Class analysis...

I think Bertrand is saying that not actually doing it (or believing you don’t) is not enough once it has been articulated as a class issue. That it is necessary for it to be recognised and for individuals to be involved in social sanctions.

Does this apply to individual law-abiding Latinos who have no connection to MS-13 other than their national or ethnic background?

"And when a complete stranger who happens to share my sex, my race, my social class, or my tennis club does something wrong, am I culpable if I do or say nothing?"

If he or she commits a crime then yes, in law you are.

I'd love to see a citation for that law, because that sounds downright unbelievable.

Yeah, my point was you are misunderstanding what class analysis is. It’s not a way of arguing, it’s a framework for understanding.

That’s the point that has been grumbling on for pages...

Why do you think class analysis is a type of argument? How and why would anyone think that getting on a mic and performing a class analysis was interchangeable with making a speech?

Its not very good at knitting either

I ask again; why have you decided that the purpose of class analysis is ‘to change hearts and minds

I didn’t say that I actually said class analysis is not very good at changing people hearts and minds.

Like trying to use a hammer to saw wood. Very useful tool a hammer, but it’s shit at sawing wood.

Seriously do you think “I Have a Class Based Anaylsis” works as well as “I have A Dream” Now class based analysis would have been useful to formulate the ideas and understand the unfairness of inequality that speech communicated. But explaining the methodology to a huge audience does not make for a gripping speech.

Here’s an example from the uk news recently. www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/woman-gagged-taped-chair-marine-scotland-government-sexism-racism-deeann-fitzpatrick-scrabster-a8366586.html%3famp

A woman was taped to a chair and her mouth sealed with tape (which is actualy very dangerous) by male colleagues because she’d spoken out against misogyny at work.

Now, in any sane organisation, the response would be a hurried HR meeting along the lines of ‘oh my god this is absolutely dreadful, damage limitation mode, haul those responsible over hot coals and fire them as soon as is legal’

Did that happen? No it did not. Her boss dismissed it. The reaction was boys will be boys

So the power structure (and this is a government agency and there’s a photo of her bound and gagged ffs) has said ‘yeah this is just what men do, it’s banter.’ And the men themselves have said ‘this is what happens when you mess with the lads.’

The boss is complicit. The attitude isvthat Male violence is just something that happens and hey boys will be boys.

It’s not OK is it?

I ask again; why have you decided that the purpose of class analysis is ‘to change hearts and minds’?

You don’t even really think class analysis hasn’t ‘changed hearts and minds’ do you?

The reason people think racism etc ‘is wrong’ is because class analysis has articulated it as a class issue rather than an individual behaviour.

Now the vast majority of people believe racism is wrong because they understand things like ‘it is prejudice against a whole group of people’ even when it is one person saying one thing to one other person.

What you are actually saying is people who are individualistic don’t see the importance of collective responsibility (simplistic as it’s usually a scale). That’s not a problem of class analysis because even those people now believe that e.g. racism ‘is wrong’ they simply apply that understanding to themselves in a more abstract manner than people who lean more to collectivism.

You know if you work with complex systems and you need to troubleshoot, and you do root cause analysis? And there’s always some idiot company that uses the process not to identify analyse and fix but as a witch hunt to find someone to blame? It’s like that.

It is exactly like that! And it's why intersectionality proper is about systems and institutions, not the number of pomo oppression points a particular individual can accumulate.

In Crenshaw's classic example, American politicians went around congratulating themselves that they had fixed employment discrimination by legislating against on both terms of race and sex. But because the legislation was separate, it had a blind spot to the reality that the there was an intersection between race and sex in the Venn diagram of employment discrimination which meant that it did not cover black women. Intersectionality proper requires class analysis to find the blind spots.

I would argue it is essential in the process because without it class based oppression/discrimination like racism cannot be seen to exist can it?

