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Re: Deaf ears

Posted by kit on 2024-January-31 06:28:40, Wednesday
In reply to Deaf ears posted by Pharmakon on 2024-January-30 22:28:15, Tuesday

I like your idea of GAME, but I think it might put too much emphasis on the agency of the minority movements, and not enough on the pressures that work against them.

What you call GAME I am disposed to describe simply as liberation movements being bought out by capitalism. Time and time again potentially-radical movements are neutered by being assimilated into the logic of the free market. And this isn't necessarily their fault - it isn't necessarily because they've been taken over by white people or by the middle classes. Assimilation follows marketisation, it doesn't lead it. For this reason I am inclined to place a lot more emphasis on the 'M' of GAME than on the 'G'.

This is why feminists are more concerned about the pay gap between male and female CEOs than about the pay-gap between CEOs and cleaners. This is why gay rights are weaponised to support the War on Terror and the War in Gaza. It is not the fault of the movements themselves - I am almost tempted to say there is nothing they could have done differently. Contemporary capitalist culture can consume any movement - however radical - and shit out only the most anodyne and inoffensive drivel.

Sure, this probably largely benefits white people and WEIRD people, but that's incidental: there is nothing threatening about a black CEO - or even a black president! You get diversity and you get inclusion and fundamentally nothing changes.

This is why I am dubious about identity politics - not because I don't want bC to be welcoming to bitchez and Muzzers and trannies and Jooos - of course I wish certain people weren't such obnoxious arseholes all the time - but because this kind of rhetoric has nothing at all to offer us.

To be fair, I think it has very little to offer anyone. Anyone trying to deal with their (very reasonable) alienation from our culture has to deal with bigger problems than a highly vocal minority who don't love transgender people.

But we are, for now and for the foreseeable future, one of the very few minorities who have not been consumed and egested by the political culture industry of late capitalism. We are outsiders to capitalist identity politics, and I think this is a position to value rather than resent.

But other than this one distinguishing mark, we are people with nothing at all in common. Without the consoling lies of corporate capitalism, and without the solidarity of a really radical struggle, our differences cannot be anything other than jarring and uncomfortable.

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