They've taken their toll, these latter days.
America’s regimented public education system was created by 20th century industrialists in order to create large underclass of docile skilled laborers to serve their ever-expanding industrial empires. It is intended to stamp out your natural curiosity and questioning, your independent nature, and make you a willing drone for the system.
This is a standard woke, anticapitalist screed about children and education under empire, right? Not quite.
Continue reading “On industrial childrearing”
Today’s experimental thought…
I was reading a Marxist critiquing identitarian politics, and finding some resonance. I’m starting to think that any movement that centers your individual identity over what community you cocreate and cocreates you is inherently un-socialist. It can’t help but make you an unwitting ally of the individualist precarity death cult.
Mind you, I think that acknowledging and pointing out the othering, bigotry, and suppression that capitalism and authoritarianism rely on is an essential part of the project. You can’t make a case for liberation until you say look: people are being racialized. People are being rammed into gender and sexuality and neurotype boxes.
And I believe that socialism can create the best possible safety for affirming unique individual identity. But as soon as you make that the point you lose the game.
I think for many the only thing staving off this loss has been the fact that identity politics gave a lot of people a reason and a frame within which to cocreate community who otherwise would not have. But the poison pill of individual-uber-allez is dormant in any politics that prioritizes personal self-actualization over our obligations to each other. Over our cocreation of our humanity.
A person is not the unit of humanity. A person is a person through other people.
The deeper problem here is that many people do not actually understand what coalition-building looks like because they have never had to build one in real life. Their political experience is primarily aesthetic. It happens through Threads posting. Through captions. Through re-quotes sharpened into little prison shivs. Real organizing is much uglier and much harder. It involves awkward interactions and partial agreements and deeply irritating personalities
https://davidgate.substack.com/p/we-need-to-have-imperfect-allies
There was a whole slew of books on cognitive biases that came out a couple decades ago and it’s a pity none of them covered the human tendency to keep an “after the purge” bucket in their heads into which they can kick all pragmatic thoughts about working constructively.
They've taken their toll, these latter days.
