Guest blog: Critique of 'The MAP community needs to chill'

[BLueRibbon]

https://www.map-union.org/perspectives/ ... s-to-chill

In our latest guest blog, Mu reader John Tawvnik critiques Brian Ribbon's recent article on MAP community politics. This article is a critical response to a publication by a Mu editor; therefore, we have chosen to post it without copy editing. As with all guest blogs, opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Mu Committee or its editors.

Feel free to add your thoughts in this thread!

[Jim Burton]

It may be worth adding here, if any of our readers wish to document their less heard-of, more controversial or less-conventional MAP (or allied) identity by linking it to some of the topics already discussed in our blogs, we are welcoming guest submissions. There is a balancing requirement where we might need to seek and document a diversity of examples after permitting one divergent opinion or identity, but we are not against directly stimulating debate on the question of inclusion.

[anarchist of love]

https://www.map-union.org/perspectives/ ... s-to-chill

In our latest guest blog, Mu reader John Tawvnik critiques Brian Ribbon's recent article on MAP community politics. This article is a critical response to a publication by a Mu editor; therefore, we have chosen to post it without copy editing. As with all guest blogs, opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Mu Committee or its editors.

Feel free to add your thoughts in this thread!

Okay, i read over the blog thing, tho a bit quickly. It looks very good!

The only thing i would promote is what i used to try to have done in/with the NAMBLA Bulletin: Have it be "an umbrella" for all the groups/individuals who want such to utilize to "get the word out wider" than those groups or individuals can easily do without spending years of distracting labor to create such themselves! No more, no less!

But instead that group chose to lambast me and veritably push me out (in their harshly-taught cynicism, i now figure). At the time i didn't understand it at all.

That this petty tyranny in NAMBLA happened, really sucked, and was a big reason why i finally left all of them altogether. (Luckily, at the time, there was the online community, which one member turned me on to...)


The only other thing is that i would promote studying closely is what i thought of as i read that blog (?) post: This depth-charging topic:

Lupus Dragonowl's
"Against Identity Politics:
Spectres, Joylessness, and the contours of ressentiment"

Chapters:
Identity and Spectres
Identity Politics and Maoism
Between anarchy and identity politics
The Politics of Affect
Exodus versus submersion
Common sense and the community
For a World Without Spectres!
Bibliography

Identity Politicians (IPs) are a particular kind of leftist who use the spectre[1] of an identity-category (gender, race, sexuality, etc) as a lever to obtain power. In the sense discussed here, they should not be considered coterminous either with groups of people oppressed by identity categories, or even that subset who prioritise identity as a key site of struggle. Not all women, Black people, People of Colour (POC)[2], or members of other specifiable groups are IPs; not all feminists, anti-racists, or even separatists are IPs. Racism, sexism and other oppressions along identity axes are sociologically real, and not every person involved in the struggle against such oppressions is an IP.

Intersectionality - the recognition of multiple forms or axes of oppression, with complex interacting effects - is an effective theoretical response to the problems of Identity Politics, but there have clearly been difficulties putting it into practice. In identity-linked movements, some people use intersectionality as a way to avoid the idea of principal contradiction, although occasionally in practice, people who claim to be intersectional end up treating one or two oppressions as primary. Nevertheless, the fact that not all identity-related theories or movements need to be treated as Identity Politics does not mean that the influence of Identity Politicians is trivial. The writers and activists discussed here not only exist, but their ideas and practices are often insidious and unfortunately widespread. Recognizing the importance and necessity of countering that deleterious influence is my motivation for writing this essay.

It should here be emphasised that this is not a critique of all forms of radical theory focused on racial or gender oppression. This critique of IPs is by no means a critique of every position which focuses on a particular type of oppression (such as gender or race). Indeed, aspects of this critique are already present in a number of theorists who work with identity. For instance, the iconic anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon argued that dualistic identities deform interpersonal relations and reproduce colonial power. While the struggle against colonial power is in fact an irreducible antagonism, and moves similar to those of IPs are strategically useful to fight it, the ultimate goal is to overcome such binaries in a future of the disalienated “whole [hu] man” (Wretched of the Earth, 238-9). He even articulates an almost Stirnerian’ claim that “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence ... I am endlessly creating myself” (Black Skin, White Masks 204).
(...)
Source:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... y-politics

(Note: by Sternerian, the author is alluding to Max Stirner's The Ego And It's Own, which i happen to think neatly dovetails with my own work in our domain.)