Kontextmaschine

7th April 2015

Post reblogged from On Not Living in the End Times with 374 notes

empiricistsinthecrib:
tbh I think the fact that things like “vanilla privilege” and “monosexual privilege” are concepts that people actually believe exist are good reason to throw out privilege analysis. It’s an incredibly liberal point of view that focuses on individual grievances rather than seeing discrimination as a structure that harms people institutionally.
the issue is that neoliberalism prefers privilege politics to solidarity politics and so encourages the former to spread while diminishing the latter. i like the way david harvey put it:
Values of individual freedom and social justice are not, however, necessarily compatible. Pursuit of social justice presupposes social solidarities and a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality or environmental justice. The objectives of social justice and individual freedom were uneasily fused in the movement of ’68. The tension was most evident in the fraught relationship between the traditional left (organized labour and political parties espousing social solidarities) and the student movement desirous of individual liberties. The suspicion and hostility that separated these two fractions in France (e.g. the Communist Party and the student movement) during the events of 1968 is a case in point. While it is not impossible to bridge such differences, it is not hard to see how a wedge might be driven between them. Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.