I hate standpoint theory so much it’s the biggest blight in talking to people to people on anything.
You can be educated on something but then they go 'erm but I come from this background "
I hate it so much it’s so anti intellectual
Standpoint theory has truth to it, but it can be absurdly reductive. Lived experience is important, but it does not automatically make you an expert on systems of oppression. Liberals do not seem to understand this.
But from MY point of view, the Jedi are evil!
They literally are.
Come on, folks. It isn’t difficult to look up things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_theory
Standpoint theory, also known as standpoint epistemology,[1] is a foundational framework in feminist social theory that examines how individuals’ social identities (e.g., race, gender, disability status), influence their understanding of the world. Standpoint theory proposes that those in positions of marginalization are able to achieve certain standpoints which put them in a better position to know certain facts about the world related to that marginalization.
I don’t want to look up things. I want my comrades to teach me.
in a better position to know certain facts about the world related to that marginalization.
It’s a pretty marginal claim. You don’t think that’s true?
It IS true, but once liberals learned about it, it got bastardized into “we found a Black person who says Joe Biden is good and you’re being racist for dismissing their lived truth.”
Instead of deferring to oppressed peoples as an epistomogical authority on the conditions of their own oppression, they just dig up people from the same category and use the language of standpoint epistemology to position them as authorities on any arbitrary self-serving issue.
Essentially the same as cherry-picking transphobic “experts” to build up the Cass Report while ignoring the mountain of research that clearly shows transition is overwhelmingly positive and safe for 99% of people. Or finding the few pick-me trans people that will sell out their brothers and sisters for right-wing grift money (Blair White, Brianna Wu, etc).
I don’t think it’s the Standpoint Theory that’s the issue, it’s the fact that it completely seems to side step class. Most of the major issues with the theory can be easily solved by incorporating class dynamics into it, but then you basically get intersectionality right?
Like once I started learning about class dynamics it filled up so many gaps in my reasoning over time.
Liberals do intersectionality without class all the time too. Which does make the liberal version dogshit; intersectionality without class makes about as much sense as intersectionality without acknowledging gender, or without acknowledging race.
They are closely related but in that it’s more concerned with epistemology, it’s interesting as complementary concept - asking what the oppressed can know and learn of a system of domination that the oppressor can’t, as a result of intersectional positions. Looking at class with it sort of circles around to questions of class consciousness and where the capacities for that come from, and also questions then how that knowledge can be foreclosed. which is useful I think.
I’ve moved on from his work a lot more now but it popped up a lot in Mark Fisher’s final lectures where he was connecting it back to Lukacs’ work and, at least those chapters, are pretty interesting.
Anything that sidesteps class only serves to perpetuate liberalism
I think it might even have been invented to push workers perspective and class struggle? But I don’t really know.
Another term for this is tokenization. The premise being that an individual of X background is surely the authority on all topics related to X so you must believe them. This is, by necessity, inconstantly applied, because actual humans disagree with each other and know vastly different amounts about topics and have differing interests and backgrounds despite all being X.
Liberals use it constantly to give their bad ideas weight, as they can’t argue them on merit. Discussing a country and imperialism? Let’s bring in the gusano that knows jack shit but is very condescending. Want to go in a different direction in a strategy discussion? Sorry, John is Vietnamese (his grandparents immigrated from Vietnam) and says China is bad. There’s often a racist tone to it that they don’t recognize.
It drives me insane
It is a form of essentialism, and essentialism is the philosophy that underlies reactionary politics.
“Look for answers by assigning an immutable category to everything.”
Liberals are reactionaries
Reactionaries are essentialists; liberals are relativists. Liberals are vulnerable to reactionary positions because the liberal approach does not definitively invalidate reactionary views.
But my “father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate” lived in China and he hated it.
At least in America, which imports the reactionary losing/wealthy side of every socialist revolution around the world, standpoint theory is guaranteed to get you a “bomb every country under the sun my Venezuelan friend approves of this” perspective. Partly this is because a lot of Americans think all immigrants are impoverished instead of having to be pretty well-off to get here (excepting border-jumpers or refugees). I know some second- and third-gen immigrants that even play up this perception. Except I’ve been to their families’ houses lol
I disagree. Maybe liberals misinterpret standpoint theory but its foundationally solid.
What is that
Google is free will always be a valid response to these kinda questions
What?
Based on the wikipedia definition it sounds a lot like intersectionalism but not fully developed?
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
-Lenin
Black History Month was a Reaganite invention.
Wait really?
Yeah, in 1986 IIRC. Communists and always being right!
Let’s water down all these revolutionaries, if we create a platform to discuss what they did, we can control how extreme their actual views were.
I feel like Lenin and Marx discussed like ever possible event that can and would occur in the future lol
I’ve gotten at least a few people to read Lenin from that quote alone. They don’t call it the immortal science for nothing.
Just sectionalism then.
