Affirmative Action

So when I hear white-workers(for example) complaining about losing their job to an attempt at correcting the imbalance, I tell them to thank the white-supremacy that bred the imbalance in the first place.

"Really? Is that a satisfactory answer?"

Hm, kind of seems as though that's the only line of my post that you read. I say this because you seem to think that I'm defending affirmative action. But I wrote this-

...I often doubt that affirmative action is actually resistance or that it's really correcting imbalances in a way that is moving toward egalitarianism. It seems silly to expect entities as self-interested as capital and the state to make moves toward their own detriment, to which a correction of sexual(for example) inequality would almost certainly be.

This should clearly indicate that I do not find affirmative action to be a satisfactory answer. I will say that I don't find attacking it to be at all helpful. You see, "as an Anarchist", I find there to be something fundamentally wrong with governments; period.

The actual intent of the line which you quoted from my post is to illustrate that those that benefit from the oppression of others will suffer at the hands of resistance.

To the white worker(keeping with the example in use) is here presented a choice: Blame those that benefit from affirmative action(a mere decrease in severity), or blame, and hopefully fight, the white supremacist power structures(made up of executors and benefactors) that have structured the conditions under which resistance occurs(successful or otherwise). It is in the latter that you'll find the broadest stroke of my "answer".

Your talk of individualism is well and good as it something to keep in mind when dealing with individuals and the intersections of institutionalized oppression that are represented within them. However, your approach seems to ignore the fact that oppression has a class basis. The executors of oppression operate according to categorically discriminating plans which are actualized through the material realities of manipulation, coercion, and violence.

If class-based(economic, ethnic/racial, gender, religion, etc.) analyses often seem reductive, I often find it to be a result of people treating oppression as hierarchical, rather than treating them as appropriately Kyriarchical.

Kyriarchy-based methods of analysis are far more useful for understanding situations such as these, where white people may be oppressed economically while being privileged socially(racially).

From this perspective there is a clear connection between the individual and class, presenting us with an opportunity to embrace the full complexity of systemic oppression.

I hope that clears up some things about my post.

/r/DebateAnarchism Thread