@VilageidiotxBut the fact of the matter is that these are issues that exist independent of an abrasive capitalist ideology, they aren't just symptoms of systematic economic inequalities. They are cancers in their own right, the divide between races and genders in America and the world, but have historical and socio-cultural origins that need to be addressed. That isn't to say that they aren't exacerbated by economic problems, because they are, but in the same vein, the opposite could also be said about social issues worsening economic issues.
By saying that we need to stop focusing on social issues and turn our gaze to the REAL problem that is the capitalist forces of evil, you fall victim to the same problem you accuse me of. You're oversimplifying the issue by splitting it into something that is starkly black and white. You're just swapping the (real) patriarchy with the classism that is the source of evil behind everything.
Trans*people are systematically denied recognition under the law as their gender, homeless people are pushed out of cities and forced further into their situation instead of being offered help, more black men go to prison to fuel the prison industrial complex, Big Pharma fights to get Obamacare repealed, women are still vocationally, socially, and culturally seen as inferior to men, instead of just different, we continue to drone strike the Middle East despite right-wing terrorism being the bigger domestic problem, and conditions on plantations worsen annually while DC does nothing about it. These are complex problems, and no single one really exists independent of the other. It really won't do to try fixing them with ignoring any aspect of them, be it social of economic.
Clearly the real problem here is the state. You should maybe consider becoming an anarchist.
OK, so let me clear up my language.
I think MDK was right because I feel that the processes that caused racism and sexism to flourish were the laws specifically keeping these groups down, and with those laws gone the divide is now entirely a mix of cultural divisions and lingering remnants of the old prejudices. It has not been that long since the Civil Rights movement and Second Wave Feminism, and a massive chunk of the voting population are people that were alive when those things were happening. I legitimately think that these are wounds time is healing. Honestly, I would go as far to say that "women are still vocationally, socially, and culturally seen as inferior to men" isn't even true in the western world. It just doesn't hold up when you consider that the number of women in higher education is starting to supersede the number of men.
But the economic issue is completely ignored. Or, at least it is ignored in the United States, and this might be where the disconnect is. We dance around it, we pretend that it isn't there, we cherry pick statistics and fall back an Reaganomic fallacies to avoid the fact that wealth in the western world is slipping out of the hands of the majority, and that young people now will generally live poorer lives than their parents did. And the effects of this? Angst, a willingness to find other groups to blame. People blaming there problems on other races, or sexes, or cultural groups (Blacks are draining resources, or whites are hoarding all the access, or white men are holding everybody else back, or mexicans are taking all our jobs. Hell, there are some motherfuckers out there who blame it one women in the workforce). And this gets proliferated by academics, armchair feminists, tea-party neocons, and internet libertarians who do not want to find a fix that involves something as broad as everything. It is easier to draw lines in the sand, to say that our problems are caused by Group A and if only we thwart Group A everything will be OK. And so, to use speech that might be too Marxist for everyone else's comfort, you end up with a proletariat that is so divided upon itself that it cannot see to its own interests.
But division is sexy. Whoever the fuck it is that is doing it, Tumblr feminists or /pol/ style racists, popular conservative media or academic liberalism, everyone is attracted to pushing people apart so they can claim sole victim status in the economic woes of modern America. And that is simply not helping. If you look at Ferguson and turn it into an issue of black vs white, you create a division that furthers the problem. There is a situation where corruption and a lack of resources has caused a community to take to the streets, but if they look at whites instead of city hall and the national economy that utterly failed them, and if whites in turn grow defensive and start chalking everything up to hooliganism, than absolutely nothing has been fixed. And as these governments fail all of us in turn, we all blame each other.
It's not even like i'm turning this into another "Group A" situation and saying that the problem is the ultra wealthy. It isn't that simple. The ultra wealthy are tumors, but they are tumors caused by the larger disease of our entire world philosophy, and we are as much to blame for their existence as they are. They are a symptom of the same problem that killed the Roman Republic, the codification of our economic code into a moral one so that we cannot change with the times. We have to accept that hard work and material success and liberty and social consciousness have no value outside of what they do for promoting universal human happiness, which should always be our one unmovable cardinal law. And when we have shed all the shit and accept that, when we've decided to focus on rearranging our economic model to fit that goal, all other things will fall into place.
Wilted Rose
