he/him
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Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: March 27th, 2022
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22·13 days agoyou really struck a chord with me with mention of that liberal mentality. liberalism encourages us to derive our identity as much from consumption rather than production, because identity based on production leads to class consciousness
zizek is not based, he’s a western marxist in what i understand to be the 2nd international/frankfurt school tradition: academic, culture-focused and no organizing or action. that debate was incredibly frustrating too. peterson read the cliffs notes for the communist manifesto 2 years ago and pretends he has any idea what he’s talking about, and then zizek goes “yes well actually i think we have a lot in common, cancelling is bad” lol wtf
i mean, we all have identities related to our experiences: with production, with consumption, and with interacting with other humans. i think there are two primary ways that liberalism mangles the concept of identity:
liberalism encourages identities to be primarily based on consumption at the expense of production. think someone whose entire identity is disney, but their job is office work. the latter is not glamorized, and is in fact encouraged by liberalism to be seen as some sort of failure, in contrast to the apparent success of the bourgeoisie under capitalism. consumption is often used an escape from the bulk of people’s lives, they productive work. this is one way that class consciousness is discouraged
in the instances where liberalism embraces identity, it does so at the expense of the material conditions that led to the identity in the first place. in fact, it sometimes proposes that identity is not only dominant over material conditions, but is self-reinforcing, pretending that there is not a fundamental relationship between the two. think how right-wing liberals claim that being trans is “just in your head,” but when left liberals are asked to define gender the word “patriarchy” will never even occur to them. this is another way that class consciousness is discouraged
in each dialectic, productive identities are primary over consumptive ones, and material conditions are primary over the identities that they foster. neglect of this fact results in deep, deep alienation.