[lbo-talk] identity politics and Ubuntu stuff

[Alan Rudy]

>
> Shag:
>
> It is a thesis I've been developing for years, drawn out over the coruse of
> two years on the old blog (and sometimes here). My argument is that these
> groups share certain foundational assumptions about the nature of social
> change.
>
> The system is so big and all encompassing, so baked in to society and baked
> in to individuals heads, that it's hard to escape. (Janet Halley calls this
> way of thinking 'paranoid structuralism'.) In fact, no one really does
> except a few people who, for inexplicable reasons, come to see the light. It
> is then their job to whip other people in to shape using polemic,
> moralizing, scolding, etc. and so forth. Everyone is duped by society and
> the only way to fight it is to cajole, persuade, moralize, scold, finger
> way, and so on, insisting that the only way to change things is for
> *everyone* to do x, y, z, etc.
>
> Under this approach to moralizing identity politics, a major portion of
> people's energy is geared toward rooting out those people even within the
> social movement who do not uphold the correct lifestyle and behaviors.
>

You also just described most alternatively scientistic and moralistic
environmentalists...
Peter Taylor wrote about this in an article/chapter titled: How Do We Know
We Have Global Environmental Problems... it can be read at:
www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/92b.doc