Agreed but it’s not very good at changing heart and minds. In all seriousness imagine the “I Have a Dream Speech” but the title is actually “I Have a Class Based Analysis”

Bertrand is arguing that if you accept the existence of racism, sexism, classism etc (which are only understood because of analysis of the class based dynamics of oppression/discrimination - class analysis) then it follows that you have a responsibility to act when you see it going on because ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Also that re sexism and particularly male violence it is not really credible to claim that there are men who have never seen it (objectively), that actually not having seen it is because of subjective understanding and people just haven’t recognised it when it happens (‘just kidding’ ‘banter’).

I think Bertrand is saying that not actually doing it (or believing you don’t) is not enough once it has been articulated as a class issue. That it is necessary for it to be recognised and for individuals to be involved in social sanctions.

I think that’s more accurately an expression of the utility of class analysis, I’m not entirely sure whether she was arguing it is class analysis or whether she was just answering the repeated ‘it’s not a good tool’.

Obviously depending on where you personally fall in terms of the scale of collectivism to individualism in terms of ideology you will have different feelings re the extent of your own personal responsibility.

I think it is pretty clear however that every single poster finds class analysis a useful tool in that many of those being negative have posted articles about the material conditions of working class kids or said racism is wrong...

You’re completely missing the point

Trumpian dynamics IS the individual. It’s the individual over all else, and fuck everyone else. It’s the type of media coverage that requires no critical thought, no reflection. It’s identity politics writ large.

Class analysis goes beyond that. You’re still stuck on the ideacthat an individual is responsible for the group and internally reacting to that defensively. That’s trumpian.

It’s also not what class analysis IS or what anyone here is saying.

Acknowledging that men as a class are more violent (and they are, 98% of all violent crime is committed by men) is not the same as pointing the finger at YOU. No one cares about YOU. YOU are not the issue (unless in the trump type world where everything is about the individual.) you as an individual are irrelevant to the debate, just as one white personal me is irrelevant to the debate on racism. The CLASS of white people is relevant. The CLASS of men is relevant.

You know if you work with complex systems and you need to troubleshoot, and you do root cause analysis? And there’s always some idiot company that uses the process not to identify analyse and fix but as a witch hunt to find someone to blame? It’s like that. You’re centering yourself where you’re irrelevant. The process is the thing that matters, looking into our complex system, what really caused what went wrong and how can we fix it?

Companies that witch hunt tend to fail. Ones that use the process properly in a blame free way tend to prosper.

What worries me about class analysis of the male violence problem is that it may act as a distraction from the fact that a lot of the worst male violence is perpetrated by men with clear, diagnosable personality disorders, who are then let out of prison to commit more violence.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22984858

Men from the S+V [sex offense plus violence offense] group committed significantly more acts of rape and sexual coercion than the mere sexual offenders. Furthermore, S+V offenders showed the highest rates of PDs [personality disorders] overall (68.3%), with every second offender being diagnosed with an antisocial PD and every third offender with a borderline PD. In summary, the results suggest that S+V offenders form a group of individuals with remarkable differences regarding PD profiles, the relatively highest frequencies of conduct disorders, familial addictive problems, and PDs overall.

It seems to me that it would be beneficial to promote knowledge about anti-social personality disorders among parole boards, for example, with a view to them being less willing to let these men out. It would also be a good idea to educate women and girls about anti-social personality disorder, the fact that these men can often appear charming and plausible, and that most of them seem to be essentially unreformable. There are still people on the left who deny that PDs exist (the scholars who pursued research into sociopathy in the 1970s were treated like lepers, and it is only as the evidence has piled up that popular and academic opinion has shifted).

I''m not saying that broader attitudes toward VAW don't still need further change, but if we really want to eliminate, or seriousl y reduce VAW, we should be thinking about the issues around these personality disordered individuals as well.

If you choose to stay silent when your friend makes a racist comment, then you are responsible for that decision as well.

And when a complete stranger who happens to share my sex, my race, my social class, or my tennis club does something wrong, am I culpable if I do or say nothing?

No one is saying that. You are responsible for your own actions, not those of other people.
If you choose to stay silent when your friend makes a racist comment, then you are responsible for that decision as well.

Look beyond the self. Collective action, collective awareness. Perhaps that skirts dangerously close to social democracy in the USA?

