is more divisive than being a bigot in the first place.
If you don't 
for me, then you ain't Black!
People really do need to learn when to shut up
I can't believe we're having this struggle session now involving 3 year old accounts?
How did they keep quiet this long and what made them lose this ability?
i know, im kinda wilding
earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
earnestly waiting, i need to know what brainworms i have that will end with me being banned now
If I had to guess (not for you specifically, but hexbear in general), it would be tone indicators. The last big struggle session that I can think of was whether we should use tone indicators to accomodate neurodivergent people. It actually makes sense to use them in an online forum like this, even for neurotypical people because nuance is lost when one is just reading text straight up. However, I saw a lot of pushback on this sort of thing from users that would normally be all about the "hexbear party line" (so to speak) of things like vegan solidarity, trans solidarity and respecting pronouns, etc. And it's the same line of argumentation that people who were against meat content warnings were using ("what's the big deal?" etc.). So yeah perhaps that's the next frontier.
i already have to badger people to do spoiler tags and nsfw tags properly for trauma related content, that is gonna take ages to catch on
i do usually use emojis as a tone indicator a lot of times though 🤔 thats probably not very reliable for a lot of neurodivergent people but maybe some emojis could be made to ease adoption, would have to inform people on hover texts
i already have to badger people to do spoiler tags and nsfw tags properly for trauma related content, that is gonna take ages to catch on
You've (correctly) told me to add spoiler tags and NSFW tags on my own posts, and while inconvenient at first, I would not want it any other way because that's better for other people.
I think it boiled down to some people being mildly inconvenienced and being asked to modify their behavior for the sake of other people.
Fair-weather comrades until that moment.
Shush you're never allowed to leave. I won't let you.
what is this, a hotel in california? 
I love that song. I can't help it. Even with its contextual political baggage. 
A lot of these people have been saying the same things for years, if they weren't being transphobic or making jokes about pumpkin spice lattes the mods just let them be and so did the user base
Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, "No investigation no right to speak", has been ridiculed as "narrow empiricism", to this day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. There are many people who "the moment they alight from the official carriage" make a hullabaloo, spout opinions, criticize this and condemn that; but, in fact, ten out of ten of them will meet with failure. For such views or criticisms, which are not based on thorough investigation, are nothing but ignorant twaddle. Countless times our Party suffered at the hands of these "imperial envoys", who rushed here, there and everywhere. Stalin rightly says "theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice". And he rightly adds that "practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory". Nobody should be labeled a "narrow empiricist" except the "practical man" who gropes in the dark and lacks perspective and foresight.
I may be misunderstanding this 
quotation, but I think it aligns with your post. One who holds class/ethnic/racial/gender/cis/etc privilege and doesn't have the empathy and curiosity to investigate how that privilege effects their material circumstances makes a poor communist.
It's "all struggles matter" and it sucks.
Join a party. This is a message board.
Except that I've seen the same exact shit in irl orgs, pushing out marginalized comrades. Just because this is the internet, doesn't mean you're exempt from examining your privledge and holding solidarity with marginalized people by shutting the fuck up and listening.
Message boards have standards. This is a shitposting site.
Merely mentioning the word bourgeois(ie) makes so many people in the first world cringe, including the ones who proclaim to be left. I don't understand why it is so hard to admit your privileges, wild how decades of liberal propoganda even made basic descriptive words unappealing and cringeworthy.
"Eugh you are so stuck in time an unappealing to the common people"
I am both of those but not because I use the correct terminology
Workers talk about losing their jobs, tech workers get uncomfortable and insist that the lost jobs were not real jobs unlike their jobs that may very well be next. "Maybe you shouldn't have gotten into the humanities where a decade later you might get replaced by new slop machines, which will totally not happen to my coding job ever ever ever. The slop machines are liberating and will revolutionize the world if you stop complaining about losing your not real job and wait long enough. We're all in this together." 
Yeah, one of my critiques of LA/PMO conceptions of tech workers having different class interests or being a new class is that...well...their aristocracy isn't. It's extremely conditional and the Bourgoisie has an interest in removing it. It's all false consciousness boosted by a larger paycheck.
