this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
610 points (99.8% liked)

Progressive Politics

4189 readers
1128 users here now

Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)

(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses

Bullshit!

Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what's almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is "Wealth". Race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) is only somewhat positivelly correlated and gender is barelly so (the difference in average incomes between rich and poor is literally thousands of times greater than the difference in average incomes between men and women).

There is no reason to pull out "identitarian markers" when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal "divide and conquer" fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of "differently deserving of having Equality" based on things people wore born with rather than on Need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.

Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one's head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one's count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one's gene for melanine production.

It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with very right-shifted Overtoon Windows, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about "class inequality" their mind sees "identitarian markers" (just like the Fascists) rather than "Working Class" which is from where the actual expression "class inequality" originates from.

[–] KindnessIsPunk@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I understand that wealth is the primary decider of one's rights in America.

However you can't say that Reagan deliberately putting drugs in black neighborhoods didn't have a systemic effect on the advantages of black people in America.

You can't say that women earning 80% as much as men doesn't have an effect on how high they could reach.

I don't think that any one thing decides which class you're going to be but it does stack the cards against you. Maybe this person never experienced it but she certainly had a higher chance of it.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for gender as per your own numbers: women earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).

There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there's only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don't see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be "something" and "having an obligation to behave in certain way" purely because of their race or gender, you're following THE EXACT SAME MENTAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.

(Emphasys and big caps because that's the part that really pisses me off)

Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they're leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It's thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don't shift politics to the Left by limiting yourself to the perspective on other human being of the Fascists.

You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that's just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.

PS: But don't trust me, just look at the actual results - Identity Politics has been way worse than things like Social Democracy or even Unionism in reducing the systemic abuses its supporters claim to want to address. In fact in the countries and period were Identity Politics dominated left-of-center (relative to the local Overtoon Window) politics, the suffering due to systemic abuses has actually worsened when compared to periods and places were Social-Democracy or even just Unionism were more dominant.