There’s a thing that bugs me a lot with some written pieces on discrimination (particularly class based discrimination), wherein the writers ascribe a kind of malicious intent to the group doing the discriminating. The example that has set this off in particular was pointing out bourgeois feminists have historically attacked sex workers but done very little for women getting undervalued in domestic labour. This is actually a really interesting observation and definitely got me thinking, but the writer took the stance that this was a big intentional thing to prevent women uplifting themselves through higher paying sex work and instead maintain a cheap supply of domestic labour. I will agree that that is absolutely the result, but if you want to break up discrimination you need to understand why people discriminate to begin with and just assigning it to this intelligent greed of the people with power is for one, a cop out and two, unhelpful because you’re insisting that it’s a character flaw on the part of the powerful which is as good as saying it’s unchangeable.
In this particular example and in many like it I’d say that what is more likely at play is thoughtlessness that is self-serving. This looks very much like selfishness from the outside, but the character flaw isn’t that people don’t care about other humans, it’s that they’re fucking lazy and will generally not think about things that don’t benefit themselves to think about. The bourgeois feminists this particular piece was decrying conflicted with sex workers because there was a perceived morality issue between their brands of feminism. To the bourgeois (I’m so sorry I keep calling them that it was just the article please I’m not a marxist anymore) feminist, their battle was in legitimising their power, breaking glass ceilings, getting into political office, etc. This is their goal and everything is either in support of it, working against it or not relevant to it. From their perspective then, women in sex work are misconstrued to be in support of the patriarchy that works against their goal (as opposed to just doing their own thing within a patriarchal system that unfairly colours everything they do as political). They then seek to turn women from this work, not thinking of the reasons they might be doing it to begin with. They do not think about the situation of women in the domestic labour market being underpaid and having very few options for upwards class mobility because that’s not relevant to their particular goal.
The reason they create this situation is not because they were greedily trying to secure a supply of cheap domestic labour by cutting off one of the few pathways through which women could escape poverty in a patriarchal system, it is because they didn’t ever think that women might need to escape poverty in a patriarchal system because they were not in poverty and thinking about other people is hard. Without sufficient motivation, people won’t do it. We pay attention to our own battles and everyone is either for us, against us or invisible.
This is the case for so many forms of oppression, it is not that the people with power are malicious it is that they do not conceive of what other people are dealing with. This obliviousness creates the bystanders that make up systems of oppression because they don’t realise what they’re doing is discrimination. And treating obliviousness like it’s instead malicious intent causes the bystanders to turn off because they feel attacked rather than educated. Worse, it turns them against the cause decrying the oppression the bystanders are unthinkingly committing.
I’m not trying to tone police here, and I’m not saying we don’t call out systems of oppression because the people in power can’t stand to have their widdle feelings hurt. I’m saying we need to stop assuming people hurt us because they meant to rather than because they just didn’t think.
By the way there’s a transphobic joke like half an hour into Deadpool and it took up two seconds but ruined half the movie for me. Nobody I’ve talked to even remembers it was said. Not because they’re bad people, just because it didn’t even occur to them that a sentence fragment could spoil a movie for someone.
The point is not intent, the point is that it’s a result that assists in the maintenance of bourgeois capitalism (I am a Marxist, or well a general communist, have some anarchist leanings), because it assists in the survival of the bourgeoisie, and bourgeois women in particular, it becomes a form of thought that is popular. Power creates flawed thought, and behavior, behavior that cannot be changed without stripping people of that power.
There cannot be a bourgeois without a proletariat. There cannot be an employing class unless there are people who can be exploited for employment. That is simply a fact.
There will never be any change until we abolish the inequalities that create and maintain this social structure.
TL;DR: Stop assuming an analysis is of individuals when its about the functioning of systems of power
Oh hey! You wrote the thing that made me write the thing, that’s neat! I wouldn’t have expected you to find this.
So, to jump into some things you’ve said there I agree 100% on the intent not mattering to the current situation but it does matter if you want to start finding the weakpoints to push and collapse the support of blissful ignorance that perpetuates the worst of these systems, which is where I’m coming from.
I really like what you’re saying about power creating flawed thought because that’s exactly what I’m getting at here, it’s the power that makes it so easy for people to ignore the people they’re standing on to have that power in the first place and it provides a big disincentive to thinking about these things. Because the more you think about “oh hey, people providing me with domestic labour do so at a huge personal and financial cost that I’m not adequately compensating them for” you’re going to feel compelled to give up some of your power (namely, having cheap domestic labour to allow you to put your energy elsewhere) in order to make other people’s lives less shit. So some people do the right thing and they do make that trade off (I’d be willing to wager this would lead to a dwindling demand rather than better pay more often than not) but more people would avoid thinking about it, in the same way we avoid thinking about death, simply because it’s uncomfortable, not because they disagree with the reality of the situation. These people go on to retain that extra bit of power and use it for other things, often making themselves more powerful.
What I was getting at with my thing is the thoughtless are absolutely in the wrong and need to change their actions, but the origin of their behaviour of thoughtlessness is not malice or greed (anymore than self-serving laziness can be said to be greed) but the sweet sweet lure of inaction that costs you nothing. The direction I am therefore proposing is not one of shaming the powerful for their continued indifference (which will provide an even greater disincentive to think about what they’re doing because then they’d have to set themselves up to get their widdle feelings hurt) but instead motivating them to analyse the situation more fully through a diet rich in intersectional feminism and sharing life experiences.
To put it in Marxist terms I am proposing we trick the bourgeois into thinking the revolution was their idea 😀
and I’m saying they can’t be duped into giving up their own power, and will need to be forced at gun point (literal or metaphorical)
Capitalism is self perpetuating, and adapts to rhetoric and can only be removed by force
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 