On the other hand dismissing the real poverty of the lower ranks of the working classes is also a real problem. Wealthy workers have a responsibility to contribute more to the left, not whine about how they're also poor struggling exploited proletarians
I have long maintained that tech workers are still workers and solidarity with workers is necessary for leftists.
Some tech workers make that very difficult at times if they decide their salary makes them superior to "underwater basket weavers" or the like.
Fucking well put
These arguments only work when they're not being used to ignore the problems when they're also occurring among the left. Anyone that deploys them argument when it is occurring within the left just help to alienate and split away the affected group.
no more half measures walter
It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing" when it would be so easy to just say "chauvinists" or something for the second group, which 99% of the time will be the corresponding majority members but isn't essentializing and has some resilience against Candace Owen types.
It seems unhelpful to frame this as "minority do good thing, majority do bad thing"
I don't think anything is being framed that way here. It's just written in casual language. I think we can recognize when a person from a marginalized group is a reactionary like Candace Owens.
The problem with just saying "chauvinists" is that no one on hexbear or in the DSA thinks the word applies to them. The point of the post is that all white people, all men, etc., are exposed to privilege brainworms from cradle to grave, and we're not necessarily aware of the brainworms we have absorbed, so when someone criticizes us we should shut the fuck up and listen and reflect, because it's not a far-fetched criticism. Getting defensive and shouting people down because we're sure we're not chauvinists is what's actually divisive.
...I keep neurotically editing the wording of this comment because I got stuck in some kind of obsessive loop, I'm going for a walk.
A lot of what you are describing here is why leftism is dysfunctional in the west. Since leftism in the west isn't always a matter of material survival, western leftists use it to hyper-individualize themselves. Essentially they use leftist ideology to try to improve their class/conditions within a capitalist system without attempting to overthrow it. They also attack each other when one person does not see another's personal problems as "the one true leftist perspective."
A key factor is sometimes these criticisms are not coming from someone who is looking for solidarity, but supremacy. This is why people become defensive, because these accusations are not always launched with a cooperative perspective in mind, but a competitive mindset that is a result of western societal framing. Many of the examples cited can also be liberal perspectives quietly excusing capitalism. Basically saying "if it was only 'x' group that was removed from power, or put in charge, the current system would work.
im going to be real with you, you have the line of a section of the left that marginalized ppl eventually learn to detect so that we can stay far away, like being able to smell rotten eggs at 10 parts per billion or whatever
the idea of a person seeing themselves as a worker first-and-only (that is, of class reductionism) is something that makes the most sense to cishet white male etc workers. they have no other material interests, really, besides as workers and as consumers, so they're focused on that narrow conversation. for them it seems frustrating and "postmodern" for people to advance their interests on different fronts besides the simon-pure marxian vision of two great classes pitted against each other. actually they're doing what everyone is doing - representing their own interests - but they alone have this conviction that everyone else's interests are lesser. they have the strongest possible white fragility / male fragility / cisheteronormative / etc reaction of fearing that the oppressed are seeking, as you put it, "not... solidarity, but supremecy" and that we have a "competitive mindset"
the strength of marxism is not in dogmatically subsuming minority interests to some ideal homogeneous collective for the sake of "solidarity," but in being able to identify that our interests are connected by our common class oppression. that means that, for example, I will advance my interests as a woman, without one iota of compromise to you - not sorry - but I can work on common goals with leftists who want the same thing I do, i.e. an end to class society
my favorite marxism quote:
What is right for the working class, cannot be wrong for the women. Being oppressed, devoid of rights and, in many instances, disregarded, it is not only their right, but their duty to defend themselves and to adopt any method that appears good to them, so that they may win an independent position. [...] Woman, in order to attain her aim more quickly, must look about for allies, and she naturally finds such allies in the proletarian movement. The class-conscious proletariat has long since commenced to storm the fortress of the state that is founded on class rule, which includes the rule of one sex over the other. - August Bebel
Great point. I am personally struggling with this a lot both in my work with less privileged people and privileged coworkers.
