> I never said anything about smashing. If manly man politics is about
> 'unsubtle, unsympathetic...snidely, and with superabundant
> superiority...rather than trying to figure out where someone is and working
> from", then you appear to be the alpha manly man around here.
>
Nope, I simply responded to your blasting (a variant of smashing, in my eyes) of Shag. It is you who keep splitting structures and identities and Shag and I who refuse... if you've now read her response (or anything conversation she's contributed to over the last three months and beyond) you'll see that you accused her of something farcical.
>
> Why do you fucking assume that I was not trying to figure out what she was
> saying? I actually was but was a little put off by the 'beating chest,
> smash structures' line. My attempt to disarm was in response to her and
> others attempts to disarm rather than discuss.
>
Maybe she wasn't talking directly to you, maybe she was talking about manly man politics in general. It seemed clear to me that you were not trying to figure out what she was saying since her contributions to the list over the last three months - and for years, go check the archives if you'd like - have always simultaneously engaged the structural and agential character of these issues... it was manly manishness to react rather than take the time to think about the positions - you indicated a while back that you'd been lurking for years - Shag has always taken.
>
> Again, I said nothing about smashing structures, that is a purposeful
> distortion by shag and you are now repeating it for the same reason (manly
> man politics).
>
Dude, you can't accuse someone of not believing in the reality of structures and, below, indicate that you've focused on the structures of capitalist society, and not - at least implicitly - prioritize taking on (read: hoping to smash) structures. Later, still, you shift from structures to barriers (Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson used to speak of obstacles) but you gotta admit the usual imagery of structures and obstacles is not one of gently picking up a play structure or simply going around, or over, an passive obstacle... if you're talking about incremental and local changes then your not taking on structures, usually, your keeping the structural in mind or in the conversation in the context of the contingent, immediate and particular
>
> No, I don't have to proceed as you demand down some empirical tallying up
> and ranking of structures. Of course " structures don't exist - except as
> abstractions - beyond
> their everyday, and never straightforward, reproduction" but that doesn't
> mean that they don't have real impacts. What about real estate red lining,
> do you think going after that structural practice was wroth while? Or,
> would it have been better to hold anti-racism seminars for all of those
> involved and repeat how racist they are over and over... I am sorry but
> practices crystallize into institutions and structures and we can actually
> address them there rather than inside every ones heads.
>
Here, your manly manishness comes out again. My post very clearly had nothing to do with anti-racism seminars and didn't express sorrow at your muddle-headedness. If you want to make an argument, make an argument, the unsubtle, unsympathetic and snide superiority is just manly manishness, squashing (smashing?) me like a bug (structure?).
If red lining is a structure then what you mean by structure isn't what I'd expect most folks on this list mean by structure. Most folks I know who talk about and have theorized structural racism aren't talking about a local/regional instantiations/institutionalizations of personal racism like red-lining but of the post-personal/post-civil rights legacies of restrictive covenants, lynching, educational and consumer segregation, etc. At the same time, the folks who took on these issues didn't take on racism, they took on police brutality, educational segregation, lynching, red-lining, etc... the structure was not taken on, its real but always highly contingent and unevenly presented manifestations... as I noted, the structure is altered - to varying degrees - by which, how many and where these manifestations are defeated.
> What is classism? Do you mean how rich people look down on poor folk? Why
> couldn't I tell stories of how I met people where they are, in their
> complex
> instersectional imediate location and talk to them about structures of
> class
> explotation? Do you mean that women and people of color experiance hunger
> in different ways? Is there no universal way to feel hunger?
>
If you told such stories, as I see it, you'd tell us what the issue folks were organizing around was about and no longer be talking about taking on class, racial, sex/gender, sexual, political, economic and/or ecological structures. At the same time, if you talk to people working on increasing the quality of school-provided meals by means of fostering farm-to-school marketing and educational opportunities about the structures of class exploitation, or racial oppression, or compulsory heterosexism, or even agroecological degradation on conventional farms, there is a really great chance you are going to piss them off by focusing on abstractions - however materialist in nature and real in their effects - rather than on the immediately-deal-withable. That bit about hunger is just manly manishness again, you know from my previous posts that I've been at this agrifood studies stuff for twenty years and am pretty closely related to folks fighting just these issues, against multiple layers of rather fierce resistance, from UCSC's Agroecology Farm to Food First!.
>
> Obviously since I left the farm, I focus on the structures of capitalist
> society that prevent real alternatives to strive in agrifood systems. I
> don't focus on how it is far too complex because everyone experiences it
> different and we are all individuals and we all have different food needs,
> choices, production practices, cultural consumption traditions....not that
> these aren't there, just that to focus on them is to miss the forest for
> the
> trees.
>
I never suggested things were way too complex, I indicated that there are too many structures and agencies to take on in any particular effort. Materialist abstraction means not only the parsing of reality into managable meta-bits but also the ability to distill immediate conditions into their most important, viable and transformable elements - and this latter process is something I had to learn to let others be major players in (as I gave up, however haltingly and ongoingly, my own manly manishness). The folks protesting the UCBerkeley-Novartis deal were generally well-aware of all sorts of structural inequalities in modern society but to talk to them about such things when they were concerned about the privatization of public education, the end of shared governance at UCB, and the ecological, health and cultural effects of ag biotech would have led me to be dismissed as a crank. Even if you took the UCB-N deal as an example of the structural contradictions of neoliberal governance, or as the next next logical step down the screw-the-public and public-mission trajectory the university embraced most clearly in the Goldshmidt/As You Sow debacle of the 1940s and the tomato harvester nightmare of the 1970s, those structural tendencies could only be used to frame the particular struggle, they themselves could not be taken on then and there.
>
> The idea is to build movements to displace
> structural barriers to the development of people and a society that is
> absent exploitation and oppression. Nobody said anything about smashing
> stuff!!!
>
It seems to me that displacing barriers to ending exploitation and oppression means not taking on structures... it means doing the possible and building potential with the structural in mind.
>
> I never said they weren't engaged in real politics or neocons in disguise.
> Why do you continue to assign to me a position which is not mine? I don't
> tell people involved in identity politics that they are unsophisticated,
> immovable, and intransigent distractors, even if they can be. I usually
> ignore them and focus on movements that seem to have clear concrete goals
> and objectives instead.
>
> One thing that might help you with Shag's posts and mine... we are rarely
responding to you alone... while you may ignore irritating and monofocal
anti-racists, a number of arguments have been made by people who genuinely
can't ignore them that the problem is that such folks - and then there's
either an explicit or implicit generalization about all or most of the folks
focused on anti-racism - don't emphasize the more important structural
feature of society, class. When you, then, challenge Shag about real
structures (that you say she denies) and (implicitly) less-real identities
(that you say she prefers), there are echoes, intended or not.