Okay, long story short: I know how hard-left this sub is, and I'm pretty much to the left myself. I can't stand crooked law enforcement. I fiercely support Black Lives, and I think we need reform badly. But I happen to enjoy some movies/shows/games that have police characters. And I'm getting beyond fed up seeing a certain movie (Zootopia) that impacted me so much get attacked from the let in this manner. Basically, I don't agree with how some in the hard left keep holding it up as "cop propaganda" or "fascist", which it isn't, and people accusing it of "getting racial allegories wrong" when in reality, the movie is an allegory for prejudice as a whole. Like, I don't find crap like this funny. I find it infuriating. Because it's not true. https://i.redd.it/0qy9v4on7gs31.jpg Some hard leftists accuse the film of missing the mark because the "predators" evolved from eating prey mammals to eating fish and bugs. That's not meant to symbolize anything in real life, it's just something that happened with those animals in a kids' movie. It doesn't clash with the movie's messaging at all. It's not "police apologism" because the police department is depicted as inept in many ways, and the story contains a moral against unfair profiling. Now for some reason, the "NP" link option isn't working, but I discussed this before in BreadTube and CompleteAnarchy. I'm asking you how you feel about this because I once encountered a thread in this sub mocking Judy Hopps, doing the whole "ACAB" thing, and I was legit upset by it. If you think I'm some kind of idiot, weirdo or loser for getting so emotional about a movie aimed at kids that's part of a big corporation that's your right. But people have been sharing "Judy's a pig, smash the state" memes in the Zootopia sub. And as someone who can't watch certain scenes in the movie without crying my eyes out, they really bothered me and I didn't think they were fair at all.
I think to put base and superstructure into a hierarchy is to ignore their dialectical nature.
It’s really that simple. But also, when I heard that a few years ago I thought it was nonsense jargon, so here’s an explanation for anyone reading who had that sentence slide right off their brain.
We’re obsessed with thinking of everything as hierarchical. Even in a group of two things or people, many of us find our brains trying to figure out which one is dominant over the other. The Marxist concepts of base and superstructure are often seen through this lens. The economic base is everything about a society that involves its people’s relationship to the means of production. The superstructure is everything else. Culture, politics, media, religion, etc. The relationship between these two parts of society is like this: One part shapes the other part, and in return the shaped part protects its shaper. So for example, the economic base of exploitation of people in the color in the US gave rise to the cultural construction of race as we know it, but that same construct protects the economic order of capitalist oppression via white supremacy.
So which is the shaper and which is the protector? Base or superstructure? The key insight relevant to this conversation is that both parts perform both functions. That’s the dialectical portion. So to run with the racial example, the economic conditions of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide in the US were themselves made possible by racial pseudoscience which arose to justify colonialism. The base and superstructure push and pull one another this way.
There may be people reading this who have a lot to say about me implying that base and superstructure perform both functions equally, but I specifically didn’t say that because it’s generally not true. But I do believe that balance has changed in the west since the time of Marx and Engels.
I think of these systems like a river. You have the water and you have the riverbed. They’re a dynamic system and if you want to redirect the river, it doesn’t make sense to move the water’s path without modifying the bed as well.
A big insight of intersectionality for me has been that looking at systems of oppression in isolation is like unweaving a blanket to understand its pattern.
The other, as it relates to class, is that class oppression is not a system whose liberation involves the coexistence of its opposing groups.
Straight people are going to need to learn to live in peace and respect with gay people.
White people are going to need to learn to live in peace and respect with people of color.
The bourgeoisie must be eradicated.
The class’s constituents must take on a different class character entirely. A class-conscious coexistence of the working and owning classes is the material base for fascism. This cannot stand. So while class is inextricably tied to the oppression of these social groups, class stands out as a system of oppression whose eradication will remove the very distinctions it preys on.