Funny you should say that, because almost everyone on the left in the US considers the expectation that law-abiding Latinos should bear any sort of collective responsibility (sorry, "awareness") for the crimes committed by others of their group to be the purest Trumpian racism. Just as holding law-abiding men (or innocent members of any group) responsible for the actions of their criminals would be little more than open bigotry.

Ok, so according to you this standard of "collective responsibility"

It isn’t collective responsibility, it’s collective awareness. Collective acknowledgment of existence, collective determination to work towards removing the problematic structure.
So nobody is expecting every El Salvadorean to go around like the Fratres Saccate apologising for them. And nobody is expecting every man in the world to self flagellate.

What’s right is that a class should self examine and be aware of an issue. To listen and not deny there’s an issue. To take on board suggestions from people who are ex gang members on how to reduce gang affiliation risks. To LISTEN TO WOMEN when they say that Male violence is an issue.

Not just to say well it’s not me, I don’t do that, you bigot. NOT ALL MEN. Yeah we know it’s not all men. We know it’s not every el salvadorean in the states. We know it’s not every white person.

Look beyond the self. Collective action, collective awareness. Perhaps that skirts dangerously close to social democracy in the USA?

Yeah, but why do you think it is ‘the tool’? Why are you expecting it to perform that function?

I would argue it is essential in the process because without it class based oppression/discrimination like racism cannot be seen to exist can it?

Class analysis therefore is necessary isnt it

I have never at any point said class analysis is not necessary. It’s just not a very good tool to persuade people to change their behaviour.

Good luck trying to ‘win hearts and minds’ if you can’t even articulate that e.g. racism exists!

Why? I’m aware that being white in the West means I have the deck stacked in my favour on a lot of things. I’m aware i probably benefit from that in invisible ways. I may not even SEE racism sometimes because the more insidious stuff probably does even register with most of us. I’m aware it’s my duty to listen to those who do experience it, to take what they say about it as probably more valid than my blinkered view, to call it out where I do see it and to raise my kids to not be racist.

Ok, so according to you this standard of "collective responsibility" applies to (a) men taking steps to stop other men being violent, (b) white people taking steps to stop other white people being racist. Do you apply this standard of collective responsibility to any other groups? To take a topical example from the US, MS-13 is a gang comprised mainly of Central American Latinos who have committed around 200 murders in the US in the last 5 years. Do you place a moral responsibility on law-abiding US Latinos to take steps to prevent those murders, and hold them morally culpable if they do not?

What is racism?

What is sexism?

What is classism?

Etc etc...

Aren’t they all oppressions/discriminations on the basis of shared characteristics?

Class analysis therefore is necessary isnt it? Because without it class based oppression/discrimination is just one individual being mean to another individual...

It’s not anti-nuance or anti-individual because you need both the framework and the ‘nuance’....

Some people seem to be suggesting that we should only look at the ‘nuance’ because articulating the framework is mean to some people who have lots of issues or some people will feel judged...

Too many people are still getting stuck at the ‘but I’m not like that and you’re having a go at me personally’ stage

I’m not a man, no ones having a go at me. I just think class analysis does not win hearts and minds.

People don’t decide on a course of action just because someone points out they belong to a certain class of people.

To go around in hair shirts... seriously my typos ... sigh.

Too many people are still getting stuck at the ‘but I’m not like that and you’re having a go at me personally’ stage.

You need to look beyond yourself.

ust imagine trying to apply this standard to any other group whose members have been know to commit crime and violence - it would be denounced as hateful bigotry, and rightly so.

Why? I’m aware that being white in the West means I have the deck stacked in my favour on a lot of things. I’m aware i probably benefit from that in invisible ways. I may not even SEE racism sometimes because the more insidious stuff probably does even register with most of us. I’m aware it’s my duty to listen to those who do experience it, to take what they say about it as probably more valid than my blinkered view, to call it out where I do see it and to raise my kids to not be racist.

I’d expect the analogous stuff from men. No one is asking them to gonround in hair charts self flagellating to atone for the crimes of individuals, just to be aware of it, listen to what we are saying about it, call it out when they see it and raise their kids to be decent.

That seems like common sense to me.