I am in a country that has a strong nation building discourse around perceived equality and "sameness" and therefore there tends to be a lot of hostility towards anyone who tries to raise the question of very clear differences in privilege and be taken seriously.
My relatives got very angry at me over the summer when they told me how a person they know has had flooding in their home and as I knew that the person in question is very very wealthy and has several homes I said "Shame, but they will be ok." This resulted in these two yelling at me about how unempathetic I am and how they feel like they can't talk about their life struggles at all with me (both are petty bourge). I am myself poor, neurodivergent, fat & a woman.
I replied to them that I would not have been ok had this happened to me and got asked if I am bitter. I am not, these are just the material conditions we have. Technically all involved in this discussion were workers.
Someone once described all this to me with an example of a reality tv show that didn't manage to "work" in my country the same way as it did in a place like the UK. Here when you sit a rich person and a poor person on the same couch talking about what their everyday lives are like, you will only get sameness related discourse where the rich person is both allowed and socially encouraged to see their inability to heat their hot tub as often as befofe as the same as the poor person not being able to afford food.
This results in a society where extremely privileged people are allowed to have takes on things like poverty, race, gender as equals and fully diminishes the hardships experienced in the margins. And this is at least partially a result of a social democratic model of society where a lot of focus has been put to gender equality and equality of the workers. But only for the majority.
What this does to disabled folks and people who can never work, to people who are outside the scope of being able to do wage work and the way this legitimizes the outrage when calling out privilege is a thing I am trying to figure out.
In my real life work I am trying to raise the class consciousness of privileged people around me by raising the point of all of us being workers and our interests being aligned, but within this cultural framework I feel like this often ends up reinforcing the sameness myth and hiding the clear implications of privilege. So not entirely sure how to get the labor aristrocat to both understand our interest being aligned yet different.
Not entirely sure what my concluding point here even is, but just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely important conversation.
The outrage that pointing this out tends to result in seems like a sort of fragility, one person even admitted to me once that me reminding them of their privilege makes them feel guilty for the things they have. Which I think isn't a bad thing as long as this doesn't turn into hostility towards the margins, but to an understanding of what privilege is.
thank you so much for sharing all that, it feels really good to be understood on this stuff
On the one hand capitlaism is the problem. So unless we fix thst the other problems aren't fixable. On the other hand almost any group to have real success organizing came from a special interest focus like that. So there are two wolves here both of them secretly liberals
On the one hand capitlaism is the problem
patriarchy predates capitalism by thousands of years and it will continue to exist after the revolution. unless we make a point to specifically struggle against it, male workers will for their narrow benefit naturally reproduce gendered division of labor under a socialist system and therefore sustain the material basis of sexism. this is just one area where a smothering insistence on "we're all in this together" actually disfavors a less privileged section of the proletariat.
in other words, it's class reductionism
On the other hand almost any group to have real success organizing came from a special interest focus like that
this is definitely true yes, u are not fully a 
I DO think that all these hurt individuals of the "oppressive class" as well as the oppressed
But yeah sometimes it's stfu time
patriarchy is absolutely directly damaging to men and people growing up amab, it's maybe not the time or place to bring that up when someone is complaining about something specific.
i'm not disputing that it does but i'm less clear on how white supremacy harms crackers other than the line about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
this in itself is big imo
perpetuates racism and their biggest working class perpetrators, and blinds poor whites into staying poor. lose-lose for everyone.
i'm not disputing that it does but i'm less clear on how white supremacy harms crackers other than the line about racism being a wedge to control poor whites.
That's the issue. All of sociology must be rooted in historical materialism. Doing that here, we can see the issue is to split the working class so that working whites do the job of the bourgeoisie for them-- they do not grasp class consciousness, opting instead to self-identify as an invented social concept ("white") -- a concept that is always defined as acceptable and aligned with the ruling class' material goals -- in order to split the working class and oppress other races, sexes, genders, etc avoiding revolution.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Vaush posts go in the_dunk_tank
Dunk posts in general go in the_dunk_tank, not here
Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from the_dunk_tank